Planetary Resources

[go4mars]

Kickstarter!? I can't see how this is good news. These guys were supposed to have virtually unlimited capital behind them, and that was what made them different from companies like Shackleton...

Wow. I guess the billionaires did not invest as much as we thought.

I highly doubt that kickstarter is primarily about the money.  It's about gauging outside interest, raising awareness on a broader scale, and offering random people like me the chance to get a T-shirt and feel slightly involved from the sidelines. 

I don't watch professional sports and buy my city's team jerseys.  My Bernaysian tribalistic psychological needs are instead met by cheering for organizations that advance and enable the state of the art.  Particularly in the realm of expansion into space. 

[JohnFornaro]

Planetary Resources has just started a kickstarter in an attempt to both move the project forward and give people a chance to get involved.

http://www.planetaryresources.com/2012/06/back-us-on-kickstarter/

They're planning a kickstarter project for people to get involved  :o
Peter Diamandis says they're looking for ideas.

http://www.planetaryresources.com/2012/06/back-us-on-kickstarter/

Relatively old news.  I'll repeat it again, tho, for those who missed it the first two times...

:)

Wow. I guess the billionaires did not invest as much as we thought.

Mr. Ellison, a random billionaire, just bought an island in Hawaii.  Kinda pricey, tho.  The surf in those shadowed craters just can't compare, can it? Could this be an example of "tribalistic psychological needs"?

Just being naughty this morning.  Don't mind me.

[Warren Platts]

Kickstarter!? I can't see how this is good news. These guys were supposed to have virtually unlimited capital behind them, and that was what made them different from companies like Shackleton...

Wow. I guess the billionaires did not invest as much as we thought.

I highly doubt that kickstarter is primarily about the money.  It's about gauging outside interest, raising awareness on a broader scale, and offering random people like me the chance to get a T-shirt and feel slightly involved from the sidelines.  ...

I get it that they are trying to create "buzz" among the serfs, but I am afraid this move will backfire among the movers and shakers of the world. Bill Stone's attempt to raise cash for Shackleton Energy was an abysmal failure, I'm sorry to say. Shackleton Energy will probably never recover. There must be other ways to create "buzz" than by asking for handouts on a forum mostly used by starving artists and grad students who can't get grants. I think it points to a serious cash shortage. The overseers could possibly be already complaining about the burn rate....

[mrmandias]

Kickstarter!? I can't see how this is good news. These guys were supposed to have virtually unlimited capital behind them, and that was what made them different from companies like Shackleton...

$3.65m/year - the perfect basis to design, build, test, launch, and operate a fleet of space telescopes.

Or, maybe, they're going to build a fleet of sats, and $3.65m/year is just enough to launch & operate yet another clone after the production line has been up-and-running for a while, and ops have become routine?


Edit: ISTM kickstarter is a very "now" way to attract a lot of interest, and these guys might as well make money on the side wherever they can, after all.

cheers, Martin

I see this as more of a publicity measure than a serious attempt at fundraising.  Plus a way of getting good ideas out of the public and getting people to 'vote' on which one is best in a monetarily backed way.  Crowd-sourced evaluations of potential ideas.

Though now that I think of it, there is no company, however lavishly funded, that will pass up free money.  Which is what kickstarter is.  I'm guessing that PR has been overwhelmed with emails and people signing up on their distribution lists and has decided to monetize it a little.

[Danderman]

The best publicity for Planetary Resources would be to open an engineering office, hire a bunch of people, obtain launch contracts, start buying subassemblies, announce a first launch date, etc.

The worst publicity would be to look for cash on the Internet.

[go4mars]

The best publicity for Planetary Resources would be to open an engineering office, hire a bunch of people, obtain launch contracts, start buying subassemblies, announce a first launch date, etc.

The worst publicity would be to look for cash on the Internet.

Depends on who you want to raise publicity with.  Kickstarter is generally a different crowd than people who stay informed about space related things.  They seem to be pretty good at attracting a wider audience.

[Danderman]

The best publicity for Planetary Resources would be to open an engineering office, hire a bunch of people, obtain launch contracts, start buying subassemblies, announce a first launch date, etc.

The worst publicity would be to look for cash on the Internet.

Depends on who you want to raise publicity with.  Kickstarter is generally a different crowd than people who stay informed about space related things.  They seem to be pretty good at attracting a wider audience.

No problem if you don't mind headlines like .....................


Planetary Resources Falls Back on Kickstarter For Funding

[Robotbeat]

The best publicity for Planetary Resources would be to open an engineering office, hire a bunch of people, obtain launch contracts, start buying subassemblies, announce a first launch date, etc.

The worst publicity would be to look for cash on the Internet.

Depends on who you want to raise publicity with.  Kickstarter is generally a different crowd than people who stay informed about space related things.  They seem to be pretty good at attracting a wider audience.

No problem if you don't mind headlines like .....................


