Flying back from the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Jerusalem, I passed some time watching a television documentary on the business life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The producers concluded that “the commodore,” as Vanderbilt was known from his days plying New York Harbor on his father’s wind-powered Staten Island ferry, was able to “see around corners” in predicting the next market for investing.
Born toward the end of the 18th century, Vanderbilt was a ruthless monopolist, completely unsentimental, who made his fortune by investing in the latest technology to advance his interests. His fortune was built on steam, first in a fleet of coal-powered ships and then in railroads when he realized their value in linking the U.S. coasts.
Vanderbilt’s ability to realize what his customers needed, and to fill that need before anyone else, foreshadowed the billionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and other high-tech hotbeds. Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and their ilk all are cast in the commodore’s mold, with an exception. They’re nuts about spaceflight, and they’re putting their money where their enthusiasm is.
Whether they are indeed peering “around corners” to a profitable future remains to be seen, of course. One of the most interesting panels at this year’s IAC posed the question: “New space economy—the dawn of a new era or the next economic bubble?” And one of the most interesting answers came from Simon P. “Pete” Worden, former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center and a seminal backer of the push to move the terrestrial economy off the planet.
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