Invention vs. Entrepreneurship

I'm an inventor. I suspect that entrepreneurs know as little about good inventors as the general public knows about successful entrepreneurs.

I've been working for three years, along with Dr. John Wilkes and about 10 engineering students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, on a spacecraft that gathers mixed gases at the edge of the earth's atmosphere. The idea was first developed by Sterge T. Demetriades around 1960 and was proposed for the American Apollo moon program. The idea was scrapped. However, one of Mr. Demetriates's inventions devised for gas gathering, the plasma thruster, was developed by the Soviets for economically putting their fleet of spacecraft on station. The thruster has since been widely adapted and updated.

Currently NASA launches propellants (and equipment) into space at $10,000/kilogram, a Delta IV might come in at $7,000/kg, and SpaceX might someday come in at maybe $3,000/kg if they're lucky. Their propellant launch costs are our equipment launch costs. Therefore, given any particular launch price, the current target is for our equipment to gather propellant gases in orbit at roughly 1/10 of the cost per kilogram of launching those propellants.

In a 2005 speech to the AIAA, NASA Director Michael Griffin estimated that NASA would need 250 metric tons of propellant per year by 2020, or $2.5B/year. The NASA number may be slashed assuming that the American moon program is canceled. However, the European, the Japanese and the Russian/Indian moon programs are going forward. Also, almost every known space mission uses some amount of propellant. Because this invention would give America a lead in a critical area of space, the politics of making money on propellant will be interesting.

I just gave a paper at the AIAA's Space09 convention in Pasadena on 9/17/09. Mr. Demetriades, now 81, came from his house about 10 miles away to see the presentation and to deliver a few remarks to the crowd. Mr. Demetriades and I differ in our gas gathering altitudes. I prefer a fairly stable orbit at 200 km or higher, where liquefied gases may be effectively pumped off to other spacecraft. The 1960 gas gatherer operated at an altitude of 100 km where gas is far more abundant. The idea is public enough that scholars either will or won't find show-stopping holes in my proposal. So far, no show stoppers have emerged. It apparently will work.

I have written a strong, thorough, well-hedged patent. Mr. Demetriades beat me to a very few ideas in 1960, ideas which are now public domain, but I still have dozens of different claims in this pioneering area. I have a great hedge. I can't guarantee that a patent will stop or even slow down a non-US government in its quest to match American technological dominance in space.

Someone on this board said that ideas are a dime a dozen. I suspect that a great entrepreneur can start with a marginal idea and still swim upstream and build a great company, but given a choice, why not start with the one idea that has overwhelming possibilities?

I'm an inventor. There aren't that many outstanding inventors on earth. It's important that I continue to invent. I'm persistent enough to study for years to be an entrepreneur, and I could spend 60 hour weeks for years on a fledgling company. That's not what I'm for.

I'm looking for a space entrepreneur, someone who can pull together a team of consulting engineers and contractors to prototype and develop this idea. Experience and reputation will be important.

Tags: collector, gas, gatherer, inventor, leo, lox, propellant

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Card on September 29, 2009 at 2:43am: Here's the trouble: what people mean that an idea is worth a "dime a dozen" is that having an idea isn't enough. It's not that an entrepreneur can turn any-old-idea into a great business; it's that there genuinely are a zillion good ideas in the world and not enough people that can turn them into businesses.

I'm the first to give respect to a great inventor; a lot of great companies have come from an inventor and an entrepreneur teaming up; but, how do you know what you have is useful? And I don't mean "cool" and I don't mean why do you think it should be useful, but how do you KNOW that it's useful to specific people? Do you know that it can be built, or do you know how to do it? How much does it cost to build one? I'm not asking these questions because I want to know; it's these questions that are what a "business plan" consists of. And if it's your idea, how can you find a partner unless you can answer these ideas enough to interest them? It's once you've answered these kinds of questions that an idea becomes worth some money; I've heard of companies buying business plans, and only the business plan document itself, for $100,000 to $150,000 and up. It's after you've done the research and have that credibility that your "idea" is now worth something.

And you run into trouble when other people do your research for you. It's a sad fact of life that planning tends to be more important than having a plan.