Planetary Resources Falls Back on Kickstarter For Funding

Sure, fine. Except the whole point of the Kickstarter campaign isn't to raise a bunch of funding (it clearly won't, even if really successful) but to give an outlet to those who want to participate in the project, to be able to point the telescope to this or to that. This is explicitly stated in their Kickstarter video, and common sense tells you that they aren't going to raise significant funding from Kickstarter.

Get real. This is just cheap PR.

[Warren Platts]

Planetary Resources Falls Back on Kickstarter For Funding

lol! That's a real one! Here's the link:

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2012/06/planetary-resou-3.html

Here's another headline:

Billionaire Backed Asteroid Venture Seeks KickStarter Funding to Fund Public Outreach

KickStarter is generally for smaller projects that are just getting going and have no significant amounts of funds behind them. That is not the case here. Four out of Planetary Resources five investors are billionaires and the fifth is a former member of Planetary Resources’ billionaires boys’ club.

The fifth investor is Microsoft mogul and two-time ISS space tourist Charles Simonyi, who was on the Forbes list of billionaires until a few years ago.

I realize that crowd sourcing is in right now and it gets people involved and invested in the project. I get that part. There’s some logic there and if the company were a non-profit or some small start-up trying to bootstrap its way up without much money, it would make sense.

... The message is: we’ll engage the public only if they’re willing to pay us to do so and figure out our marketing strategy for us.

[Robert Thompson]

Skackleton was a windsock that caught no wind because there's no demand at EML2 because (insert) and so there was no plausible return on involvement. His plan was collect underpants ... profit. His idea is for a time that has not come. Planetary Resources have people waving underpants. The barriers to involvement, compared to the plausible returns on involvement, are far more promising than the Shackleton option. This is an idea whose time has come.

[Diagoras]

asking for handouts on a forum mostly used by starving artists and grad students who can't get grants

Tim Schaefer is a starving artist? He's got quite a belly for one.

[Danderman]

The issue here is perception. If you trust the veracity of PR's assertions that they are totally funded, then there's no problem. However, if you don't have a stake in this, and you simply read that they are looking for money on Kickstarter, then they start to appear as just another wannabe space company.

They would have been better off organizing a formal outreach campaign that did not involve near term $$ from internet users.

Having said that, I would gladly pay $100 to point an orbiting camera at some place in the solar system.

[go4mars]

If you trust the veracity of PR's assertions that they are totally funded, then there's no problem. However, if you don't have a stake in this, and you simply read that they are looking for money on Kickstarter, then they start to appear as just another wannabe space company.

If they are fully funded already, I don't see the downside.  If they are fully funded, why would they care if a casual observer assumed they were unfunded?     There may even be competitive/convenient/strategic reasons to hold out that perception. 

[StephenB]

New press release by Planetary Resources, including blog entry by Chris Lewicki, President, Chief Engineer & Chief Asteroid Miner.

[neilh]

New press release by Planetary Resources, including blog entry by Chris Lewicki, President, Chief Engineer & Chief Asteroid Miner.

Sweet, I think that post answers a number if questions folks in this thread have been wondering about.

[neilh]

New press release by Planetary Resources, including blog entry by Chris Lewicki, President, Chief Engineer & Chief Asteroid Miner.

Sweet, I think that post answers a number if questions folks in this thread have been wondering about.

The post ends with a request for examples of "modern engineering done well that we can apply to exploring asteroids and developing space resources", and Chris Lewicki has been directly responding to several of the comments left behind. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but in one of his comments he mentioned that PR is collaborating with a company that does in-space additive manufacturing.

[vulture4]

The small LEO telescope concept could be a very useful idea scientifically although I will be surprised if private investors want to back it I think NASA should. Similar ideas were discussed many years ago as a concept that could be carried to ISS on the Shuttle and deployed to co-orbit, able to be recovered for service if necessary. Or even mounted on the truss for some types of observation where the presence of the ISS did not interfere with observation.

Unfortunately the tendency for funding to gravitate to fewer and fewer projects of larger and larger scale seemed to leave such ideas forgotten.

[RocketmanUS]

The small LEO telescope concept could be a very useful idea scientifically although I will be surprised if private investors want to back it I think NASA should. Similar ideas were discussed many years ago as a concept that could be carried to ISS on the Shuttle and deployed to co-orbit, able to be recovered for service if necessary. Or even mounted on the truss for some types of observation where the presence of the ISS did not interfere with observation.

Unfortunately the tendency for funding to gravitate to fewer and fewer projects of larger and larger scale seemed to leave such ideas forgotten.

Could they use them to orbit the moon ( at least the version for BEO ) and scan it? It would be a good test area before heading far out?

[ChefPat]

Anybody that hasn't read Abundance needs to, to understand what PR is doing & how they intend to do it.

[krytek]

I don't know if this has been posted before, but it sure looks like something along the lines PR wants to do with it's kickstarter.
Only PR's gonna be very much more capable.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space