By: Kenneth Chang
Via: The New York Times

Kenneth Chang/The New York Times
Mojave, Calif., is the home of the Mojave Air and Space Port.

MOJAVE, Calif. — The sign into town, slightly weathered, says “Gateway to Space!”

Beyond it lies the Mojave Air and Space Port, once a Marine auxiliary air station during World War II, now an incubator for the tinkerers and dreamers in the New Space movement. Adherents believe that the next phase of space exploration will be led by nimble, ambitious entrepreneurs — a new generation of people like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who helped create the electronics industry in a garage — and that this is their moment to come together and make it happen.

Sean Mahoney/Masten Space Systems

Several times a week, the Mojave-based Masten Space Systems flies its reusable rockets.

“It’s very similar to the Silicon Valley effect,” said Stuart O. Witt, the chief executive of the space port for the past decade, explaining how half a dozen outer space start-ups came to cluster at Mojave, a small desert town about 90 miles north of Los Angeles.

This is where the first private, piloted spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, launched in 2004. Virgin Galactic is now conducting flight tests of a larger version, called SpaceShipTwo, that will take tourists on jaunts 62 miles up, giving them a brief bout of weightlessness. Small start-ups here are also developing new rocket fuels and trying to transform a discarded second stage of a rocket into a prototype moon lander.

This month, the headline event for this push of entrepreneurs will take place on the other side of the country, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, plans to launch cargo (but no people) to the International Space Station.

Until now, all spacecraft going to and from the station have been government-operated vehicles like NASA’s space shuttles and Russian Soyuz capsules. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, perched atop its Falcon 9 rocket, will be the first purely commercial supply ship — albeit one paid for by NASA — to make the trip. The launching, delayed several times, is now scheduled for May 19.

The mélange of small aerospace companies at Mojave shows that the ambitions of the New Space movement go far beyond serving as a delivery service for NASA.

Two of the companies are fronted by famous billionaires: Virgin Galactic is part of Richard Branson’s empire, while Stratolaunch is the brainchild of Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft. Stratolaunch is building two cavernous structures, a factory to build an airplane with the widest wingspan and a hangar to store it in. The airplane will be an airborne launching pad for a rocket.

Fred Prouser/Reuters

At the Mojave Air and Space Port, Virgin Galactic conducts tests of SpaceShipTwo.

Then there are the lesser-known start-ups with shallower pockets and grungier work spaces. Masten Space Systems is housed in a one-floor box dating to Mojave’s World War II days. The workshop is essentially a large garage, with pieces of rockets sitting on the concrete floor.

Masten’s specialty is its software, which makes a rocket take off vertically, hover and then land softly on the launching pad.

David Masten, the founder, used to dabble in rockets while running a technology company in the Bay Area. After the company was sold to Cisco, he founded his rocket company and, three years ago, won $1 million in a NASA-sponsored competition to demonstrate precision flying similar to what would be needed for a future lunar lander.

“It’s not a hobby anymore,” said Joel Scotkin, Masten’s chief executive. “We’re essentially self-sufficient in terms of revenue right now as we grow our business and customers.”

The venture has attracted people like Nathan O’Konek. A lawyer by training, he was working in New York putting together finance deals and volunteering at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum to sate his fascination with space. On a visit to Mojave, he learned about Masten and chucked it all to move here, becoming the director of business operations.

With just 15 or so employees — the number changes with the flow of interns — Mr. O’Konek is often out at the launching pad helping load liquid oxygen into a rocket. Masten engineers fly their reusable rockets and conduct engine tests several times a week. “You’re out there all the time,” Mr. O’Konek said. “I like what we’re doing. It’s exciting, but I also like to see the other companies out there pushing the envelope.”

Even smaller is Firestar Technologies, which gets much of its money from federal research contracts. Its main product is an alternative fuel for the thrusters that spacecraft use to maneuver in space. The chemical currently used, hydrazine, is highly toxic, and Greg Mungas, Firestar’s chief executive, has a less toxic kind that could be tested soon on the space station.

