Golden Spike: Another Space Commerce Casualty? (Update)
Keith’s 27 Sep note: Golden Spike Company (http://goldenspikecompany.com/) was going to do all sorts of commercial stuff on the Moon with lots of illustrious names attached. Their website went dark a week and a half ago and no one seems to have noticed. Not a good way to maintain a business presence. Oh well.
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Keith’s 29 Sep update: After being offline for several weeks someone at Golden Spike finally noticed that their website was down an hour or so ago. It now says “under construction”. Either no one at the company pays much attention to their website – or no one outside of the company visits the site often enough for its absence to be noted. Take your pick, I guess.
Keith’s 27 Oct update: A month later and the website still says “under construction”. This is what it looked like in August 2015 when they were asking for non-tax deductible donations. Business must be a little slow if a functional website is such a low priority. Just sayin’.
So another vaporware and white paper space company died because of the need for extraordinary investment for extraordinary time without extraordinary profit at the end*. I’d forgotten they’d even existed.
If I had the $7-8 billion that the company’s wikipedia page said they budgeted for, I wouldn’t have given it to them. I’d put it into an investment fund, then use the annual earnings after inflation and taxes to pay for low-cost robotic missions. Maybe I could pay for a few Discovery Program level missions.
* At least Golden Spike had some people with experience in doing crewed lunar missions, albeit from decades ago.
The basic problem is these New Space firms look at space as their first step and revenue source instead of developing an more practical evolutionary approach. This is probably a legacy of space being a “government” industry where leaps of tens of millions of dollars for the first step is normal. What they need to do is start focusing on Earth markets and intermediate steps first. Sadly none do and even get upset when you suggest it claiming you don’t understand the “vision”. The real problem is they don’t understand the free (non-government) market world.
An intriguing point. What would be an example of ‘intermediate’ steps? Isn’t it the case that the first step- buying some sort of rocket ship for space access- requires millions?
Planetary Resources and SpaceX are doing more of a “get paid to build as you go” thing. Build a service that makes money, then build on that, all with your end goal in mind. With Planetary Resources, the end goal is asteroid mining. With SpaceX it is Mars colonization. Both are providing paid services to build components of their long range plan with profits from active programs.
I agree. I think Planetary Resources is a good model. At least they are building something and showing progress. Granted, even a step from a CubeSat to a larger telescope will be a bit deal, but it’s better than saying they are going to do some massive project 30 years from now.
Developing the technologies needed for lunar settlement first instead of working on the expensive rocket hardware that is not needed until the later stages. For example working on the robots that will be used for prospecting and using them on Earth first in harsh environments like the arctic where it is expensive to send human geologists.
And yes, Planetary Resources model is also good as Bill Housley notes.
Someone woke up over there – the site shows a single “Under Construction” page with the company logo.
I guess the website is not big priority and/or no one really visits it – so no one notices when its not there.
Another space tragic lol.