Using the mystique of space to sell Vuitton luggage

A Louis Vuitton handbag ad features Annie Leibovitz' portrait of three iconic astronauts: Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell.

The News: The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Louis Vuitton will launch the newest ad in its series of “Journeys” campaigns, featuring celebrity portraits by Annie Leibovitz. Perched on an ancient pickup parked in the desert, windswept, dressed for the road, astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell gaze at the moon as if it’s their next stop.

Next to Ride on the hood, overstuffed with maps and a pair of field glasses, is a $1,530 Vuitton Icare carryall, named after Icarus, the figure in Greek mythology who flew on wings of wax.

The ad series will debut June 3 on the web at www.louisvuittonjourneys.com and appear in July magazines. It includes a video in which Ride (the first woman in space), Aldrin (the second man on the moon) and Lovell (captain of the starcrossed Apollo 13 mission) discuss how space changed their lives.

Says the Journal’s Rachel Dodes:

The campaign, with agency Ogilvy & Mather, marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and is intended to be “an homage to these great travelers,” said Antoine Arnault, Vuitton’s head of communications and son of Chairman Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France. He said the astronauts each donated a “significant” portion of their modeling fee to Al Gore’s Climate Project, though he declined to specify how much.

This isn’t the first time Vuitton has picked an unlikely icon to endorse its handbags and suitcases. Mikhail Gorbachev and Keith Richards appeared in “Core Values” ads, and previous Journeys ads featured a barefoot Sean Connery and father and daughter film directors Francis and Sofia Coppola.

The Space 2.0 Connection: Maybe there isn’t one. As we focus on the business details of getting space technology startups off the ground, we shouldn’t lose sight of the emotional connection that many Americans still have to the space program we followed as kids.

Earth and lunar orbit just like home for Broad Reach

8th Continent Project Founding Sponsor Profiles

Though “Broad Reach” is a nautical term, 8th Continent Project founding sponsor Broad Reach Engineering prides itself on its wide range of talents, agility and ability to develop new products specifically for unique spaceflight missions.

What this means, Christian Lenz said, is that “Broad Reach looks at available technology and sees areas of cross-pollination that lead to new capabilities and opportunities for near future missions.”

Broad Reach Engineering, with offices in Colorado and Arizona, develops hardware and software for spaceflight missions. Products include spacecraft avionics, science payload electronics, spacecraft flight software, dual and triple frequency GPS receivers for high precision orbit determination (POD) and occultation science, as well as mission design services.

“We provide high-end and cost-effective products to the aerospace industry,” Lenz stated. “In the space industry, quite frankly, companies generally develop a set of products for one mission and then do not improve them, sometimes for decades, so what is flown today was often developed in the 1980s or earlier. That’s neither sustainable nor does it serve the end user.”

Broad Reach Engineering believes in a first principles and clean sheet approach in order to get to a no-nonsense engineering approach to providing solutions that best fit to make the mission successful.  Generally this will entail higher integration, increase performance, and often, at the systems level, the improvements are “free” compared to what might be considered as older “heritage solutions.” What this translates to is more than 12 years of proven success developing and delivering engineering and flight hardware and software to clients.

According to Lenz, Broad Reach Engineering is a private, mostly employee-owned business that has shown steady growth since its founding in 1997. To date, more than 14 of Broad Reach’s systems are in orbit and another three are in final stages of integration and test. This includes five fully executed Technical Assistance Agreements, required under the International Traffic and Arms Regulations (ITAR) with countries in every continent except Antarctica and Africa.

In 2005 the company launched its first Integrated Avionics Unit (IAU) onboard the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) XSS-11 mission. As a supplier to Lockheed Martin, Broad Reach supplied the spacecraft core avionics for this important mission. In the spring of 2006 the company then launched Dual Frequency GPS radio occultation and Precision Orbit Determination receivers onboard the six COSMIC spacecraft. Based on the licensed BlackJack design by JPL, these GPS receivers have been providing key atmospheric data to the science, weather forecasting and climate monitoring communities.

