Paul G. Allen
Microsoft Cofounder
Born: Jan 21, 1953
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Paul G. Allen |
Billionaire Paul Allen says he "sure wouldn't mind" taking a ride someday in the spaceship he paid to have built in the California desert.
"But you have to understand, you have test pilots flying this thing right now," the co-founder of Microsoft said. "You want to prove out these things and use it many times before you'd want to have passengers on board."
Space tourism "is around the corner, but it's not here yet," Allen, 51, said in a rare interview.
On Monday, Allen's rocket ship, called SpaceShipOne, is expected to attempt to reach sub-orbital space. If successful, it would be the first private, manned spaceship to leave the earth's atmosphere.
The pilot of the spaceship is expected to be weightless for more than three minutes and see the blackness of space before gliding back to earth. The craft does not go fast enough to put it into orbit.
Allen spent more than $20 million to build the spaceship, which is attracting wide media attention. The craft was put together by a team led by Burt Rutan, who became famous for building a privately funded airplane that in 1986 made the first flight around the world without refueling.
Rutan is urging the masses to attend the event, which is expected to draw up to 30,000 people to the small town of Mojave, Calif.
"This is the first time that a manned space flight will be a close-up public event. Unlike everything we've done in the past, we're encouraging people to come out and be there," Rutan said.
If Monday's flight is successful, SpaceShipOne is later expected to contend for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a competition to launch three people into suborbital space, bring them back safely and do it again within two weeks using the same vehicle. Several private groups are in contention for the prize.
"We're working our way up to trying to win the X Prize over the next few months, so that's an exciting prospect," Allen said.
Beyond that, he said, "We're hoping to show ... that private ventures in this kind of leading-edge field, do what would have cost NASA 20 years ago hundreds of millions of dollars. Now private individuals can do these kinds of things."
Rutan predicts SpaceShipOne will eventually pave the way for a flourishing space-tourism industry.
"I think you'll find that someone with (an average) salary who can afford to go out and buy a luxury cruise vacation ... that you could be an astronaut. You could see that same black sky that Alan Shepard saw," Rutan said, referring to the first U.S. astronaut to go into space.
Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and cable entrepreneur, may be worth $20 billion, but he just can't keep his investments healthy (consider troubled Charter Communications). The latest to suffer is the Hospital, an appropriately named media center, private club, and restaurant space in the heart of London's Covent Garden. After swallowing $100 million of Allen's money, the Hospital is in intensive care.
When Allen bought the derelict Victorian maternity hospital for $8 million in 1996, he and pal Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics wanted to build a creative space for new-media types to mingle with Mick Jagger, Deepak Chopra, and other Stewart buddies. This convergence of talent would put on gallery shows, record music, make films at the Hospital's studios, and enjoy famed Chicago chef Charlie Trotter's cuisine. As Stewart told Vogue in January, "When creative artists in different genres get together, they do things."
But it took three years to win permission from London planning officials, and the May opening was derailed last fall when Allen and his Vulcan Investment Management advisors got cold feet. Construction halted. Hiring froze. Dennis Hopper, the Hospital's first artist-in-residence, was told to stay home. Trotter was out too, although his kitchen had already been built and a $320,000 stove ordered. By February, Allen had laid off Drew Kaza, the former BBC executive who was CEO of the venture; the COO; the club people; and the restaurant advisors.
Allen, who declined to comment, sent a Vulcan VC, Chip Treverton, to fix the mess. "The scope of the project has changed," says Treverton, 30, who took FORTUNE on a tour of the site. "In the downturn of the last several years, Paul has begun reassessing his entire portfolio." All that's opening this year is the TV studio, due to be completed in July, and the art gallery. The Hospital folks were at a London trade show recently, hawking extra studio space to any production company they could find. Plans for the private club may go forward, but with lower fees and more talented members. "We'd take David Beckham, but probably not Posh," says spokeswoman Deborah Fitzgerald.
A May 7 internal document obtained by FORTUNE projects pretax losses through 2007, though they'll fall from $9.6 million this year to $5.9 million in 2007. Treverton calls that a "worst-case scenario." And Allen remains committed. "There is a social agenda here as much as anything else," says Treverton. "I don't think return on investment is relevant." Makes one wonder how much longer Allen will be worth $20 billion.
Before they gained fame and fortune beyond their imagination, Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the late 1960s were eager-eyed private-school kids who ventured to the University of Washington and tinkered with the computers on campus.
The two computer nerds who would later form Microsoft never attended the University of Washington, but thanks partly to those days, they are among the most generous contributors to the state's flagship university.
The UW announced yesterday that Allen has donated $14 million to a new computer-science and engineering facility that will be named after him.
University officials also revealed yesterday that the anonymous $6.5 million donation it received last summer for the facility came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Bill and I got a big part of our start in computer science at the University of Washington when we were still students at Lakeside School," Allen said in a statement.
The two would tinker with the four computers on campus, writing codes and creating a class-scheduling program for their Seattle private school.
"We want to help make sure it's an even more cutting-edge resource for the coming generation," Allen said.
At a time when the high-tech sector has been hit hard by a slumping economy, UW officials say they have been blessed to have the Microsoft co-founders on their side.
Along with the Allen and Gates donations, the UW received $7.2 million in August from Microsoft for the computer-science facility.
Former and current Microsoft employees individually have contributed a large share of the additional $16 million in private money the UW has received for the project.
Thus far, the UW has raised $67 million of the $72 million needed for the building through private donations and state funding.
The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering is scheduled to open in the summer of 2003 with 75,000 square feet of space and a lab that is triple the size of the existing lab.
"I am incredibly grateful to Paul, to Bill and to all our other donors for providing us with the tools to remain competitive," said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in computer science at the UW and former chairman of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (from 1993 to 2001).
"We've been operating with less than half the space of comparable programs at a time when the field is becoming more laboratory-intensive and student demand and intellectual opportunity are greater than ever."
Allen and Gates have given other gifts to the UW. Allen previously has donated $20 million to the UW through his various foundations — $10 million of it created the Allen Library, donated in the memory of his late father, Kenneth, who was an associate librarian there; and $5 million went to the Henry Art Gallery/Faye G. Allen Center for Visual Arts, named for his mother.
Gates personally has donated at least $60 million to UW, including $12 million for a law-school building that will be named after his father, William H. Gates.
An undergraduate-education building was named after his late mother, Mary Gates, in 1995 after he endowed a scholarship in her name.
source: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=allen20m1&date=20020220 11jan05
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