Armadillo Aerospace is a space technology company funded and driven by amateurs with great success. What makes it doubly interesting is that it is being done from near Dallas, Texas, which is the home to occasional flashes of brilliance like the integrated circuit in the late 1950s and later almost the home of America's Answer to CERN.In a similar spirit Waterloo Labs in Texas has some inspiring videos for example controlling a real car from an iPhone app.
The pattern of creative peaks and troughs in Dallas is much the same as areas like Route 128 in Massachusetts (Wang, Digital, Apollo), or Route 101 (Silicon Valley) in California, or Seattle, Washington (Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon), alternately pulling in and then expelling thousands of engineers and dreamers with waves of military, research or commercial funds. Dallas is typically harder hit by the troughs, Texas having only three Tier 1 universities, none of which is in Dallas.
Armadillo is part of a movement of bright (and well funded) amateurs competing for prizes such as the Ansari X prize. The author recently heard Anousheh Ansari's inspirational presentation of her childhood interest in spaceflight in Iran (where women are suppressed to this day, supposedly in the name of Islam) and how she was able to become an astronaut many years later. Another company in a similar vein is Tesla Motors. Their impressive sports car destroys the carefully cultivated image of unappealing electric cars calculatedly built by the Detroit Automakers, with their vested interest in lack of progress.
It's an archetypal theme of Dwapara Yuga that individuals should be able to succeed where governments and huge corporations often cannot since both tend to have very narrow definitions of what constitute 'good elements' in employees, or worse, a vested interest in inventions not coming to the market and disrupting fat profits in monopolies and cartels.
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