Hi Jen, Tony, Alan, Jenny, and Jess,

My name is Ken Davidian and I've been working with Brad to provide you with support from a variety of virtual communities, including the NASA group that I've brought together of about 15-30 people (depending on how you define the term "team"). We've been working on many of the commercial space topics that you'll be working on this summer, and we wanted you to begin where the rest of us have left off instead of recreating the wheel (unless you *want* to recreate the wheel, and there may be some value to that, but that's totally up to you!).

Anywho, the focus areas you've identified are a good start, and I wanted to give you some input on those ideas as soon as possible, so here goes!

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1. Procurement (aka "Acquisition") is a biggie and we've begun doing a lot of work on that. You'll be interested in looking at the Ed Frankle paper I just uploaded tonight because, although it delves heavily into policy, the statutes and NASA FAR Supplements passed in the 1990s are having HUGE impacts on how we (NASA) can behave to encourage the emerging commercial space industry today. We can talk more about that, and in fact, I'm hoping to bring in guest lecturers who can really talk intelligently about that topic precisely.

2. FAA Regulations: Again, I'll be working to bring in a speaker/mentor for your group to provide you background as well as the State-of-the-Art knowledge on this topic. Stay tuned for more details about this, but this is a really exciting area, especially if you want to expand the topic to include what other countries are doing or might do about this...

3. ITAR: Ouch! This is, of course, a biggie. We've already started a page on the wiki about this, and there's a lot of information we can provide. The NSSO recently did an integrated study that pulled information from companies of all shapes and sizes, through the DoC, FAA-AST, and NASA, and came to some pretty grim results about how ITAR has negatively impacted US business. The flip-side of that is how US ITAR has *helped* other countries expand their technological capabilities...

4. IP: This is a hot topic since this is a major source of income for the small, emerging companies. It may not be a topic that will keep you (Jenny) busy the entire summer, but it's good that it's a topic that'll be covered.

5. Ownership of Lunar Property: This is another big topic of policy discussion and there's some work that's already been done from which you can begin your research.

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In all these cases, and for other topics we can think of, it would be great if there was a wiki page created and filled in. You would all be doing the entire commercial space community a great service if that was one of the deliverables of your work. Please consider providing that contribution to this wiki.

Policy, Regulation, and Law is a broad set of topics and we'll have to focus on the highest priority and/or easiest specific areas to tackle. We'll talk a bit about this when I come out on Monday, but for now, I just wanted to encourage you to dig in, because it looks like you're headed in the right direction!

Ken