Kenneth Chang/The New York Times

The Roton was developed in Mojave by the Rotary Rocket Company before it ran out of money. The vehicle now rests in a park.

Mr. Mungas started Firestar while at the University of Colorado, Boulder, but in 2009 he moved the company to Mojave, where it fit in more easily, adding to the cacophony of sonic booms, explosions and rocket launches that are heard daily. “There are very few experiments that you can’t basically design and run” in Mojave, he said. “It’s a very, very open environment for doing this kind of testing. It’s great.”

Mojave is also the home of Scaled Composites, started by Burt Rutan, an aerospace pioneer. It was he who designed the first plane to fly around the world without refueling: Voyager, which completed that trip in nine days in 1986.

The air and space port is in an area replete with aerospace history. Just to the south is Edwards Air Force Base, where the Voyager flight began and ended, and where many of the Air Force’s early rocket planes flew, including Chuck Yeager’s X-1, the first to break the sound barrier.

While Mr. Rutan’s company continued to thrive after the 1986 flight, the rest of Mojave languished. By the mid-1990s, the port was best known as a parking lot for mothballed jets that airlines could not afford to fly.

The modern history of Mojave as a space capital starts with a business failure: the Rotary Rocket Company. The founders of Rotary wanted to shake up the industry with a low-cost design that merged rocket propulsion with helicopter blades in a vehicle that could get all the way to orbit. A prototype of the vehicle, called the Roton, was built and got off the ground with three test hover flights — but then the company ran out of money and went out of business in 2001.

The Roton now sits in a small park at the port, a testament to the airfield’s philosophy.

“We actually take pride in giving people permission to fail,” said Mr. Witt, the port’s chief executive.

The Rotary people did not go away, but instead founded new space companies. Jeff Greason, Rotary’s propulsion chief, opened XCOR Aerospace, also at Mojave. The company is building a space plane called Lynx that, like SpaceShipTwo, is meant to take tourists on suborbital. The Lynx is smaller, with just two seats: one for the pilot, the other for the passenger.

XCOR has almost run out of money a couple of times — employees have gone without paychecks occasionally — but says it is flush with cash right now because of an infusion of investments. Test flights of the Lynx could begin this year.

Like everyone at the Mojave port, Mr. Greason is looking forward to the SpaceX capsule launching, viewing it as just the latest step along the road. “They have much to be proud of,” he said of SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, an Internet entrepreneur. “But I don’t believe they have reached the point where they are independent of NASA for their continued research and development activity.”

For that matter, neither have most of the start-ups here. While they cheer on Mr. Musk’s rocket, they hope the momentum they are building is larger than that flight’s fate.

“It’s ridiculous to condition the success or failure of the industry on any one launch,” Mr. Greason said, but “there is reason for optimism that in the next few years, one or more companies — I certainly hope we’re one of them — will become profitable.”

via The Atlantic and NPR

Today, at least 90% of the country has a stove, electricity, car, fridge, clothes washer, air-conditioning, color TV, microwave, and cell phone. Take a moment to savor this graph from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century:

One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

– In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones

– In 1915, <10% of families owned a car

– In 1930, <10% of families owned a refrigerator or clothes washer

– In 1945, <10% of families owned a clothes dryer or air-conditioning

– In 1960, <10% of families owned a dishwasher or color TV

– In 1975, <10% of families owned a microwave

– In 1990, <10% of families had a cell phone or access to the Internet

In his final of 3 posts, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic notes: “In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away.” His first installment of this series followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. The second explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. The third is different because it goes beyond numbers, to include issues of quality of life and the question of progress: “It’s not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women’s ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.” (Believe it or not, the boom box was the fastest-adopted gadget of the last 50 years.)

Another piece from NPR traces the Birth of Silicon Valley. Now a well-known hotbed of innovation stretching along the peninsula southwest of San Francisco Bay, the story that emerges from this timeline is the transformative power of venture capital, as well as the onward march of technology. Click on the image below to explore the timeline.

