Jason Pontin (Moderator)
Director/Editor, Red Herring Magazine

"We tonight we will debate the state of commercialization of the space industry. I'd like to have the panelist to explain themselves why the have any interest or confidence to speak on the subject."

Elon Musk
Founder of Zip2 and PayPal

"Long ago I worked for a company called 'Rocket Science' which didn't do any rocket science. I started a company called Zip2 … I sold that to Compaq for a little more than $300 million in cash in early 99 and then started a company called X.com which we renamed about a year ago to Paypal. It's basically the world's largest electronic payment system … I don't spend a lot of time there day to day. I am actually looking at starting a company in the space sector to compete with Boeing and Lockheed, which I think is pretty do-able … There's an overarching goal here which is that we'd really like to make a dent in the cost of space related stuff. That doesn't seem likely to come from major aerospace companies."

Stephen Fleming
Former Partner, Alliance Technology Ventures

"I spent about eight years in the venture capital business as a partner at Alliance Technology Ventures which is a firm based out of Atlanta … I did bring several space-related to our investment committee and failed to get approval for any of them. I did invest my own money as an angel investor in XCOR Aerospace."

Walt Anderson
Founder, Gold & Appel

"I have invested in some space start ups that didn't work out quite a long time ago. I've made a lot of money in telecom and building companies and spent some of it learning what not to do with space startups … I run a private fund called Gold & Appel that invests in a number of technologies including water transportation, telecom-related businesses both here and overseas, but we are very interested in space and we think we've found some formulas that work. One of our more conservative investments is that we own a ground station operator that serves as a reseller to existing satellite operators. We're one of the largest resellers of IP over satellite … We also made an investment in Mir Corp and for a little while owned the Mir Station until it got put into the Pacific Ocean. We also have another company called Orbital Recovery which will be using existing technology to recover failed satellites."

Jim Schultz
Partner, ReedSmith

Blake Powers
Director of Outreach
Space Products Development
NASA