space tourism

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

Like Europe, Japan has been very conservative when it comes to manned space activity and space tourism. Although various design concepts and research and market studies were conducted on space tourism in Japan before the idea was taken seriously in the United States, Japanese aerospace companies have only just begun to work on developing suborbital space vehicles. "It has been very delicate to talk about manned space vehicles, including space tourism," explains Misuzu Onuki, a well-known aerospace business consultant, author, and space tourism advocate in Japan. However, that may change under Japan's new Space Basic Plan, issued in zoo9.

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She thinks that this may motivate the Japanese government to finally provide registration and guidelines for private suborbital craft for space tourism and other applications, just as the FAA/AST did in the United States. However, she is not holding her breath, pointing out that "Japan is very slow with regulations." Despite the lack of progress in private vehicle development, Japan's unique strength is its end-user potential for space tourism. There is a great deal of consumer enthusiasm in Japan for flight opportunities in space, perhaps more than in any other country. Japan's mainstream travel agencies, such as Spacetopia, Club Tourism, and JTB, pioneered selling iss space tourism, suborbital, zero-g flights, and even the lunar trip.

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His ex-wife and business partner, Suzanne, was among them, as were his sons, Michael and Brad; his girlfriend, Dawn Abraham; and several wealthy friends and colleagues from his investment company, Wilshire Associates. Accompanying Tito's group was the staff of Space Adventures (sA), a pioneering space tourism company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. SA CEO and president Eric Anderson stepped off the plane, along with a handful Of SA staff and investors. Though his prematurely receding hairline suggested otherwise, Anderson was a mere twenty-six years old, but he was about to establish himself as the primary player in space tourism. Anderson had brokered the deal to fly Tito to the iss and had survived through prolonged bargaining with the Russians and strenuous NASA opposition to the flight.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

Next we will examine new commercial capabilities for launching into low Earth orbit and finally get us easily to the Moon, to reach near Earth asteroids (NEAs) and Mars and go even beyond. Spaceplanes and the Space Tourism Business—The Start of a New Space Adventure Arthur C. Clarke’s “Three Laws of Prediction,” although witty and tongue in cheek, are also amazingly insightful. His first law is a particular case in point: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” The wisdom of Clarke’s First Law particularly hits home when it comes to the topic of space tourism . Some 18 years ago, when Peter Diamandis, the father of the XPrize, came to talk to the Masters’ students at the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg, France, while this author was serving as dean, he made a pitch for their joint class project to be a study of space tourism.

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These development programs are in addition to XCOR and Virgin Galactic and their spaceplane development. Many of these projects are targeted at transportation needs rather than space tourism flights. This is simply because this is where the money is. The schedules for actual test flights with passengers are still far from certain, but certainly several years in the future. There is one system under development that does not fit the spaceplane model. This is the development by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company of their New Shepherd reusable Vertical Takeoff and Vertical Landing launcher system. This unique space tourism system involves both a reusable rocket launcher and capsule that is launched and separated from the New Shepherd to allow paying passengers to gently parachute back to Earth while enjoying their outer space experience through large observation windows.

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Projected 2035 Market Size for New Services Type of Service Projected Revenues Supersonic/Hypersonic flights in the Extreme Stratosphere (i.e. Protozone flights) $10 billion/year or more Commercial launches to low Earth orbit Up to $10 billion/year Space Tourism/Space Adventures via spaceplanes $2 billion/year High Altitude Platform Systems for telecom, remote sensing and surveillance and UAVs $2 billion/year Private Space Habitats for experiments and space tourism $1 to 2 billion/year Protospace robotic transport Up to $1 billion/year Dark Sky Station for experiments and ion engine launch of small payloads to low Earth orbit Up to $1 billion/year The Not Too Distant Future In the next 5–10 years we may indeed have hypersonic jets that can fly across oceans in 2 h.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

It’s now an international activity; fewer than half of the satellites launched for commercial use are built in the United States (Figure 34).21 The economic viability of space tourism is difficult to extrapolate—its capabilities aren’t very impressive and its eventual size and long-term future are unclear. A few wealthy individuals have ponied up $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station, and it’s the belief of space visionaries that as the price comes down, the demand will increase. But there are wild cards, such as the risk tolerance of people indulging in a recreation that could lead to a grisly end. The best market study done so far is by the Futron Corporation, an aerospace consulting firm with no skin in the space-tourism game. For orbital trips, they assume that the $20 million price tag will come down to $5 million after twenty years.

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Astronaut Fact Book 2013, NASA Publication NP-2013-04-003-JSC, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC. 17. The Colbert Report, Episode 1012, broadcast on November 3, 2005, on Comedy Central. See episodes online at http://www.thecolbertreport.cc.com. 18. “Prospects of Space Tourism” by S. Abitzsch 1996, presented at the Ninth European Aerospace Congress, hosted by Space Future. 19. Space Tourism: Do You Want to Go? by J. Spencer 2004. Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books. 20. The swift death of the program at the hands of the US House of Representatives is recounted on the NASA Watch website: http://nasawatch.com/archives/2005/06/nasas-first-and-last-artist-in-residence.html. 21.

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NASA has also been becalmed, and its personnel and its supporters have experienced the accompanying feelings of listlessness and stagnation.1 As our story moves from the past to the present, we first describe how far our aspirations have fallen in forty years—from the Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 to an inability to get an astronaut into low Earth orbit. We look at the difficulty of space travel, rooted in the implacable truth of the rocket equation. Then we see a glimmer of hope in the nascent space tourism industry. Last, we draw a parallel between the evolution of information technology and space technology, leading to optimism that resurgence is around the corner. NASA’s lowest point was arguably the 2013 shutdown of the US Government, when 97 percent of its employees were furloughed, the highest percentage of the twenty-four federal agencies.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

“We need to make some bold moves … Fire them as soon as possible”: Email provided to author. “Delay is a strange word”: “Virgin Galactic Space Tourism Could Begin in 2013,” BBC News, October 26, 2011. “Things are going incredibly well”: Robin McKie, “Destination Outer Space,” Observer Magazine, June 17, 2012. “exciting brand … build momentum”: Lucy Tesseras, “Space Age Thinking,” Marketing Week, December 11, 2013. “democratization of space”: Charisse Jones, “As Shuttle Fades, the Race for Space Tourism Is Flying High,” USA Today, July 25, 2011. “being on the inside of a blast furnace”: Fisher, “Very Stunning, Very Space, and Very Cool.”

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“can’t afford to lose anybody”: Leigh Buchanan, “Big Ideas Also Mean Big Risks,” inc.com, November 6, 2012. “Fire in the cockpit”: “Report of Apollo 204 Review Board,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, April 5, 1967. “the way things go in our business”: Terry Gross interview with Alan Shepard, NPR, July 15, 1994. SPACE TOURISM ISN’T WORTH DYING FOR: Rogers, “Space Tourism Isn’t Worth Dying For.” “hype factory”: Doug Messier, “Mojave Journal: The Ansari X Prize’s Awkward Family Reunion,” ParabolicArc.com, October 5, 2015. “a great friend and a great spaceship”: Marky Stucky comment, “Whitesides Vows to Stay the Course, Defends Virgin Galactic’s Approach to Safety,” by Doug Messier, ParabolicArc.com, November 15, 2014.

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Stumped, he felt sickened that the last option to avoid an almost certain death was going to require him to unbuckle, crawl down, open the hatch, jump out, throw his parachute, and watch as Richard Branson’s multimillion-dollar spaceship smashed into pieces on the desert floor, and, perhaps with it, Branson’s dream of making his space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, a reality. Stucky was chasing his own dream. He’d spent almost forty years trying to become an astronaut. He’d done stints in the Marines, the Air Force, and NASA, and he now worked for an experimental aviation firm, Scaled Composites, which Branson, a showboating British mogul, had hired to build and test a spaceship for commercial use.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

This flight of fancy would eat up $1.6 billion and be canceled because it was technically infeasible. In 1999, entrepreneurs betting on space tourism leased the failing Russian space station Mir. Despite a successful seventy-three-day crewed repair mission funded by MirCorp’s investors, the orbital habitat fell into the ocean before it could be permanently saved. Financial difficulties and pressure from NASA, which saw the effort as competition for its own space station, ended the project. But it did prove that a market for space tourism existed among the wealthy. In 1996, Peter Diamandis, an eager space fan with a talent for networking and raising money for space ventures, created a $10 million prize to be awarded to the first privately funded vehicle to fly to space twice in two weeks.

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Similar acclimatization will be required before people believe in the transformative economic possibilities of space. “Here’s why space tourism is the first killer app,” Joel Sercel, a space engineer who has worked with Musk and Bezos, told me. “Recreational flying was the killer app in aviation. That gave crazy people rides in airplanes, which was just an outlandish thing to do. It normalized the airplane. There’s a market for tens of thousands of people a year for space tourism. That will normalize space so that it will no longer seem exotic, and then when people say, ‘Hey, we oughta build a robotic factory that eats asteroids and turns them into cars,’ people won’t snicker.”

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The first step to Bezos’s space colonies, then, was to stop the laughter. This would not be easy, especially as space tourism was associated at that time only with people paying $20 million to the Russian space-industrial complex for a lift up to the International Space Station. And they would have to compete for mind space with the boisterous marketing of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. At first, this bolstered the concept’s credibility, but as years passed without any of Galactic’s ticket holders actually getting into space, the idea of cheap space tourism returned to the same category as flying cars and fusion power. That may be one reason for Blue’s dedication to silence.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David
Published 1 Apr 2013

Global space travelers will experience the wonder of space firsthand, while increasing our knowledge of how common people—without years of astronaut training—fare in the environment of space. At the same time, this new industry will ignite the market for commercial space vehicles. This enthusiasm—on the part of industry and the public—will inspire the government to set up sensible, forward-looking regulations. The space tourism industry will begin. I am sure of it: Space tourism will bloom very soon. Public space travel by private citizens or nonprofessionals is critical as it makes space more familiar. That appreciation, I feel, can shed today’s elitist nature of going into space. One upshot is to help garner more support for space exploration activities.

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But when that ship slingshots back to Earth for its maintenance cycle, the interest will be intense. Can you imagine taking a cruise on the very ship that carried the first human beings to Mars? Call me an optimist, but I have a strong intuition that people will line up for that possibility. Space tourism on the rise: the Virgin Galactic suborbital system (Illustration Credit 3.1) My enthusiasm for these viewpoints has been bolstered by market surveys and space tourism forecast studies conducted by Futron Corporation and notables such as Geoffrey Crouch, professor of tourism policy and marketing at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The outlook for public interest and participation in space travel is potentially substantial.

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Putting in place and staying on track with a unified approach to space program activities must begin now. So travel with me on a journey of the imagination. It starts in Earth orbit, where America’s space entrepreneurs have opened up the opportunity for hundreds of citizens to participate in the growing business of space tourism. Space adventurers are rocketing into space aboard a new, reusable spacecraft capable of runway landings and carrying out a variety of missions. Meanwhile, early Block 1 exploration modules travel back and forth between Earth and the moon, as well as transit between Earth and Mars. We fly by comets and intercept Earth-threatening asteroids.

Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle
Published 2 Jan 2019

It was an important milestone for the company, bringing it a step closer to passenger flights. Virgin Orbit is moving ahead quickly, as well. With far smaller, nonhuman payloads, there is much less at stake. It’s an easier path to tread than space tourism. If a satellite is lost, it will have an impact on the companies that create and insure it, but nobody will perish. But launching satellites is also a business with more current and potential competition than space tourism. Today, Virgin Galactic’s only real rival to carry civilians into space is Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which is also building and testing spacecraft that will shuttle tourists. With satellites, though, there are many up-and-coming launch businesses.

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—Greg Autry, director of the University of Southern California’s Commercial Spaceflight Initiative and former NASA White House Liaison “For spaceflight fanatics like me, now—the dawn of the Second Age of Space Exploration—is the most exciting time to be alive since the moon missions of the late 1960s and early ’70s. But this complex new frontier of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, space tourism, Mars cyclers, and asteroid mining is as different as could be from the Apollo era. In Space 2.0, ace science writer Rod Pyle—an advisor to NASA and the National Space Society—provides an engaging and expertly informed explanation of how we got this far, along with a factual yet inspiring intro to our around-the-corner new adventures in space.

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The New Shepard is still in testing, but Blue Origin has announced its intention to carry six passengers on short tourist flights by the end of 2019. Larger orbital rockets, the New Glenn and massive New Armstrong, are also being planned. The rockets and capsules will be reusable. UNITY Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism start-up, is test flying its suborbital rocketplane and plans to be flying tourists by 2019 or 2020. The rocketplane is capable of carrying multiple passengers, is fully reusable, and is dropped from a carrier plane at altitude. Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket has flown nine times with eight successes and should be ready for tourist flights by 2019.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

But Simpson’s article also contained some insight into Blue’s goals, especially its desire to develop “vehicles and technologies that will help enable an enduring human presence in space.” Blue intended to build rockets that would take three passengers or more on suborbital flights to the edge of space. The story didn’t use the phrase space tourism, but that’s what Bezos was describing, and what he had in mind. Blue’s rockets would also do something different—something no rocket had ever done before. After blasting off from the launchpad, they would, as Simpson wrote, “land vertically.” Reusable rockets were a dream that had eluded the space community for years.

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But others at the hearing praised the accomplishments of the X Prize and the enthusiasm it generated. Congressman John Mica said that the flight of SpaceShipOne had “launched a whole new era in space.” The flight heralded an exciting future and “altered our vision of what the aviation system of the future will look like,” he said. “We now see the possibilities, including the development of space tourism, US spaceports, rapid global transportation.” The testimony of the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, was perhaps most important. If she called for Congress to crack down on the enterprise, the companies in the Personal Spaceflight Federation could be in real trouble. Instead, she came out strongly for the industry, equating the moment of commercial space to where commercial aviation was a hundred years earlier, when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk.

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“I think he’d be shocked that nobody had been back to the moon. I think he’d be shocked that the record for the maximum number of humans in space at any one time is thirteen. He would be, like, ‘What have you guys been up to? What, I die and the whole thing stops? Dudes, get on with it!’” YEARS AFTER VIRGIN Galactic started touting its space tourism program, it now was about to have competition. Richard Branson was promising all the luxuries that had been associated with the glamorous Virgin brand. But with Amazon, Bezos had a long history of customer service experience that he was bringing to Blue. Two days before the launch, Blue’s passengers would arrive in West Texas, the company said on its website, where “the area’s isolation lends clarity and focus as you prepare for the experience of a lifetime.”

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

This is why the two-stage reusable vehicles being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin are the right designs for both orbital delivery and fast intercontinental travel. More broadly, if you want any rocket vehicle to achieve a ∆V more than twice its exhaust velocity, you need to use more than one stage. SPACE TOURISM Since the 1990s, a number of promoters have pointed to space tourism as a clever business path to opening the final frontier. In the era of ultra-high-priced spaceflight, such concepts were impractical, with the only achievements being several flights delivering a few billionaires to either the Russian Mir or the International Space Station at prices of around $20 million each.3 However, in the relatively near future this picture could change radically, as the same intercontinental rocket plane technology enabling fast global travel could also be used to send passengers to orbit at much more affordable rates.

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If the Falcon Heavy or its successor, the Starship two-stage launch system, can be made fully reusable, then an entirely new market for space launch can be created, one involving not a hundred or so launches per year, as is currently the case, but hundreds or even thousands per day. Such a market would drive a radical cheapening of space technology, finally making possible all the dreams of space tourism, industrialization, and colonization that have been within view but out of reach since the dawn of the space age. So the dam has been broken, and the four-decade-long post-Apollo age of stagnation in space launch and human spaceflight technology has come to an end. An entrepreneurial space race has erupted with players including Firefly, Vector Launch, Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch, and, most important, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin—which will soon launch its own reusable New Glenn booster with similar capabilities to the Falcon Heavy—competing to take their share of a market that will soon explode in size.

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More than twenty teams entered the XPRIZE contest, and ultimately one of them, the Spaceship One group led by aviation genius Burt Rutan and backed financially by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, won the prize in 2004.1 The headlines made by the success of Spaceship One (which was a small suborbital rocket plane launched off of a subsonic aircraft carrier vehicle) attracted Virgin Group CEO Sir Richard Branson, who adopted the concept and, with the addition of some truly serious money, has since been moving to commercialize it under the name Virgin Galactic as a system for suborbital space tourism. More recently, the late Paul Allen started his own company, called Stratolaunch, to commercialize a much larger version of the Spaceship One concept for orbital delivery. There is a lot more that could be said about this episode, but the point I want to make here is this: Ansari did not get, or expect to get, any significant financial return for her $10 million prize fund donation.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

ISBN 978-1-62365-195-4 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019 www.quercus.com Contents Introduction POLITICS & POWER 01 Ubiquitous surveillance 02 Digital democracy 03 Cyber & drone warfare 04 Water wars 05 Wane of the West ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT 06 Resource depletion 07 Beyond fossil fuels 08 Precision agriculture 09 Population change 10 Geo-engineering THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 11 Megacities 12 Local energy networks 13 Smart cities 14 Next-generation transport 15 Extra-legal & feral slums TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE 16 An internet of things 17 Quantum & DNA computing 18 Nanotechnology 19 Gamification 20 Artificial Intelligence HEALTH & WELL-BEING 21 Personalized genomics 22 Regenerative medicine 23 Remote monitoring 24 User-generated medicine 25 Medical data mining SOCIAL & ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS 26 Living alone 27 Dematerialization 28 Income polarization 29 What (& where) is work? 30 The pursuit of happiness TOWARD A POSTHUMAN SOCIETY 31 Human beings version 2.0 32 Brain–machine interfaces 33 Avatar assistants 34 Uncanny Valley 35 Transhumanism SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER 36 Alt.Space & space tourism 37 Solar energy from space 38 Moon mining 39 Space elevators 40 Alien intelligence DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS 41 Cell phone radiation 42 Biohazards & plagues 43 Nuclear terrorism 44 Volcanoes & quakes 45 The sixth mass extinction UNANSWERED QUESTIONS 46 The Singularity 47 Me or we? 48 Mind modification 49 Is God back?

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Alternatively, if you’d like a faster opinion on likely funeral dates just visit deathclock.com the condensed idea Living forever timeline 2100 Human beings start migration to far-flung galaxies 2150 Typical humanoid life span is 584 2200 Children heavily taxed to reduce overcrowding on planet XB-1987 2250 Having children is made illegal on Earth 2255 Children kept illegally 2275 Average life span now over 800 2300 Transhumanism declared a giant mistake 36 Alt.Space & space tourism “Alt.Space” is a term that hasn’t quite taken off yet. It’s a phrase that is just starting to emerge, used to describe private spaceflight, especially that provided by a new breed of companies intent on offering low-cost access to space through the creation of novel technologies or business models.

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The first private passenger on board a rocket (a space tourist) was Dennis Tito, who paid around $10–20 million for a return ticket to the International Space Station via the Russian Space Agency. Others who’ve taken the trip on a Russian Soyuz rocket include Mark Shuttleworth, Anousheh Ansari, Charles Simonyi and Guy Laliberté. As you can see, space tourism is a bit of a man thing, but this may change. “It won’t be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: ‘I want to work 200 kilometers from home—straight up!’” Arthur C. Clarke, sci-fi author, inventor and futurist The Russian Space Agency is no longer allowing paying passengers, but billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is currently offering a similar experience, albeit suborbital, for a much more down-to-earth price of $200,000.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Published 19 Sep 2016

Louis carried Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris and into the hearts and minds of the world. Today, all eyes are on St. Louis again.” To rousing applause, he said, “The XPRIZE has been created for one major purpose, to accelerate the development of low-cost, reusable launch vehicles and thereby jump-start the creation of a space tourism industry.” Gregg Maryniak, who had plotted and planned this event with Peter, listened with pride. Peter was the most relentless person he knew. At the dais, Peter talked about the incentive prizes of the 1920s and 1930s, “the hundreds of aviation prizes that pushed the envelope of speed, distance, endurance, and safety in the fledgling aeronautical industry.

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Clarke: “I’d like to send my fondest greetings to Buzz and Peter. I recently had the pleasure of having Peter here. He explained the commitment you have made to launching a new era in private space travel. Thirty years ago, Stanley Kubrick and I made this little movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We predicted by that time, space tourism would begin and if you had money, anyone who wanted to could go to orbit. Sooner or later this will happen, and I hope the XPRIZE will contribute to that. I think I may need to revise my predictions to the date 2004 instead of 2001.” Clarke smiled and went on, “It’s always been our nature as humans to explore our surroundings and turn frontiers into future homes.

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The vehicle would launch vertically from water and land horizontally like a seaplane. In California, Peter’s friends Gary Hudson and Bevin McKinney—who had been at the John Galt gathering in Montrose, Colorado—were working on a Buck Rogers–style ship, only with helicopter blades on top. Even the grandfather of rockets, Bob Truax, who had been pushing for space tourism since before Peter Diamandis was born, was eyeing the race. The eighty-five-year-old Truax* had a forty-foot-long spaceship, two fuel tanks, and a rocket engine in storage just outside of San Diego. Having designed and built Evel Knievel’s Skycycle, Truax had known both success and failure. At an age when most of his peers were relaxing into retirement and a round or two of golf, Truax confessed, “I just like to go out and play with rockets

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 6 Nov 2023

“The Space Industry Will Be Worth Nearly $3 Trillion in 30 Years, Bank of America Predicts.” CNBC, October 31, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/the-space-industry-will-be-worth-nearly-3-trillion-in-30-years-bank-of-america-predicts.html. ———. “Space Tourism Pioneer Dennis Tito Books Private Moon Trip on SpaceX’s Starship.” CNBC, October 12, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/12/spacex-starship-seats-space-tourism-pioneer-dennis-tito-books-private-moon-trip.html. Shelhamer, Mark. “Enabling and Enhancing Human Health and Performance for Mars Colonies: Smart Spacecraft and Smart Habitats.” In The Human Factor in a Mission to Mars: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Konrad Szocik, 59–67.

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This doesn’t just mean more rocket launches, it means more spacecraft. In 2015, there were about fourteen hundred active satellites. As of 2021, there were about five thousand; and as of October 2022, around three thousand working satellites are controlled by SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink. Space tourism, long promised but rarely delivered on, appears to actually be happening. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin regularly sends people on 100-kilometer-high hops, and SpaceX has contracted to send tourists around the Moon. Where once there were only a few government agencies doing space launch, there is now a growing number of private entities competing on cost.

