I’ve written
about ISDC before, but this year’s meeting really broke all my expectations. See also another report on the first day from one attendee, and reports from from HobbySpace’s Clark Lindsey. Articles and presentations from the conference are also available online.

The opening address from Burt Rutan, who received NSS’s von Braun award, was covered by NPR, Wired, and Space.com/AdAstra Online. In a blistering and energetic talk, Rutan was everything we had hoped for, relating to the hundreds of space advocates in the audience with his passion for doing space right, taking the risks that were needed, and berating NASA (or “naysay”, as Rutan mispronounced it a couple of times) for its risk-averse attitude. Interestingly, Rutan’s argument is that we need to radically LOWER the risks of spaceflight, and to do that we need to take real risks in design: the only way we can dramatically improve safety is to do something quite different from what’s done before: evolution isn’t enough.

Transformational Space Corporation, or t/Space, which Rutan has been associated with, had a full-scale mockup of their proposed vehicle on display, with lots of information about the innovations they’re looking at to lower the cost to get into space. And that was only one of the major elements at the conference that could revolutionize space in the next few years.

Elon Musk had a lunchtime speech about his Space-X company, which Ricky here knows something about, and their upcoming testing and launches: he clearly stated their Falcon-1 booster was “small”, Falcon-5 will be “medium”, and “large” and “big gulp” (bigger than Saturn-5?) sizes are being looked at down the road – more at space.com.

More along the revolutionary lines, Virgin Galactic and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize spoke about real adventures in the near-term future – and that the goal is really getting to the Moon and jump-starting the colonization of space. Treating spaceflight as just another transportation mode, FAA was represented by Patricia Grace Smith, Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, who has been the one awarding astronaut wings, spoke about it all. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta spoke at the gala dinner Sunday night in the amazing new wing of the Smithsonian Air and Space museum near Dulles airport.

Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweigart spoke about the threat from asteroids, and specifically from asteroid 2004 MN4 expected to pass close to Earth in 2029 – there’s no telling where it will go on subsequent near approaches.

There were also wonderful space science talks: Steve Squyres of the Mars Exploration Rover team talked about all that the Mars rovers have done, and Bob Mitchell gave a wonderful talk on the Cassini mission.

And there was so much, much more, I’m feeling quite overwhelmed. A new era in space exploration is upon us – it’s going to be an exciting ride!