Space Frontier Foundation President Rick Tumlinson

Good morning, and welcome to the Revolution. The book in my hand is Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Get this book, read this book. I fell asleep last night reading it, and it was refreshing to get back to one of the many core inspirations that helped push me into this field when I was young. I don't know if you know this, but the Space Frontier Foundation's first check for $50.00 came from the Heinleins.

Well, anyway, it is interesting that here we are in Ceasars Palace, Las Vegas. Right in the middle of a desolate place that until fifty or a hundred years ago was considered a barren and useless scrap of land that no one could do anything with. That is until that great historical visionary "Bugsy" Segal and a few other socially unacceptable types decided to put something here, and look what happened. No matter your moral judgment of the man and the place, they did create something very useful, at least for generating money and entertainment. Who would have thought it.

Well, that is what we are about. Vision. Prepping for the event, I have been talking a lot to friends and associates about the Moon, and it is interesting how we have written it off in our minds. Even one of my co-founders said the Moon is nothing but a slag heap with the visual appeal of a pile of gravel. Right, remember Las Vegas folks. The hand of humanity has transformed this place into a multi-billion dollar economic machine that helps power this part of the country, employs directly or indirectly over a million people and generates taxes to fund an entire state. Now they may not be what you consider tasteful activities to say the least, but it worked, and proves you never know what can happen when imaginations get started. And remember, many of you had to fly over what was once called the Great Western Desert of the mid-western U.S. to get here. That was another area people said would never amount to anything, a dry endless prairie of extreme weather conditions, tornados, wild animals and inhabitants who were shooting back at you, yet now feeds the world.

We are up against the same challenge here. We are trying generate excitement and fund ways to go to a place our culture turned its back on some years ago. (By the way, getting back to what funded this town, you realize the Apollo missions were in essence simply badly managed entertainment stunts. After all, if there had been some driving societal need, some underlying purpose in their design, we would still be there. In fact, when the ratings dropped, we walked away, as the sponsors lost interest. Yes, it was all veiled in high sounding rhetoric and government language. Yes, we did it using and to advance all sorts of government games and agendas, but in the end we walked because it wasn't fun anymore, and no one tried to figure out a way to make it profitable, economically or culturally. You see, when no one is entertained anymore by a government program it goes away, and to our country, space and the Moon were programs.)

A few minutes ago I said "Welcome to the Revolution." Well, today I can say we are in the revolution. This year, the year 2000, the revolution has begun. The year 2000 may well be looked at as the turning point in the opening of space. The time when the people, the private sector, began to take over, and slowly, take the lead in the opening of the space frontier. It is happening this year. But it has been a long, long battle. I remember in the year 1989 I think it was, sitting in the board room of a big law firm in Washington D.C. with a group of other insane people and talking about the Moon.

David Gump, Jim Dunstan, Bill Stone and few other folks, including an old Virginian in a blue and white seersucker suit sitting at the end of the table. His name was Tom Rogers, a long time government insider, tired of the inside game. He looked at us and said "Gentlemen, we are going to the Moon!" Yeahuh huh. We were going to launch something the size of a basketball. It would fly to the Moon and say, "I got here with no government money, have a Coke and a smile" – a Lunar Sputnik. I recall we put together videos with shots of Peter Jennings at ABC with the image of the spacecraft over his shoulder to make it real, as it would be when it hit the media.

That was ten years ago, ten years. It's now ten years later. David Gump has mortgaged his house for this dream countless times it seems. We even came up with all kinds of other money, "terrestrial revenue streams" we called them, to try and stay in business. Now, finally, ten years later, David and Jim have landed a client, and it has really begun. Ten years. It has been a heck of a fight. Ten years. And if you are not up for that kind of haul, that kind of fight, you may as well leave the room right now, cause that is what it takes to change the world.

Now the nice thing about the Moon is that it is close, on the edge of the Near Frontier, and nobody cares about it. Let me explain the term Near Frontier and Far Frontier, as I am trying to get everyone to buy off on them so we can get past some basic job description confusion we have been having. I divide space cleanly into two arenas, call it Rick's Handy Dandy Guide to Space. I came up with the terms to help us get past some conflicts we in the private sector were having with our friends in government as to who does what and where.

