The Final Frontier:
Get an early start on the commercialization of space

by Michael Riska

Space is starting to heat up again. After spending the last decade watching the glorified airplane that is the space shuttle make routine flights to the sky’s periphery for mundane tasks—like fixing broken telescopes and watching bean sprouts grow in zero gravity—it’s time for some real action.

And real action is what we’re getting this year: we’ve seen NASA successfully engineer the hot, throbbing rendezvous of the NEAR probe with the asteroid Eros; obnoxious billionaire Dennis Tito has been catapulted beyond the stratosphere on his own dime, making him the world’s first space tourist; and a mission to Mars is finally looking like a reality.

It’s an exciting time for the space industry, and if you’ve got your eye on the horizon, here’s a company that could profit mightily in the coming decade…

At the moment, the bulk of the commercial space industry is being run by large, highly diversified, and enormously boring conglomerates like Lockheed Martin (LMT:NYSE), General Dynamics (GD:NYSE) and Boeing (BA:NYSE). These companies have reserved suckling privileges at NASA’s teats for generations, and are sure to be major players far into the future. But they’re so diversified that for every dollar they make on the pillaging of space, they’re going to lose 50 cents on a failing Dairy Queen in Nebraska that only the oldest moles down in the accounting catacombs even know is on the books.

So why not speculate on a pure-play startup? For under a dollar, you can buy shares in SpaceDev (SPDV:OTC-BB), a San Diego space development and exploration venture that offers fixed-price commercial space services. SpaceDev is the first company of its kind to be publicly traded on the stock market. So far, they’ve been paying the bills by designing orbital maneuvering gear and secondary payload micro-kick rockets for the Air Force, and by partnering on some small deals with Boeing. But they just landed a US$1 million contract as part of the Mars Sample Return project—to study options for a Mars prospecting mission in 2011.

This is the beginning of the road to the big leagues.

Which leads to what SpaceDev really wants to do: survey and harvest mineral resources from space. There are vast mineral reserves in space just waiting to be exploited. And, while retrieving them may be expensive, in the end it will be more beneficial—and even more profitable—to mine asteroids than it is to rip the tops off mountains in West Virginia. A single two-kilometer-wide asteroid could yield trillions of dollars worth of platinum, iron, nickel, cobalt and other minerals.

SpaceDev’s Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP) mission is scheduled to fly in 2002, and will be visiting some of the over 1000 asteroids that orbit relatively near the earth. Since SpaceDev is not beholden to any government agencies, the missions will be funded by renting space for payloads (both scientific and otherwise) on the probes. The University of Arizona and Dojin, Ltd. have already signed up.

Obtaining raw materials in space will be an incredibly lucrative business, not just because of the inherent value of the minerals themselves, but because they will provide the building materials for all other projects that occur in orbit and beyond. Space stations, hotels, even launch pads for interplanetary missions will all be built from materials mined in space. For under a dollar a share, this one’s worth betting on for the long haul… although, as you can well imagine, it is a purely speculative play.

ACTION ALERT

SpaceDev
13855 Stowe Drive
Poway, CA 92064
Phone: 858-375-2000
Fax: 858-375-1000
Web site: http://www.spacedev.com
Email: info@spacedev.com