These very early SSCO experiments are intended to provide a direction for future operations. The travelers might go to another depot just beyond the Moon, and on to Mars, where more propellant would already be waiting for the return trip. If a depot was placed at the Space Station, for instance, space travelers could depart Earth any time the weather was good, then wait at the station for Earth and Mars to swing around to the right positions. Propellant tanks can be flown weeks or months ahead of time to wherever they need to be, in some cases by slow, low-cost tugs.
Depots have been discussed since the 1960s, but for the first time since then, the discussions are becoming serious.
These are an enabling and potentially disruptive technology for spaceflight. Welcome to the challenges of space travel.įor spacecraft, which use a variety of fuels and oxidizers, the gas station equivalent is a propellant depot. With that picture in your mind, imagine that you now need to travel 100 times as far, and most of the trip is straight uphill. By the time you're done, you have a 2-ton truck that gets 11 miles per gallon and is mostly fuel tank. But pickups don't get good mileage, so you need a bigger tank. 200 gallons weighs 1200 pounds, so you quickly realize you're going to end up with something bigger. You go shopping for a car that gets 30 miles per gallon with a 200-gallon gas tank. Imagine that you're about to begin a trip from New York to Los Angeles and back in a world with only one gas station, in Manhattan. Rumor has it that the company is vying for a $100 million third round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, and has plans to go public once it closes a new round.Ībove: Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk. While it’s been close to 18 months since its taken venture capital, Airbnb is already up to $230 million. This startup is the darling of the collaborative consumption movement, allowing anyone to put up their house or apartment for travelers to rent. Odds of an IPO: Looking good, but only if it can close its next round For each we weigh the odds of whether, market conditions permitting, of course, they have a shot or not.
We picked nine private companies with public market potential to watch in 2013. And just because the smart money is betting on companies that get paid selling to other companies, doesn’t mean some well-known consumer outfits, including Twitter, Square, and Evernote couldn’t try their luck with an IPO in 2013. Not nearly as catchy as something reptilian, but hopefully a lot more profitable than the newly public consumer companies, Facebook chief among them, that took a beating in the public markets in 2012.Ĭonsistent with the enterprise theme, we already know that data-center networking company Gigamon and solid-state storage business Violin Memory have filed their S-1 forms. The Chinese calendar might have it pegged as the year of the black snake, but investors are already calling 2013 the year of the enterprise IPO.
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