“Our data has been of such high quality that many weather centers around the globe have started using this information operationally,” Lenz explained.

Broad Reach hardware is also proven On-Orbit in LEO and GEO and now also in lunar orbit.

“We are always pushing the envelope, bringing space technology to a place that moves that needle,” he added. “Our goal is to be a part of the movement that is Space 2.0, part of entrepreneurial ventures – like the 8th Continent Project – that are able to reach across boundaries and provide the innovation needed to broaden our world and our experiences.”

PowerBeam moves electricity without wires

According to Chris Surdi, marketing specialist for PowerBeam, a member of the 8th Continent Chamber of Commerce, wireless electricity really is as simple as it sounds.

PowerBeam is revolutionizing power transmission by integrating optical technology to produce safe, reliable and abundant wireless power. Through its patented technology, PowerBeam can “beam” power over great distances to devices of any kind that require electricity to operate. What that means to consumers is: no more high electrical installation costs, no more searching for a nearby outlet (that, in the end, still isn’t close enough!), no more ugly winding and dangling cords, and no more tethering a mobile device to the wall to recharge it (thus making it immobile). Based out of San Jose, Calif., PowerBeam provides a straightforward solution to wireless technology for not only commercial use but for the space industry as well.

PowerBeam’s patented wireless electricity system uses Powmitters™ and Powceivers™ to deliver power without wires. The optical technology turns electricity into optical power. That power is then beamed across open space into a receiver. Similar to a solar cell, the receiver turns the optical power back into electricity. Whatever device is attached to the receiver is powered without any wires.

“No matter what you do, you cannot have an outlet in every square foot within a room. With PowerBeam, you can,” Surdi said. “We have the ability to ‘beam’ power to any device anywhere within line of sight giving you the freedom to live truly wirelessly. Wireless technology is now feasible.”

This is, according to Surdi, the natural evolution and the essence of the wireless trend; the ability to control where, when and how much power is transmitted and to what it is transmitted.

PowerBeam expects to have its technology in the market within 18 months, connecting items such as digital signage displays in retail stores, small TVs, digital photo frames, home theaters and lighting fixtures.

One particular value proposition from the consumer perspective is that PowerBeam’s solution will work continuously all day long without any interruptions due to power loss. The word “recharge,” Surdi commented, will be deleted from everyday vocabulary.

NASA has expressed interest in the PowerBeam concept for both terrestrial and space-based applications. As part of their Centennial Challenges, NASA sponsors The Spaceward Foundation, which manages the Power Beaming (Climber) Competition. The competition is seeking new ways to power the Space Elevator continuously as it ascends into outer space from the surface of the earth. The company has talked extensively with NASA to put its wireless technology on space rovers.

“PowerBeam is commercializing this technology right out of the gate, a technology that would otherwise be the domain of government projects,” Surdi said. “PowerBeam has bundled advancements in wireless technology into a package that is convenient and safe to use in consumer environments and in Space 2.0.”

8C Chamber Profile: Emergent Space Technologies

There is something deeply inspiring and deeply American about the notion of starting a business from the ground up, literally in a garage, supported only by vision, brains and drive. That’s how amazon.com – now a global brand – got its start. And, it could also quite literally be the way Space 2.0 evolves.

Emergent employees in a lab at Goddard Space Flight Center

Emergent Space Technologies, a  founding  member of the 8th Continent Chamber of Commerce, is positioned to be a big player in space’s entrepreneurial evolution. In fact, the company’s founder and president George Davis was only last month named one of  50 GNSS Leaders to Watch by GPS World.

According to Brendan O’Connor, Emergent’s Chief Technology Officer, the company’s ability to combine high-end software engineering with high-end aerospace engineering sets them apart. “Our domain expertise and experience, combined with our knowledge of current and emerging technology, make Emergent the small business team of choice in the aerospace industry,” he said. “We bring modern information technology to the aerospace industry and specifically high-end, cost-effective solutions to guidance, navigation and control problems.”