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If you can swing it, have a few kids, raise them to reproductive age, then go gentle into that good night. We don’t know how to do this. Not really, anyway. Humans have been in space for over sixty years now and we do know plenty about what astronauts experience. But astronauts aren’t normal people. To be frank, they’re better than us. Although this is changing a little as the era of space tourism permits the schlubby among us to reach orbit, the average astronaut is someone who combines deep specialist skills with the ability to pass a battery of physical and mental tests that most of us would bail on in a few days. Many of the early spacefarers were ultraskilled test pilots, but even when space agencies opened up a little, the résumés remained intimidating.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

(Says Rutan, ‘Innovation is what we do because there’s nothing else to do in Mojave.’) Slung under that eggshell-wing, between White Knight’s catamaran-style twin hulls, was a stubby little appendage, SpaceShipOne. Inside it sat a 63-year-old man named Mike Melvill. The age of private space flight – and with it the potential for space tourism – was about to dawn. On the face of it, innovation prizes deserve credit for this epochal event. White Knight was one of two dozen competitors trying to win the Ansari X Prize, created by a non-profit foundation. (Some were unlikely challengers: one team was proudly sponsored by ‘the Forks Coffee Shop in downtown Forks’.)

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We can also credit philanthropy: Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, bankrolled Rutan’s work for reasons reminiscent of the HHMI: he liked the idea and believed in the experimenter’s talent. Or we could equally thank hard-nosed commercialism: Rutan teamed up with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, which is determined to turn space tourism into a profitable business. Virgin Galactic has since commissioned a larger ship, SpaceShipTwo, with bigger windows and room to float around. Take a longer view, and it’s government that deserves a pat on the back for the dawn of private space flight. Back in the 1950s, the X-15 plane funded by NACA – the short-lived predecessor of NASA – flew at a height of 106 km, at the edges of space itself, after hitching a lift on a B-52 bomber.

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Another example is Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Branson started in music distribution before setting up a record label, Virgin Records. His other projects have included transatlantic airlines, no-frills airlines, mobile phone services, passenger trains, bridal wear, cola, vodka, high-end tourism (including space tourism), radio stations and financial services. Each of these enterprises has been attempted within a separate, standalone company – sometimes several stand-alone companies in different countries. Some of the ideas flopped: Virgin Cola’s main achievement was in provoking a crushing response from Coca-Cola.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith
Published 3 Apr 2006

The seminar room at the plush hotel playing host to the Global Travel and Tourism Summit is airy and bright, semicircular and walled in glass, and carpeted in rich blue, and if you listen you can hear the sea sighing in the background. I’m not surprised that only a dozen or so delegates have turned up to hear space tourism being discussed, because this is a business conference and mass space tourism is still a pipe dream. Most delegates are either in the bar or on the beach, or chatting in the pleasant sun on the terrace, or attending more practical seminars, but here are Scott and other panelists, who include Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, sitting at a long table waiting to begin.

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Space sci-fi is everywhere, from Star Trek and Lost in Space to the Silver Surfer comics which taught me to read, to the era-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the inscrutable black slab that contains the key to the Universe is dug up on the Moon, by people living on a Moon base. We’re in one of those rare moments where imagination and expectation are converging and anything seems possible. In 1969, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that, by 2001, there will be bases on the Moon. There will be daily flights into the void, probably run by private companies, and mass space tourism. Communities will orbit the Earth and fan out through the solar system. Today proves that the technology to do these things is available. David is already talking about us saving up to buy a ticket for one of the first commercial space flights, which are on sale now. All we’ll have to do then is toss a coin or fight a duel to decide who gets to use it.

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Probably no one other than Scott, but all this intrigue adds to the impression of an American hero’s precipitous, almost Miltonian fall from grace. Is that how the narrative reads to him? Paradise Lost? A life of two halves? Has he merely been unlucky, or is he the classic flawed hero? Whatever else he might be, Dave Scott is an enigma. And he’s here, quietly flown in to take part in a small panel discussion on the future of space tourism, a day after the man with whom he almost perished on Gemini 8 made headlines through his presence alone. Scott’s reclusiveness is different from Armstrong’s, though, because he hasn’t decided against profiting from his Apollo past. He has an arrangement with an auction house in California, where he conducts “closed signings,” from which the public is excluded, with each signature priced at between $165 and $400 a pop, depending upon what’s being signed.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

More extreme destinations will include the Arctic and the Antarctic, underwater travel and space travel. The wider universe has long fascinated Earth dwellers and the idea of space tourism has caught the collective imagination in recent years. Will it happen? The answer is, it already has; although whether blasting off into Earth orbit will ever feature in a mass-market tour brochure is open to debate. I personally think that space flights will appeal to a very niche demographic — namely, rich old men. But the US Federal Aviation Authority has published a set of proposed regulations for space-tourism operators, including everything from flight-crew qualifications to medical requirements and permits.

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Trends like simplicity and back to basics have spawned fads such as glamorous camp- Travel and Tourism 273 ing (glamping), luxury backpacking (flashpacking), and wild swimming (taking a dip in various rivers and streams). We’ve got the new A380 airline (complete with double beds for fly-by entrepreneurs and dictators), an enclosed tropical island in the middle of Germany (the tropical islands theme park in Krausnick), and space tourism (almost) courtesy of Virgin Galactic. Dubai is in a whole load of trouble (as some people predicted) for at least a while, and sanctuary tourism — where people can escape from the anxieties of everyday life — is doing well (as you’d probably expect). Having said this, a contradictory trend is people not going on holiday for extended periods, due to their anxiety about not being at work.

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A 311 Index ‘O’ Garage 170 3D printers 56 accelerated education 57 accidents 159, 161–6, 173, 246 ACNielsen 126 adaptive cruise control 165 Adeg Aktiv 50+ 208 advertising 115–16, 117, 119 Africa 70, 89, 129, 174, 221, 245, 270, 275, 290, 301 ageing 1, 10, 54, 69, 93, 139, 147–8, 164, 188, 202, 208, 221, 228–9, 237, 239, 251, 261, 292, 295, 297–8 airborne networks 56 airlines 272 allergies 196–7, 234, 236 Alliance Against Urban 4x4s 171 alternative energy 173 alternative futures viii alternative medicine 244–5 alternative technology 151 amateur production 111–12 Amazon 32, 113–14, 121 American Apparel 207 American Express 127–8 androids 55 Angola 77 anti-ageing drugs 231, 237 anti-ageing foods 188 anti-ageing surgery 2, 237 antibiotics 251 anxiety 10, 16, 30, 32, 36, 37, 128, 149, 179, 184, 197, 199, 225, 228, 243, 251, 252, 256, 263, 283–4, 295–6, 300, 301, 305 Apple 61, 115, 121, 130, 137–8, 157 Appleyard, Bryan 79 Argentina 210 Armamark Corporation 193 artificial intelliegence 22, 40, 44, 82 131, 275, 285–6, 297, 300 Asda 136, 137 Asia 11, 70, 78, 89, 129, 150, 174, 221, 280, 290, 292 Asimov, Isaac 44 Asos.com 216 asthma 235 auditory display software 29 Australia 20–21, 72–3, 76, 92, 121, 145, 196, 242, 246, 250, 270, 282 Austria 208 authenticity 32, 37, 179, 194, 203–11 authoritarianism 94 automated publishing machine (APM) 114 automation 292 automotive industry 154–77 B&Q 279 baby boomers 41, 208 bacterial factories 56 Bahney, Anna 145 Bahrain 2 baking 27, 179, 195, 199 Bangladesh 2 bank accounts, body double 132 banknotes 29, 128 banks 22, 123, 135–8, 150, 151 virtual 134 Barnes and Noble 114 bartering 151 BBC 25, 119 Become 207 Belgium 238 313 314 benriya 28 Berlusconi, Silvio 92 Best Buy 223 biofuel 64 biomechatronics 56 biometric identification 28, 35, 52, 68, 88, 132 bionic body parts 55 Biosphere Expeditions 259 biotechnology 40, 300 blended families 20 blogs 103, 107, 109, 120 Blurb 113 BMW 289 board games 225 body double bank accounts 132 body parts bionic 55 replacement 2, 188, 228 Bolivia 73 Bollywood 111 books 29, 105, 111–25 boomerang kids 145 brain transplants 231 brain-enhancing foods 188 Brazil 2, 84, 89, 173, 247, 254, 270, 290 Burger King 184 business 13, 275–92 Bust-Up 189 busyness 27, 195, 277 Calvin, Bill 45 Canada 63, 78, 240 cancer 251 car sharing 160, 169, 176 carbon credits 173 carbon footprints 255 carbon taxes 76, 172 cars classic 168–9 driverless 154–5 flying 156, 165 hydrogen-powered 12, 31, 157, 173 pay-as-you-go 167–8 self-driving 165 cascading failure 28 cash 126–7, 205 cellphone payments 129, 213 cellphones 3, 25, 35, 51, 53, 120, 121, FUTURE FILES 129, 156, 161, 251 chicken, Christian 192 childcare robots 57 childhood 27, 33–4, 82–3 children’s database 86 CHIME nations (China, India, Middle East) 2, 10, 81 China 2, 10, 11, 69–72, 75–81, 88, 92–3, 125, 137, 139–40, 142, 151, 163, 174–5, 176, 200, 222, 228, 247, 260, 270–71, 275, 279, 295, 302 choice 186–7 Christian chicken 192 Christianity, muscular 16, 73 Chrysler 176 cinema 110–11, 120 Citibank 29, 128 citizen journalism 103–4, 108 City Car Club 168 Clarke, Arthur C. 58–9 Clarke’s 187 classic cars 168–9 climate change 4, 11, 37, 43, 59, 64, 68, 74, 77–9, 93, 150, 155, 254, 257, 264, 298–9 climate-controlled buildings 254, 264 cloning 38 human 23, 249 CNN 119 coal 176 Coca-Cola 78, 222–3 co-creation 111–12, 119 coins 29, 128, 129 collective intelligence 45–6 Collins, Jim 288 comfort eating 200 Comme des Garçons 216 community 36 compassion 120 competition in financial services 124–5 low-cost 292 computers disposable 56 intelligent 23, 43 organic 56 wearable 56, 302 computing 3, 33, 43, 48, 82 connectivity 3, 10, 11, 15, 91, 120, Index 233, 261, 275–6, 281, 292, 297, 299 conscientious objection taxation 86 contactless payments 123, 150 continuous partial attention 53 control 36, 151, 225 convenience 123, 178–9, 184, 189, 212, 223, 224 Coren, Stanley 246 corporate social responsibility 276, 282, 298 cosmetic neurology 250 Costa Rica 247 Craig’s List 102 creativity 11, 286; see also innovation credit cards 141–3, 150 crime 86–9 forecasting 86–7 gene 57, 86 Croatia 200 Crowdstorm 207 Cuba 75 cultural holidays 259, 273 culture 11, 17–37 currency, global 127, 151 customization 56, 169, 221–2, 260 cyberterrorism 65, 88–9 Cyc 45 cynicism 37 DayJet 262 death 237–9 debt 123–4, 140–44, 150 defense 63, 86 deflation 139 democracy 94 democratization of media 104, 108, 113 demographics 1, 10, 21, 69, 82, 93, 202, 276, 279–81, 292, 297–8 Denmark 245 department stores 214 deregulation 11, 3 Destiny Health 149 detox 200 Detroit Project 171 diagnosis 232 remote 228 digital downloads 121 evaporation 25 315 immortality 24–5 instant gratification syndrome 202 Maoism 47 money 12, 29, 123, 126–7, 129, 132, 138, 150, 191 nomads 20, 283 plasters 241 privacy 25, 97, 108 readers 121 digitalization 37, 292 Dinner by Design 185 dirt holidays 236 discount retailers 224 Discovery Health 149 diseases 2, 228 disintegrators 57 Disney 118–19 disposable computers 56 divorce 33, 85 DNA 56–7, 182 database 86 testing, compulsory 86 do-it-yourself dinner shops 185–6 dolls 24 doorbells 32 downshifters 20 Dream Dinners 185 dream fulfillment 148 dressmaking 225 drink 178–200 driverless cars 154–5 drugs anti-ageing 231, 237 performance-improving 284–5 Dubai 264, 267, 273 dynamic pricing 260 E Ink 115 e-action 65 Earthwatch 259 Eastern Europe 290 eBay 207 e-books 29, 37, 60, 114, 115, 302 eco-luxe resorts 272 economic collapse 2, 4, 36, 72, 221, 295 economic protectionism 10, 15, 72, 298 economy travel 272 316 Ecuador 73 education 15, 18, 82–5, 297 accelerated 57 lifelong learning 290 Egypt 2 electricity shortages 301 electronic camouflage 56 electronic surveillance 35 Elephant 244 email 18–19, 25, 53–4, 108 embedded intelligence 53, 154 EMF radiation 251 emotional capacity of robots 40, 60 enclosed resorts 273 energy 72, 75, 93 alternative 173 nuclear 74 solar 74 wind 74 enhancement surgery 249 entertainment 34, 121 environment 4, 10, 11, 14, 64, 75–6, 83, 93, 155, 171, 173, 183, 199, 219–20, 252, 256–7, 271, 292, 301 epigenetics 57 escapism 16, 32–3, 121 Estonia 85, 89 e-tagging 129–30 e-therapy 242 ethical bankruptcy 35 ethical investing 281 ethical tourism 259 ethics 22, 24, 41, 53, 78, 86, 132, 152, 194, 203, 213, 232, 238, 249–50, 258, 276, 281–2, 298–9 eugenics 252 Europe 11, 70, 72, 81, 91, 141, 150, 174–5, 182, 190, 192, 209 European Union 15, 139 euthanasia 238, 251 Everquest 33 e-voting 65 experience 224 extended financial families 144 extinction timeline 9 Facebook 37, 97, 107 face-recognition doors 57 fakes 32 family 36, 37 FUTURE FILES family loans 145 fantasy-related industries 32 farmaceuticals 179, 182 fast food 178, 183–4 fat taxes 190 fear 10, 34, 36, 38, 68, 150, 151, 305 female-only spaces 210–11, 257 feminization 84 financial crisis 38, 150–51, 223, 226, 301 financial services 123–53, 252 trends 123–5 fish farming 181 fixed-price eating 200 flashpacking 273 flat-tax system 85–6 Florida, Richard 36, 286, 292 flying cars 165 food 69–70, 72, 78–9, 162, 178–201 food anti-ageing 188 brain-enhancing 188 fast 178, 183–4 functional 179 growing your own 179, 192, 195 history 190–92 passports 200 slow 178, 193 tourism 273 trends 178–80 FoodExpert ID 182 food-miles 178, 193, 220 Ford 169, 176, 213, 279–80 forecasting 49 crime 86–7 war 49 Forrester Research 132 fractional ownership 168, 175, 176, 225 France 103, 147, 170, 189, 198, 267 Friedman, Thomas 278–9, 292 FriendFinder 32 Friends Reunited 22 frugality 224 functional food 179 Furedi, Frank 68 gaming 32–3, 70, 97, 111–12, 117, 130, 166, 262 Gap 217 Index gardening 27, 148 gas 176 GE Money 138, 145 gendered medicine 244–5 gene silencing 231 gene, crime 86 General Motors 157, 165 Generation X 41, 281 Generation Y 37, 41, 97, 106, 138, 141–2, 144, 202, 208, 276, 281, 292 generational power shifts 292 Genes Reunited 35 genetic enhancement 40, 48 history 35 modification 31, 182 testing 221 genetics 3, 10, 45, 251–2 genomic medicine 231 Germany 73, 147, 160, 170, 204–5, 216–17, 261, 267, 279, 291 Gimzewski, James 232 glamping 273 global currency 127 global warming 4, 47, 77, 93, 193, 234 globalization 3, 10, 15–16, 36–7, 63–7, 72–3, 75, 81–2, 88, 100, 125, 139, 143, 146, 170, 183, 189, 193–5, 221, 224, 226, 233–4, 247–8, 263, 275, 278–80, 292, 296, 299 GM 176 Google 22, 61, 121, 137, 293 gout 235 government 14, 18, 36, 63–95, 151 GPS 3, 15, 26, 50, 88, 138, 148, 209, 237, 262, 283 Grameen Bank 135 gravity tubes 57 green taxes 76 Greenpeace 172 GRIN technologies (genetics, robotics, internet, nanotechnology) 3, 10, 11 growing your own food 178, 192, 195 Gucci 221 Gulf States 125, 260, 268 H&M 217 habitual shopping 212 Handy, Charles 278 317 Happily 210 happiness 63–4, 71–2, 146, 260 health 15, 82, 178–9, 199 health monitoring 232, 236, 241 healthcare 2, 136, 144, 147–8, 154, 178–9, 183–4, 189–91, 228–53, 298; see also medicine trends 214–1534–7 Heinberg, Richard 74 Helm, Dieter 77 Heritage Foods 195 hikikomori 18 hive mind 45 holidays 31, 119; see also tourism holidays at home 255 cultural 259 dirt 236 Hollywood 33, 111–12 holographic displays 56 Home Equity Share 145 home baking 225 home-based microgeneration 64 home brewing 225 honesty 152 Hong Kong 267 hospitals 228, 241–3, 266 at home 228, 238, 240–42 hotels 19, 267 sleep 266 human cloning 23, 249 Hungary 247 hybrid humans 22 hydrogen power 64 hydrogen-powered cars 12, 31, 157, 173 Hyperactive Technologies 184 Hyundai 170 IBM 293 identities, multiple 35, 52 identity 64, 71 identity theft 88, 132 identity verification, two-way 132 immigration 151–2, 302 India 2, 10, 11, 70–72, 76, 78–9, 81, 92, 111, 125, 135, 139, 163, 174–5, 176, 247, 249–50, 254, 260, 270, 275, 279, 302 indirect taxation 86 318 individualism 36 Indonesia 2, 174 industrial robots 42 infinite content 96–7 inflation 151 information overlead 97, 120, 159, 285; see also too much information innovation 64, 81–2, 100, 175, 222, 238, 269, 277, 286–8, 291, 297, 299 innovation timeline 8 instant gratification 213 insurance 123, 138, 147–50, 154, 167, 191, 236, 250 pay-as-you-go 167 weather 264 intelligence 11 embedded 53, 154 implants 229 intelligent computers 23, 43 intelligent night vision 162–3 interaction, physical 22, 25, 97, 110, 118, 133–4, 215, 228, 243, 276, 304 interactive media 97, 105 intergenerational mortgages 140, 144–5 intermediaries 123, 135 internet 3, 10, 11, 17–18, 25, 68, 103, 108, 115–17, 124, 156, 240–41, 261, 270, 283, 289, 305 failure 301 impact on politics 93–4 sensory 56 interruption science 53 iPills 240 Iran 2, 69 Ishiguro, Hiroshi 55 Islamic fanaticism 16 Italy 92, 170, 198–9 iTunes 115, 130; see also Apple Japan 1, 18, 26, 28–9, 54–5, 63, 80–81, 114, 121, 128–9, 132, 140, 144–5, 147, 174, 186, 189, 192, 196, 198, 200, 209–10, 223, 240, 260, 264, 271, 279, 291 jetpacks 60 job security 292 journalism 96, 118 journalism, citizen 103–4, 107 joy-makers 57 FUTURE FILES Kaboodle 207 Kapor, Mitchell 45 Kenya 128 keys 28–9 Kindle 60, 121 Kramer, Peter 284 Kuhn, Thomas 281 Kurzweil, Ray 45 Kuwait 2 labor migration 290–91 labor shortages 3, 80–81, 289–90 Lanier, Jaron 47 laser shopping 212 leisure sickness 238 Let’s Dish 185 Lexus 157 libraries 121 Libya 73 life-caching 24, 107–8 lighting 158, 160 Like.com 216 limb farms 249 limited editions 216–17 live events 98, 110, 304 localization 10, 15–16, 116, 128, 170, 178, 189, 193, 195, 215, 220, 222–3, 224, 226, 255, 270, 297 location tagging 88 location-based marketing 116 longevity 188–9, 202 Longman, Philip 71 low cost 202, 219–22 luxury 202, 221, 225, 256, 260, 262, 265–6, 272 machinamas 112 machine-to-machine communication 56 marketing 115–16 location-based 116 now 116 prediction 116 Marks & Spencer 210 Maslow, Abraham 305–6 masstigue 223 materialism 37 Mayo Clinic 243 McDonald’s 130, 168, 180, 184 McKinsey 287 Index meaning, search for 16, 259, 282, 290, 305–6 MECU 132 media 96–122 democratization of 104, 108, 115 trends 96–8 medical outsourcing 247–8 medical tourism 2, 229, 247 medicine 188, 228–53; see also healthcare alternative 243–4 gendered 244–5 genomic 231 memory 229, 232, 239–40 memory loss 47 memory pills 231, 240 memory recovery 2, 228–9, 239 memory removal 29–30, 29, 240 Menicon 240 mental health 199 Meow Mix 216 Merriman, Jon 126 metabolomics 56 meta-materials 56 Metro 204–5 Mexico 2 micromedia 101 micro-payments 130, 150 Microsoft 137, 147, 293 Middle East 10, 11, 70, 81, 89, 119, 125, 129, 139, 174–5, 268, 301 migration 3, 11, 69–70, 78, 82, 234, 275, 290–91 boomerang 20 labor 290–91 Migros 215 military recruitment 69 military vehicles 158–9 mind-control toys 38 mindwipes 57 Mitsubishi 198, 279 mobile payments 123, 150 Modafinil 232 molecular biology 231 monetization 118 money 123–52 digital 12, 29, 123, 126–7, 129, 132, 138, 150, 191 monitoring, remote 154, 168, 228, 242 monolines 135, 137 319 mood sensitivity 41, 49, 154, 158, 164, 187–8 Morgan Stanley 127 mortality bonds 148 Mozilla Corp. 289 M-PESA 129 MTV 103 multigenerational families 20 multiple identities 35, 52 Murdoch, Rupert 109 muscular Christianity 16, 73 music industry 121 My-Food-Phone 242 MySpace 22, 25, 37, 46, 97, 107, 113 N11 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam) 2 nanoelectronics 56 nanomedicine 32 nanotechnology 3, 10, 23, 40, 44–5, 50, 157, 183, 232, 243, 286, 298 napcaps 56 narrowcasting 109 NASA 25, 53 nationalism 16, 70, 72–3, 139, 183, 298, 302 natural disasters 301 natural resources 2, 4, 11, 64, 298–9 Nearbynow 223 Nestlé 195 Netherlands 238 NetIntelligence 283 networkcar.com 154 networks 28, 166, 288 airborne 56 neural nets 49 neuronic whips 57 neuroscience 33, 48 Neville, Richard 58–9 New Economics Foundation 171 New Zealand 265, 269 newspapers 29, 102–9, 117, 119, 120 Nigeria 2, 73 Nike 23 nimbyism 63 no-frills 224 Nokia 61, 105 Norelift 189 320 Northern Rock 139–40 Norwich Union 167 nostalgia 16, 31–2, 51, 169–70, 179, 183, 199, 203, 225, 303 now marketing 116 nuclear annihilation 10, 91 nuclear energy 74 nutraceuticals 179, 182 Obama, Barack 92–3 obesity 75, 190–92, 199, 250–51 oceanic thermal converters 57 oil 69, 72–3, 93, 151, 174, 176, 272, 273, 301 Oman 2, 270 online relationships 38 organic computers 56 organic food 200, 226 osteoporosis 235 outsourcing 224, 292 Pakistan 2 pandemics 4, 10, 16, 59, 72, 128, 232, 234, 272, 295–7, 301 paper 37 parasite singles 145 passwords 52 pictorial 52 pathogens 233 patient simulators 247 patina 31 patriotism 63, 67, 299 pay-as-you-go cars 167–8 pay-as-you-go insurance 167 payments cellphone 129, 213 contactless 123, 150 micro- 130, 150 mobile 123, 150 pre- 123, 150 PayPal 124, 137 Pearson, Ian 44 performance-improving drugs 284–5 personal restraint 36 personal robots 42 personalization 19, 26, 56, 96–8, 100, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 120, 138, 149, 183, 205–6, 223, 244–5, 262, 267, 269 Peru 73 FUTURE FILES Peters, Tom 280 Pharmaca 244 pharmaceuticals 2, 33, 228, 237 Philippines 2, 212, 290 Philips 114 Philips, Michael 232–3 photographs 108 physical interaction 22, 25, 97, 110, 118, 133–4, 215, 228, 243, 276, 304 physicalization 96–7, 101–2, 106, 110, 120 pictorial passwords 52 piggy banks 151 Pink, Daniel 285 plagiarism 83 polarization 15–16, 285 politics 37, 63–95, 151–2 regional 63 trends 63–5 pop-up retail 216, 224 pornography 31 portability 178, 183–4 power shift eastwards 2, 10–11, 81, 252 Prada 205–6, 216 precision agriculture 181–2 precision healthcare 234–7 prediction marketing 116 predictions 37, 301–2 premiumization 223 pre-payments 123, 150 privacy 3, 15, 41, 50, 88, 154, 165–7, 205, 236, 249, 285, 295 digital 25, 97, 108 Procter & Gamble 105, 280 product sourcing 224 Prosper 124, 135 protectionism 67, 139, 156, 220, 226, 301 economic 10, 15, 72, 299 provenance 178, 193, 226 proximity indicators 32 PruHealth 149 psychological neoteny 52 public ownership 92 public transport 171 purposeful shopping 212 Qatar 2 quality 96–7, 98, 101, 109 Index quantum mechanics 56 quantum wires 56 quiet materials 56 radiation, EMF 251 radio 117 randominoes 57 ranking 34, 83, 109, 116, 134, 207 Ranking Ranqueen 186 reality mining 51 Really Cool Foods 185 rebalancing 37 recession 139–40, 202, 222 recognition 36, 304 refrigerators 197–8 refuge 121 regeneration 233 regional food 200 regional politics 63 regionality 178, 192–3 regulation 124, 137, 143 REI 207 Reid, Morris 90 relationships, online 38 religion 16, 58 remote diagnosis 228 remote monitoring 154, 168, 228, 242 renting 225 reputation 34–5 resistance to technology 51 resorts, enclosed 273 resource shortages 11, 15, 146, 155, 178, 194, 254, 300 resources, natural 2, 4, 11, 64, 73–4, 143, 298–9 respect 36, 304 restaurants 186–8 retail 20–21, 202–27, 298 pop-up 216, 224 stealth 215 theater 214 trends 202–3 Revkin, Andy 77 RFID 3, 24, 50, 121, 126, 149, 182, 185, 192, 196, 205 rickets 232 risk 15, 124, 134, 138, 141, 149–50, 162, 167, 172, 191, 265, 299–300, 303 Ritalin 232 321 road pricing 166 Robertson, Peter 49 robogoats 55 robot department store 209 Robot Rules 44 robotic assistants 54, 206 concierges 268 financial advisers 131–2 lobsters 55 pest control 57 soldiers 41, 55, 60 surgery 35, 41, 249 robotics 3, 10, 41, 44–5, 60, 238, 275, 285–6, 292, 297 robots 41, 54–5, 131, 237, 249 childcare 57 emotional capacity of 40, 60 industrial 42 personal 42 security 209 therapeutic 41, 54 Russia 2, 69, 72, 75, 80, 89, 92–3, 125, 174, 232, 254, 270, 295, 302 safety 32, 36, 151, 158–9, 172–3, 182, 192, 196 Sainsbury’s 215 Salt 187 sanctuary tourism 273 satellite tracking 166–7 Saudi Arabia 2, 69 Schwartz, Barry 186 science 13, 16, 40–62, 300 interruption 53 trends 40–42 scramble suits 57 scrapbooking 25, 108, 225 Sears Roebuck 137 seasonality 178, 193–4 second-hand goods 224 Second Life 133, 207–8 securitization 124, 140 security 16, 31, 151 security robots 209 self-driving cars 165 self-medication 242 self-publishing 103, 113–14 self-reliance 35, 75 self-repairing roads 57 322 self-replicating machines 23, 44 Selfridges 214 sensor motes 15, 50, 196 sensory internet 56 Sharia-based investment 125 Shop24 209 shopping 202–27 habitual 212 laser 212 malls 211–5 purposeful 212 slow 213 social 207 Shopping 2.0 224 short-wave scalpels 57 silicon photonics 56 simplicity 169–70, 179, 186, 202, 218, 224, 226, 272 Singapore 241 single-person households 19–20, 202–3, 208–9, 221, 244, 298, 304 skills shortage 293, 302 sky shields 57 sleep 159–60, 188, 228, 231, 246–7, 265 sleep debt 96, 266 sleep hotels 266 sleep surrogates 57 slow food 178, 193 slow shopping 213 slow travel 273 smart devices 26–7, 28, 32, 35, 44, 50, 56, 57, 164, 206, 207 smart dust 3, 15, 50, 196 smartisans 20 Smartmart 209 snakebots 55 social networks 97, 107, 110, 120, 133, 217, 261 social shopping 207 society 13, 15–16, 17–37 trends 15–16 Sodexho 193 solar energy 74 Sony 114, 121 South Africa 84, 149, 242 South America 82, 270 South Korea 2, 103, 128–9 space ladders 56 space mirrors 47 space tourism 271, 273 FUTURE FILES space tugs 57 speed 164, 202, 209, 245, 296–7 spirituality 16, 22, 282, 298, 306 spot knowledge 47 spray-on surgical gloves 57 St James’s Ethics Centre 282 stagflation 139 starch-based plastics 64 stealth retail 215 stealth taxation 86 Sterling, Bruce 55 storytelling 203 Strayer, David 161 street signs 162–3 stress 32, 96, 235, 243, 245–6, 258–9, 265, 257–9, 275, 277, 283–5 stress-control clothing 57 stupidity 151, 302 Stylehive 207 Sudan 73 suicide tourism 236 Super Suppers 185 supermarkets 135–6, 184–6, 188, 191–2, 194, 202–3, 212, 215, 218–19, 224, 229 surgery 2, 31 anti-ageing 2, 237 enhancement 249 Surowiecki, James 45 surveillance 35, 41 sustainability 4, 37, 74, 181, 193–5, 203, 281, 288, 298–9 Sweden 84 swine flu 38, 251, 272 Switzerland 168, 210, 215 synthetic biology 56 Taco Bell 184 Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model 49 tagging, location 86, 88 Taiwan 81 talent, war for 275, 279, 293; see also labor shortages Target 216 Tasmania 267 Tata Motors 174, 176 taxation 85–6, 92, 93 carbon 76, 172 conscientious objection 86 Index fat 190 flat 85–6 green 76 indirect 86 stealth 86 Tchibo 217 technology 3, 14–16, 18, 22, 26, 28, 32, 37, 40–62, 74–5, 82–3, 96, 119, 132, 147–8, 154, 157, 160, 162, 165–7, 178, 182, 195–8, 208, 221, 229, 237, 242–3, 249, 256, 261, 265–6, 268, 275–6, 280, 283–4, 292, 296–7, 300 refuseniks 30, 51, 97 trends 40–42 telemedicine 228, 238, 242 telepathy 29 teleportation 56 television 21, 96, 108, 117, 119 terrorism 67, 91, 108, 150, 262–3, 267, 272, 295–6, 301 Tesco 105, 135–6, 185, 206, 215, 219, 223 Thailand 247, 290 therapeutic robots 41, 54 thermal imaging 232 things that won’t change 10, 303–6 third spaces 224 ThisNext 207 thrift 224 Tik Tok Easy Shop 209 time scarcity 30, 96, 102, 178, 184–6, 218, 255 time shifting 96, 110, 116 time stamps 50 timeline, extinction 9 timeline, innovation 8 timelines 7 tired all the time 246 tobacco industry 251 tolerance 120 too much choice (TMC) 29, 202, 218–19 too much information (TMI) 29, 51, 53, 202, 229; see also information overload tourism 254–74 cultural 273 ethical 259 food 273 323 local 273 medical 2, 229, 247 sanctuary 273 space 271, 273 suicide 238 tribal 262 Tourism Concern 259 tourist quotas 254, 271 Toyota 48–9, 157 toys, mind-control 38 traceability 195 trading down 224 transparency 3, 15, 143, 152, 276, 282, 299 transport 15, 154–77, 298 public 155, 161 trends 154–6 transumerism 223 travel 2, 3, 11, 148, 254–74 economy 272 luxury 272 slow 273 trends 254–6 trend maps 6–7 trends 1, 5–7, 10, 13 financial services 123–5 food 178–80 healthcare 228–9 media 96–8 politics 63–5 retail 202–3 science and technology 40–42 society 15–16 transport 154–6 travel 254–6 work 275–7 tribal tourism 262 tribalism 15–16, 63, 127–8, 183, 192, 220, 260 trust 82, 133, 137, 139, 143, 192, 203, 276, 282–3 tunnels 171 Turing test 45 Turing, Alan 44 Turkey 2, 200, 247 Twitter 60, 120 two-way identity verification 132 UAE 2 UFOs 58 324 UK 19–20, 72, 76, 84, 86, 90–91, 100, 102–3, 105, 128–9, 132, 137, 139–42, 147–9, 150, 163, 167–8, 170–71, 175, 185, 195–6, 199, 200, 206, 210, 214–16, 238, 259, 267–8, 278–9, 284, 288 uncertainty 16, 30, 34, 52, 172, 199, 246, 263, 300, 303 unemployment 151 Unilever 195 University of Chicago 245–6 urban rental companies 176 urbanization 11, 18–19, 78, 84, 155, 233 Uruguay 200 US 1, 11, 19–21, 23, 55–6, 63, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 80–83, 86, 88–90, 92, 104–5, 106, 121, 129–33, 135, 139–42, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 162, 167, 169–71, 174, 185, 190–3, 195, 205–6, 209, 211, 213, 216, 218, 220, 222–3, 237–8, 240–8, 250, 260, 262, 267–8, 275, 279–80, 282–4, 287, 291 user-generated content (UGC) 46, 97, 104, 289 utility 224 values 36, 152 vending machines 209 Venezuela 69, 73 verbal signatures 132 VeriChip 126 video on demand 96 Vietnam 2, 290 Vino 100 113 Virgin Atlantic 261 virtual adultery 33 banks 134 economy 130–31 protests 65 reality 70 sex 32 stores 206–8 vacations 32, 261 worlds 157, 213, 255, 261, 270, 305 Vocation Vacations 259–60 Vodafone 137 voice recognition 41 voice-based internet search 56 voicelifts 2, 237 FUTURE FILES Volkswagen 175 voluntourism 259 Volvo 164 voting 3, 68, 90–91 Walgreens 244 Wal-Mart 105, 136–7, 215, 219–20, 223, 244, 282 war 68–9, 72 war for talent 275, 279; see also labor shortages war forecasting 49 water 69–70, 74, 77–9, 199 wearable computers 55 weather 64 weather insurance 264 Web 2.0 93, 224 Weinberg, Peter 125 wellbeing 2, 183, 188, 199 white flight 20 Wikipedia 46, 60, 104 wild swimming 273 Wilson, Edward O. 74 wind energy 74 wine producers 200 wisdom of idiots 47 Wizard 145 work 275–94 trends 275–94 work/life balance 64, 71, 260, 277, 289, 293 worldphone 19 xenophobia 16, 63 YouTube 46, 103, 107, 112 Zara 216–17 Zipcar 167 Zopa 124, 134 

