[FPSPACE] MirCorp: A Good Example?

[Dwayne Allen Day]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Simon Mansfield wrote:

> I also think that MirCorp has set yet another bad example for new 
> commercial space development.

The problem with what passes for "space entrepreneurship" these days is
that the people doing it are activists, not businessmen.  I think we will
only see successful space entrepreneurship when it is done by someone who
does not think space is cool at all, but thinks he can make a buck.


> The reason why I mention the zero level of contact from MirCorp to 
> SpaceDaily is that I suspect the same is true for most of the space media 
> industry, and that this reflects a belief by MirCorp that the story was 
> best played in the mainstream media and kept as a gee wiz space story, and 
> not a space business story.

One thing that surprised me a lot about MirCorp is that the trade papers
almost never covered it.  Aviation Week gave them a tiny blurb at
first.  Space News also did not give them much coverage.  This said to me
that the serious space press did not take them seriously.

MirCorp scored a major coup early on with a glowing article on the *front
page* of the Wall Street Journal.  But the article was ultimately rather
shallow--the reporter never bothered to talk to anybody other than MirCorp
people.  He never once bothered to call up space business analysts at
places like the Teal Group or other firms on Wall Street.

The vast majority of MirCorp coverage was either "gee whiz" stuff (dreamy
pieces about how neat it would be to have $20 million to fly there), or
uncritical rewrites of MirCorp press releases.  Following this story
closely on the Net, I learned that a lot of "web journalism" is total
crap.

MirCorp did a lousy job of getting their message out.  Their website is
dull and not very well-done.  And their press releases constantly
contradict previous press releases (if I was them, I'd delete all the old
press releases, so that nobody would ever know that they had to keep
scaling back their plans).

Despite this, MirCorp got *really* good press coverage.  They should be
happy with the fact that it was not until late September that anybody in
the media started to question them.  It was only with the MSNBC and
Interfax pieces early this month that someone other than a crackpot like
myself bothered to ask pretty obvious questions.


> which brings us back to Dwayne's central point all along - namely, if 
> MirCorp was never based on real markets, then what was the point of the 
> whole exercise?

I think they honestly believed that they could make it work.  I think they
were deluding themselves (their "business plan" is straight out of a comic
book), but their views were genuine.  I think they also wanted to poke
NASA in the eye.

And that's a big part of the problem--they should not care one bit about
NASA or about developing the space frontier.  All they should care about
is making money.  They clearly don't care enough about that.



DDAY