In previous centuries, before driver's licenses, before going off to out of state state schools for ten times the cost of going to your own state school, and before people lived to be old enough to make books on how to not get any older best sellers, a son became a man, eligible for marrying, work and starting a family, at 13.

Though modern life has made 13 a lot less of a transition to adulthood and a lot more of an occasion for parents to throw huge parties and subsidize musicians, caterers, florists and photographers, Bar and Bat Mitzvah remain a focus of Jewish life.

It was certainly a focus of my own Jewish life 30 plus years ago. Seeing the Bar Mitzvah as a ruse where, while the parents fulfill social obligations, children go through religious motions, meaningless to them, to earn cool gifts and score a major party, then pop out the other end of a tiring weekend of kissing relatives and hopefully one particular girl, no more adult than they went in, I went on strike against the whole system.

It can now be openly revealed that I turned 13 without memorizing a word of Hebrew or holding up any Torahs in front of any congregations assembled in front of any arcs. Amazingly the day I turned 13.00274 dawned like any other, and thus far I have felt few, if any ill effects. I hadn't in any way emerged into manhood, but neither had my Bar Mitzvah'd friends. Our parents still packed our lunches, provided us a bedroom and a telephone, and picked us up after swimming practice.

The coming of age of space, we are told, has its own Mitzvah. Space will be commercial, no longer a ward of the state. It will have commercial customers, flying their payloads on launch vehicles built with commercially invested funds. The launch ranges will be operated by private, for profit entities. Space missions will suddenly be dirt cheap, owing to commercial competition, and new applications of space will pop up like flowers in the Negev after a sudden, nourishing cloudburst.

The Bar or Baht Mitzvah ceremony which will trigger this transformation is, unlike in Judaism which set up the procedure quite some time ago, a subject of serious contemporary debate. NASA, DoE, DoD and their counterparts around the world understand that without a mastery of technology, the transition to adulthood is impossible. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is only achieved after mastery of reading Hebrew from the Torah, a non-trivial technology, particularly for us non-Israeli pre-teens, to whom Hebrew is as much a part of everyday communication as Sanskrit and Morse code. Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Dalet, Heh is replaced in the government space world by Nanosatellite, MEMS, Autonomy, Smart Structures and Phase Coherent (satellite) Constellations. Once we master those, commercial space will be as much a reality as 13 year old Jewish 7th graders marrying their classmates and setting up kosher households of their own.

For me and my Quixotic search for microspace, low cost is the ticket. If space becomes cheap enough, lots of people will access it, find cool new applications, go forth and populate LEO, if not like flowers in the Negev, then perhaps like the Diaspora filling up White Plains and Encino.

There is another faction so bent on the Mitzvah of commercial space that not only the Bible but even Shakespeare and at least one opera (Electra) presaged their approach. Only by killing our parents can we become adults, they are telling us. NASA, ESA, NAZDA and their ilk are our Jewish mommas, still reminding us to dress warmly even now that we are old enough to purposely and consciously choose not to. How can commercial remote sensing ever happen with SPOT and Landsat and the NOAA Polar Orbiters and countless Russian satellites up there, all subsidized by their respective countries' populace? NASA can't possibly pick winners and losers in the launch vehicle game, and by trying to do so, blocks the chance for obtaining capital for the most market-worthy contenders. Let the market, Adam Smith's magic hand, pick the winners, not some bureaucrat in Estec, Tokyo or Washington.

Few parents are willing to admit the prevalence of this line of thought among their seemingly loving, or at least accepting, preteens. I would like to point out the prevalence of parentless kids in children's literature - Robin of Batman and Robin, for example. We imagine that without parents we would immediately become streetwise adults. But few of us, in fact none that I knew personally, actually carry out this fantasy of achieving adulthood by bloody removal of the previous generation. For that matter, most of us, not being Jews, never learn to read the handwritten text of the Torah, and few of us invent new industries and careers that didn't even exist in our parents' days, just to leave the nest and move out on our own.

Yet, almost all of us have become adults, though admittedly much later than our parents would have liked. Without mastery of Hebrew, without invention of new careers, and without resort to patricide. It turns out to be much easier at some point to accept the realities of selling insurance or satellites, or showing up at an engineering office every morning, or in front of a blackboard or even on an assembly line, instead of living by the rules of our parents' houses, including the difficulties of attracting, in my own and George Castanza's cases, female friends once they find out we're still living with our parents. These first jobs are typically not your dream career - lowest niche on the org chart, long hours, tedious work, and a long desert of boredom and sweat separating Monday morning from Friday happy hour. But women, cars, weekends at Mammoth instead of mowing the lawn and the freedom to live wherever I can afford to, keep the hours I prefer and eat the food I like to, made the hassles of adulthood more than worthwhile.

And over a few short decades, we end up, if we're lucky, with jobs we actually like. Not those fantasy jobs - 777 pilot, world famous brain transplant surgeon, undersea explorer - but we learn the joy of doing real jobs and providing products and services other real people actually use. This satisfaction we prefer to that of solving fantastically interesting, but ultimately useless, academic problems. This is the real coming of age that the space business needs. The fact that some of us are arguing for patricide, while others believe that adulthood lies in the next fancy technology or discovery of the as yet undiscovered new space application, puts us squarely at the Bar Mitzvah stage. There is hope that one day, while the comfort of NASA's largess will be no less inviting, the lure of real independence will become so attractive that we'll leave the comfort of our childhood for the subtle rewards and the discomfort of adulthood. And thus achieve the Mitzvah of commercial space.

Dr. Rick Fleeter is President of AeroAstro, a leader manufacturer of microsat and other supporting systems for low cost but effective space missions.

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