LiftPort Staff Blog

The following was cut/edited from the text I submitted to Discovery Channel Blogs.  It made sense to cut it, but I think there is a certain ‘richness’ if you’ve got the whole story.  So I am posting this “preamble” and “Space Kool-Aid” as separate posts – so that the Discovery readers can find it.

But first, a little preamble - I think most of you know what I’ve been going through over the 20 months, and why I took the notes I did.  These concepts connect with me.  Hopefully the might inspire you, when you are having a bad day/week/month/year/lifetime.

For new readers, here is the synopsis.  For details, see the LiftPort Blog here (especially back in spring-fall 2007)

Jan-2002 – March 2003: I worked with a small team on the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (and here)  research project for the Space Elevator.  Worked with Edwards on HighLift Systems and launched the inaugural Elevator to Space conferences.

March 2003 – April 2007: I built a small company (LiftPort Group) and worked night and day to push that idea forward.  As a result, we built a Carbon Nanotube furnace and made our own CNT (which was junk). We planned on opening a factory in New Jersey to ramp up production, but the quality/quantity simply didn’t justify it.  We built 18 robots and had the FAA, Navy and Air Force approve 14 high altitude or long duration flights of tethered helium balloons.  We built these test-platforms so that our robots could climb up and down a string hanging in the sky.  This isn’t easy.  We authored books and technical roadmaps, and came up with about 1000 critical questions that need to be answered in order to build this Elevator to Space.  We enlisted hundreds of volunteers and have more than 60 schools doing research on different parts of the problem.  We helped develop a NASA competition to push the technology of ‘strong string’ and robotic lifters.

April 2007: I lost our primary funding – my own personal asset of a 5 story commercial office building on the outskirts of Seattle.  The cashflow from that building was enough to sustain my small team’s daily effort.   I continually leveraged that property, and eventually the bill came due.  I lost my building, and as a result, the company collapsed.  People wrote my obituary online.  That sucked.  When all the dust settled, I had lost $1.2M in real estate equity, and had spent over $300,000 in cash, and still have over $600,000 of debt (with a couple ideas how I will pay that off… Some people scoff, but I assure you, you have to HAVE that much, to LOSE that much.  I’ve been semi-wealthy before, I’ll be back there again.)  And if all that were not enough, I was also being fined by the State of Washington, for misfiling some paperwork on fundraising – but that story got twisted all out of proportion and people were claiming (wrongly) that I was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud.  All that was untrue, but it sure didn’t help my personal outlook on things.

Over the next several months, I tried a couple different ways of reviving the company,  but in the end,  I simply could not.  So, I put it in mothballs, and spent some time trying to figure out “what’s next”?  If my original plan for building an Elevator to Space doesn’t work, then what plan can I come up with, that will?  Should I resurrect LiftPort Group, or should I let it die a noble death?  And probably the most important question of all, do I even WANT to make the effort, to continue?

So then, there was a self-imposed media blackout for most of a year.  I was inactive on the Space Elevator, while I tried to reconstruct my life.  It was a bad year, but it’s over, and now I can focus on building again.

The short answer is Yes, I can resurrect LiftPort. Yes, I have a plan, and Yes, I do WANT to keep going.

When I arrived in Barcelona, I resolved to transform my life and my project, to breath new life into it, and continue on with – what I think of as – my life’s work.

Fast forward to June 2008, here I am at “space camp” and I love it.  It is part of my ‘resurrection plan’.  And I have to tell you that it is great, and I am having a lot of fun in the process!

I am soaking up all the good vibes and good advice I can get from whatever source.  (Have you ever noticed that when you are open to it, the universe will send all sorts of signals your direction – bible verses, songs on the radio, the right books, the right people and the right environments?  I am open to it, and it happens to me all the time!)

(You can see why this speech is having an impact on me, right?  Well, I believe it’s true.  Acting on passion will have a profound effect on your life.)

Take care

Michael Laine

http://www.twitter.com/mlaine

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Written by Michael Laine and posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under 1. Nuts and Bolts, 1.3. Engineering, 2. Business, 2. Communicate, 2.1. Finance, 2.3. Management, 3. Capitalize, 4. Regulations, 4.3. Operations, Balloon Lift Systems, LiftPort Robotics, MJL Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.