We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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XCOR moving ahead on Xerus design Things have been awfully quiet (officially at least) over at XCOR. They are busy working on their suborbital spaceship design, Xerus is still in early days and remains a paper spaceship. However, unlike many other designs which exist only in POVRAY renderings, the engine technology is real and the team has already proven itself by building and flying and reflying and display flying a rocket plane.
Watch that space.
PS: They are also your fellow Samizdata readers, our ‘home team’ in the X-Prize contest as it were.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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Sorry, but they’re not my home team. I haven’t found a way to buy any stock in their venture.
While Scaled Composites may not be publicly traded the engine manufacturer, SpacDev is. By purchasing SpacDev stock I can participate in the effort.
How about XCOR letting more people become involve? We’re capitalists after all.
Mike: If you want to know the real culprit to your problem, look no furher than the SEC. “We’re from the government and we’re here to protect you”. The SEC does not allow a startup company to sell stock to a wide range of people in small amounts unless it goes through a very long and complex legal process to be listed (this can cost $1M to do). Once you are listed you are under harsh and restrictive scrutiny and have far less leeway in what you can do, and not only because of the SEC directly, but indirectly because the regulations have created a feeding trough for lawyers who will sue on behalf of shareholders if the managment farts in the wrong direction and is not big enough (ala Exxon) to have an equal and opposite legal budget.
The alternative for raising capital is to remain “closely held” which means a limited number of large investors. Each investor in the circumstance must satisfy SEC regulations in order to be approved to put their money in. Primary requirement is that you can afford to lose all your money. The laws are intentionally set up to prevent grandma from mortgaging her house to invest, even though it is her house and her life. It also prevents companies from raising small amounts of capital from a large number of investors without going through paperwork.
You can of course go the penny stock route like mining speculators do, but…
Irony alert
The Long-EZ craft they are using was designed by Burt Rutan many years ago as a build-at-home design.
Burt Rutan now heads Scaled Composits.
He is competing against his old design.
Heh!
Dale,
I understand, my main business is as a certified public accountant but I’m also a licensed stock broker. Although I don’t actively deal in stocks I have to know the rules. My point is that I feel more involved in a project in which I have a financial interest, no matter how small or distant.
For commercial space exploration to succeed there will have to be publicly traded companies involved that have access to vast amounts of capital and, by drawing on the markets, they will also be cultivating grassroots support. The penny stock may not be a bad way to go, SpacDev is only available on the over-the-counter market and I suspect it has few institutional investors. I don’t have access to the book here in the office but wasn’t Lazarus Long’s mother touting penny stocks in a newspaper column as a way of influencing investment in emerging technologies? I know its fiction but commercial space development will need broad public political support and investment.
Dale-
I’m not too thrilled by the penny stock route, having lost a bunch of money on watered mining stocks a number of years ago. (The companies made money, but contrived to arrange things so that I did not.)
But I think your idea of investing in space travel is excellent. As an alternative that might be workable in the current regulatory structure, how about a mutual fund? You are a licensed broker so you should have some idea of the difficulties involved in setting one up.
I suspect that they may be slightly less than those for other stock companies.
I don’t like mutual funds as a general means of investment because I don’t believe that they can pick stocks any better than I can. They do well in a rising market and lousy in a falling one.
This is a different situation however. I wouldn’t be investing for short term or medium term returns but to have some skin in the private space program. It would be sensible to have someone with a lot more knowledge of the technology and the people involved than I have making the investment decisions. The investment would not be a matter of buying some stock to flip but of making a long term investment in the companies and looking after that investment. (Perhaps I am in error in calling this thing a mutual fund. It might not buy stock at all but instead loan money or invest in other ways in the companies. Maybe an investment trust would be a better name.)
People like Dale Amon would be ideal to do the evaluation for such a venture. Technology and libertarianism. If a Samizdata Space Exploration Fund is ever started, you can put me down for some shares.
As far as investing there are several routes:
The Colony Fund is attempting to build out a mutal fund that does the investing for you. You could designate some portion of the high risk part of your standard retirement portfolio into it and then the fund would invest in a mixed portfolio (70% VC, 25% in traditional equities, and 5% in long term, high risk ‘large’ projects).
Some companies can go the Reg D 50x route depending on how much money they need and their disclosure abilities. Its not cheap, but its not the same as a full IPO either. I think this is what Lifport Financial is going to be doing.
You can also invest inside your state depending on your states investment laws. So if you’re in California or Virginia you can find companies to invest in.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while and so far the Reg D stuff seems the most appealing, its a little expensive but there are ways to bootstrap yourself. As the Artemis Society chairman I’m working on an ASI project called the
Coalition for the Development of Space Value Networks (I know, bad name) that might help this whole problem a little.
-MM