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Customers as Innovators
by michael belfiore
This year is shaping up to be a major milestone in the area of suborbital space flight.
That’s a class of space travel that until the last few years has been relegated to so-called expendable sounding rockets, basically glorified weather balloons that shoot up to high altitude for a few minutes of robotic observation or experimentation.
Now a host of private companies is at work on manned spaceships that bring people aboard for the ride. Two companies,
Scaled Composites, and XCOR Aerospace, are expected to begin rocket powered flights with people on board this year. These vehicles are decidedly not expendable; their passengers expect to return to fly another day.
Reusability means that the cost of these vehicles, unlike with expendables, can be amortized over the span of multiple flights. The more revenue-producing flights the vehicles can make, the cheaper the cost per flight.
That’s where the Customer as Innovator comes in. In conversation with me, XCOR’s CEO, Jeff Greason, stressed the importance of the customer to his company’s future as a spacecraft innovator. Greason and company want to fly each of their Lynx space planes four times a day, a frequency unheard off for a spacecraft. And it depends on customers stepping up for those flights.
An key characteristic of extreme innovators is that they take risks. In few places is this more apparent than in commercial space flight, where customers risk far more than reputation and fortune in supporting a new business.
“We are striving to be as safe as the engineering art will permit us to be, and I think we can be much, much safer than past government space flight efforts have been,” said Greason, “but it can still be a high risk endeavor compared to driving a car or taking a cruise.”
The first customers for any new technology, the early adopters, are innovators every bit as much as the engineers, managers, and other investors who bring the new tech to market. They’re risks-takers too, pioneers in their own right.
“We celebrate Steve Jobs,” Greason said, “but not the guys who bought the first Apple II. But without one you can’t have the other.”
Keep looking up. — MB
Michael Belfiore is an author, journalist, and speaker on the innovations shaping our world. He has written about game-changing technologies for Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, New Scientist, Smithsonian, Invention & Technology, the Financial Times and Moonandback among others.
Moonandback
reports on spaceflight daily and our documentary project interviews \”the people who are making space happen\”.
2013-01-19 10:01:34
Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/01/19/customers-as-innovators/
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