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

It was clear to me, if we were going to boldly go, it was going to have to be without the help of government. Thus I devoted the next thirty years to starting private ventures that I thought would open the space frontier. In addition to my work with the International Space University, these included three efforts to jump-start a space-tourism economy: the XPRIZE, Zero-G, and Space Adventures Limited. It was thru the founding of Space Adventures3 that I teamed up with Eric Anderson, my future partner in Planetary Resources. Back in 1995, Anderson, a recent University of Virginia aerospace graduate, joined me as an intern to help develop a company to leverage the vast assets of the once-powerful Soviet space program, now hungry for hard currency and willing to offer anyone with enough cash a ride into space.

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Incorporation of a back-end business model into the prize design. The ideal competition is designed so that there is a back-end business opportunity for teams to exploit once the prize is won. For example, the Ansari XPRIZE required a three-person spaceship rather than a one-person ship. This opened the possibility of space tourism, allowing for a commercial business model that made it easier for teams to raise funding and was one of the main reasons they were willing to spend far more money than the purse in their attempts to win. When a team wins, the resulting publicity drives capital investment, deployment of the technology, market acceptance, and a new industry that produces a long-term solution to the market failure initially targeted by the competition. 15.

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Chapter Five: The Secrets of Going Big 1 Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, April 24, 2012. 2 See http://www.planetaryresources.com. 3 Space Adventures was cofounded in partnership with Mike McDowell, who served as the company’s first CEO and chairman. 4 For a nice breakdown of Branson’s space plans, see Elizabeth Howell, “Virgin Galactic: Richard Branson’s Space Tourism Company,” Space.com, December 20, 2012, http://www.space.com/18993-virgin-galactic.html. 5 See http://www.blueorigin.com. 6 Justine Bachman, “Elon Musk Wants SpaceX to Replace Russia as NASA’s Space Station Transport,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 30, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-30/elon-musk-wants-spacex-to-replace-russia-as-nasas-space-station-transport. 7 AI with Chris Anderson conducted 2013. 8 Mikhail S.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya
Published 12 Jan 2018

While space activities during the Apollo program of the 1960s were purely a government-led effort supported by American industrial might, today we see the beginnings of a transition, where commercial interests are staking claims to the space economic sector beyond the needs of the government. This is evident in the emerging space tourism market, commercial launch systems that service the government and private sectors, resource recovery plans via asteroid mining and sample return from the Moon, and privately financed space-based science . Without a doubt, governments are still the largest customers. This will change as launch costs decrease, a space/lunar infrastructure is created, space resources become more valuable, and the space/lunar environment becomes critical for certain types of manufacturing and processing.

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In another effort at ‘future history’, Benaroya extrapolated the present, and its promise, into a possible future. ( 36 ) In that book, the timeline shown below was proposed for this extrapolation, from the perspective of Yerah Timoshenko, who is the protagonist and narrator. 1969 First men on the Moon 2009 Chandarayaan-1/Moon Mineralogy Mapper reveals H2O molecules 2014 Space tourism reaches $1 billion 2024 Humans return to the Moon 2029 Permanent lunar colony 2034 Humans land on Mars 2041 Permanent Martian colony 2046 Space elevator prototype construction begins in orbit around Earth 2049 Lunar space elevator construction begins 2059 Yerah Timoshenko’s (YT) great grandparents go to the Moon 2060–2061 YT’s grandparents born on Earth (conceived on the Moon) 2070 Fusion reactors go online on the Moon, a year later on Mars 2084 First families settle on the Moon 2089–2090 YT’s parents born on Earth 2094 First lunar Olympics held 2099 First human birth on the Moon 2115 YT’s parents move to the Moon 2119 YT born on the Moon 2142–43 YT’s son and daughter born on the Moon 2169 The present – 200th anniversary of the first men on the Moon Now Terraforming on Mars started 2179 Upcoming 150th anniversary of off-Earth permanent habitation. 2.8 Interview with David Livingston This interview with David Livingston was conducted via email, beginning on June 25, 2017 and concluding on July 19, 2017.

…

We begin with a brief professional biography, and then continue with the interview. Brief Biography Dr. David Livingston is the founder and host of The Space Show®, with the website www.​thespaceshow.​com. For nearly 17 years and close to 3000 interviews, it has been the nation’s only talk radio program exclusively focusing on space commerce, space tourism, and facilitating our becoming a space-faring economy and society. Dr. Livingston is also the Executive Director of the One Giant Leap Foundation , Inc. (OGLF), the 501(C)3 that controls The Space Show®. OGLF strives to promote space education. David is also an Adjunct Professor of Space Studies in the Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

To give just one example of how innovation and efficiency might lead to us wanting to consume energy this century, the possibility of desalinating water for agricultural use looks like it is being made more viable by graphene filtration technology. This opens up a huge potential for farming in the desert. It’s brilliant but comes with a colossal new energy demand. A different kind of example can be seen in the early forays into space tourism. The final flaw in the ‘natural peak’ argument is that it is simply not possible to infer global energy trends by looking at only certain countries, since the dynamics of energy growth play out at a global scale, and whatever goes on in one place effects and is affected by what happens elsewhere.

…

But overall, as with arguments our demand for energy will also plateau, I fear the idea that our travel requirements will naturally top out shows a lack of imagination and lack of observation of evidence to the contrary. As I write this, the Chinese are building a high-speed rail link to the UK and Richard Branson is developing space tourism. Meanwhile autonomous cars open up the possibility of endless extra How many travel miles can we get from a square meter of land? 101 journeys, delivering everything you can think of, right down to the kids’ forgotten gym kit, without the natural constraint of human travel time being required.