By: Nidhi Subbaraman
Via: Fast Company


Professional racing is an extreme sport. Drivers battle super-hot temperatures and G-forces for hours. To survive a race, let alone win one, a driver needs to be in top physical health.

A startup called MC10 based in Cambridge, Mass., is making wearable electronics that could change the way drivers train and stay on track during races. In the future, they hope to help all kinds of athletes up their game.

Through the thin plastic sensors worn on the arm like a transluscent [sic] patch, a driver’s team can monitor the driver continously [sic] during a race, keeping tabs on their level of energy and hydration, fixing both car and driver at break points in the race. “Think about it as a pit stop for the driver,” Ben Schlatka, MC10′s cofounder [sic] and VP of business development, says. The sensors will be designed to be specific to their use, but can detect temperature, electrical signals to pick up heart, brain, and muscle activity, measure hydration levels, and even detect motion.

MC10′s sensors are made of the same materials that regular electronics are–a combination of semiconducting silicon and metal electrodes. The difference here is that these sensors have been engineered to be bendable, stretchable, light, and extremely sensitive. This makes wearing them a dramatically different experience than wearing conventional electrodes and monitors that are rigid and tough.

“[They're] truly a soft, thin, almost skin-like device that integrates seamless with the athlete,” says Schlatka. They are also built for roughness. “G-forces, temperatures–our technology will survive all of these things,” he tells Fast Company. Though only about an inch long each way, the sensors can pick up hydration levels, heart rate, even motion cues.

This past weekend, MC10′s sensors took their first spin in a NASCAR race, pasted to the arm of 22-year-old driver Paulie Harraka during the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race on the Martinsville Speedway track in Ridgeway, Virginia. Early on in the race, plans veered slightly off course when the car’s cooling system failed. “I was hotter than I normally am and the adhesive of the MC10 patch worked just great,” Harraka tells Fast Company.


“You’re on the edge all the time,” Harraka continues. “The temperature in these vehicles get up to 140 degrees. The race lasts for hours.”

MC10 was spun out of materials scientist John Roger’s lab at the University of Illinois, where Rogers and his team have been designing bendable, stretchable electronics that can be unobtrusively connected to the body. Members of the lab have designed sensors on flexible catheters to aid heart surgeries, eyeball cameras that augment vision, and channeled their expertise in skinny, flexible electronics into stick-on skin sensors for monitoring daily health signs.

The company has collaborations for sophisticated medical tools underway, with partners like Massachusetts General Hospital. There they’re testing out sensors attached to catheters that pick up vital signs of a patient during heart surgery. While those hi-tech medical tools make their slow journey through the FDA’s regulatory process, MC10 is targeting an early adopter athlete market in parallel, racing ahead with this first collaboration with Wauter Motorsports, Harraka’s team. Military applications are in the pipeline through project collaborations MC10 has in place with the U.S. government and Department of Defense.

“Athletes are an early market segment for us because they appreciate tech that allows for performance optimization,” Schlatka says. “There’s no regulation, it’s faster to the market.” In fact, speed fiend Harraka only met the MC10 team for the first time this March, at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Less than a month later, he was revving up his engine with a custom-designed sensor stuck on his forearm. To Harraka, the deal made instant sense. “At NASCAR we’re such a technology and numbers-driven sport,” Harraka says, “it’s totally natural they’d want to be using and testing cutting edge-tech.”

The race on Sunday was a demonstration that the sensors (currently inactive) were durable and would stay on during real race conditions, without distracting the driver. In the coming months, MC10 and Harraka’s team will be testing multiple sensors to pick up health readings during practice runs and other races.

[Images: Ronda Greer]

Deloitte returns as NCCDC sponsor to help support the demand for skilled cyber professionals

By: Deloitte
Via: PR Newswire

SAN ANTONIO, April 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) today announced that the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) is returning to San Antonio for the seventh consecutive year. Sponsored by Deloitte, one of the largest professional services organizations in the United States, the three-day national championship will kick off on April 20th at the St. Anthony Hotel.