I'm curious, though; do you have the paper itself? I can only find the preview here: http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMSPACE07_1808/PV2007_6074.pdf

Is it not published broadly, or do you have to pay for it?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Card on September 29, 2009 at 3:15am: Sorry, obviously I mean this:
http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMSPACE09_2074/PV2009_6759.pdf; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Paul Klinkman on September 29, 2009 at 11:03pm: I owe the AIAA something, so maybe it's better if people pay for the paper.

Liquid oxygen (LOX, lately called LO2) is quite useful to any agency with a lunar base program. Companies such as Boeing and ULA are vying to build fuel depots so that a lunar mission can draw on a 180 metric ton fuel supply, which would be mostly liquid oxygen (80% LO2 for a LO2/Methane burn mixture, 89% LO2 for a LO2/LH2 burn mixture).

Because no fuel depot exists, most satellite launch companies will take a Delta IV, for example, and put a 9 ton third stage on the rocket along with a 6 ton payload. This system will reach Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) after pausing in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) after launch. I believe that a market exists for taking 15 ton payloads from LEO to GTO, or to many non-LEO orbits.

The Russians have been relying on propellant-efficient ion thruster engines since the 1980s. The European Space Agency is switching over, and now NASA is catching up. Ion thruster technology gets far more specific impulse out of each kilogram of propellant than does burning fuel in a rocket engine. When propellants are launched from earth, xenon gas is a marginally best propellant of choice, but if nitrogen and oxygen are available in orbit at a substantial cut rate, all thrusters would burn nitrogen, oxygen or an unrefined mixture of gases.

The mixture of highly efficient ion thrusters and an inexpensive propellant source will probably lead to refuelable, reusable, rather powerful space tugs for moving satellites and for cleaning out existing space junk from orbit. With inexpensive propellants, the space market should gravitate toward longer-lasting, refuelable, man-repairable spacecraft in general. Hubble-style repairs may become the rule, rather than the exception in space.

Lower costs to space will certainly mean more opportunities opening up, and more propellant use.

In 10 years almost all countries will favor gas gathering, as it lowers every space mission's carbon footprint. A national love of burning fossil fuels is just not imaginable.

I have no idea what the United States military would pay to be the OPEC of space propellants in orbit. They have hundreds of active satellites in LEO and they pretty much all consume propellants.

Our goals are to gather oxygen and nitrogen, to restore the orbital momentum lost in the gathering process, to separate and liquefy the oxygen, to store the oxygen, and to pump the oxygen off. A fuel depot will handle those last two tasks. Separating oxygen was accomplished over 200 years ago. Liquefying oxygen in space is apparently within the state of the art. Several nice ion thrusters that burn an unseparated oxygen/nitrogen mix are being tested now, and we'll the winner of this contest to regenerate our spacecraft's orbital momentum.

The fundamental problem that we need to solve is gathering the gases.

We have empirical evidence that oxygen ions penetrate into the solid metal surfaces of satellites in orbit, where they then oxidize the metal and cause spalling. We also have a theoretical model of hyperthermic atom behavior which explains how high-velocity atomic nucleii can penetrate through solids, liquids and vapors. What we don't yet have is laboratory proof that the known laws of physics indeed work as advertised for us.

Rigging up a telling experiment won't be too hard, or too expensive. A potential buyer of the patent rights could probably rig up a test in a month. I expect the test to show that one or both of my two favorite gas collectors, the sure thing model and the possibly less expensive dark horse system, will effectively gather high velocity oxygen and nitrogen atoms in a vacuum. A full-fledged test might cost $100,000, or a dirt cheap test with a willing collaborator might cost $10,000. Then we fly an array of extremely tiny gas gathering experiments on a cube satellite. Then we put up a (miniscule) prototype gas gathering satellite and gather perhaps a kilogram of mixed gases over a year. At this point some major development money must be on the table for scaling up the prototype and pre-selling propellants to customers.

This may not be everything you, or an investor, would be looking for. I'm about 90% sure that the device can be built and that it will make scads of money. If anyone wants to move to 95% assurance, they can perform the simple tests outlined above.

I don't know what real product research and development costs. Sorry.; ▶ Reply to This