Rick Tumlinson

Rick Tumlinson has been called one of the world’s top space “Visionaries” and is credited with helping create the NewSpace commercial space industry, whose players include Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Paul Allen of MicroSoft and Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon. He co-Founded the Space Frontier Foundation, led the team that took over the Mir Space Station for a year as the world’s first commercial space facility, signed up the first “space tourist” Dennis Tito, and has spoken as an expert witness before the US Congress 6 times on space policy. He worked with the founders of the International Space University, helped kick start the Lunar Prospector Project and helped or founded several other Frontier Enabling projects and organizations. He edited the book Return to the Moon, and is a regular writer for the Huffington Post and Space News. A founding Board Member of the XPrize, he founded the Texas Space Alliance, started Silicon Valley based Deep Space Industries - an asteroid mining firm. In 2015 he won the World Technology Award along with Craig Venter of the Human Genome project. Currently, his New Worlds organization is focused on developing the people and technology to settle the space frontier. This summer New Worlds is holding its second major US space policy summit in Washington DC on July 20th, and will be putting on the New Worlds 2017 Conference Nov 10-11 in Austin.