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(Berners-Lee) 32, 147–48, 227 hydrocarbons/hydrogen 72 hydroelectric power 75 hydro storage 72 ice 228 ICT (information and communication technology), impacts 84–85, 113–14 imperial units 242–44 income tax see tax system India, global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 individual actions see personal actions and effects individualism 119, 225–26, 228 indoor farming 45–46, 67–68 inequality 228 and citizen’s wage 154 energy use 60, 90–91, 131 food distribution 15–16 global deals 210 population growth 150–51 prisons/prisoners 156 tax system 142–45, 144 trickledown of wealth 130–31, 130 and values 169–71 wealth distribution 130–35, 131–40, 132, 134 insecurity 172–73 interdependencies, global/societal 189–90 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 229 interstellar travel, impracticality of 117–18, 195, 237 interventionist economies 127–30 intrinsic motivation and values 143–44, 170–73 investment 140–42, 228–29 renewable energy sources 73, 87 sustainable farming 48–50 Index iodine, malnutrition 15 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iraq, global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 Ireland, tax system 145 iron animal sources of food 19–20 malnutrition and inequalities of distribution 15 irrigation technology 45–46 Italy, wealth distribution 130–35, 133 Japan nuclear energy 76 sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 Jevons paradox, energy efficiency 82–83 jobs see work/employment joined up perspectives 189–92, 221 journalists see media roles Kennedy, Bobby: speech on GNP 124 Keys to Performance (O’Connor) 180 kids 6–8, 187, 191, 229 kilocalories 12, 242–43 kinetic energy in a gas analogy 136–39 laboratory grown meat 45–46, 67–68 lag times, climate change 204–5 land requirements, sustainable travel 101–3, 102–3, 103–4 leadership 229–30 life expectancy, benefits of growth 123 life-minutes per person lost, diesel vehicles 109 lifestyles 4–5; see also personal actions and effects 283 limits to growth 221 big picture perspective 195 energy use 67–69, 68, 94–95, 208 21st century thinking skills 187–88 and values 170 local activities, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 local food, pros and cons 30–32, 230 luxury cruises 115–16 Maldives 210, 230 malnutrition 15–16 Marine Stewardship Council 33 market economies 127–30 materialistic values 174; see also consumption/consumerism maturity, need for 93, 121 Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution 136–38, 230, 265 measurement see metrics meat eating see animal sources of food media roles 231 promoting culture of truth 179–80 trust 182 messages, societal 172–74; see also values methane 79–81, 208–9, 231 metric units 242–44 metrics healthy economic growth 124–27 prisons/prisoners 156 and values 174 work/employment 151 micro-nutrients animal sources of food 19–20 malnutrition 15 Microsoft, carbon pricing scheme 147 mindfulness 174–75, 191, 193 284 misinformation 222 and trust 182, 184 and truth 175 and values 170 mitigation strategies, businesses 163–64 models, climate change 200–1, 204–5 molecular analogy of wealth distribution 136–39 Monbiot, George 236 motivation extrinsic/intrinsic 143–44, 172–73 and trust 181, 184 Musk, Elon 167 natural gas 224; see also fracking; methane neoliberalism 45, 129, 131, 172, 228, 232; see also free market Netherlands 70, 70–71, 149–50 neuroscience 232 nitrogen dioxide 108, 208–9 Norway 130–35, 138, 155–56 nuclear fusion 77, 232 nuclear power (fusion) 75–77, 231–32 obesity 16 ocean acidification 54–55, 232 O’Connor, Tim: Keys to Performance 180 oil 233; see also fossil fuels One Planet principles 160–62, 162 open-mindedness neuroscience 232 respect for 180 spirituality/belief systems 192 and trust 181–82, 184 optimism bias 233 over-simplification 182; see also complexity overeating 16 INDEX parental responsibility 233 Paris climate agreement 165–66 particulate air pollution 107–9 Patagonian Toothfish 33–34 pay rates 173; see also wealth distribution personal actions and effects 198–99, 233–34 air travel 112–13 antibiotics resistance 21 climate change 55 energy 97 feelings of insignificance in global systems 5–6 food/agricultural issues 30, 34–35, 40, 43, 50 population growth 150–51 promoting culture of truth 178–79 technological changes 168 values 174–75 wealth distribution 139 work/employment 153 ‘personal truths’ 176–77 perspectives big picture 186, 191, 195–97 businesses 159 joined up 189–92, 221 photocopying metaphor 219 photovoltaic technology 63–64, 66–67; see also solar energy physical growth mind-set 120 Planet B, lack of 117–18, 195, 237 planned economies 127–30 planning ahead, future scenarios 204–5 planning, urban 104 plastics 55–58, 56–57, 234 politicians see governmental roles; voting pollution, chicken farming 25–26; see also air pollution Index population growth 149–50, 234 feeding growing populations 46–47 investment in control measures 141, 150–51 personal actions and effects 150–51 risks of further growth 122 positive feedback mechanisms, climate change 200–1, 239 power, units of 242–43 prisons/prisoners 154–57, 157, 174, 234 problem-solving methods 5 profit-motive 159, 174 protein animal sources 17–18, 18 carbon footprints 23–25, 24 psychology 227–28 public service 174 questions and answers, reader contributions 194 reader contributions 9–10, 194 ready meals 238 rebalancing, evolutionary 6, 221 rebound effects 213, 235, 272 business strategies 163 climate change 52, 128, 165–66, 206–7, 206 energy efficiency 84, 207 virtual meetings 113–14 reductionism 189–90, 193 refugees 234–35 relatedness/belonging 266 religion 192–93 renewable energy sources 64, 208, 235 hydroelectric power 75 investment 141 limitations relative to fossil fuels 73–86, 85–87 285 using instead of/as well as fossil fuels 81–82 wind energy 73–74 see also biofuels; carbon capture and storage; solar energy respect 171, 180, 197 responsibility corporate 219 parents 233 super-rich 134–35 restaurants role food wastage 40 vegetarianism/veganism 28 retailing, food see food retailers revenge, prisoners 155–56 rice farming 29–30, 45–46, 235 rock weathering, carbon capture and storage 92 Rogers, Carl 172 Russia 210, 235 global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 sunlight/radiant energy 69–70, 70 Rwanda 70, 70–71, 172 salaries 173; see also wealth distribution Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) 164–66 scientific facts see facts scientific fundamentalism 176 scientific reductionism 189–90, 193 seabass, rebadging Patagonian toothfish as 33–34 sea travel 114–16, 235–36 self-awareness of simple/small/local 123, 187–88, 191 and trust 181, 184 self-reflection, 21st century thinking skills 188 286 sentient animals, treating decently 11, 17 shared-use vehicles 105–6 shareholder profits 159, 174 sharing 146 shifting baseline syndrome 236 shipping 114–16, 235–36 shock 236 simple things, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 simplistic thinking 182; see also complexity slavery and citizen’s wage 154 and employment 151 fishing industry 32, 34–35 slowing down 187–88, 196 small scale, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 Smith, Adam: The Wealth of Nations 129 social support structures, and values 173–74 solar energy 236 amount falling on earth 66 coping with intermittent sunlight 71–73 countries with highest radiant energy 69–71 countries with least radiant energy 70–71 relative to fossil fuel reserves 89 global distribution of radiant energy 69–71, 70 harnessing 66–67 South Korea, sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 soya beans 21, 22, 236–37 space tourism 94, 100 spaceflight, impracticality of interstellar travel 117–18, 195, 237 INDEX Spain, wealth distribution 130–35, 133 spending practices, ethical consumerism 147–48, 168 spirituality/belief systems 192–93, 237 status symbols 173 sticking plasters (band aids) 237–38 storage of renewable energy 71–73 sunlight see solar energy supermarkets see food retailers super-rich responsibilities 134–35 taxation 145 wealth distribution 137 supply chains ethical consumerism 147–48 food and agriculture 48 science-based targets 165–66 systems approaches big picture perspective 196 businesses 159–62, 161 One Planet Living principles 160–62, 162 Taiwan, tax system 145 takeaways 238 tax system 238 carbon taxes 142–43 wealth distribution 138, 142–45 technological changes 239 agricultural 45–46 big picture perspective 195–96 business strategies 166–68 and economic growth 122–23 thinking skills big picture perspective 197 twenty-first century 185–92, 190–91 tipping points see trigger points town planning 104 transmission of renewable energy 73 Index travel and transport 99 air travel 110–14 autonomous cars 109–10 commuting 217 current rates 99–100, 100 cycling 116 diesel vehicles 107–9, 109 e-cars 106 food miles 30–32 future demands 100–1, 109–10 land needed for sustainable 101–3, 102–3, 103–4 sea travel 114–16 shared-use vehicles 105–6 spaceflight 117–18 urban 104–6 trickledown of wealth 130–31, 130, 239 trigger points, step changes in climate 2, 200–2 trust 180–84 truth 175–76, 239 big picture perspective 197 importance of seeking 177 media roles 179–80 ‘personal truths’ 176–77 promoting culture of 177–79 respect for 171 and trust 180–84 tsunami, December 2004 2 twenty-first century thinking skills 185–92, 190–91, 197 2-degree ‘safe limit’ for temperature rise 52, 200–1, 204–5, 239 unconditional positive regard 172 United Kingdom energy by end use 62, 62 gambling industry 139–40 nuclear energy 76 population growth 149–50 prisons/prisoners 155 287 sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 wealth distribution 136–37 United States global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 prisons/prisoners 155–56 sunlight/radiant energy 69–70, 70 tax system 145 wealth distribution 130–35, 132–35 units, metric/imperial 242–44 urban planning 104 urban transport 104–6 value of human life 240 values 6–8, 169 big picture perspective 197 businesses 159, 174 changing for the better 172–75 and economics 119 evidence base for values choices 169–71 extrinsic/intrinsic 170–73 global cultural norms 171–72, 197 prisons/prisoners 156 technological changes 168 wealth distribution 132–33 work/employment 152–53 see also ethical consumerism vegetarianism/veganism 26–29 Venezuela, global distribution of fossil fuels 89–90 violent deaths 240 virtual travel 113–14 visions of future 8–9 businesses 159 vitamin A 15, 19–20, 247 voting, power of 240–41 climate change policies 51–53, 200–11 288 voting, power of (cont.) energy policies 59, 97 promoting culture of truth 178–80 see also democracy waking up 241 Wallis, Stewart 145 waste food 36–43, 241 mitigation 42–44, 43, 43 as proportion of food grown 12–15, 14 by region/type/processing stage 37, 38–39, 39 water use technology, in agriculture 45–46 watts 12, 242–43 wealth distribution economics 130–35, 131–40, 132, 134 tax system 138, 142–45, 144 see also inequality The Wealth of Nations (Smith) 129 INDEX weapons industry 152 weight, units of 244 wellbeing 241 benefits of growth 123 businesses, role of 158–59 and citizen’s wage 154 metrics of healthy growth 126 work/employment 151–52 Wellbeing Economy 267 wind energy 73–74 wisdom, need for 93, 121 work/employment 229 agricultural work 44–45, 222 and citizen’s wage 153–54 investment in sustainability 49–50 personal actions and effects 153 useful/beneficial 151–52 values 152–53 zinc 15, 19–20 

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

And Dennis Tito, an entrepreneur and former astronaut, has proposed, when a new heavy-lift launcher is available, to send people to Mars and back—without landing. This would require five hundred days in isolated confinement. The ideal crew would be a stable middle-aged couple—old enough to not be bothered about the high dose of radiation accumulated on the trip. The phrase space tourism should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are routine and low risk. And if that’s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as those of the space shuttle. These exploits must be ‘sold’ as dangerous sports, or intrepid exploration. The most crucial impediment to space flight, in Earth’s orbit and for those venturing farther, stems from the intrinsic inefficiency of chemical fuel and the consequent requirement for launchers to carry a weight of fuel far exceeding that of the payload.

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See also planets; Sun space, threats to stability of, 112–13, 118 space elevator, 148–49 spaceflight: fuel as impediment to, 148–49; manned, 143–52; pioneering exploits, 138–40 (see also Apollo programme); private companies in, 146–48 space shuttle, 145, 148 space technology: international regulation of, 219; satellites, 140–42 space telescopes, 137, 142, 143 space tourism, 148 SpaceX, 146, 149 speech recognition, 85, 88 spiritual values, environmentalist, 33 Sputnik 1, 138 squirrels, genetic alteration of, 74 stars: as fairly simple objects, 173; in modern cosmology, 214 stem cells, 65 Stern, Nicholas, 42 strangelets, 112, 114 string theory, 169, 180, 187 Stuxnet, 20 Sun: ancient and modern understanding of, 3; eventual doom of Earth due to, 2; galactic location of, 124; life cycle of, 177–78; magnetic storms caused by, 16; nuclear fusion in, 54, 122; origin of, 122.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Published 23 Jun 2015

By the seventies, he had enough money to launch his own label and started Virgin Records. He went on to sign experimental bands such as Faust and Culture Club, whom many in the music industry were reluctant to take on. Since the runaway success of the Virgin brand as a whole, Branson has pioneered other markets, such as space tourism, against the wisdom of many well-established friends and competitors. Branson’s powerful blend of renegade entrepreneurship has made him the eighth richest citizen of the United Kingdom at the time of writing,4 as well as an honorable member of the Misfit Economy. Many creatives and artists we spoke with are also developing a more entrepreneurial mind-set.

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Louis Federal Reserve, 92 salmon production, 198 Samwer, Alexander, 83 Samwer, Marc, 83, 84 Samwer, Oliver, 83 Samwer brothers, 84 San Francisco, Calif., 184, 185, 220–21 San Francisco General Hospital, 128, 207 SAP, 36 Saudi Arabia, 7, 10 Schneider, Nathan, 214 Schumpeter, Joseph, 39 Secret Garden Party, 156 Seeker, 146–47 Seidman, Dov, 215 Semco, 215–16, 217 sex, 21, 143 Sex and Society (Wright), 21 sex education, 21 Shakespeare and Company, 212, 213 shanzhai, 77–80, 81, 82, 102 see also copying Shapiro, Howard-Yana, 100–101, 102 Sharpton, Al, 176 Shell, 90, 204–5 Shenkar, Oded, 83–84 Shipibo tribe, 180, 181 Silver, Jay, 102 SimCopter, 154 Six Degrees, 103–4 Skillshare, 23 Slutkin, Gary, 128–36, 207, 210 Smith, Adam, 24 solitude, 184–85, 207, 210 Somalia, 26–27, 128–29, 131 collapse of government in, 13–14, 27–28 fishing in, 13–14, 27–29 Somaliland, 26 Somali Marines (pirates), 14 Somali piracy, 13–14, 26–27 cost of trade and, 17 evolution of, 14–15, 16–17, 29 as organized and professional, 14–17 origin of, 13–14, 27–29 payment and financing for, 16 Sonfield, Matthew C., 63 Song, Stephen, 99 South America, 127 Southwest Airlines, 84–85 space, 144–50 space flight, 148–49 space tourism, 31 Spain, recession in, 64–65 Spotify, 96, 97, 124 Sprigman, Christopher, 85 Stark, Kio, 22–23, 142 Steam, 215 steam engine technology, 88 steel industry, 88–89 Stein, Gertrude, 213 Stephens, Dale, 22–23, 139–42, 143 Stonyfield, 201 Stop Online Piracy Act, 113 streaming technology, 96 Structural Genomics Consortium, 101 Stuckert, Taylor, 67–70 Student (magazine), 31 Sullivan, Tim, 184 Swartz, Aaron, 113–14, 115 Sweden, 145, 156 Teach, Edward (“Blackbeard”), 121 TED, 201 telecom industry, 78 ten-thousand-year clock, 150–51 terrorists, 124 Texas, 58–59, 150 Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 59 Thai Flood Hacks, 34–35 Thailand, 34 Thessaloniki, Greece, 162 Thoreau, Henry, 185 3-D printing robots, 149 Tornabell, Robert, 65 Torvalds, Linus, 37 Toyota, 78, 85 trade: cost of, piracy and, 17 of counterfeit goods, 81 pirates’ disruption of, 121 Trade Secrets (Ben-Atar), 79 Trevithick, Richard, 89–90 Troyer, Marlin, 6, 8 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 148 tuberculosis, 128 Tumblr, 34, 186 Twain, Mark, 80 Tweakers, 98 Twitter, 83 UAW Local, 40, 600 Ulysses (Joyce), 213 UnCollege, 22, 140 United Auto Worker, 40 United Kingdom, 66, 107, 163 United Nations, 17 United States: adoption industry in, 21 automobile consumption in, 41–42 camel farmers in, 3, 4, 6, 9, 74 camel milk industry in, 5–7, 8, 72, 74–75 community building in, 67–72 history of camels in, 72–73 hustling in, 67 industrial period copying of, 79 raw milk in, 6, 7 “Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The” (Poe), 147 unschooling movement, 139–42 Urban eXperiment (The UX), 19, 125–27, 214 Valve, 215, 217 Venturing Out, 62, 64 Verdin, Zach, 185–86 Vergne, Jean-Phillippe, 94 Vermeulen, Angelo, 144–47, 149, 216–17 Verne, Jules, 143, 148, 149 Vietnam, 165 Village Telco, 99 Villains of All Nations (Rediker), 121 violence, 129–36 as health issue, 130, 131, 133–34, 136 punishment as solution for, 129, 130 understanding and perception of, 130–31, 133–34 violence interruptors, 131–32, 135 Virgin (record store), 31 Virgin Records, 31, 64 Visa, 85 Walden Pond, 185 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 87 Wall Street Journal, 36 Wang Chuanfu, 79 Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan), 77 Watson, James, 86 Watt, James, 89 Weiler, Lance, 32–34 Weinreich, Andrew, 103–5 Wells, H.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 16 Oct 2017

Ideally, it would say something like “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HUMANS! HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN?!” on the Earth-facing side. Speaking of humans, we might go up to space just for fun. Right now space tourism is so expensive and so controlled that (as far as we can tell) all the private space flight people are slightly crazy, very nerdy billionaires. We’re happy they’re doing their thing, but it might be nice if a mere millionaire could get in the game. The possibilities for space tourism are probably pretty sizable. The few space tourists who’ve been able to hitch a ride have spent around $20 million for the privilege. Not bad considering most people spend a lot of their time in zero G puking.

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Craig Venter Institute, 214–15 Jell-O, 298 Jell-O shots, 161 jet fuel, 209–10, 218 Jin, Yaochu, 122 joinery, 143–44 Joint BioEnergy Institute, 210 Joint European Torus (JET), 89 Josephson, Brian, 5–6 Josephson junction, 6 Jurassic Park (film), 222 Kazakhstan, 100 Keasling, Jay, 199 Keating, Steven, 146–48, 153, 155, 253 Kennedy, Philip, 315–17 Kevlar, 35 Khoshnevis, Behrokh, 145, 146, 147, 158 kidneys (organ), 280 Kilobot project, 115, 119 Kohler, Matthias, 152 Kurman, Melba, 159 Lake Chagan, 100 lasers, 2, 27–29, 84, 86–87 Law of the Sea, 33 leukemia, 238, 239, 242 Leuthardt, Eric, 303, 314–15 Levin, Gilbert, 334 levitation, 326–27 LiDAR, 174 life insurance, 250 LIFT (laser-induced forward transfer), 265–66 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), 99 Lipschultz, Bruce, 91–92, 93 Lipson, Hod, 159 Lipton, Jeffrey, 162 liquid hydrogen, 39 liquid oxygen, 20, 39 lithium, 77 LIT ROOM, 110–11 livers (organs), 257–59, 260–61, 280 lizards, 187 locked-in syndrome, 316 Lockheed Martin, 90 lossless power transmission, 325 Low Earth Orbit (LEO), 14, 15–16, 21, 34, 38 Lowther, William, 50 lung cancer, 238–40 lungs (organ), 261 Lyme disease, 255 lymphoma, 242 McAlpine, Michael, 271 McCracken, Garry, 77 Magee, John Gillespie, Jr., 13 “magic book,” 176 MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion) project, 87–88 “magnetic confinement”-type reactors, 85 magnetic levitation (MagLev) trains, 24–25, 30, 327 magnetosphere, 59 magnets, 5 MakerBot, 162 malaria, 198–203, 207 mammoth genome, 222–24 Mankins, John, 320 marble, 144 marching bands, 119–20 Mars, 19, 40, 45n, 52, 55, 158–59 Mars One project, 45n Masiello, Carrie, 210–11 Massachusetts General Hospital, 242 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 102, 103, 104, 106, 107n, 108, 214, 216 Mediated Matter lab at, 146 Plasma Science and Fusion Center at, 91 matching markets, 275–81 Matthews, Kirstin, 250 Maus, Marcela, 242–43 Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, 212 µBiome, 2 M-blocks, 118 MD Anderson Cancer Center, 232, 234 Mediated Matter lab, 146 medical tourism, 272 medical trials, 254–55, 268–69 medicine, 221 augmented reality in, 179, 185–86 bioprinting and, see bioprinting origami robots in, 106–7 programmable matter in, 127–28 synthetic biology in, 198–207 see also precision medicine Meetup.com, 175, 179 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 289–90, 291 Meissner effect, 326 meltdown, 91–92 memory, 220, 304, 307–8, 311 Mendelsohn, John, 232, 234 Meng, Yan, 122 Menges, Achim, 104 Menon, Sandeep, 235 messenger RNA, 193 metabolome, 244–46 meteorites, 53, 67 Michigan Array, 296, 298 microRNA, 239–40, 246–47 Microsoft, 272 Miller, Jordan, 261, 269, 270–71, 274 miniaturization, 176 “Minibuilders,” 151–52 miRBase, 240 mirror humans, 332–35 MIT Technology Review, 6n molds, configurable, 134 molecular scissors, 212, 213–14 molecules, mirror, 334 monogenic traits, 196–97 mononucleosis, 230 moon, 55 moon landing, 19 moral hazard, 273–74 Moravec’s Paradox, 139 mosquitoes, 200, 203, 218 Mossad, 50 motion sickness, 168 movies, 183 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 290–91 M-type (metal) asteroids, 53, 54 mucociliary escalator, 187–88 mucus, 236 Mukhopadhyay, Aindrila, 210 multiverse, 329 Munger, Steven, 334–35 Musk, Elon, 19 mutation breeding, 191–92 mutations, 219, 236–37 Mycoplasma genitalium, 214–15 Mycoplasma laboratorium, 215 Mycoplasma mycoides, 215n Nagasaki bombing, 98 nano-bio-machines, 3 nanobots, 118 nanotechnology, 221 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), 25, 31, 35 nasal cycle, 186–89 nasal venous sinusoids, 188 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 20, 47, 60, 65, 92, 158, 159–60 National Academy of Sciences, 203 National Cancer Institute, 238 National Defence Department, Canada, 47 National Ignition Facility (NIF), 86–87 National Institutes of Health, 214, 234, 235 Native Americans, 196n natural gas, 73, 98–99 Nebraska, University of, 176 Neufert, Ernst, 135 neural dust, 299 neural implants, 310 Neurobridge, 312 neuro-cyber-connection, 312–13 neurons, 286–87, 290, 298, 306 EEGs and, 287–90 NeuroPace, 302 neuroprosthetics, 311, 315, 322, 324 neurotrophic electrodes, 297–98, 315, 316 Neutron Club, 80 neutron gun, 80–81 neutrons, 73, 91 New Jersey, 299 New Mexico, 96 nickel, 54 Nocera, Dan, 208 North Carolina State University, 63 Norway, 22n nostrils, 186–89 Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, 100 nuclear reactors, 58 Nucleon (concept car design), 97 nucleus, 192, 193 nutrition, 245–46 Olestra, 334 Oliver, John, 326n Open Humans Foundation, 252n “optical mining,” 63 orbiting factory, 24 organ donation, 257n organ markets, 274, 275–81 Organovo, 268 organ rejections, 275 organ sales, 258, 280–81 organ transplant list, 257–58, 272 organ transplants, 206–7 origami robots, 105–8, 129 OSIRIS-REx, 65 “Our Friend the Atom” (Disney cartoon), 97 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 63–64 oxidizer, 20 Oxman, Neri, 146, 148 oxygen, 208–9 oxygen deprivation, 205 oxygen gas, 82 Pacific Ocean, 35–36 Paddon, Chris, 199 Palo Alto Research Center, 116 Panama Canal, 97 pancreas, 236 parallel universe, 329 paralysis, 312 Parkinson’s disease, 301 patenting, 124 patent law, 272 peacekeepers, 181 Pennsylvania, University of, 108 Personal Genome Project, 252–53 personal security, 124–25 PERVs, 207 pesticides, 200 Petersen, Kirstin, 149, 150–51 Pfizer, 235 phobias, 179 Phobos (moon of Mars), 55 phosphenes, 306 photosynthesis, 208 Picon, Antoine, 138 pigs, 206 Piraha (Amazonian tribe), 140n Pitt, Brad, 167 Plait, Phil, 36, 38 plants, 125 Chinese sweet wormwood, 198–99 plasma, 85, 88 Plasma Science and Fusion Center, 91 platinum, 52, 55 pluripotent stem cells, 273 plutonium, 58 pogo sticks, 27 Pokémon GO, 8n, 166, 182–83 pollution, 94 porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs), 207 positive transcriptional autoregulation, 205n potassium iodide pills, 60 poverty, 157 precision medicine, 229–56 benefits of, 254–56 cancer diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring in, 238–44 concerns about, 248–53 data collection in, 234–35 genetic disorders and, 235–37 metabolome and, 244–46 privacy issues in, 248, 250–53 Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, 234 predictive ability, 1–2 Princeton University, 142, 271 privacy issues, 130, 182, 248 of AR, 180–81 in brain-computer interfaces, 309–10 in precision medicine, 248, 250–53 programmable matter, 101–32 benefits of, 125–29 computers as, 101 concerns about, 122–25 in everyday life, 105 hacking of, 122–23 military applications of, 123–24 origami robots as, 105–8 power for, 118 reconfigurable houses and, 109–11 see also robots programmed materials, 103–5 Project Babylon, 48–49 Project Esper, 185 Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project), 47, 48 Project Plowshare, 96–100 Project Rulison, 98 Promobot, 129 Promobot IR77, 129 propellants, 14–15, 18, 20, 23 prostate cancers, 239n, 247 prosthetics, advanced, 322–24 proteins, 193, 194, 195, 221, 234, 239, 332 protium, 73 protons, 73, 77 Pryor, Richard, 328n QR code, 169–71 quantum computing, 328–30 quantum mechanics, 329, 330 Quinn, Roger, 151n radiation, 59–60, 62, 99 radiation therapy, 241 radioactive waste, 91 railgun, electromagnetic, 24–25 ramjet, 21, 22, 26 Reaction Engines, 22 Recognizer, 180 Reconfigurable House exhibit, 111 recycled fecal matter, 160 recycling, 128 Reece, Andrew, 247 refining, 56 refrigeration, 4 “Registry of Standard Biology Parts,” 216 Reichert, Steffen, 104 Reiss, Louise and Eric, 99 RepRap, 269–70 “repugnance,” in markets, 276 reuse, 128 ribosome, 193–94, 195 Rice University, 200n, 210, 250, 261 rigid airship, 29–30 Ringeisen, Bradley, 259 RNA, 193–94, 195, 332 RNS System, 302 Robinette, Paul, 130 Robot Baby Project, 120n robotic construction, 134–63 benefits of, 156–59 concerns about, 153–56 and space travel, 158–59 swarm robots in, 149–53 3D printing for, 144–49 robots, 102, 129–32 autonomous, 113–16 as construction workers, 139–44 coordinating movement of many, 119–22 evolving of, 120–22 generalization in, 142 industrial, 136 in medicine, 127–28 modular, 112–16 neuroprosthetics and, 311 origami, 105–8, 129 termite-inspired, 150–51 see also programmable matter rocket launches, 3 rockets, 23, 39 air-breathing, 19–24 aircraft-launched, 29–30 cost of, 14 laser ignition for, 27–29 propellant for, 14–15, 18, 20, 23 reusable, 14, 15, 18–19, 39 simplicity of, 22 stages of, 18n rocket sled, 25, 26 rockoon, 29 rod from God, 38 roller coaster, 23, 42 Romanishin, John, 118 Roombots, 112–13, 121, 127 Roth, Alvin, 276, 277, 279, 280 “Ruby Red” grapefruit, 192 Rus, Daniela, 106–7, 108, 118, 128 Russia, 67, 99, 217n SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine), 22 Saddest Generation, 166 Safe Is Not an Option: Overcoming the Futile Obsession with Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion into Space (Simberg), 44 Sahara Desert, 321 SAM (robot), 141, 142, 153–54 Sandia Labs, 85, 87 San Francisco, Calif., 154 sanitation, 157 satellites, 20, 34, 41, 47 Schalk, Gerwin, 313 Schall, Gerhard, 177 Schrödinger’s cat, 329 Schrödinger’s Killer App (Dowling), 330n Schwenk, Kurt, 187 See No Evil, Hear No Evil (film), 328n seizures, 300, 301, 302 Select Sires, Incorporated, 197n self-driving cars, 123 Sensorama, 168 Shapiro, Beth, 222, 223–24 Shotwell, Gwynne, 19 Shtetl-Optimized (blog), 330n Siberia, 224 sickle cell amenia, 237 Silberg, Joff, 210–11, 218–19 silicon, 52, 54 Silver, Pamela, 204, 205–6, 208–10, 219 Simberg, Rand, 44 Skylon, 22 Skype, 314 Skywalker, Luke (char.), 324 Slingatron, 25–26 slums, 157 smallpox, 216, 217 Smart Helmet, 179 “smart homes,” 111 smartphones, 169 smell, sense of, 174–75, 186–89, 334 Smith, Noah, 153n, 154 snakes, 187 social media, 248, 250 privacy issues of, 180–81 software, 102, 104–5, 124 hacking of, 122 solar flares, 60 solar panels, 58 cost of, 320 solar photovoltaic cells, 92, 208 solar power, space-based, 319–21 solar wind, 37 Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 162 solid rocket boosters, 39 solid tumors, 238, 240–41 Solomon, Scott, 200n sound, speed of, 21 South Africa, 48 Southern California, University of, 145, 308 Soviet Union, 38, 58, 99, 100, 135 space cannon, 23–26 space debris, 39–40 space elevators, 31–38, 39, 41, 42–43, 314, 320 spaceflight, 13–50 air-breathing rockets and spaceplanes for, 19–24 benefits of, 41–45 concerns about, 38–40 cost of, 41, 44–45 present cost of, 13–14 reusable rockets for, 18–19 space elevators and tethers for, 31–38 starting at high altitude, 29–30 spaceplanes, 19–24, 39 space settlements, 40 Space Shuttle, U.S., 18, 39 space tethers, 31–38 space tourism, 42 space travel: fusion energy in, 94 supergun for, 23–26 SpaceX, 8n, 18–19, 30 spatial resolution, 288, 289, 292–93 spearmint, 334 spinal damage, 312 Sputnik, 39 SR-71 spy plane, 21 Starbucks, 180 Star Trek franchise, 34, 86 Star Wars franchise, 78n, 82, 263 steam turbine, 76 stem cells, 263, 272–73 Stevens Institute of Technology, 92, 122 STL-file, 267 storytelling, 178 stratospheric spaceport, 29–30 straw, reconfigurable, 103–4 stress, 246 stroke, 247 strong nuclear force, 77 strontium-90 (Sr-90), 99 Stuttgart, University of, 104, 143 S-type (stony) asteroids, 53, 54 sugar molecules, 210 sugar sintering, 270–71 sun, 59, 78 Sung, Cynthia, 108, 119, 127 superconducting levitation, 326–27 superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), 4, 6, 290 superconductors, 4–6 room-temperature, 325–28 supergun, 46–50 supersonic ramjet (“scramjet”), 21–22, 26, 126 Sure Shot Cattle Company, 197n surgery, 185–86 Surrey, University of, 122 swarm bots, 119–20, 121–22 SWARMORPH project, 113–15 swarm robots, 149–53 switchgrass, 209–10 Switzerland, 22n SYMBRION, 115 Syn 3.0, 215 synthetic biology, 190–225 benefits of, 220–21 concerns about, 216–19 environmental monitoring by, 210–12 fuel production by, 208–10 generalizing of, 212–14 grassroots approach to, 216 “Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel” project, 160 synthetic materials, 101–2 syphilis, 230n Syria, 156 Systems & Materials Research Consultancy, 159 T cells, 242–43 technology, 3–4 asteroid-moving, 67 contingent nature of development of, 3–7 discontinuous leaps in, 2 Telegraph, 183 Teller, Edward, 98 temporal resolution, 288, 292–93 Terminator (film), 103 termites, 120, 149, 150–51 terrorism, 36, 38, 217 Tethers Unlimited, 63 tetracycline, 200 theft, 130 3D printers, 144–49, 151–52, 259 prosthetics and, 322 3D printing, 125, 152 of food, 159–63 of organs, see bioprinting software for, 267 3554 Amun, 53 Throw Trucks with Your Mind (game), 312 thyroid, 60 Tibbits, Skylar, 103–5, 118, 123, 126 titanium, 35 “tokamak” configuration, 88, 92 tornados, 25 touch, sense of, 175 Tourette’s syndrome, 301 transcranial magnetic stimulation, 302, 304 transfer RNA, 193–94, 195 Transformers series, 102 The Tree of Life (Web site), 234n tritium, 74, 77n, 91 tumor cells, 205 tumors, 290 “Tunable Protein Piston That Breaks Membranes to Release Encapsulated Cargo, A” (Silver, et al.), 206 “Tunguska event” (1908), 67 turbofan engine, 20–21, 22 Turner, Ron, 35, 36, 37 23andMe, 251, 252 Twitter, 20n, 187, 250 Two and a Half Men (TV show), 310 Type II superconductors, 326 Umbrellium (Haque Design + Research), 111 Underground Railroad, 178 UN-Habitat, 157 Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing (UFNB), 189 United Nations, 96 United States, 39, 135–36 Universal Semen Sales, Inc., 197n uranium, 58 U.S.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance
Published 8 May 2023

