Rick Tumlinson
Space innovator Rick Tumlinson helped create the NewSpace commercial
space industry that today includes Virgin Galactic and SpaceX and
billionaire investors like Paul Allen and Larry Paige of Google. He
co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, led the team that took over
the Mir Space Station for a year and signed up the first “space tourist.
He helped found the International Space University, the Lunar
Prospector Project that discovered water on the Moon, and the Mars
Society and founded the commercial space suit company Orbital Outfitters
Inc.. A founding trustee of the XPrize, he founded the Texas Space
Alliance and the EarthLight Foundation/New Worlds Institute, and Deep
Space Industries, an asteroid mining company.
Border Sessions 2014 - Wed, 12 Nov 2014
Why this is possibly the most important human activity of all
We are in a moment of change at the level of civilization and life itself. Even as we face climatic disaster, the very technologies that threatened global destruction are being used to carry the seeds of life and humanity into space, offering the hope that we might be able to not just save the Earth, but spread her seeds to worlds now dead. Within a year or two the first citizen space travelers will board the first commercial rocketships and fly into orbit, funded by dot com billionaires who want to expand human civilization into space. Meanwhile, a battle is raging between the forces protecting the old aerospace industrial complex and the NewSpace Revolutionaries who are reaching for the stars. Rick Tumlinson updates us on controversies and battles going on in the space field and speculates on how this fits into human existence and our role in the universe and life itself.
