Geek dads and software visionaries aim for the stars

John Shinal | Special for USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — By day, Steve Jurvetson is a marquee name in Silicon Valley, a partner with prominent venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an early backer of pioneering tech companies like Hotmail, Skype and Tesla Motors.

But after dozens of meetings every weekday, in between deciding whether to invest millions of dollars in entrepreneurs' ideas, Jurvetson on nights and weekends becomes a self-professed "geek dad."

Sure enough, as he went through a series of slides at a recent technology conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., there he was launching small rockets made by 3D printers at NASA's Ames Research Center, in the heart of the Valley.

On the next slide, there was Jurvetson in Black Rock Desert, Nev., home to the famous Burning Man Festival, with his kids and a rocket "that reached Mach 2.5," or more than twice the speed of sound.

"There's no light pollution there; the FAA clears the airspace to 100,000 feet," Jurvetson told the crowd at Bloomberg's Next Big Thing conference, speaking with the kind of enthusiasm another dad might reserve for a softball tournament or golf game.

Indeed, his presentation seemed a bit pedestrian on its surface — until Jurvetson joined a panel of four other men all working to help turn space flight into one of the biggest tech markets of the next few decades.

The discussion by the panel — consisting of Jurvetson, a NASA scientist, two CEOs of space-related startups and a fellow technology investor — made one thing clear to this columnist: America's manned space-exploration program has already been privatized, and there's no going back.

On the contrary, the private U.S. space industry is moving forward at, well, rocket speed.

Last month, Space Exploration Technologies (better known as SpaceX), a company in which Jurvetson has been a key investor, signed another contract to launch a space satellite, this one for the Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan.

Last September, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company signed a contract to launch three satellites (and later a fourth) for the European giant SES and another for Intelsat, using SpaceX's Falcon Rockets.

Those contracts came shortly after SpaceX, founded in 2002 by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, became the first private company to successfully complete a resupply mission to the International Space Station, a feat it accomplished twice last year.

With each contract it signs, SpaceX is helping to revive a U.S. industry that had all but disappeared.

In 1980, the U.S. had a monopoly on the market for launching commercial satellites, Jurvetson says.

Yet by the end of the last decade, NASA and private U.S. companies were conducting no such launches, as lower-cost rivals from China and India came to dominate the market.

Part of the reason was due to the fiery explosions of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

Those spectacular tragedies killed 14 astronauts and made it easier for Congress to slash NASA's budget, which it did repeatedly.

But the shuttle design itself, which made it an expensive alternative for launching satellites, was also to blame.

Whereas some Americans might have merely lamented such a fall in this country's competitive expertise as inevitable, Jurvetson saw it as an investment opportunity.

In 2009, Jurvetson's firm led a reported $60 million funding round in SpaceX, which previously had been backed mostly by the fortune of Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur also behind Tesla Motors.

"Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting," Jurvetson told the crowd gathered in Half Moon Bay.

The success of SpaceX is leading to a broader revival of the U.S. space industry, with one company, Planetary Resources, planning a 2014 launch to test technology designed to prospect and mine asteroids.

"Near-earth asteroids are the low-hanging fruit; we'll be (mining them) soon," says Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman of the company, whose backers include Ross Perot and Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

When asked when humans will get back to the moon, Anderson said "a hotel in lunar orbit" will be "a better experience" and thus more likely. "It may not be worth the extra risks to go to the surface."

Speaking of those risks, Jurvetson said earlier that he does plan to visit space someday – just not right away.

"I'm going to wait five to 10 years. It will be much more affordable and safer then," he said, before quickly adding that no one has ever been killed on a launch that he's attended.

Even geek dads, it seems, have some limits on their enthusiasm.

John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for 15 years at Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others.