In the popular press, the increase in private space activity has tended to focus on Musk and his peers, such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and the late Paul Allen of Microsoft. Those men have all funded ventures varying from rocket companies to space planes. The fascination largely revolves around billionaires who are hoping to fire up space tourism businesses or, like Musk, setting off to colonize the moon or Mars. What the public has paid less attention to is the frenetic amount of activity taking place among hundreds of other companies scattered all around the world who are building new types of rockets and satellites. These companies are locked in a race that feels more immediate and tangible than humans taking laps around the moon or doing their laundry on Mars.

…

“My friend said, ‘Darth Vader himself is sitting over there if you would like to have a real chat,’” Worden said. Among the young people at the event were Will Marshall, Chris Boshuizen, and Robbie Schingler, the future founders of Planet Labs, and George Whitesides, who would go on to run the space tourism outfit Virgin Galactic. Some of these men began to form a semicircle around Worden as he held court, and then Worden and Marshall really got into it. They were both space wonks and shared common ground around their desire to settle the moon and advance humankind deeper into the solar system. The space weapons, though, were an area where Worden and Marshall fiercely disagreed.

…

Markusic lasted all of two weeks at Blue Origin. Lurking in the background had been Richard Branson and his space aspirations at Virgin Galactic. Like Musk and Bezos, the lion-maned Branson had set out in the early part of the 2000s to create a business in space. Ever the showman, he focused first on space tourism, seeking to build a spaceplane that could carry people for a few minutes to the edge of space, where they would experience weightlessness and have the privilege of observing Earth from a rare perspective for $250,000 a pop. Virgin Galactic started in 2004 and had made some progress in the years since, although by 2011, it remained a decade away from having a real spaceplane and farther from having a real spaceplane business.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

His label signed iconic, controversial bands like the Sex Pistols, and his retail stores morphed into the Virgin Megastores. Branson also started expanding into areas beyond music, including the airline industry with the launch of Virgin Atlantic Airways in the early 1980s, trains (Virgin Trains) and telecommunications (Virgin Mobile) in the 1990s, and space tourism (Virgin Galactic) in 2004. Today, the Virgin Group consists of four hundred companies. Branson remains as chairman, while pursuing philanthropic efforts to combat global warming. Sergey Brin b. 1973, Russia Google, Inc. Born in Moscow, Sergey Brin immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of six.

…

Under Musk’s leadership, PayPal grew dramatically until it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock. He then invested in the company that would become Tesla, a manufacturer of electronic vehicles. Musk is also the founder of SpaceX, an aerospace company pursuing innovations to pave the way for space tourism, as well as for exploration and colonization of Mars. Pierre Omidyar b. 1967, France eBay, Omidyar Network Born in France, Pierre Omidyar moved to the United States as a child. He attended Tufts University in Boston, and worked for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple, before starting Ink Development Corporation, a retail business that also engaged in Internet sales.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler
Published 11 May 2015

In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place — including a supersonic-capable space suit — just seems to make sense. But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: The combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome — two “impossible” feats lately accomplished — were equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside.

…

In the fifty years since Vostok 1, the first ever manned spaceflight, asteroid mining has gone from a perennial pipedream of the Star Trek Forever crowd to a serious enough proposition that a Vatican astronomer felt the need to address ethical concerns in public. In fact, in April 2012 — and with backing from the likes of Google cofounder Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson — Peter Diamandis, creator of the XPRIZE, alongside Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures Ltd. (the private space tourism company that flew Stephen Hawking into zero-G and sent billionaire Dennis Tito to the International Space Station), announced Planetary Resources Inc. (PRI), a newly formed asteroid mining company. This time, it was Comedy Central host Jon Stewart who summed things up nicely: “Space pioneers going to mine motherfucking asteroids for precious materials!

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place—including a supersonic-capable space suit—just seems to make sense. But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: the combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome was equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside. Imagine having twenty-five miles of fall time to work with.

…

FLOW TO ABUNDANCE 187 skydiver Felix Baumgartner was heading: See: www.redbullstratos.com. 188 “Felix is an action sports athlete”: Andy Walshe, AI, April 2013. 189 “At a certain RPM”: John Tierney, “24 Miles, 4 Minutes and 834 M.P.H., All in One Jump,” New York Times, October 14, 2012. 190 lived through their midair crack-up: See Summary Report: Findings of the Red Bull Stratos Scientific Summit, California Science Center, January 23, 2013. Ansari X Prize in 2004: See: www.xprize.org. SpaceShipTwo’s flight was a test burn: “Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Makes Test Flight,” USAToday.com, April 29, 2013. Paying customers going rocket man before 2015: Elizabeth Howell, “Virgin Galactic: Richard Branson’s Space Tourism Company,” Space.com, December 20, 2012. 192 Arie de Geus: Arie de Geus, The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment (Harvard Business Review Press, 2002). 193 “We are the ones”: Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (New Press, 2006).

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

“Orphans of Apollo” (2008), a documentary by Michael Potter which first brought that phrase to an audience, tells the story of a failed attempt to take Mir into private ownership in part as a way of making this service available. That did not happen—but from 2001 to 2009 various rich men paid to be taken up to the International Space Station in Russian capsules.11 In the next couple of years suborbital space tourism—flights that get higher than 80km, but without anything like the delta-v needed for orbit—look likely to begin. It seems there are hundreds of people, maybe thousands, willing to pay $200,000 or so for flights which will reveal the Earth in its planetary pomp, the curvature of its horizon clear, the sky above it black, the clouds far, far below, with a few minutes of weightlessness thrown in.

…

Officers of the state, uniformed or otherwise? Scientists? Kardashians? Something has to happen next, and a ship of artists from around the world is no worse an idea than any other, and better than quite a few. MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan. As a provider of practical services to industry and government, SpaceX has succeeded beyond almost all expectation.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

Kenneth Chang, “Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can,” New York Times, June 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/space-station-nasa.html. There are also private companies, such as Virgin Galactic, that have plans to offer “space tourism” flights. Michael Sheetz, “Virgin Galactic Flies Its First Astronauts to the Edge of Space, Taking One Step Closer to Space Tourism,” CNBC, December 13, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/virgin-galactic-flight-could-send-first-astronauts-to-edge-of-space.html. The test flight went 51.4 miles into the air. 38. My idea here is that if you go out forty-five miles and the top of the Sears Tower disappears, but there is still a mirage on the horizon, presumably if you went out far enough, then the top of the Sears Tower in the mirage would disappear too.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

“We tried to avoid ever skipping Mars Colonizer, because that was the most fun meeting for him and always put him in a good mood,” his former assistant Elissa Butterfield says. Getting to Mars would cost serious money. So Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan. There were many revenue opportunities he could pursue, including space tourism (like Bezos and Branson) and satellite launches for the U.S. and other countries and companies. In late 2014, he turned his attention to what was a much bigger pot of gold: providing internet service to paying customers. SpaceX would make and launch its own communications satellites, in effect rebuilding the internet in outer space.

…

Sir Richard Branson, the smiley British billionaire who founded Virgin Airlines and Virgin Music, also had that dream. He had created his own space-flight company, Virgin Galactic, with a business model largely dependent on taking wealthy experience-seekers on joyrides. His marketing genius included using himself as the face and spirit of the company. He knew that there was no better way to promote his space-tourism business, and have a boatload of fun himself (which he very much liked to do), than to go up on one of his rockets. So after it was too late for Bezos to change his launch date, Branson announced that he would be going up on July 11, nine days earlier. Ever the showman, he invited Stephen Colbert to host the livecast and the singer Khalid to perform a new song for the occasion.

…

See Tesla Autopilot project Babuschkin, Igor, 605 Babylon Bee, 419, 527, 529, 554 Baglino, Drew, 195 Autopilot project and, 246, 247 Model S and, 199 Optimus and, 498 Robotaxi and, 501, 502 Straubel departure and, 302, 303 Baker, Jim, 571 Balajadia, Jehn, 362, 513 Bankman-Fried, Sam, 460–61 Banks, Azealia, 308–9 Banks, Iain, 400 Bannon, Pete, 396 Bard, 601 Barenholtz, Jeremy, 497, 561, 562–63 Barra, Mary, 421 Bassett, Natasha, 7, 265, 451, 491 Battle of Polytopia, The, 46 Bauch, Matt, 597 Beal Aerospace, 115 Beeple, 448–49 Belsky, Scott, 520 Benioff, Marc, 430 Berland, Leslie, 465, 508, 534 Bernstein, Carl, 573 Beykpour, Kayvon, 520 Bezos, Jeff, 223, 353 Amazon HQ and, 336 competition with SpaceX, 226, 227–28, 231–32, 233–34, 354 competition with Starlink, 355–56 Inspiration4 mission and, 385 love of space travel, 224–25 management style, 166, 354–55 space tourism and, 353, 356, 383, 476 Trump and, 261 Washington Post purchase, 357 wealth of, 408 Bhattacharya, Jay, 573, 578 Biden, Hunter, 567, 577, 579 Biden, Joe, and administration, 420–23, 535, 567 Binder, Matt, 576 Birchall, Jared Austin home plans and, 473 EM’s demon mode and, 539 EM’s management of Twitter and, 543 EM’s politics and, 419, 443 Kimbal’s restaurant business and, 300–301 philanthropy and, 439 Twitter acquisition and, 442, 451, 452–53, 464, 490, 494, 512 Twitter board invitation and, 445 Blade Runner, 318, 485 Blastar, 29, 33, 425 Blue Origin, 224, 226, 227–28, 233–34, 354, 355 board games.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time
by George Berkowski
Published 3 Sep 2014

I used my tried and tested strategy: try me out for free (I offered to make them the subject of my business-school research thesis) and, if it doesn’t work out, don’t pay me. I ended up running the company’s marketing and partnerships, as well as their online activities, and, with our Russian partners, delivered a wide range of space-tourism experiences to customers all over the world. In 2005, I decided to get serious about the Internet, and found a job in the e-commerce team at a big telecoms company. I was lucky enough to work for a very talented boss who made it easy for me to excel and assume more responsibility very quickly.

