During the press event at the Google Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit held May 20-21 at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, a journalist commented on the prevalence of American teams and asked, "Where are the European teams?"

A European Commissioner recently provided one very powerful answer to that question.

In a June 3rd article in The Economist entitled, "Can America keep its innovative edge? ," the magazine suggests that those who call for government-directed innovation are more likely to produce failures rarther than success.  This sentence summarizes this view:  "... think twice before creating a federal innovation agency, which would do more harm than good by backing technologies that consumers might not want. And as for funding research into the services sector, leave that to firms like IBM and EDS—American companies that practically created the market and now dominate it."

Remember Lockheed Martin's ill-fated VentureStar, cancelled in early 2001 after $1.5 Billion was spent over five years in a government- (rather than free-market) directed effort to build a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) Reusable Launch Vehicle?

NewSpace has learned from that debacle.  Can NewSpace lead America's innovative edge?