I Dream of Space: Post Mortem
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Today, (Sunday 26th, 2015) I Dream of Space LTD closes its doors.
This post is to serve as a record of what we tried to do, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will do a better job than we did.
(TLDR: Here’s our traffic/conversion data for the last 3 years.)
What was I Dream of Space trying to do?
Provide the financial infrastructure to launch humanity into the stars, enabling access to a near-limitless supply of energy, water, and precious metals, whilst galvanizing hearts and minds across nations, toward a common goal of casting aside our collective gravitational shackles, one crowd-funded spacefarer at a time.
Uh… What?
Buy a poster for $10. Get a chance to go space.
Oh. So like. A space lottery, then.
Think March of Dimes but instead of beating polio we’re funding space stuff.
Sure, but, getting people joy-rides in space isn’t exactly conquering the final frontier is it?
No, but if it doubles the salaries of rocket scientists / engineers over time, then we eventually get more of them, and they figure the rest out.
Why try a project like this in the first place?
Because industries are defined by their customers, and in the space industry, the meaningful customers are governments and multinationals. There’s no unit-of-sale for the average citizen to engage with. Nothing I can buy on my lunch-break.
The only way I can get my money into the hands of people who are making space stuff happen, is to wait for my tax-dollar to filter through the budget of whatever country I happen to live in, and hope the space-agency staff do a good job with whatever’s left of it by the time it gets there.
“Newspace” is coming — but a six-figure minimum entry point connects with comparatively few. For most, it’s another reason for space to seem impossible.
You know what else seems impossible?
Winning pretty much ANY lottery.
…Yet, the U.S. spends 70B every year (Global pool: 270B) on what in many circles, is looked down upon as a ‘tax upon the mathematically challenged’ and generally a poor investment strategy for the naive.
Fun facts! Lotteries were used to fund:
And who could forget?
Sound familiar? Working together on big difficult stuff? Frontiers etc?
So if it’s such a good idea… why did yours fail?
Mismanagement. Pure and simple. I did a good job of spotting an opportunity, and a bad job of capitalizing on it.
When we got this Wired article, we got 600 sales in 48 hours. I made the mistake of relaxing in that moment, and it took three years, several jobs/side-projects and very nearly a marriage for me to realize that the difference in people buying or not buying from us, was largely whether or not they believed it was actually possible… and the longer I Dream of Space was eking out a bootstrapped quasi-existence, the less faith people had in our ability to deliver, and the less likely someone else was going to come in with fresh eyes, a larger budget, and give people something they could believe in, namely a winner, and then one per month, one per week, etc.
Sometimes the best way to pass the torch, is to let it go, and light a new one.
Lessons learned?
Talk is cheap, and numbers matter.
‘Surviving’ isn’t winning. Indeed, it’s a very slow kind of losing.
As long as people treat the commercial space industry like science fiction, it will continue to be as much.
Final thoughts:
Someone, somewhere will eventually create a successful, sustainable consumer model for the commercial space industry.
I know this because if we don’t, than we must suffer the fate of either the dinosaurs, or every bacterium in every petri-dish to date.
Whether this solution comes from existing players, new entrants, or a combination of the two is less important than it happening at all.
For if history has proven anything, it’s that when we’re trying to tackle something bigger than any one of us, the best chance we have of winning, is by working together… even if that’s only one small step at a time.
For now, I’m taking a breather.
Carpe astra,
Reuben Metcalfe.