…

Index Note: page numbers in bold refer to illustrations, page numbers in italics refer to information contained in tables. 99designs.com 111 500 Startups accelerator 136, 160 Accel Partners 3, 158, 261, 304, 321, 336, 383 accelerators 136, 159–60, 160 accountants 164, 316 accounting software 164 acquisition (of users) costs 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9, 282 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 for five hundred-million-dollar apps 327, 341–3 for hundred-million-dollar apps 252, 259, 266, 267–74, 275–84, 295–307 and incentive-based networks 270–1 international 295–307 for million dollar apps 136–7, 139, 140–51, 148–9, 153 and mobile social media channels 271–3, 272 and mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 strategy 222–31 for ten-million-dollar apps 211–12, 213, 222–31, 236–7, 248–9 and traditional channels 268–9 and ‘viral’ growth 225, 278, 279–84 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 acquisitions 414–25 buying sustained growth 417–18 by non-tech corporations 418–20 initial public offerings 420–2 Waze 415–16 activation (user) 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 Acton, Brian 54, 394 addiction, smartphone 30–1 Adler, Micah 269 administrators 409 AdMob 414–15 advertising 43 business model 67, 89–90 costs 140 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 mobile 148–9, 268–70, 272–3, 272 mobile social media 272–3, 272 mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 outdoor 264 shunning of 42, 54–6 video ads 273 aesthetics 131 after product–market fit (APMF) 180 agencies 195–7, 264, 343 ‘agile coaches’ see scrum masters agile software development 192–3, 299, 315, 357, 377 Ahonen, Tomi 45 ‘aiming high’ 40–1 Airbnb 160, 301 alarm features 48 Albion 111 alerts 293 Alexa.com 146 Alibaba 227 ‘ALT tags’ 147 Amazon 7, 29, 131, 164, 227, 276, 366, 374–5, 401, 406 Amazon Web Services 374 American Express 347 Amobee 149 analytics 134–5, 149, 199, 205, 210, 212, 217–21, 294 and cohort analysis 287–8 Flurry 135, 149, 220 function 217–18 Google Analytics 135, 219–20, 345 limitations 284 Localytics 135, 221 and marketing 263 mistakes involving 218–19 Mixpanel.com tool 135, 217–18, 220–1, 287, 290–1, 345 Andreessen, Marc 180, 418–19 Andreessen Horowitz 72, 80, 180, 321, 383, 385, 418–19 Android (mobile operating system) 6, 23–4, 38, 415 advertising 274 audience size 119 beta testing 202 building apps for 116–22 and international apps 296 in Japan 306 scaling development and engineering 357–8 time spent on 26 and WhatsApp 55 Angel Capital Association 162 angel investors 154, 155–6, 323 AngelList 99, 131, 155, 159, 233 Angry Birds (game) 6, 42, 47, 57–8, 87, 89, 97 and application programming interface 36 delivering delight 207 design 131 funding 321 game in game 348–9 international growth 297–9 platform 117, 118 product extension 356 virality 282 annual offsites 379 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 anonymity 43, 56–7 anti-poaching clauses 247 antidilution rights 245 API see application programming interface app descriptions 143 app development billion-dollar app 8, 389–425 CEO advice 406–13 getting acquired 414–25 people 395–405 process 390–1 five-hundred-million-dollar app 325–87 funding 328, 383–7 hiring staff 334–6, 337–40 killer product expansion 350–63 process 326–8 scaling 326, 330–6, 331–2 scaling marketing 341–9 scaling people 364–72, 377–9 scaling process 373–82 scaling product development 357–63 hundred-million-dollar app 251–324 international growth 295–307 process 252–4 product-market fit 255–6 retention of users 286–94 revenue engines 257–66, 275–85 user acquisition 267–74 million-dollar app 81–171 app Version 0.1 123–35 coding 133–4 design 129–33 feedback 127, 134–5 funding 152–60, 161–71, 176, 235–49 identity of the business 106–14 lean companies 115–22 metrics 136–9, 139 process 82–4 startup process 85–105 testing 126–8 user acquisition 140–51 ten-million-dollar app 173–249 growth engine 222–31, 235–49 metrics 211–21 new and improved Version 1.0 198–210 process 174–6 product–market fit 180–97 revenue engine 232–4 venture capital 235–49 app stores 22, 27–8, 33–4 see also Apple App Store; Google Play app-store optimisation (ASO) 142, 225 AppAnnie 205 Apple 19, 20, 31–2, 393 application programming interface 35–6 designers 129 Facetime app 46 iWatch 38–9 profit per employee 402–3 revenue per employee 401 visual voicemail 50 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 313 see also iPad; iPhone Apple App Store 22, 27, 32–3, 75, 88, 89, 117, 226 finding apps in 140, 141, 142–5 international apps 297–9 making submissions to 152–3 and profit per employee 403 ratings plus comments 204–5 Apple Enterprise Distribution 201–2 application programming interface (API) 35–6, 185, 360, 374 ARPU see annual revenue per user articles of incorporation 169 ASO see app-store optimisation Atari 20 Atomico 3, 261, 321, 383 attribution 227–31 for referrals 230–1 average transaction value (ATV) 214–15, 219, 232, 236, 387 Avis 95 backlinking to yourself 146 ‘bad leavers’ 247 Balsamiq.com 128 Banana Republic 352 bank accounts 164 banking 156–7 Bardin, Noam 43 Barr, Tom 338 Barra, Hugo 120, 306 Baseline Ventures 72 Baudu 226 beauty 131 BeeJiveIM 33 before product–market fit (BPMF) 180 ‘below the fold’ 143 Beluga Linguistics 297 Benchmark 75 benefits 398–400 beta testing 201–4 Betfair 358 Bezos, Jeff 366, 374 Bible apps 45 billion 9–10 Billion-Dollar Club 5 billionaires 9 Bing 226 ‘black-swan’ events 54 BlackBerry 23 Blank, Steve 257 Blogger 41 blood sugar monitoring devices 38 board seats 242, 243–4 board-member election consent 169 Bolt Peters 363 Booking.com 320 Bootstrap 145 Botha, Roelof 76, 77, 80 Box 7, 90, 276, 396–7, 411 brains 10 brainstorming 108 branding 111–13, 143, 263–4 Braun 129 Bregman, Jay xiii, 14–16, 95, 124, 209, 303 bridge loans 323 Brin, Sergey 366 Bring Your Own Infrastructure (BYOI) 17–18 Brougher, Francoise 340 Brown, Donald 44 Brown, Reggie 104–5 Bubble Witch 421 Buffet, Warren 4 build-measure-learn cycle 116 Burbn.com 72–4, 80 business advisors/coaches 103 business analysts 343 business culture 395–8 business goal setting 310–11 business models 67, 83, 87, 88–91, 175, 253, 259, 327, 351–2, 391, 400, 423–4 business success, engines of 183–4, 423–4 Business Wire 150 CAC see Customer Acquisition Cost Cagan, Marty 314 calendars 49 calorie measurement sensors 38 Cambridge Computer Scientists 160 camera feature 48 Camera+ app 48 Candy Crush Saga 6, 47, 87, 89, 131, 278–81, 318, 349, 421–2 card-readers 41–2 cash flow 164 CEOs see Chief Executive Officers CFOs see Chief Financial Officers channels incentive-based networks 270–1 mobile social-media 271–3, 272 mobile user-acquisition 269–70 source attribution 227–31 testing 224–7 traditional 268–9 viral 280–2 charging phones 49–50 Chartboost 149 chauffer hire see Uber app check-ins, location-based 72, 74 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) 309, 380 advice from 406–13 and the long haul 68 and product centricity 185–6 role 337 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) 316 Chief Operations Officers (COOs) 309, 326, 337–40, 380 Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) 186–7, 195 Chillingo 298 China 24–5, 146, 226, 306–7 Cisco 402 Clash of Clans (game) 6, 28, 36, 47, 87, 89, 97, 118, 227, 348–9, 398 Clements, Dave 120 Climate Corporation 412, 419 clock features 47 cloud-based software 67, 90 Clover 419 coding 133–4 cofounders 85, 91–105, 188, 191 chemistry 92–3 complementary skills 93 finding 96–9 level of control 94 passion 93–4 red flags 102–3 successful matches 104–5 testing out 100–2 cohort analysis 237, 287–8 Color.com (social photo-sharing) app 113, 255 colour schemes 111 Commodore 20 communication open 412–13 team 194 with users 208–9 Companiesmadesimple.com 163–4 computers 20–1, 29 conferences 97–8, 202, 312–13 confidentiality provisions 244 connectedness 30 ConnectU 105 consumer audience apps 233–4 content, fresh 147 contracts 165–6 convertible loans 163 Cook, Daren 112 cookies 228–9 Coors 348 COOs see Chief Operations Officers Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) 148–9 Cost Per Download (CPD) 148 Costolo, Dick 77–8, 79–80 costs, and user acquisition 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9, 282 Crash Bandicoot 33 crawlers 146–7 Cray-1 supercomputer 20 CRM see customer-relationship management CrunchBase 238 CTOs see Chief Technology Officers Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9 customer lifecycle 212–14 customer segments 346–7 customer-centric approach 344 customer-relationship management (CRM) 290–4, 343 customer-support 208–9 Cutright, Alyssa 369 daily active users (DAUs) 142 D’Angelo, Adam 75–6 data 284–5, 345–7 data engineers 284 dating, online 14, 87–8, 101–2, 263 decision making 379–82, 407–8 defining apps 31–4 delegation 407 delight, delivery 205–7 design 82, 129–33, 206–7 responsive 144 designers 132, 189–91, 363, 376 developer meetups 97 developers see engineers/developers development see app development; software development development agencies 196 ‘development sprint’ 192 Devine, Rory 358–9 Digital Sky Technologies 385 directors of finance 316–17 Distimo 205 DLD 97 Doerr, John 164, 310 Doll, Evan 42–3, 105 domain names 109–10 international 146 protection 145–6 Domainnamesoup.com 109 Dorsey, Jack 41, 58, 72, 75–7, 79–80, 104, 112, 215–16, 305, 312, 412–13 ‘double-trigger’ vesting 247 DoubleClick 414 Dow Jones VentureSource 64 down rounds 322–3 downloads, driving 150–1 drag along rights 245 Dribbble.com 132 Dropbox 7, 90, 131, 276 CEO 407, 410–11 funding 160 scaling 336 staff 399 Dunbar, Robin 364–5 Dunbar number 365 e-commerce/marketplace 28–9, 67, 89, 213–14 Chinese 306 Flipboard and 351–2 and revenue engines 232, 233–4, 276 social media generated 271–2 and user retention 288, 289 eBay 7, 28–9, 131, 180, 276 economic models 275 economies of scale 331–2, 331–2 eCourier 15, 95 education 68–9 edX 69 Ek, Daniel 357 Ellis, Sean 182 emails 291–3 emotion effects of smartphones on 29–30, 30 inspiring 223–4 employees see staff employment contracts 246–7 engagement 236, 278, 283 engineering VPs 337, 358–9 engineers/developers 190–1, 194–5, 361–2, 362, 370, 375–7, 405 enterprise 90, 233–4 Entrepreneur First programme 160 entrepreneurs 3–5, 7–8, 65, 262, 393–4, 409, 424 Ericsson 21 Etsy 107, 109, 110, 358 Euclid Analytics 149 Evernote 7, 90, 131, 399 ExactTarget 291 excitement 30 executive assistants 367 Exitround 419 experience 67–8, 264, 397 Fab.com 352 Facebook 7, 10, 26, 32, 48, 76, 226, 394, 422 and acquisition of users 271, 272, 273–4 acquisitions 416–18, 417 agile culture 375 alerts 293 and application programming interface 36 board 180 and business identity 114 and Candy Crush 280–1 Chief Executive Officer 406 cofounders 100–1 and Color 255–6 design 131, 206, 363 Developer Garage 97 driving downloads on 151 and e-commerce decisions 271, 272 and FreeMyApps.com 271 funding 419 and getting your app found 147 and the ‘hacker way’ 375 initial public offering 420–1 and Instagram 29, 51, 76–80, 90, 117 name 110 ‘No-Meeting Wednesday’ 376 product development 187 profit per employee 403 revenue per employee 401 scaling 336 and Snapchat 57 staff 339, 362, 363, 398, 401, 403 and virality 281 WhatsApp purchase 42, 54–6, 416–17, 417 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 and Zynga 279, 281 Facetime app 46 fanatical users 294 feedback 86, 127, 134–5, 182, 192–3, 198–201, 256, 396 loops 204, 211 qualitative 199 quantitative 199 see also analytics Feld, Brad 170, 241 Fenwick and West 168 Fiksu 264, 269–70 finance, VP of 317–18 finding apps 140–8, 148–9 FireEye 90 First Data 419 first impressions 107–10 Fitbit 38 fitness bracelets 38 flat rounds 322–3 Flipboard 6, 29, 42–3, 49, 51, 89–90 and application programming interface 36 Catalogs 351–2 cofounders 105 design 131, 207 funding 164 growth 351–2 platform choice 119 product innovation 351–2 user notifications 292 virality 281 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 Flurry 135, 149, 220 Fontana, Ash 233 Forbes magazine 40 Ford Motors 419 Founder Institute, The 168 founder vesting 166–7, 244 Foursquare 419 France Telecom 13 franchising 354 FreeMyApps.com 270–1 Friedberg, David 412 Froyo (Android mobile software) 7 Fujii, Kiyotaka 304 full service agencies 195–6 functionality 25–6, 45–50, 131 funding 72, 75–6, 84, 87–8, 152–60, 161–71, 179 accelerators 159–60 angel investors 154, 155–6, 323 for billion-dollar apps 391 convertible loans 163 core documents 169–70 for five-hundred-million-dollar apps 328, 383–7 founder vesting 166–7 for hundred-million-dollar apps 254, 258, 316–17, 318–24 incubators 159–60 legal aspects 163–4 and revenue engines 233–4 Series A 234, 238–40, 238, 240, 241, 242–6, 255, 319–21, 385 Series B 238, 241, 253, 260, 284, 319–21, 322, 384 Series C 384 signing a deal 167–8 for ten-million-dollar apps 152–60, 161–71, 176, 235–49 venture capital 72, 75, 156–8, 165–6, 235–49, 261–2, 383–5, 385, 418–19 game in game 348–9 gaming 42, 47, 318, 355 business model 67, 89 and revenue engines 232, 278–9 and user retention 288, 289 see also specific games Gandhi, Sameer 336 Gartner 271 Gates, Bill 4 general managers (GMs) 300–3 Gladwell, Malcolm 424 Glassdoor 361–2 Global Positioning System (GPS) 23 Gmail 72 GMs see general managers goal setting 40–1, 310–11 Goldberg, Dave 397 Goldman Sachs 385 ‘good leavers’ 247 Google 7, 19, 23, 27, 72, 88, 164, 226 acquisitions 43, 414–16, 418 application programming interface 35–6 beta testing 202 Chief Executive Officer 406–8 developer meetups 97 finding your app on 144, 147 Hangouts app 46 meetings 381–2 mission 404, 408–9 and the OKR framework 310 profit per employee 403, 405 revenue per employee 401, 405 scaling 332 and Snapchat 57 and source attribution 228–9 staff 339, 340, 361–2, 366, 401, 403, 404–5, 412 Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF) meetings 311–12 transparency 413 value 78 Waze app purchase 43 and WhatsApp 56 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 see also Android (mobile operating system) Google Ad Mob 149 Google AdSense 149 Google Analytics 135, 219–20, 345 Google Glass 38–9, 405 Google I/O conference 313 Google Maps 33, 35, 414, 416 Google Now 37 Google Play 88, 89, 117, 120, 226 and beta testing 202 finding apps in 141–5 profit per employee 403 ratings plus comments 204–5 Google Reader 72 Google Ventures 384 Google X 405 Google+ and business identity 114 and virality 281 Google.org 339 GPS see Global Positioning System Graham, Paul 184–5, 211 Graphical User Interface (GUI) 20 Greylock 321, 383 Gross, Bill 406–7, 409–10 Groupon 7, 51–2, 227, 344–5, 419 Grove, Andy 310 growth 267, 308–17 buying sustained 417–18 engines 184, 210, 222–31, 259, 265 and five-hundred-million-dollar apps 329–36 and Friday update meetings 311–12 and goal setting 310–11 and hiring staff 308–9, 411–12 and product and development teams 313–14 and staff conferences 312–13 targets 234, 260 see also acquisition (of users); international growth; scaling Growth Hackers 182 GUI see Graphical User Interface hackathons 99 Haig, Patrick 143 Hailo app xiii–xiv, 5, 36, 89, 386 big data 284–5 branding 112–13 cofounders 94–6 customer segments 346–7 customer-support 208–9 design 131, 132, 133, 206–7 development 123–7, 153–4 Friday update meetings 311 funding 162, 242 goal setting 310 growth 296–7, 299, 302–4, 308–11, 313, 315–17, 329–30, 334–6 hiring staff 308–9, 334–6, 338, 366–7 idea for 14–18 international growth 296, 297, 299, 302–4 market research 182 marketing 263, 264, 268, 270, 273, 341, 347–8 meetings 381 metrics 137–9, 216 name 107 organisational culture 396 platform choice 117, 120, 121 premises xiii–xiv, 177–8, 329–30, 371–2, 386 product development 189, 191, 196 retention 293–4 revenue engine 276 scaling development and engineering 357 scaling people 365–7 scaling process 377 team 258 testing 177–8, 201–4 and user emotionality 224 virality 280, 282 Hangouts app 46 Harris Interactive 31 HasOffers 149 Hay Day 47, 97 head of data 342 Heads Up Display (HUD) 38 heart rate measurement devices 37–8 Hed, Niklas 42 hiring staff 308–9, 334–6, 337–40, 365–70 history of apps 31–2 HMS President xiii–xiv, 177–9, 329, 371, 386 HockeyApp 202 HootSuite 151 Houston, Drew 407, 410–11 HP 180, 402 HTC smartphone 121 HUD see Heads Up Display human universals 44–5 Humedica 419 hyperlinks 147 hypertext markup language (HTML) 147 I/O conference 2013 202 IAd mobile advertising platform 149 IBM 20, 402 icons 143 ideas see ‘thinking big’ identity of the business 86 branding 111–13 identity crises 106–14 names 106–11 websites 113–14 image descriptions 147 in Mobi 149 in-app purchases 28 incentive-based networks 270–1 incorporation 163–4, 179 incubators 159–60 Index Ventures 3, 261 initial public offerings (IPOs) 64, 67–9, 78, 80, 246, 420–2 innovation 404–5 Instagram 6, 29, 48, 51, 67, 71–80, 88–90, 114, 117, 226, 278, 340, 417–18 cofounders 73–4 design 131 funding 75–6, 77–8 X-Pro II 75 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 instant messaging 46 Instantdomainsearch.com 109 integrators 410 Intel 310 intellectual property 165–6, 244, 247 international growth 295–307 Angry Birds 297–9 Hailo 296, 297, 299, 302–4 language tools 297 Square 295, 299, 304–6 strings files 296 Uber 299–302 International Space Station 13 Internet bubble 13 investment see funding iOS software (Apple operating system) 7, 23–4, 46, 75, 104 advertising 274 audience size 119 building apps for 116–22 and international apps 296 scaling development and engineering 357–8 time spent on 26 iPad 42–3, 118–20, 351 iPhone 6, 19, 22–3, 32, 38–9, 183, 351 advertising on 274 camera 48 designing apps for 117–18, 120 finding apps with 145 games 42, 47, 58 and Instagram 74–6 in Japan 306 and Square 104, 306 and Uber 301 user spend 117 and WhatsApp app 54–5 iPod 22 IPOs see initial public offerings Isaacson, Walter 32 iTunes app 22, 47, 88, 143 iTunes U app 69 Ive, Jony 129 iZettle 304 Jackson, Eric 40 Jain, Ankit 142 Japan 227, 304–6 Jawbone Up 38 Jelly Bean (Android mobile software) 7 Jobs, Steve 4, 22, 32, 323, 393, 425 journalists 150–1 Jun, Lei 306 Kalanick, Travis 299–300, 384, 422 Kayak 336 Keret, Samuel 43 Keyhole Inc. 414 keywords 143, 146 Kidd, Greg 104 King.com 349, 421–2 see also Candy Crush Saga KISSmetrics 291 KitKat (Android mobile software) 7 Klein Perkins Caulfield Byers (KPCB) 158, 261, 321, 383 Kontagent 135 Koolen, Kees 320, 339 Korea 30 Koum, Jan 42, 54, 55–6, 154, 321, 394, 416 Kreiger, Mike 73–6 language tools 297 Launchrock.com 113–14, 145, 202 Lawee, David 415 lawyers 103, 169, 170, 242 leadership 410–11 see also Chief Executive Officers; managers lean companies 69, 115–22, 154, 257, 320–1 Lee, Bob 340 legalities 163–70, 242–7, 301 letting go 406–7 Levie, Aaron 396–7, 411 Levinson, Art 32 LeWeb 97 Libin, Phil 399 licensing 356 life experience 67–8, 264 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291, 342 Line app 46, 226 Lingo24 297 LinkedIn 97, 226, 406, 408–9 links 147 liquidation preference 242, 243, 245 non-participating 245 Livio 419 loans, convertible 163 Localytics 135, 221 locations 69 logos 111–14 LTV see lifetime value luck 412 Luckey, Palmer 39 LVMH 304 Lyons, Carl 263 Maiden 95 makers 375–7 see also designers; engineers/developers managers 189–90, 300–3, 375–7, 405 MapMyFitness 419 market research 115, 127, 182 marketing data 345–7 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 and incentive-based networks 270–1 marketing engineering team 344–5 and mobile social media channels 271–3, 272 and mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 partner marketing 347–8 scaling 341–9 teams 262–6, 337, 342 and traditional channels 268–9 VPs 262–6, 337, 342 marketplace see e-commerce/marketplace MasterCard 347–8 Matrix Partners 283 McClure, Dave 136, 160, 211, 234 McCue, Mike 42–3, 105, 351 McKelvey, Jim 41, 104 ‘me-too’ products 181 Medium 41 Meebo 73 meetings 379–82, 412–13 annual offsite 379 daily check-ins 381 disruptive nature 376–7 Friday update 311–12 meaningful 381–2 monthly strategic 380 quarterly 380 weekly tactical 380 Meetup.com 98–9 Mendelsen, Jason 170 messaging platforms 226 time spent on 46 and user retention 288, 289 metrics 136–9, 139, 211–21 activation 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 average transaction value (ATV) 214–15, 219, 232, 236, 387 consensual 215–16 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291, 342 and product-market fit 209–10 referral 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213, 230–1 revenue 137, 138, 139, 154, 211–12, 213, 214–15, 219, 291 transparency regarding 312 see also acquisition (of users); retention (of users) mice 20 Microsoft application programming interface 35–6 revenue per employee 401 Windows 20, 22, 24 Millennial Media 149 minimum viable product (MVP) 123, 153 MirCorp 13–14 mission 261, 404, 408–9 Mitchell, Jason 51 Mitsui Sumitomo Bank 305 Mixpanel.com tool 135, 217–18, 220–1, 287, 290–1, 345 MMS see Multimedia Messaging Service Mobile Almanac 45 Mobile App Tracking 230, 231 mobile technology, rise of 19–39 MoMo app 306 Monsanto 419 moonshots 404–5 Moore, Jonathan 200 MoPub 149 Moqups.com 128 Mosaic 180 Motorola 21 Moz.com 143 Mullins, Jacob 419 Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) 47 Murphy, Bobby 43, 104–5, 152–3 music player apps 47 MVP see Metrics into Action; minimum viable product names 106–11, 142 NameStation.com 108 Nanigans 273–4 National Venture Capital Association 64 native apps 33–4 NDA see Non Disclosure Agreement negotiation 265 Net Promoter Score (NPS) 206, 209 net-adding users 206 Netflix 400 Netscape 164, 180 New Enterprise Associates 385 New York Times news app 32–3, 256 news and alerts feature 48–9 Nextstop 72 Nguyen, Bill 255–6 NHN 227 Nike Fuelband 38 Nintendo Game Boy 47 Nokia 21, 35–6 Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) 165 noncompetition/non-solicitation provision 244, 247 notifications 291–4 NPS see Net Promoter Score Oculus VR 39 OKR (‘objectives and key results’) framework 310–11, 380 OmniGraffle 128 open-source software 23, 34–5, 185 OpenCourseWare 68–9 operating systems 20–4 see also Android; iOS software operations VPs 337 org charts 258, 309 organisational culture 395–8 O’Tierney, Tristan 104 outsourcing 194–7 ownership and founder vesting 166–7 and funding 155, 156, 161–3, 318 oxygen saturation measurement devices 37–8 Paananen, Ilkka 118–19, 397–8 Page, Larry 4, 23, 382, 404, 407–8 Palantir 90 Palihapitiya, Chamath 187 Pandora 7, 47, 67, 131, 410 pay-before-you-download model 28 pay-per-download (PPD) 225 Payleven 304 payment systems 7, 33–4, 227, 304, 305 see also Square app PayPal 7, 227, 304, 305 Pepsi 196 Perka 419 perks 398–400 perseverance 67, 394, 410 personal computers (PCs) 29 perspiration measurement devices 38 Pet Rescue Saga 349, 421 Petrov, Alex 369 phablets 7 Pham, Peter 255 PhoneSaber 33 Photoshop 128 PIN technology 305 Pincus, Mark 311 Pinterest app 48, 226 and business identity 114 and e-commerce decisions 271, 272 and getting your app found 147 name 107 and virality 281 Pishevar, Shervin 300 pivoting 73–4 population, global 9–10 portfolio companies 261–2 PowerPoint 128 PPD see pay-per-download preferential return 243 premises 370–2 preparation 412 press kits 148, 150 press releases 150 Preuss, Dom 98 privacy issues 43, 56–7 private vehicle hire see Uber pro-rata rights 242, 243 producers 409 product chunks 360 product development scaling 357–63 scope 199 team building for 188–91 and team location 193–4 and vision 186–8, 191 see also app development; testing product expansion 350–63 product extension 354 product managers 189–90, 405 product-centricity 185–6, 314, 360 product-market fit 9, 180–97, 235–6, 248, 256–7 measurement 209–10, 212, 286–8 profit 267, 320, 342 profit margin 258–9, 318, 321 profit per employee 402–4, 403, 405 profitability 260, 277, 400 Project Loon 405 proms 12 proto.io tool 133 prototype apps 86, 174 app Version 0.1 123–35, 174 new and improved Version 1.0 198–210 rapid-design prototyping 132–3 PRWeb 150 PSP 47 psychological effects of smartphones 29–30, 30 pttrns.com 131 public-relations agencies 343 publicity 150–1, 225, 313 putting metrics into action 138–9 Puzzles and Dragons 47, 131 QlikView 221, 284–5 QQ 307 quality assurance (QA) 190–1, 196 Quora 76 QZone 307 Rabois, Keith 368, 369 Rakuten 227 Rams, Dieter 129 rapid-design prototyping 132–3 ratings plus comments 204–5 Red Bull 223 redemption codes 230 referrals (user) 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213 attribution for referrals 230–1 referral codes 230 religious apps 45 remuneration 361–2, 362, 363 Renault 13 restated certification 169 retention (of users) 136–9, 153, 154 for five hundred-million-dollar apps 327, 341–3 for hundred-million-dollar apps 286–94, 288–9 measurement 286–8 for ten-million-dollar apps 206, 211–12, 213, 278 revenue 137–8, 139, 154, 211–12, 213, 214–15, 219, 236, 239–40, 267, 291, 331–2, 341–2, 354 revenue engines 184, 210, 232–4, 257–66, 265, 275–85 revenue per employee 400–2, 402, 405 revenue streams 27–9 Ries, Eric, The Lean Startup 115–16 Rockefeller, John D. 9 Rocket Internet 304 Rolando 33 Rosenberg, Jonathan 413 Rovio 58, 97, 118, 297–9, 318, 320–1, 336, 354, 409 see also Angry Birds Rowghani, Ali 77 Rubin, Andy 23 Runa 419 SaaS see software as a service Sacca, Chris 75–6 sacrifice 86–7 Safari Web browser 32 salaries 361–2, 362, 363 sales VPs 337 Salesforce 291 Samsung 23 Galaxy Gear smartwatch 38 smartphones 121 Sandberg, Sheryl 4, 100–1, 339, 397 SAP 304 scaling 259, 308, 312, 323–4, 326, 330–6, 331–2, 384–5 decision making 379–81 international growth 295–307 marketing 341–9 and organisational culture 396–8 people 338–9, 364–72 premature 334–5 process 373–82 product development and engineering 357–63 and product innovation 350–6 reasons for 333–4 skill set for 335–6 Schmidt, Eric 120 scope 199 screenshots 131, 144, 206 scrum masters (‘agile coaches’) 315, 359, 360 search functions 49 organic 141–2, 141, 145 search-engine optimisation (SEO) 142, 145–8, 225 Sedo.com 109 Seed Fund 136 Seedcamp 160 Sega Game Gear 47 segmentation 220, 287, 290, 346–7 self-empowered squads/units 360 SEO see search-engine optimisation Sequoia Capital 76, 77–80, 158, 255, 321, 383, 385 Series A funding 234, 238–40, 238, 240, 241, 242–6, 255, 261, 262, 319–21, 385 Series B funding 238, 241, 253, 260, 319–21, 322, 384 Series C funding 384 Series Seed documents 168 Sesar, Steven 263 sex, smartphone use during 31 Shabtai, Ehud 43 shares 156, 166–8, 244 ‘sharing big’ 51–2, 52 Shinar, Amir 43 Shopzilla 263 Short Message Service (SMS) 21, 46–7 Silicon Valley 71–4, 77, 79, 99, 162, 168, 180, 184, 255, 340, 361, 411, 422 Sina 227 sitemaps 146–7 skills sets complementary 93 diverse 409–10 for scaling 335–6 Skok, David 283 Skype app 7, 46, 111, 200–1, 226, 357, 419 Sleep Cycle app 48 Smartling 297 smartwatches 7, 38–9 SMS see Short Message Service Snapchat app 6, 43, 46, 56–7, 88, 89, 223, 226, 416, 418 cofounders 104–5 design 131 funding 152–3, 307, 320 name 107 platform 117 staff 340 valuations 333 virality 280, 283 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 social magazines 42–3 see also Flipboard social media 48 driving downloads through 151 and getting your app found 147 mobile channels 271–3, 272 and user retention 288, 289 Sofa 363 SoftBank 227 software development agile 192–3, 299, 315, 357, 377 outsourcing 194–5 see also app development software as a service (SaaS) 67, 90, 208, 214, 233, 276–7 Somerset House 329–30, 371 Sony 21, 47 SoundCloud 358 source attribution 227–31 space tourism 13–14 speech-to-text technology 50 speed 20 Spiegel, Evan 43, 56–7, 104–5, 152–3 Spinvox 50 Splunk 90 Spotify app 47, 357–8 SQL 284 Square app 6, 41–2, 58–9, 87, 89, 333, 350 branding 112 Chief Executive Officer 412–13 cofounders 104 design 131, 363 funding 320–1 international growth 295, 299, 304–6 marketing 348 metrics 215–16 name 107, 110 product–market fit 183 revenue engine 276 scaling people 367–8 scaling product innovation 352–3 staff 340, 367–8 transparency 312 virality 282 Square Cash 353 Square Market 353 Square Register 350, 352–3 Square Wallet 348, 350, 353 Squareup.com 144 staff at billion-dollar app scale 395–405, 423 attracting the best 91 benefits 398–400 conferences 312–13 conflict 334, 378 employee agreements 244 employee legals 246–7 employee option pool 244 employee-feedback systems 378 firing 370, 378 hiring 308–9, 334–6, 411–12 induction programmes 370 investment in 360 mistakes 369–70, 411–12 and premises 370–2 profit per employee 402–4, 403 revenue per employee 400–2, 402 reviews 370 scaling people 364–72, 377–9 scrum masters 315, 359, 360 training programmes 370 see also cofounders; specific job roles; teams Staples 419 Starbucks 338, 348 startup weekends 98 startups, technology difficulties of building 63–80 failure 63–5, 73–4 identity 106–14 lean 115–22, 154 process 82–4, 85–105 secrets of success 66–9 step sensors 38 stock markets 420–1 straplines 111 strings files 296 Stripe 160 style 111 subscriptions 90 success, engines of 183–4, 423–4 SumUp 304 Supercell 28, 47, 97, 118–19, 318, 336, 397–8, 401, 403 see also Clash of Clans; Hay Day SurveyMonkey 397 surveys 206, 209 synapses 10 Systrom, Kevin 71–80 tablets 7 Tableau Software 90 Taleb, Nicholas Nassim 54 Tamir, Diana 51 Tap Tap Revolution (game) 42 Target 419 taxation 164 taxi hailing apps see Hailo app TaxiLight 16 team builders 264 team building 188–91 teams 82, 174, 252, 390 complementary people 409–10 for five-hundred-million-dollar apps 326, 342–5, 357–63, 374, 386 growth 313–14, 326, 342–4 for hundred-million-dollar apps 258–61 located in one place 193–4 marketing 262–6, 342–4 marketing engineering 344–5 product development and engineering 357–63 ‘two-pizza’ 374 TechCrunch Disrupt 97, 99 technology conferences 97–8, 202, 312–13 Techstars 159, 160, 168 Tencent 307 Tencent QQ 226 term sheets 168, 169, 170, 243–4 testing 126–8, 177–8, 187–8, 192–3, 199–201 beta 201–4 channels 224–7 text messaging 21 unlimited packages 42 see also Short Message Service ‘thinking big’ 40–59, 82, 85 big problem solutions 41–3 disruptive ideas 53–9 human universals 44–5 sharing big 51–2, 52 smartphones uses 45–50 Thoughtworks 196 time, spent checking smartphones 25–6, 26, 45–50 Tito, Dennis 13 tone of voice 111 top-down approaches 311 traction 233, 252 traffic information apps 43 traffic trackers 146 translation 296–7 transparency 311–12, 412–13 Trilogy 13 Tumblr 110, 226, 399, 418 Twitter 41, 48, 54, 72, 226, 394 acquisitions 418 and application programming interface 36 and Bootstrap 145 and business identity 114 delivering delight 206 and e-commerce decisions 272 and FreeMyApps.com 271 funding 419, 421 and getting your app found 147 initial public offering 421 and Instagram 51, 76–7, 79–80 name 110 and virality 281 ‘two-pizza’ teams 374 Uber 6, 36, 87, 89, 333, 350 and attribution for referrals 231 design 131 funding 320, 384, 422 international growth 295, 299–302 name 107, 110 revenue engine 276 revenue per employee 401 scaling product innovation 355–6 staff 339, 399 user notifications 292 virality 280 Under Armour 419 Union Square Ventures (USV) 3, 158, 242, 261, 262, 288, 321, 323, 377, 383 unique propositions 198 UnitedHealth Group 419 URLs 110 ‘user experience’ (UX) experts 190 user journeys 127–8, 213–14 user notifications 291–4 user stories 193 users 83, 175, 252, 327, 390 activation 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 communication with 208–9 definition 137 emotional response of 223–4 fanatical 294 finding apps 140–8 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291 metrics 136–9 net-adding of 206 ratings plus comments 204–5 referrals 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213, 230–1 target 83, 115, 127 wants 180–97 see also acquisition (of users); retention (of users) Usertesting.com 200–1 USV see Union Square Ventures valuations 83, 161–3, 175, 237–8, 238, 253, 318, 319, 322, 327, 333, 391 venture capital 72, 75, 156–8, 165–6, 235–49, 261–2, 383–5, 385, 418–19 Viber app 6, 46, 1341 video calls 46, 47 viral coefficient 282–4 ‘viral’ growth 225, 278, 279–84 Communication virality 281 and cycle time 283–4 incentivised virality 280–1 inherent virality 280 measurement 282–4 social-network virality 281 word-of-mouth virality 281–2 virtual reality 39 vision 261, 393–4, 408–9, 414, 415 voice calls 46–7 voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) 46 voicemail 50 Wall Street Journal 43, 55 warranties 246 Waze app 6, 43, 97 acquisition 415–16 design 131 name 107 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 web browsing 49 Web Summit 97 websites 113–14, 144–8 WebTranslateIt (WTI) 297 WeChat app 46, 226, 306 Weibo 48 Weiner, Jeff 408–9 Wellington Partners 4 Weskamp, Marcos 207 Westergren, Tim 410 WhatsApp 6, 42, 46, 54–6, 87, 90, 226, 394 acquisition 42, 54–6, 416, 416–17, 417 cofounders 96 design 131, 144 funding 154, 320–1 platform 117–18 valuations 333 virality 280 White, Emily 340 Williams, Evan 41, 65 Williams, Rich 344 Wilson, Fred 110, 242, 288, 323, 377 Windows (Microsoft) 20–1, 22, 24, 24 Winklevoss twins 105 wireframes 127–8 Woolley, Caspar 15–16, 95, 124, 338 WooMe.com 14, 87–8, 101–2, 263 Workday 90 world population 9–10 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 313 wowing people 8–9 WTI see WebTranslateIt Xiaomi 306 Y Combinator 159–60, 184–5, 211, 407, 410–11 Yahoo!