Recently Emergent teamed with The University of Texas at Austin to develop a picosat capable of performing an automated rendezvous and docking mission.
“Picosats are a great illustration of Space 2.0,” he said. “They are a way of democratizing space. At Emergent we’ve engineered picosats to be quick and inexpensive. What used to take years now, because of our software, can take as little as 12 months from concept to launch.

“What Space 2.0 ultimately does is shrink the space industry down and makes it entrepreneurial. It’s not that farfetched to think that someday soon someone in a garage could make and launch their own satellite.”

Founded eight years ago and located in Greenbelt, Md., Emergent provides consulting and engineering services to the civil, commercial and military space industry around its core competencies of spacecraft guidance, navigation and control, satellite ground systems, space mission automation and picosats. The team, as the Web site notes, has an unparalleled breadth and depth of aerospace and information system engineering experience and thrives on developing synergistic solutions to challenging problems that benefit humans here on Earth and as they explore the vast frontiers beyond.

The company’s current clients include such noted partners as NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and Lockheed Martin. Emergent has worked on the Orion spacecraft and is currently working the final steps to obtain its CMMI Level 3 certification.

“What we do that no one else does is come up with unique engineering solutions and the software to implement them,” O’Connor explained.

O’Connor remarked that as an 8C Chamber member, Emergent plans to take part in a variety of networking opportunities and calls it “a timely and great idea that needed to happen.”

8C Chamber Profile: Planehook Aviation Services

Posted on June 11, 2009 by the 8C Project

When most people think of space, they don’t often think of corporate espionage. But since 2004, Dave Hook, founder and President of Planehook Aviation Services, has not only been thinking about it but has built his business around doing something about it.

“People working in the commercial space industry have different enterprise risk exposures,” explains Hook, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy with a degree in astronautical engineering. These exposures include everything from corporate espionage, terrorism and other criminal elements all the way to business resilience planning and the security design or upgrade of a facility.

Planehook’s client base includes corporations, airports and various government agencies. But the civilian space industry, space tourism in particular, is an especially important emerging market for his company. After years of providing input on federal regulations and working behind the scenes with the FAA in its development of security and training regulations for commercial spaceflight, Planehook announced that it would bring its effective security strategies and proven solutions to the civilian manned spaceflight industry. Part of these efforts includes Planehook’s establishment of the Space Tourism Security Alliance.

“People in Space 2.0 have great ideas, applications and products, but they don’t necessarily plan for the threats that are out there,” Hook said. In his experience, it is during the research and development phase when an entrepreneur is most vulnerable. Planehook Aviation Services provides comprehensive risk assessments – from calculating the consequences of loss of manpower to catastrophic hazards such as the loss of a facility due to a natural disaster, to weighing and anticipating potential human threat – so that companies and individuals can be better prepared and succeed.  Planehook also helps companies by developing security plans that fit within their budget.

“The 8C project is a brilliant concept,” he added. “Providing an incubator for space entrepreneurs is crucial; it’s part of ‘bringing them up right’ and providing them with all the necessary mentoring and support they need. I see my contribution as being one of providing a foundation for effective security plans and habits in their business plans and operations. Investors want to see that a start-up venture has thought about security and included all the necessary precautions to handle risks.  Investors want to know that entrepreneurs have considered and planned for probable consequences.”

Space 2.0 the focus at Rockies Venture Club June 9

The Rockies Venture Club will devote its June 9 dinner meeting to “Space 2.0: The Entrepreneurial Frontier.”

Appearing to discuss how space technology translates to entrepreneurial ventures will be Burke Fort, director of the 8th Continent Project; Gene Branch,  partner at  Townsend and Townsend and Crew’s Denver office; Steve Murchie, director of the Keiretsu Forum’s Denver chapter; and Paul Jerde, executive director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. John Metzger, CEO of Metzger Associates and a former president of the Rockies Venture Club, will moderate the panel.

The RVC’s monthly dinner meetings have moved to the Denver Athletic Club, 1324 Glenarm Place. They begin at 5 p.m. with cocktails and networking and finish by 8 p.m.

Tickets are $39 for RVC members, $49 for nonmembers. Information and reservations:  www.rockiesventureclub.org or 303-831-4174.