First, visualize the Earth as the center of an expanding bubble of life, moving ever outwards. The edge of that bubble, the edge of the area of human activity, sits on the Moon. Inside of the Moon we have explored relatively heavily, we have been tromping and stomping around for some thirty years. Hell, we are even running telephone poles and wires through it in the form of communications satellites. NASA, or today's Lewis and Clarks, have done a fine job exploring this area. Beyond the Moon is what I call the Far Frontier, and that is all of everything else, the whole rest of the universe. This is an area in which we have not yet had any serious human activity or exploration. There is another way to make the division as well. From the Moon inwards, business plans begin to make more and more sense, and as you get closer to the Earth the giggle factor in the corporate boardroom begins to drop. The Moon represents the transition zone. Beyond the Moon the best way of supporting exploration is to put together public funds in some form, be they as part of a National Geographic Society type organization, or in the form of tax dollars and national so called "programs" or publicly funded "projects."

The reason I had to come up with this division was so that I could sleep at night. I was, like many of you, in constant conflict and facing continuing disappointments as I watched the failed and confused interaction of the public and private sectors in space. It was making me nuts. It seemed that all of space belonged to the government. Belonged to NASA. I love NASA like everybody else, and I want to see them do great things in space. But there is a problem with them. I do love NASA, they are part of the American family, but if I had a brother or sister or son or daughter like NASA it would be like having a heroine addict living in your house. NASA is addicted to the control and power they get from ruling space. Now this didn't come about because they did it to themselves, but as a result of a lack of visionary leadership at the top of our government here in the USA. NASA is a bureaucracy, and like any bureaucracy without leadership it hunkers down and begins to olive for itself, expanding and defending its turf, and for NASA that meant all of space.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can redirect NASA, turn them back into Lewis and Clark and send them over the hill to scout the far horizons. We have to get them out of the Near Frontier so the people, the private sector, can do their work. We need a new alignment, a new partnership in space.

What is interesting about this "new space order" (I am kidding) is that the Moon, being on that transition zone, represents the place where we can define a new partnership between the public and private sectors. I personally believe the next President may well announce a human mission to the Red Planet. There is a Mars movement out there, the Mars Society and people like that, and I support them totally. In fact FINDS gave Bob Zubrin his first 100k to start his Arctic Base simulation. Although he never publicly admits it, I must say our logo is on the side of that little base they built in Greenland. And the reason we did that is that I want to see pressure applied to the political side to think about it. We want to see NASA pushed on. We want to see NASA get what it really wants, a trip to Mars and the beginning of the human exploration of Mars.

Now there are some people like Zubrin who say you don't need the Moon to go to Mars ? you just shoot them out there, throwing ships at the planet filled with what I call expendable people I think that is rather culturally naïve. I think what that doesn't recognize is the same alliance in our society that you have to go to too get that money just fought a war last year and the bottom line of that war was no allies shall die. The same year a lady
in Antarctica came down with a health problem and the entire world stopped.

That's the same culture you've got to go to too convince to send people on what could be a one-way trip to Mars. I believe firmly that the only way that we are going to get to Mars in any sustainable way is from space.

You don't go to Mars directly from Earth, you go from space. On the way there you are going to do basically a Mercury, Gemini, Apollo type approach where you learn to walk before you run and then fly. In that scenario I believe that you have to train your astronauts somewhere where there is dust, vacuum and extremes of temperatures. A place where if they fall down and cut their suits they could die. And that basically is the Moon. I believe that that is where the training should take place.

I believe that given the right partnership wherein NASA is directed by the next president to go to Mars but work with the private sector to open the Moon on the way so they can do it better, cheaper , more safely and in a sustainable way isn't going to be seen as going to the Moon on the way to Mars. The fear of going to the Moon on the way to Mars comes from a thing called the Space Exploration initiative, given by NASA to former President Bush that funded everything in NASA's wish basket on the way to Mars. It is constantly thrown up by Zubrin and bashed back down as the wrong way to go – a very expensive way and indeed it would have been. It definitely was. But that is not what I am talking about.

You do it with a commercial partnership on the Moon that is absorbing most of the operational costs and even creating profits for those concerned. Then the government agencies going to Mars do not necessarily have to spend all of their money or their PR or their political capital in selling a trip to the Moon first. In other words they can leverage off an infrastructure that is partially funded and supported by the private sector.

That is what is beginning to happen. There are some very interesting commercial projects involving the Moon underway right now, and they involve developing infrastructure with private dollars.

But first, let me go back for a minute. As I said before, for ten years or so many of us in this room have been pushing these ideas. We have had to overcome a lot of challenges and fight a lot of enemies, but a lot of the worst challenges were those we created ourselves.