Modeled from real world scenarios and obstacles, this one-of-a-kind competition will feature the top 10 champions of the regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition from universities across the country. The national event will serve as an additional training ground for future cyber defenders. It also provides the best and brightest collegiate students an opportunity to shine on a national stage and connect with the top cyber security firms in the country.

The threat of cyber attacks targeting the United States is a serious issue at the highest levels of government. President Obama recently noted “cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” Moreover, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recently announced that the Department of Homeland Security faces a barrage – thousands – of cyber-attacks every 45 minutes. In line with the United States’ commitment to cyber defense, Secretary of Department of Defense Leon Panetta announced in his 10-year budget forecast that cyber security is one of a few select areas that will receive additional investment and resources, even as the Department of Defense readies to scale back $487 billion in spending in other areas.

“Our nation is under constant attack from various cyber criminals, from individuals stealing personal financial information to sophisticated terrorist networks seeking to hack into our electrical grid and be a detriment to our way of life,” said General Harry Raduege, Deloitte Services LP and chairman of Deloitte’s Center for Cyber Innovation. “Our nation continues to seek out and employ the best and brightest to combat cyber crimes. Competitions such as the NCCDC help refine the skills necessary to man our new front lines.”

NCCDC provides higher education institutions with information assurance and computer security programs in a competitive environment.

“San Antonio boasts one of our nation’s largest military contingents,” said Dr. Gregory White, director, UTSA Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security. “Students who participate in these kinds of competitions are at the forefront of the war on terror. Cyber terrorism is very real. Each day, our federal government and commercial sectors are at risk. Our competition provides the necessary foundation for students to implement what they’ve learned to serve a higher calling as key defenders against cyber terrorism and maintain the security of our networks.”

The attention from government and business leaders now focused on cyber security has also brought an added benefit for those who compete in the NCCDC – job opportunities. In previous years, for those with proven skills in the field the NCCDC has fostered hundreds of employment opportunities for participants over the last six years.

About the NCCDC
The NCCDC consists of qualifying and regional events with the winners of each regional event advancing to the National Championship. The winners of the 10 regional CCDC events are: At-Large Regional: University of Alaska Fairbanks; Mid-Atlantic Regional: Towson University; Midwest Regional: St. Cloud State University; Northeast Regional: Rochester Institute of Technology; North Central Regional: University of Wyoming; Pacific Rim Regional: University of Washington; Rocky Mountain Regional: United States Air Force Academy; Southeast Regional: University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Southwest Regional: Texas A&M University; Western Regional: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. To learn more about the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition click here.

About Deloitte Federal Government Services
Federal agencies turn to Deloitte for their most meaningful and challenging problems. With a mix of public sector experience and private sector perspective, Deloitte’s diverse capabilities across consulting, financial advisory, audit and enterprise risk, and tax services help clients address issues from many dimensions. Learn more about the Deloitte Federal U.S. Government practice

About Deloitte’s Center for Cyber Innovation
The Deloitte Center for Cyber Innovation (Center) develops cyber solutions for clients in the public and private sectors who are seeking to improve information sharing, collaboration and performance by harnessing the power of increasingly interdependent networks. Located in Arlington, Virginia, the Center helps clients plan for, execute and manage an integrated cyber business strategy to enhance operations, mitigate risks, empower personnel and strengthen customer support. Learn more about the Center.

