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The Space Frontier Foundation
Feb 20, 2005 16: 51 EST
Previously published Nov 29, 2004 00: 28 EST
Last week we covered Carl Sagan's Planetary Society, and now time has come to check out the Space Frontier Foundation. It's pretty amazing how many such organizations are around - in US alone...
MIR and Hubble
"Dedicated to opening the space frontier for all humanity within our lifetimes," the Space Frontier Foundation, created in 1988, sounds just like our guys. They want to save the Hubble and have a good point about the trashed MIR station:
"The Space Frontier Foundation Calls Mir's De-Orbit a Historic Tragedy. The Russian space station Mir was de-orbited in March of 2001. We congratulate the people of Russia for operating history's longest-lived space station. But why was such a successful facility destroyed simply because the American space agency saw it as inconvenient while building its expensive new International Space Station?" That's a good question many have asked before.
Transforming Space
So who are the guys? Here's their own description: "The Space Frontier Foundation is a media and policy organization composed of space activists, scientists and engineers, media and political professionals, entrepreneurs, and citizens from all backgrounds and all nations.
We are transforming space from a government-owned bureaucratic program into a dynamic and inclusive frontier open to people. We are determined to convert the image held by many young people that the future will be worse than the present, and we reject the idea that the world's greatest moments are in its past."
Annual awards
The foundation's goal is large-scale permanent settlement of space, achieved by free markets and free enterprise. They give annual awards to space activists who have made the greatest contributions that year to opening the frontier. Most recently, an award went to Burt Rutan and the XPrize.
As usual, the society comprises of some heavy duty names and titles. The founders are Bob Werb, Jim Muncy and Rick Tumlinson.
Bob Werb was an active partner in a real estate firm that owns and manages a portfolio of garden apartments, shopping centers and office buildings with properties in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina and Florida. Recently, he has assumed a more passive role in Rivercrest Realty Investors and has been spending more time working with several small space start-ups.
Jim Muncy has been congressional staff member, worked in the White House, and now he is a consultant in Polispace consulting firm. He advises several space companies.
Rick Tumlinson was named one the top one hundred most influential people in the space field by Space News. From an old Texas family whose pioneering credits include co-founding the Texas Rangers and fighting in the Alamo, Rick has spent his life fighting to open the space frontier. The son of an Air Force Sergeant and his English wife, he was educated primarily in England and Texas.
Tumlinson worked for noted scientist Gerard K. O'Neill at the Space Studies Institute, founded the New York L-5 Society, and was a key player in starting the Lunar Prospector project which discovered hints of water on the Moon. Over the years he has been a lead witness in six congressional hearings on the future of NASA, the U.S. space program and space tourism, most recently in early 2004, testifying before the Senate Space and Technology Committee on the Moon, Mars and Beyond program.
He co-founded the firm LunaCorp which produced the first ever TV commercial shot on the International Space Station for Radio Shack. He led the team which turned the Mir Space Station into the world’s first commercial space facility, and was a co-founder of the space firm MirCorp. Along the way he personally signed up Dennis Tito, the world’s first "citizen explorer," and has assisted in numerous other such projects.Rick is working on a book, The Case for the Moon, and is starting his own space firm, “XTreme Space.”
Image from top to bottom; Rick Tumlinson, Jim Muncy, Bob Werb. Compiled by ExplorersWeb, courtesy SFS/NASA.
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