Scaled composites. Suborbital vehicles. Double-hulled launch planes. And private space travel. What do all of these have to do with the legal profession?
Today Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic announced the second design of the suborbital vehicles: SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two. And wow! This is Buck Rogers type of stuff. A launch vehicle that takes a rocket up to 50,000 feet, then launches the rocket into suborbital space. But that’s just part of the story. There’s the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. You’re not going to find the SpaceShipTwo at LAX or Heathrow. You’ll find them at a spaceport in New Mexico. The goal is two or three flights per day. The remarkable thing, if I’m not mistaken, is that all of this is done without government money.
Now compare this with the space shuttle. A space shuttle mission only comes around every few years. Billions of dollars is spent on the program. And an amazing amount of fuel is needed to get it off the ground. Now don’t get me wrong. The space shuttle program has done a lot of good. But maybe its stuck in its paradigm.
So what does this have to with the law? As you can see, this blog is about legal frontiers or the future of the legal profession. Innovation excites me. I like to see people trying new things. I like to see if things can be done better and more efficiently. I like to see progression. The main question for this blog is can the legal profession be innovative? Can the legal profession step out of the space shuttle program and into a new paradigm like Virgin Galactic. I think it can and hope to capture some of the progress here at legalfrontier.com.