On behalf of my fellow Co-Founders Dan Adamo and Dr. John Jurist, welcome to the Space Enterprise Institute website. SEI is a tax-deductible educational and scientific foundation organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of the United States.
We created SEI to provide an important missing element in the overall public space discourse: Evidence-based analysis and synthesis supported by objective verifiable data, documented spaceflight experience and reasonable extrapolation. In our opinion the public space discourse has unfortunately degenerated into a rancorous debate between multiple factions of differing ideology supporting various solutions, pathways, destinations and approaches that are, in large part, unsupported by rational, quantifiable justification.
Although we don’t pretend to know the answers, we do believe in the ability of a multidisciplinary quantitative approach, based on weight of evidence and reasonable extrapolation, to differentiate feasible from infeasible, practical from impractical and reality-based from fantasy-based alternatives.
SEI’s adopted motto is: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.”*
Ideology, like politics and religion, cannot be productively debated. Numbers, and the assumptions, conclusions and implications behind them, can be. 2014 is year fifty-three of human spaceflight. It is time to elevate the discussion accordingly.
All our intellectual products, technical critiques, ideas, op-eds, policy concepts and “Think Tank” functions for space exploration, science, commerce, development and eventual settlement will be made available on this website free of charge. Our focus will be on the intersection between government/science, operations and enterprise.
We invite you to join the SEI community and participate in the discussion.
Dr. James S. Logan
July 16, 2014
Austin, Texas