Posts

Showing posts from May, 2013

Who Would Have Guessed?

It was Stiennon and Hoerr's space-nerd spectacular "The Rocket Company" ( now available on Kindle!) that introduced me to Kroemer's lemma: The last 40 years has seen a lot of futile effort by space enthusiasts to find the one magic product or market that will justify building a truly commercial space industry. Well, it hasn't been found, and we're tired of waiting for it. And if you accept Kroemer's lemma, it can't be done that way anyhow. Even if you guess correctly what it is that won't create a huge growth in demand for launch services so that costs come down, that demand won't -- and can't -- come into being until the cost does come down. So who is Kroemer and what is his lemma? Herbert Kroemer is a Nobel Laureate in physics who wrote, in 1995, the Lemma of New Technology : The principle applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been -- and will continue to be -- applications created by that t