Here’s the summary from the Rockies Venture Club website:

The aerospace business has long kept risk capital at a distance. Venture and angel investors tend to avoid companies whose business models entail carrying out multi-billion-dollar cost-plus contracts with one customer: the government.

Space 2.0 companies commercialize the investment in space technology that already exists, paid for by taxpayers over more than a half-century of NASA innovation. From temperature-shifting fabrics to photovoltaic solar arrays and satellite communications, venture-funded startups use patents and orbiting assets to build businesses quickly.

The Rockies Venture Club’s June meeting will take a look at Colorado’s unique place in the space business. Colorado boasts two aerospace incubators and lots of Space 2.0 companies, from tiny GPS and solar energy start-ups to Digital Globe and EchoStar.

Come prepared to have your assumptions challenged.

DigitalGlobe IPO shows where Space 2.0 can go

The News: Congratulations to founding sponsor DigitalGlobe, whose IPO debuted yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. Trading under the ticker symbol DGI, the remote sensing company, which had been expected to price at $16 to $18,  hit the market at $19 and rose as much as 31 percent before settling at $21.50 at the close, according to Bloomberg News.

Space 2.0 leader DigitalGlobe started trading Thursday on the NYSE.

News coverage credits Longmont, Colo-based DigitalGlobe with helping thaw the IPO market, which has been at a standstill for months. Only four other companies have gone public in 2009, including Rosetta Stone, the language learning software maker that went public April 15.

The Space 2.0 Connection: DigitalGlobe is a perfect example of the growth trajectory Space 2.0 companies can take. It began by licensing images from U.S. military and intelligence satellites – orbiting assets already paid for by taxpayers. As it grew, DigitalGlobe launched two of its own satellites, and a third is due to join the constellation this fall. In 2008, according to SEC filings, DigitalGlobe earned $54 million on $275 million in revenues.

Its imagery is now used by by federal agencies, as well as Microsoft’s MSN network and Google Earth.

From Bloomberg:

The company attracted investors during an IPO drought because of its ties to the government and its fleet of satellites, said Matt Therian, an analyst at Renaissance Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut. DigitalGlobe is launching a third satellite this year, which may help almost double revenue.

“This industry has a lot of barriers to entry: It takes $400 million to $500 million to build a satellite, and you need a relationship with the federal government,” he said. “If they can get their next satellite up there without any issues, it has the potential to throw off a good bit of cash.”

Of the $279.3 million raised in Thursday’s offering, $25.9 million will be used to fund DigitalGlobe operations, including finishing the WorldView-2 satellite and launching it in September. DigitalGlobe also borrowed $355 million last month to complete and launch the satellite. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. is building WorldView-2, the third in DigitalGlobe’s constellation of orbiters, and United Launch Alliance is set to launch WorldView-2 on one of its rockets, according to Greg Avery at the Denver Business Journal.

DigitalGlobe’s investors, the largest of which is Morgan Stanley, will receive most of the proceeds from the sale of 14.7 million shares. Morgan Stanley will own about 32 percent of DigitalGlobe after the IPO, Bloomberg News said.

SpaceHack lets real people connect with space exploration

The News: SpaceHack.org was on Wired’s list of top 100 geeks to follow on Twitter. We checked it out and like it a lot.

SpaceHack is a project of Ariel Waldman, a “digital anthropologist” in San Francisco who worked briefly as program coordinator for the NASA CoLab collaboration project at Ames. According to the site, “Spacehack is a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, interact + connect with the space community and encourage citizen science.”

The directory lists competitions such as the Regolith Excavation Challenge and Elevator:2010; open source projects, including the Vision Workbench; data analysis projects such as the Global Telescope Network; and educational activities, including My NASA Data for earth science studies, and the SEDSAT-2 competition to build Cubesat orbiters.

Because education and collaboration are right in the 8th Continent Project’s wheelhouse, and because we love geekgrrls in general, we salute Ariel and spacehack.org.

What’s so Space 2.0 about the Hubble telescope?