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 May 2015

Until seventeen days ago, his mission had been to lay groundwork for the addition of a second, larger torus, built around a newer Hub aft of the existing one and intended for space tourists. This was part of a public-private partnership between NASA and Rhys’s employer, a British billionaire who had been one of the early movers in the space tourism industry. Rhys had a new mission now, but he was still a perfect fit for the job. Dinah went back through the orbital module and peered through the hatch at him, lying there patiently motionless in his couch. “First time in space?” Dinah asked him, though she already knew the answer. “Don’t you have Google up here?”

…

“Well, stay in my good graces,” she said, “and I’ll let you play with some.” DAY 56 As of A+0.56, the Hub module around which the torus spun was no longer the aft-most part of Izzy. They called it H1 now. A larger hub, called H2, had been sent up on a heavy-lift booster from Cape Canaveral and mated with it. H2 had originally been planned as the basis of a large space tourism operation. Rhys’s original mission, for which he’d been planning and training for two years, had been to get that up and running. It had a new purpose now, of course, but functionally it would look the same: H2, the big central module, with a new and larger torus rotating around it. That new torus, inevitably called T2, was going to be assembled in space from a kit of rigid and inflatable parts, some of which had been shipped up packed inside of H2, others to follow later on subsequent launches.

…

Bracketed to the outside surfaces of those tubes, and still being installed by fresh waves of Scouts, were runs of plumbing and wiring, and structural reinforcements tied into the adjacent trusses. The initial tube tree, built between about A+0.29 and A+0.50 by Tekla and the other first-wave Scouts, sported half a dozen docking locations. These were spoken for immediately by the first wave of so-called Pioneer launches: three Soyuz spacecraft, two Shenzhous, and a space tourism capsule from the United States. Encouraged by the success of the launch that had carried Bo and Rhys, the Russians had found ways to cram five or six passengers on each Soyuz. The Shenzhou spacecraft was based on the Soyuz design, except larger, and updated in various ways. Like the Soyuz, it was meant to carry a crew of three—but this was based on the assumption that those three would want to return to Earth alive.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

Just three weeks before the start of the 2003 conference, the second President Bush had announced from the Oval Office the “decapitation attack” that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, assuring the world that it would not be “a campaign of half measures” and that “no outcome except victory” would be acceptable.27 Typically, registrants at the National Space Symposium include Air Force generals, corporate executives, heads of space centers, and administrators of NASA and other government agencies. You’ll also find engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, investors, flyboys, space weapons traders, communications specialists, space tourism mavens, and the occasional astrophysicist, as well as selected members of Congress, representatives of state government, and diplomats and scientists from the ever-growing international community of spacefaring nations. There are students. There are teachers. Most of the registrants are men. That year, many of the five thousand people gathered at the Broadmoor had some professional link to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

…

The biggest chunk of the world’s space economy is the fast-rising level of commercial activity, which amounted to more than three-quarters of global spending on space in 2016. Included in this category is everything from telecommunications satellites, satellite TV and radio broadcasting, launch services, insurance, the manufacture of spacecraft, the satellite monitoring of long-distance food shipments, high-res Earth-observation imagery, and space tourism to position/navigation/timing (PNT) support for the delivery of your latest unnecessary Internet purchase or the optimal location for your imminent fishing weekend. In other words, a lot of freewheeling space power and profit looks ready for the taking—or, as the Space Foundation puts it, “the ongoing process of integrating space technology into all aspects of life” has spawned companies that “seek to monetize the growing torrent of information flowing from and through space systems.”

…

But at present we’re uncomfortably close to open season up there in near-Earth space. The old two-superpower spacescape is long gone. So, too, is the vision of America as the space hegemon. Multiple smaller nations and private companies are becoming spacefarers. New projects and problems keep presenting themselves: potentially profitable mining ventures, lucrative space tourism, an increasingly crowded geostationary Earth orbit for communications satellites, maneuverable satellites that could conceivably be used as attack vehicles, launch services for sale by competing countries, insufficient coverage in the five existing UN space treaties of issues relevant to private ventures, frequent but legally mushy invocation of the “global commons,” the reawakened nightmare of nuclear escalation and proliferation, everybody’s growing reliance on satellite capabilities.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

In 2008, a group of astronauts, scientists and space experts created the Overview Institute to share astronauts’ insights more widely and “move humanity closer to world peace.” The 2012 documentary film Overview and the 2018 National Geographic channel series One Strange Rock brought the phenomenon to mass audiences, while advances in virtual reality and space tourism mean that many more people could soon experience the effect directly. And in 2016, psychologists analyzed the effect, describing it as a powerful example of awe. To see Earth from outside, they suggest, is the ultimate shift in perspective, forcing astronauts’ focus away from themselves and toward what matters for the planet as a whole.

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“compassion and concern”: David Yaden et al., “The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-transcendent Experience in Space Flight,” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 3 (2016): 3. sold his SUVs: Ben Guarino, “The Overview Effect Will Save Earth One Rich Space Tourist at a Time,” Inverse, December 18, 2015, https://www.inverse.com/article/6301-overview-everview-effect-space-tourism-environmentalism-spacex-richard-garriot. “From out there on the moon”: Alex Pasternak, “The Moon-walking, Alien-hunting, Psychic Astronaut Who Got Sued by NASA,” Vice, May 14, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aek7ez/astronaut-edgar-mitchell-outer-space-inner-space-and-aliens. “you don’t see the barriers”: Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, 3rd ed.

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

It turned out that the astronomer Fred Hoyle was right in 01947 when he forecast, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” In those photos from the Moon we saw fractured humanity’s home as itself unfractured and whole, and we began to see what the Tewas saw from local mountains: a relationship measured in millennia. This insight will keep being renewed as space tourism develops in the coming decades. The environmentalist René Dubos also was right: “We are becoming planetized probably almost as fast as the planet is becoming humanized.” Our global influence and our global perspective are almost keeping pace with each other (which is fortunate—it could have been otherwise).

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel
by Lonely Planet
Published 30 Sep 2015

Check travel advisories due to the political situation in Ukraine. 10 Space, the final… well you know the rest Fifty years after the first episode of Star Trek and space remains the final frontier… but it’s getting closer. Despite the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise, dozens of companies are spending millions to turn space tourism to a reality. Space Adventures is the first company to successfully transport its clients outside earth’s atmosphere, with seven civilian astronauts since 2001, but others are close behind. The only drawback is the price tag – an estimated US$20–40 million per passenger, though Virgin Galactic hopes to undercut the market with fares of just US$250,000.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

Colonists will extract the metals and minerals for their own use, since it would cost too much to transport them to earth. Mining operations in the asteroid belt would become economic only when we have self-sustaining colonies that can use these raw materials themselves, which won’t happen until late in this century or, more likely, beyond. SPACE TOURISM But when might the average civilian go into space? Some visionaries, like the late Gerard O’Neill of Princeton University, dreamed of a space colony as a gigantic wheel, including living units, water-purification plants, air-recycling units, etc., established to solve overpopulation on earth.

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Media reports estimated that it cost $20 million. He said he was reluctant to give the precise cost, but he told me that the media reports were not far off. He had such a good time that he actually went into space twice. So space travel, even into the near future, will still be the province of the well-off.) Space tourism, however, got a shot in the arm in September 2010, when the Boeing Corporation announced that it, too, was entering the business, with commercial flights for tourists planned as early as 2015. This would bolster President Obama’s decision to turn over the manned spaceflight program to private industry.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

During the past five decades, astronaut activities have transpired solely in near-Earth orbits. Humans will likely continue to operate within this easily accessible domain, although most of what they do, such as manufacturing specialized items under weightlessness conditions, can be accomplished more effectively by robots. Space tourism (far better described as space adventurism because of its dangers) could prove a lucrative enterprise, a joy for the rich and in some ways an inspiration to everyone—but only if the risks remain sufficiently low. Beyond the first few hundred miles above the Earth’s surface, a thousand times farther into space, the moon beckons to those who seek to search its surface for clues to the formation of the solar system, to others who hope to mine the lunar surface for valuable resources, and to still others who plan to establish habitats for long-term residence or moon bases for longer-range travel, using the moon’s underground water for drinking and to release breathable oxygen.

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School
by Andrew Hallam
Published 1 Nov 2011

Selling Stocks I think stockowners should hold their companies for long periods, but there are instances when it’s wise to sell: 1. If the company deviated from its core business. 2. If the stock was grossly overpriced. The first reason for selling is self-explanatory. If a company’s ability to make chocolate is legendary, but it decided to switch gears to pursue space tourism (something it has no track record in) then it might be wise to bail on the shares. The second reason to sell requires some judgment and a bit of math. When we sold Schering Plough Schering Plough (which can no longer be purchased on the stock market, since Merck <www.merck.com> purchased it in 2009) met my investment club’s purchase requirements in 2003, and we paid $15.24 a share.

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 12 May 2010

I would love to hear from anyone who knows more about this. Finally, I haven’t bothered to factor in the embodied energy of the shuttle itself. Since each shuttle (apart from Challenger, which crashed after ten trips) was reused around thirty times, I think the emissions of manufacture would turn out to be very small compared with the fuel burn. Space tourism is not a low-carbon option. A university 72,000 tons CO2e per year > So that’s about 5.5 tons for each staff member and student. The figures here are based on a study for Lancaster University. It included just about everything you can think of: gas, electricity, commuting, business travel, and everything the university buys, right down to the paper clips.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

Past it, a mile-long row of hangars hold even more ambitious vehicles designed to rekindle an adventure with the heavens that was somehow lost between Apollo and the grinding bureaucracy and cost of the Space Shuttle. Scaled’s spinoff, The Rocket Company, is now building a fleet of launch vehicles for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism venture that is scheduled to begin operations in late 2012. The vehicles come in a pair: SpaceShipTwo, a sleek bullet of a spaceplane with a unique tail that pops up to a 45-degree angle on descent to slow the aircraft with a controlled stall after it has taken its passengers to the edge of space, and WhiteKnightTwo, a 747-sized four-engine giant that carries SpaceShipTwo aloft, along with a cabin full of other passengers who will get a zero-G parabolic ride on the way back.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
by Mike Brown
Published 7 Dec 2010

Though my first search had come to nothing scientifically, planets were still never far from my mind. I still wanted to find one. I just needed a new way to do it. Less than a year after the first failure, I was back to work on the sky, and this time I was determined to do the job right. It was 2001, and though perhaps Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions of space tourism and obelisks on satellites of Jupiter had not come true, it was finally time to get rid of the hundred-year-old technology of the photographic plates. To some, it was a sad day when the photographic plate handling system at the 48-inch telescope was dismantled, though anyone who had ever had to work in the absolute darkness of the nighttime dome, moving plates from their holders to the telescope to the darkroom, could not have felt too bad to see it all go.

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars
by Nicky Jenner
Published 5 Apr 2017

Orbital ATK and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) have also expressed interest in Mars, though the spaceflight contributions from the former come primarily through its work on NASA’s SLS (for which they are providing the boosters) and low-orbit commercial ventures around Earth (including shuttling cargo to the ISS), and from the latter via its quest to make spaceflight as routine as driving a car (the birth of space tourism!). Branson has spoken of his desire and determination to ‘[be] a part of starting a population on Mars’ within his lifetime, but has no firm plans. A few years ago two different private agencies, Mars One and the Inspiration Mars Foundation, prominently challenged NASA’s aim of sending humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, proclaiming they could do it far more quickly.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

A revolution in medicine and biotechnology that changes the way we do, well, just about everything, by extending life spans (starting with the long-promised cures for Alzheimer’s disease and cancer), rewriting reproduction (today, CRISPR, the next day artificial wombs), and enabling genetic engineering on a species-altering scale. A revolution in space flight that gives us real space tourism, moon bases, and eventually a colony on Mars. A revolution in artificial intelligence and the study of consciousness that does the same, only more so, by enabling human beings to escape the physical plane altogether. Despite the disappointments of the last few decades (or perhaps because they don’t fully acknowledge them), the default assumption of most futurists is that one or more of these scenarios are inevitable.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

No political vision should be allowed to cost whatever it takes, because that removes resources from other people, who have their own dreams for the future, and from their attempts to solve the problems that are most urgent to them. The fact remains that the moon landing would not have taken place in 1969 if it had not been for the US government project. As a space enthusiast, I would regret that. But what was it all about, really? We did not get any moon bases and no asteroid mining, no solar power in space, no space tourism and no journey towards Mars and into outer space. Precisely because it was all about political symbolism, the moon landing was little more than a glorified photo opportunity, and there was a complete lack of interest in building a sustainable infrastructure for space travel. And because the political interest in it was so overwhelming, the costs for the Apollo programme were allowed to soar, which made the project possible then but also completely unsustainable in the slightly longer run.

