Well, cheap space access was the theme of this conference.

John Carmack has posted here on occasion & he's profiled...
A leading do-it-yourselfer is John Carmack, perhaps better known in computer game circles as a founder of id software, and the brain behind such PC action games as Doom and Quake. But he also heads Armadillo Aerospace of Dallas, Texas and a group intent on building vehicles that transport people to the edge of space.

Personally bankrolling his space company, Carmack reported that good progress is being made and he expects to spend upwards of a $1 million on a craft that propels three people on a suborbital jaunt. In working up to the vehicle, the software sage and volunteers have been building and launching a series of inexpensive, small rocket platforms, shot into the air on hydrogen peroxide-fueled engines.

"I'm a big proponent of little experiments," Carmack emphasized.

Sometimes those experiments work. Sometimes they crash.

"The truth is we learn more from one crash than people can learn from months and months of simulation," Carmack said. "The challenges of rocket science have been mythologized out of all proportion to their true difficulty," he added, and that constructing, testing and flying rockets is not as expensive as people think.

"I plan on making money off this. I believe that if it's neat to me, it will likely be neat to other people. And neat is a commodity…you can make money off neat," Carmack said.

-p