The News: As we write this May 13, the team from Space Shuttle Atlantis has snagged the Hubble Space Telescope and stowed it in Atlantis’ payload bay. Next a robot will go over Hubble’s surface, looking for divots in its thermal protection system and other problems. Five spacewalks are scheduled to repair or add components to Hubble, which

Hubble telescope as seen from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, May 13, 2009 above Madagascar. Photo c/o NASA.

has taken a lickin’ and kept on tickin’ for 19 years, just like John Cameron Swayze’s Timex watch, only bigger and much more expensive.

The Space 2.0 Connection: Your Space 2.0 blogger went to school in the 1970s and thus managed to graduate from a prestigious institution with no science courses at all. So we enjoy Googling unfamiliar technologies and trying to figure out (1) what they mean and (2) whether they have a terrestrial application.

Among the devices being replaced or installed on the Hubble on this mission:

Cosmic Origins Spectrograph: One of two spectrographs being added to Hubble (the other is the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph), the COS was developed at the University of Colorado and built by Boulder-based Ball Aerospace. Spectrometry measures the properties of light over a portion of the spectrum and is used to identify materials, in physical and analytical chemistry and remote-sensing applications as well as astronomy. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is especially sensitive to faint point sources of light, which will help scientists learn about far-off stars and gauge the size of the universe.

Fun facts to know and tell: the Fine Guidance Sensor No. 3 is accurate to 0.01 arcsec, the equivalent of the width of a paper clip wire from two football fields away. This degree of stability and precision cuts down on “telescope jitter” to such a degree that when the spectrograph is locked onto its two target guide stars, it compares to keeping a laser in Washington, D.C., focused on a dime in Manhattan.

Battery Modules: Ever-smaller and more powerful battery packs have migrated from aerospace applications into hybrid cars, videocams, generators and other household objects.

Rate Sensing Units: Gyroscopes that can be used for many sensing and navigational applications in cars, planes and so on.

Robots: Were actually reverse Space 2.0 technology. People hear “robot” and think Isaac Asimov and “Danger, Will Robinson,” but automata have been kicking around since the 13th century and definitely deployed first on Earth. The first industrial robots were produced in 1961, with MIT and General Motors leading the charge to replace human workers with their robotic counterparts. Robots blow up bombs, vacuum floors, spot-weld cars, do surgery and pack chocolates into boxes, but the first remote-controlled robot in space didn’t appear until April 1993, when ROTEX was put through its paces on the shuttle Columbia.

Media Opportunity: PopSci’s ‘Best of What’s New’

Got a great idea – or a great company? One of our founding sponsors, strategic communications firm Metzger Associates, identified a national competition that seems tailor-made for some of 8th Continent’s chamber members.

Popular Science’s annual “Best of What’s New” showcases innovation in 12 categories, including home technology, green tech, aviation and space, engineering and personal health. The magazine picks the 100 most appealing products and projects.

Nothing’s too large or small. The 2008 finalists ranged from the Large Hadron Collider to Gorilla Super Glue. According to editor Mark Jannot, winners demonstrate “outstanding innovation, vision and execution.”

Space 2.0 winners in 2008 include:

•    Enphase Energy’s solar micro-inverter
•    Ground Bot, a surveillance ball that rolls through mud, sand, snow and water, developed by Swedish physicists for planetary exploration
•    GeoEye-1, built by General Dynamics, can capture clear black-and-white images of objects 16 inches across
•    Energy Integration Technologies’ Aevex Intelligent Heat outerwear, which transmits warmth to gloves and coats through a polymer film
•    The Japanese Space Agency’s JAXA Kizuna broadband satellite, which beams 1.2 Gbps net connections to small antennas in remote Asian locations

Products must have been put into use or announced with a firm release date between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009. Government agency, university or infrastructure technologies must debut, their construction must begin, or the result of successful early-phase testing must occur or be announced between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009.

There’s a $300 entry fee per product, rising to $350 the last week of submissions (Aug. 15-21).

Deadline is Aug. 21. Info: https://www.popsci.com/bown2009/html/