VENTURE CAPITAL - Space entrepreneurs launch ideas at investors - Rocket racers and other concepts are received as mere flights of fancy.
SAN JOSE — Peter Diamandis, the diminutive spiritual leader of a new generation of rocketeers determined to turn space into a paying business, held up a thick wallet.
"Did anybody lose this?"
The roomful of dreamers laughed appreciatively.
Money -- the lack of it and desire for more of it -- drew scores of rocket entrepreneurs last week to the Space Investment Summit, one of the first business events in the budding field of private commercial space travel.
Attendees pitched such equipment as new spacesuits, inflatable launch vehicles and NASCAR-styled rocket racers to an admittedly modest -- and skeptical -- group of venture capitalists.
What they were all hoping for is a replay of the Netscape Moment, that point when investors began throwing billions of dollars into the newfangled contraption called the Internet.
The rocketeers who gathered for the two-day event at the Dolce Hayes Mansion were confident their Sputnik Moment was near, believing it's just a matter of time before venture capital billionaires realize that space is not just a place, but also a cash register.
"We are living in a different time and age now," said Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation, which funded the $10-million prize that went to the first private manned craft launched into space three years ago. "For the first time ever the ability to build and operate space systems is in the hands of small companies."
Judging by the grim looks on the faces of investors at the event, the Sputnik Moment is still a long way off.
Remigius Shatas, a partner in RNR Ventures in Huntsville, Ala., said he had invested as much as $10 million in the space business and had yet to make money.
"Maybe the killer app hasn't been invented yet," he said.
Bob Werb, chairman of the board of the New York-based Space Frontier Foundation, conveyed advice from Walt Anderson, one of the largest and most colorful investors in new space businesses.
Anderson couldn't appear because he was in a federal jail cell, serving a sentence for tax evasion.
"Do not invest in miracles," Anderson warned. "Do not buy excuses and failures. Do not let your enthusiasm for space confuse your enthusiasm for a particular company."
There was no shortage of ideas.
Digital Solid State Propulsion, a 2-year-old Reno company, pitched its concept of electrically controllable rocket propellant.