About Deloitte’s Security & Privacy Services
Security, privacy and operational resilience are critical issues facing both public and private organizations today. Security & Privacy (S&P) services help organizations in their management of information and technology risks by delivering end-to-end solutions, using demonstrated methodologies and tools in a consistent manner. Our services help organizations address timely and pervasive issues such as identity theft, data security breaches, data leakage, cyber security and system outages across organizations of various sizes and industries, with the goal of enabling ongoing, secure and reliable operations across the enterprise. For deeper insights and new research on information security and privacy, visit our new innovation center, the Center for Security and Privacy Solutions.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

By: J. Katie McConnell
Via: CitiesSpeak.org

There’s been no shortage of interest and commentary about the importance of entrepreneurs and small business to the nation’s recovery. Almost daily, economists and policy wonks engage in a seemingly never-ending discussion on what the “right” businesses are to create jobs. And while these conversations have utility and value, they have not produced many actionable strategies for cities where entrepreneurs and small businesses actually exist. In response, NLC released Supporting Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: A Tool Kit for Local Leaders.

Almost universally, city leaders understand the value of all shapes and sizes of entrepreneurs and small businesses. These businesses create jobs, employ local residents, and help define a community’s sense of place. What is often unclear, however, is how city leaders can foster an environment that encourages entrepreneurs and small businesses.

The tool kit profiles efforts in cities of all sizes to support entrepreneurship and small businesses. These efforts range from knowledge focused in Boston’s Innovation District, governance focused in Seattle, Wash., export focused in Wichita, Kan., or regulatory focused in Rockhill, S.C.

The tool kit’s core message is that cities need to look to the things they can actually control. This includes providing a supportive political leadership; channels of communication between business and government; and reasonable, transparent regulations with accessible interfaces.

Additionally, given the shaky track record of some government-led entrepreneurship efforts, as cities strive to provide more sophisticated services to spur entrepreneurship, partnerships with necessary expertise are essential along with sufficient levels of resources and realistic expectations and time-frames.

It is our hope that this new tool kit shines additional light on the role that local government plays in business development and helps city leaders create a more supportive environment for their local entrepreneurs and small businesses. To download Supporting Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: A Tool Kit for Local Leaders, click here.

By: G. Nagesh Rao
Via: TriplePundit

Over the past few years, the mere utterance of the term “Regional Innovation Clusters” (RICs) has either ginned up folks or struck a gut-wrenching chord within the startup and technology world. No fiercer critic has emerged than Vivek Wadhwa, who has been opining thoughtfully on his belief that government sponsored Regional Innovation Clusters, are doomed for failure. He believes the current strategy of constructing an incubator in an area with cheap real-estate and sprinkling a few smart folks in the area to “create magic” is insufficient.

As someone who has worked for the US government for seven years as a civil servant, on a variety of endeavors including matters related to RICs, I understand and concur with many of Vivek’s sentiments. But I do question his supposition that it has to be that way.

The truth is that governments at the federal, state or local level can partner with local stakeholders to create a fully functional RIC through a hybrid of pre-existing organic growth and pragmatic policy mechanisms. The role of democratic government is to develop viable and sustainable endeavors in the public’s best interests. If the right stakeholders are brought into place to make it happen the formula can work.

A great example of a successful RIC is the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) which has become the backbone of the budding cleantech initiatives in LA due to Mayor Villaraigosa’s cajoling of various public and private stakeholders. Recently, Governor Jerry Brown’s decision to dismantle the California Redevelopment Agency (CRA) system laid a serious blow to LACI, since it was spearheaded as a CRA project. Nonetheless the partners involved made sure to keep this initiative alive and well, making sure the public knew that it was going to sustain various political administrations for years to come.

Why? Because the initiative was created with the right players in mind, from top tier universities (Caltech, USC, and UCLA), to the massive manufacturing base in the valley to the creative minds emanating out of Hollywood. The public demanded that next wave of cleantech development be spearheaded right out of LA, they wished to be a “Neo-Mecca” for next generation innovation and sustainable technological development. That is why LACI survived, the public with the Mayor’s office willed this endeavor to stay the course because they truly believe in the vision.

Full disclosure: I spent the last year in the LA cleantech scene working and advising with a number of startup companies as well being the go-to “Government and IP-Policy and Procurement Guru,” and it was a positively enlightening experience.

[Image credit: Michael Bonnett Jr, Flickr]