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts
by Peter L. Shillingsburg
Published 15 Jan 2006

The point, if there is just one, is to understand the conditions of writing and reading in order to see the full range of factors and elements that are relevant to an electronic representation of print literature and the reasons for doing so in the context of a knowledge site. Script act theory begins with the question: if speech – conversation, and face to face negotiations from ordering dinner from a menu to organizing space tourism – is tied to time, place, speaker, and hearer in ways that specify meaning, why is writing and how is writing different? Script act theory derives from an analogy to speech act theory, a field of study that began with analysis of how communication happens in oral 46 From Gutenberg to Google exchanges – not just speaking but hearing and, perhaps, understanding.5 Speech act theorists have also, of course, been very interested in written communication and have argued about the effects of considering speech as the primary form and writing as a derivative or secondary manifestation of speech – rather than considering them as equal or even separate acts and systems.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
by Mary Roach
Published 1 Jan 2010

The anxiety of not knowing whether there will be another flight. The extraordinary commitment and devotion to career. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose. Jay listened to me, and then he said, “Might be worth it, no?”* AN ENTIRE FLEDGLING INDUSTRY has been launched on the imaginations of people like my agent. Space Tourism Society president John Spencer envisions an orbiting “super yacht” featuring “Snuggle Tunnels” and a zero-gravity hot tub. Budget Suites America founder Robert Bigelow, now heading up Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, has begun testing and launching inflatable components for a “commercial space station” to be leased out for research, industrial testing, and space vacations and honeymoons.† Bigelow hopes to be open for business in 2015.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Singularity University doesn’t grant degrees in the normal sense; it is a kind of secular seminary devoted to the faith that technology is the harbinger of human progress, until it outwits us altogether. Students pay for the experience with an ownership stake in the startups they create there. “Be exponential,” Singularity’s slogan reminds them.11 In June 2014, the institution’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Diamandis, a space-tourism entrepreneur, convened a gathering of fellow tech luminaries to discuss the conundrum of automation-caused unemployment. “Tell me something that you think robots cannot do, and I will tell you a time frame in which they can actually do it,” claims Federico Pistono, a young Italian who spoke there.

Work! Consume! Die!
by Frankie Boyle
Published 12 Oct 2011

For example, stick a load of jigsaws in your loft and you can’t keep them out – and with all those coats their insulation value is triple that of fibreglass. A proposed rise in university tuition fees could leave students with debts of over £100,000. Forget going to university. If you want to make some money, start a university. If students have to pay these fees, then watching Countdown in your pants will become a more expensive experience than space tourism. Apparently, some hard-up students have turned to prostitution. If you meet a fellow student in this situation, then remember – you should get a 10 per cent discount with your NUS card. The only people who can afford to go to university will be the massively wealthy and the girls who’re putting themselves through by stripping.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

8 Typically Atypical 9 Big Dogfights 10 Innovation is Nothing New 11 Hiring ’em and Keeping ’em Part Three – LAUGH 12 Culturing the Culture 13 The Fruits of Passion 14 The Party Line Part Four – LEAD 15 Leaders of the Future 16 Being There 17 Collaboration is the Key 18 Decisions, Decisions 19 Good Business Epilogue Afterword Acknowledgements Index PREFACE LIFE’S TOO SHORT Don’t enjoy it? Don’t do it! From my very first commercial venture at age sixteen with Student magazine, right up to today’s far loftier adventures with such things as Virgin Galactic and space tourism, I have always had one paramount philosophy: if a new project or business opportunity doesn’t excite me and get my entrepreneurial and innovative juices flowing, if it’s not something with which I sense I can make a difference while having a lot of seriously creative fun, then I’d far rather pass on it and move right along to something else that does excite me.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

We concentrated on the following key areas: Nature and measurability of impact, and how this might evolve Achievability of the go-to-market strategy, particularly across developed and developing markets Intentions and motivations of our co-investors, particularly the lead investor in this seed funding round It is the final point that's worth dwelling on. “Intentions and motivations of our co-investors” is very close to the fundamental principles we use to invest under at Virgin in the broader sense. As a multifaceted family office with investments in sectors ranging from financial services to space tourism, we have always been very keen to bring in co-investors who align with our goals, but who also bring sector-specific expertise. Infant Mortality in the Developing World: A Tragedy in Numbers According to a World Health Organization (WHO) analysis, an estimated 15 million babies are born prematurely each year (less than 37 completed weeks of gestation), and the number is rising.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

He would make around $225,000 a year.16 Not only would his decisions be subject to approval by workers, but if Chase were a Mondragon-style cooperative, it would share some profits and workers with Basque co-op versions of Bank of America and Wells Fargo. It may seem like science fiction to imagine successful international firms behaving in this way, but some already do. In spring of 2022, business at Soraluce was strong. The cooperative had recently received an order from Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company, for ten machines worth around €20 million. This news was celebrated not so much for the profit it would generate as for the new jobs it would let the cooperative create. During the beginning of the pandemic, orders declined sharply, and the members of Soraluce voted to decrease their salaries by almost 9 percent.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

We like start-ups, disrupters and rebels . . . people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs.”23 As just one example of this general shift, today we have a whole new conception of space travel. A company called Planetary Resources (backed by billionaire investors including Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt) is promising to mine moons and asteroids. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is offering $250,000 zero-gravity flights and has its eye on space tourism and suborbital trips with zero friction and gravity—New York City to Tokyo in two hours. Jeff Bezos of Amazon works out vigorously every morning in preparation for the moment when Blue Origin, the space exploration company he founded on 300,000 acres of land in rural Texas, is ready to send him into orbit.24 And, as we’ve already touched on, entrepreneur/tech-cheerleader Peter Diamandis has partnered with Google and launched the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, a $30 million prize for the first private entity that can land a robot on the Moon, get it to travel at least 500 meters, and transmit images and information back to Earth.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History
by Kassia St Clair
Published 3 Oct 2018

(The latter’s biggest claim to fame, prior to winning second prize in a glove-designing competition for NASA, was creating the angel wings for Victoria’s Secret fashion shows.) Their creations incorporate new materials including dyneema, a high-molecular-weight polyethylene that is stronger than nylon. Their suit, they predict, would be ten pounds lighter than the current model and around a third of the cost.46 A bigger worry, however, now that the era of mass space tourism feels closer than ever, is that companies will dispense with spacesuits altogether, as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and World View have said they plan to do. They argue that since the cabins will be pressurised, there will be no need for cumbersome spacesuits. While all astronauts would likely agree that spacesuits are not the most comfortable pieces of kit, few would advocate trips without them.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

Though the Future Investment Initiative was theoretically about getting foreigners to invest in Saudi Arabia, the news it generated was largely about Saudi Arabia investing even more in foreign companies. Rumayyan said the sovereign wealth fund aimed to have $2 trillion in investments, many of them overseas, by 2030. Branson got a $1 billion commitment for the parent of his space tourism company Virgin Galactic. Blackstone already had a commitment of $20 billion for an investment fund, and the Vision Fund was already off the ground with $40 billion from Saudi Arabia. Rajeev Misra, head of the Vision Fund, strutted around the Ritz-Carlton, holding meetings in Masayoshi Son’s huge suite and vaping nonstop.

The Deepest Map
by Laura Trethewey
Published 15 May 2023

His ambitions appeared to be running headlong into a historical pattern in exploration: as more pioneers flood over a frontier, the terrain becomes crowded, exploration becomes more complicated, and the frontier is no longer frontier. Explorers then tend to seek out new, unrestrained frontiers. In June 2022, Victor joined the fifth paid flight to space with Blue Origin,35 the space tourism company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—a ride he called “ten minutes of pure unfettered joy.” A few months later, in November 2022, he sold Triton Submarines’ Hadal Exploration System to the American video game billionaire Gabe Newell and his ocean exploration research organization, Inkfish. In the future, Victor planned to shift his interest in the ocean to areas that would require less permitting, such as investing in autonomous ocean technology or diving shipwrecks.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
Published 10 Mar 2020

The center was filled with virtual rollercoasters, spherical holograms featuring roaring lions, and interactive robots. The kingdom used the event to announce three new megacities meant to represent its new direction. The first was a sprawling entertainment complex called Qiddiya to be built near Riyadh that would bring together movie theaters, concert venues, theme parks, and perhaps a space tourism site. The second was a sprawling eco-tourism project on the very islands that Branson had visited a few weeks before. The third and most ambitious would be unveiled by MBS himself—when he finally showed up. According to the schedule, the prince was supposed to open the event, and the guests packed into the same conference hall where Donald Trump had spoken to see him.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

The last time anyone walked on the moon was 1972, after just six lunar missions. The fastest anyone has ever travelled was on the Apollo 10 mission – back in 1969. Bases on the moon and Mars remain the province of science fiction. Humanity goes no further than Yuri Gagarin did. If you showed today's satellites, the International Space Station and atmosphere-grazing space-tourism pods to a child in the 1960s, they would be gravely disappointed. Our cars, trains, ships and planes are cleaner, sleeker, safer, more reliable.41 But they do not change the fundamental mode of everyday movement, as did the car, or break the limits of speed, as did flight. Quality goes up, price comes down, as it should in a well-functioning and competitive market.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

It’s the same thought process that has allowed these scientists to score dozens of interplanetary holes in one with supersonic spacecraft, sending them millions of miles through outer space and landing them on a precise spot. It’s the same thought process that brings humanity closer and closer to colonizing other planets and becoming an interplanetary species. And it’s the same thought process that will make affordable commercial space tourism the new norm. To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

BUT SOON BUck EyE CAME TO housE AE ItqhT ANd RAdio TElescopcs T(«T would pRObE T^E UNIVERSE WiT^OUT JNTERfERENCE ffiOM EARTHS RAdlATtQN OR T^E SUN% kARsh liqkr. The MOON, wrrh NO ATMOSPHERE ANd viRTUAlly NO QROuwd MOTION, pRovided T^E PERFECT base FOR TElescopes. MANy sTARTliNq discovERies CAME FROM T^iAT ONE SITE OVER T^E NEXT T^IREE dECAdeS. ThE MOON BASES also fiRed up T^E qlobAl public's INTEREST IN fiwAlly bEinq AlfowEd TO CjO VISIT T^IEM. SpACE TOURISM boOMEd, STARTJNQ WiT^ T^E bASIC ORblTAl pAcl«qE IN 2009. People could pAy $100,000 FOR rhfiEE dAys of ORbiTiN EARTh ON T^E SUCCESSORS TO TilE SpACE shynliS, DESpiTE T^E STEEp pRJCE, ANd TA!ES of SPACE sickNEss, The wAiiiNq OSTS Quickly exTENded TO A dECAde, ThE suNNy'Side Dsy Dock MOON bASE WAS AN EVEN MORE EXOTIC ANd EXPENSIVE JOURNEY.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

‘I decided that to benefit the most people in the world I’d have to address existential risk. I thought about that for a bit and realized getting people off this rock was the first thing we should do. So I made a list of all the things that could pay for the first permanent job in orbit.’ There were three items on his list: space-based solar power, space tourism and asteroid mining. ‘Solar power needs resources in space otherwise it’s not economic and I couldn’t see myself as a tour operator. So here we are.’ ‘So you’re actually . . .’ I was trying to find a way of expressing my incredulity without appearing rude. ‘You actually think this is going to happen?’

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

There’s a tendency among critics to dismiss Musk as a frivolous dreamer that stems first and foremost from a misunderstanding of what Musk is actually doing. People like Smil seem to catch an article or television show that hits on Musk’s quest to get to Mars and immediately lump him with the space tourism crowd. Musk, though, hardly ever talks about tourism and has, since day one, built up SpaceX to compete at the industrial end of the space business. If Smil thinks Boeing selling planes is crucial to the American economy, then he should be enthused about what SpaceX has managed to accomplish in the commercial launch market.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

One unprecedented shift that will create further challenges involves the apparently inevitable introduction of suborbital space travel systems in the near to medium term. These systems will allow the world’s überwealthy to tie together their distant properties with ever greater speed and ease. While the introduction of regular space tourism flights for the super-rich has been delayed by the crash of the Virgin Galactic in October 2014, regular low-orbit travel is likely to emerge in the medium term – for those who can afford it. With the prospect of travel times between London and Sydney reduced to 2.2 hours, ‘luxury’ real estate agents are already foaming at the mouth.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

The tanker planes that extend their lifting capacity and their range are utterly standard. The aircraft’s development had been overseen and paid for by one of the world’s increasingly numerous billionaires, who had made her money from high-density data-storage systems. Her cover story was the development of a space-tourism follow-on to Virgin Galactic; that project’s name was Espedair, a name that stuck even when the cover was blown. The project cost more than the most extravagant of her peers had ever spent on a yacht – but not all that much more. The Concert has two sites for operations, one in Central America, one in the South Pacific.

Southwest USA Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Painters and writers set up art colonies in Santa Fe and Taos in the early 20th century, and in 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state. A top-secret scientific community descended on Los Alamos in 1943 and developed the atomic bomb. Some say that four years later, aliens crashed outside of Roswell. Maybe that’s why New Mexico is now poised to become a leader in space tourism and commercial space flights. New Mexico Scenic Routes One of the best ways to explore New Mexico is to travel its scenic highways. Eight have been selected as National Scenic Byways (www.byways.org) – though they are not necessarily the most striking stretches of pavement in the state.

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SPACEPORT AMERICA: THE ULTIMATE SIDE TRIP White Sands earned its nickname ‘Birthplace of the Race to Space’ in 1947, when humanity, courtesy of NASA’s Werner von Braun, successfully hurled its first missile out past the stratosphere from among those rolling, pure white dunes. Today, thanks to Virgin Galactic CEO Sir Richard Branson, former Governor Bill Richardson and lots of other pie-in-the-sky visionaries (not to mention state taxpayers who may foot most of the projected $225 million bill), the world’s first private spaceport has opened right next door. Space tourism may well involve a simple 62-mile (straight up) add-on to your New Mexico vacation package. For just $200,000, you can book your flight on VSS Enterprise online for a 90-minute ride in a plush cruiser with reclining seats, big windows and a pressurized cabin so you won’t need space suits. The vessel is designed by legendary aerospace engineer Bob Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne was the first privately funded (by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen) manned vehicle to reach outer space twice in a row, winning him the $10 million 2004 Ansari X-Prize.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

Ingvar Kamprad established Sweden’s IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer, in 1943. Amancio Ortega, the founder of Spain’s Inditex, the world’s largest fashion company which owns Zara, started off in 1963. Britain’s Richard Branson launched his Virgin Group, which began in music and now embraces everything from planes, trains and space tourism to finance and health clubs, in 1970. Even the leading post-1975 successes are not quite global giants. Red Bull, an Austrian company co-founded in 1984 by Dietrich Mateschitz which makes the world’s most popular energy drink, may be among them, but it is privately held so it is hard to know how much it is worth.651 The gap is glaring in the digital world.

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
by P. W. Singer and August Cole
Published 28 Jun 2015

The Germans had apparently learned their lesson three weeks ago after a Belgian weather satellite had wandered into the zone and been lased into a molten ball of junk. “Today’s traffic?” asked Huan. “A slow day. Intelligence reports two launches expected: an unmanned Russian replenishment vehicle for the ISS and one of those space-tourism flights from the European spaceport in French Guiana,” said Chang. “War-zone tourists. In space! Such idiots. Let me check with Hainan to see if we can service that target, maybe make their trip even more exciting,” said Huan, laughing. Huan’s braying laugh was one of the most trying aspects of life aboard the station for the entire crew.

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965
by Francis O. French , Colin Burgess and Paul Haney
Published 2 Jan 2007

Forty years after the Lovelace tests, a substantial amount of private investment funding is now riding on Funk successfully piloting a spacecraft. She has been involved in several private space ventures over the years, but Interorbital Systems is the first to have named her as a rocket pilot. The company plans to have Funk fly their proposed Solaris X rocket plane on a spaceflight. Interorbital is just one of many space tourism developers that are operating in the Mojave Desert close to Edwards Air Force Base, and only time will tell which companies will succeed. But, as ever, Funk is enjoying the experience. "It's really just another kind of space race," she says. Eileen Collins has told the press that she thought about Funk while in space and knows that if she gets there she'll really enjoy the experience.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

names of famous explorers: Mylene Mangalindan, “Buzz in West Texas Is About Jeff Bezos and His Launch Site,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2006, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116312683235519444 (January 24, 2021). selling $1 billion a year of Amazon stock: Spencer Soper, “Bezos Sells $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock for Space Project,” Bloomberg, April 5, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-05/bezos-hopes-big-windows-will-give-space-tourism-a-boost (January 24, 2021). unveiled New Glenn: Chris Bergin and William Graham, “Blue Origin Introduce the New Glenn Orbital LV,” NASASpaceFlight.com, September 12, 2016, https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09/blue-origin-new-glenn-orbital-lv/ (January 24, 2021). Blue ended up winning: Sandra Erwin, “Air Force Awards Launch Vehicle Development Contracts to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, ULA,” SpaceNews, October 10, 2018, https://spacenews.com/air-force-awards-launch-vehicle-development-contracts-to-blue-origin-northrop-grumman-ula/ (January 24, 2021).

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

, have faded away, while those connected to hot new mobile Internet apps—including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Eric Lefkofsky of Groupon, and Jan Koum of WhatsApp—have risen up to the billionaire list in recent years. Though Silicon Valley has seen protests over the growing disparity between techies and low-paid service workers, on the national stage tech tycoons are treated as celebrities. The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose interests range from electric supercars to space tourism, is celebrated in scholarly reviews on how he is “changing the world.” There are many billionaire folk heroes from Silicon Valley, largely because consumers love the services they provide. WhatsApp gained seven hundred million followers in its first six years in business, which is more than Christianity gained in its first nineteen centuries, as Forbes magazine has pointed out.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

Typically, these little R&D periods didn’t lead to larger endeavors, but occasionally, there would be a venture to pursue. Such was the case in 2000, when after finishing Quake III: Arena, Carmack decided he wanted to learn about rocketry and soon after founded a company called Armadillo Aerospace (whose goal was to build a suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism). Regardless of outcome, these were periods Carmack greatly enjoyed and for this one, following the release of Rage, he decided to focus on virtual reality. When asked why virtual reality, Carmack would say, “no particular reason.” And while there may not have been a specific inciting incident, an almost equally accurate answer could have been “it was only a matter of time.”

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

PROSPERITY, HEALTH, AND EDUCATION: AN OVERFLOWING CORNUCOPIA Since 1900, Americans have become, on average, healthier, wealthier, and if not wiser, then at least more educated, although as we shall see, the education story is somewhat more complicated. These decades have seen our lifespan nearly double and have witnessed the transition from outhouses to iPhones, from dusty wagons on dirt roads to the advent of space tourism, from cracker-barrel country stores to drone deliveries. Objective measures show remarkable, virtually uninterrupted progress over more than a century. The simplest measure of this progress is provided by Figure 2.1, showing year-by-year growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.2 FIGURE 2.1: LONG-TERM REAL GROWTH IN US GDP PER CAPITA, 1871–2016 Source: C.

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space
by Stephen Walker
Published 12 Apr 2021

In Baikonur, I am grateful to Antonina Bogdanova, Director of the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum and to Galina Milkova of the Museum of Baikonur History, for her eye-opening two-day tour of this extraordinary town and cosmodrome. To their illustrious ranks must be added Vladislav Shevkunov, director of Vegitel Aero and Space Tourism at Star City, who enabled me to witness the last ever launch from Gagarin’s pad in September 2019, when a Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts thundered into the skies and made the earth tremble just as Gagarin’s R-7 did almost sixty years before. This book could not have been written without the expert advice of three of the finest historians in this field.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science
by James Poskett
Published 22 Mar 2022

Alongside this, investment in space science is part of a broader effort to transition away from an oil-based economy, as the UAE seeks to become a hub for scientific and technological development in the Middle East. There are even plans to build a space port in Abu Dhabi to support commercial space tourism.15 As with all space exploration, there is an element of nationalism to this too. The UAE wants to maintain a leadership role within the Middle East, and it sees the prestige associated with space science as a means to do that. Shortly after the launch of the Mars probe, the UAE government Twitter account shared a message ‘of pride, hope, and peace to the Arab region’.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

As if that wasn’t enough, the rules also stated that the spaceship must be able to accommodate the weight of two additional adults and undertake a second launch within the span of two weeks. Without any government funding, twenty-six teams spent upward of $100 million trying to reach this lofty goal, and in the fall of 2004, the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team succeeded, potentially paving the way for space tourism and other commercial spaceflights. Incentive prizes are bold and audacious and capture the world’s attention—exactly the type of thinking we need to make a significant leap forward in protecting ourselves from the profound technological risks we face today. An XPRIZE for cyber security could serve as an engine of innovation, an outstanding impetus to drive exponential change for good and address the world’s technological insecurity to the overall benefit of humanity.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

Most fail completely, in which case the value of their equity rounds to zero—an unthinkable catastrophe for a stock market investor. But each year brings a handful of outliers that hit the proverbial grand slam, and the only thing that matters in venture is to own a piece of them.[23] When today’s venture capitalists back flying cars or space tourism or artificial intelligence systems that write film scripts, they are following this power-law logic. Their job is to look over the horizon, to reach for high-risk, huge-reward possibilities that most people believe to be unreachable. “We could cure cancer, dementia, and all the diseases of age and metabolic decay,” Peter Thiel enthuses, dripping with disdain for incrementalism.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

“Virgin and Brawn Agree Sponsorship to Confirm Branson’s Entry to Formula One,” Guardian, March 28, 2009; Daisy Carrington, “What Does a $250,000 Ticket to Space with Virgin Galactic Actually Buy You?” CNN, August 16, 2013; Peter Elkind, “Space-Travel Startups Take Off,” Fortune, January 16, 2013; FOOTNOTE: Salvatore Babones, “Virgin Galactic’s Space Tourism Venture for the 1% Will Warm the Globe for the Rest of Us,” Truthout, August 14, 2012. 39. Chibber, “How Green Is Richard Branson?” 40. Richard Wachman, “Virgin Brands: What Does Richard Branson Really Own?” Observer, January 7, 2012; David Runciman, “The Stuntman,” London Review of Books, March 20, 2014; Heather Burke, “Bill Gates Tops Forbes List of Billionaires for the 12th Year,” Bloomberg, March 9, 2006; “The World’s Billionaires: #308 Richard Branson,” Forbes, as of July 2014; Vidal, “Richard Branson Pledges to Turn Caribbean Green.” 41.