For example, I remember as we tried various ideas for LunaCorp, we began to learn a very simple rule when it comes to investors or customers buying your ideas ? don't put and if on an if. Believe me, if you are putting together a business plan for a space project, and you have too many ifs, or require what the science fiction writers call "unobtanium, your business plan is not going to sell. It goes like this...We are going to build an untested spacecraft, and fly it on an untested rocket using untested software with a group of novices and we want to do it with your money!" I'm sorry folks. That just doesn't work. You have to learn what the customer is really after, what they really want. After they buy off on the wonderfulness of your amazing concept they need to know you can deliver. Somebody is betting their entire corporate PR budget at Coca-Cola on a two or three year stint, they want certainty. They want triple, quadruple redundancy. They want more certainty with their advertising dollars than NASA requires with their safety standards. You have to understand things like that to make it in this game, and it took a while to learn, hell some of us still haven't gotten it yet.

We also had to learn how to interact with NASA and survive in a world they dominate. Parts of NASA are slowly starting to learn how to work with us. There are some folks from the agency here and I am looking forward to talking with them and interacting. Yes, we still have fights in other areas, but I think we can begin to co-operate when it comes to the Moon. I hope we can. I don't think many of them bear the private sector any ill will, but I am worried about the things that used to happen to the early mammals when a Tyrannosaurus Rex who may not have even been hunting the mammal, and was instead looking for a nice fat brontosaurus accidentally stepped on the little furry guy. Ooops, sorry, pancakes. That is the kind of thing that can and does happen today.

Let me give you a, shall we say, imaginary scenario to illustrate the accidental death by dinosaur theory. Someone in this room puts together a commercial mission to go to the Moon, retrieve Lunar soils samples and bring them back to Earth to study and sell as novelties to fund further missions. Now, out of pure coincidence, three weeks after they announce their plans, NASA announces they are going to release several pounds of their Apollo samples for study and use around the world. Boom. Pancakes. Their business collapses. NASA scratches its head. Did the agency do it on purpose? No, of course not. It was a coincidence. After all, as a friend of mine used to say, great minds run in the same gutter. But that kind of thing can and has happened repeatedly, as we trip over each other on the way to the frontier. It is the kind of thing we are going to have to deal with and I think we can, if we try and work together, and define those proper roles for each sector.

The other thing I want to touch on is us getting real. We have to begin to understand the real world out there. For example, this year FINDS hasn't publicly announced it, but we just signed the first ever interplanetary data purchase agreement. The money has been exchanged, the contract signed. In fact the agreement was signed with a company that will be presenting this week. What was interesting for me was dealing on a business basis with scientists and engineers to cut the deal. I was coming at it from a business point of view. Frankly, I do hope they succeed, but even if they don't in the mean time I wanted to teach them and the community a lesson about reality and business.

I was sitting there with these engineers saying "by a date certain, I want my data, period end of story" The data in question would come from a probe they are sending to the Moon. After they do their Lunar injection burn they are going to turn their antennas back towards the Earth and see if they can acquire terrestrial GPS signals. If they can acquire the GPS location data we may discover our GPS can be used by triangulation at Lunar distances. That is a valuable service and something we believe is worth doing. Now, once they do their TLI they have to turn on those instruments and aim them at the Earth. At that point, whether or not they acquire a signal the experiment will be considered a success. If not, if they cannot turn on their instruments, or if they don't get the probe to the right spot by that certain date then I get their furniture and their car. I take it all away. Now that was hard to explain to these guys, because they kept saying "but its space and space is special, so many things can go wrong." And I just said "but I'm a customer, I am a customer get used to it. I want my product or I want my money back or everything you own." I want to make you hurt if you fail, cause you will be hurting me." That is how the business world works, you put big stakes on the line and you must have them pay off or you go down. Well, they agreed, and just to make things even worse, I had the contract written by a lawyer with one of their competitors. Everybody signed it and I knew I had a good deal. So keep your eye out for that project. (I'll let them decide if they want to discuss it here.)

There are other enemies out there, others we have to deal with. There are people like the United Societies in Space folks who want to socialize space before we get there and lay down a bunch of rules for us. I had one of their people, one of their official people come to me and say we have to go out there and create these rules and legal structures in space first, because when we get to the Moon who are we going to lease it from? I couldn't even answer that e-mail. I had no answer for that person. These folks are obviously already on a different planet from myself.

These are the kinds of people and challenges we are up against, but we will pull it off. Some of us will make it over the barbed wire and we are charging ahead. It is happening this year. Right now, for as you know, this year we acquired a little space station. The rebels acquired a space station. Ok, that is a beginning isn't it? This year some other rebels acquired a corporate sponsor to go to the Moon. This year another very quiet team called Idea Lab is out there that doesn't want anyone to know they exist. Ooops. I'm sorry I mentioned them but they are going to come out soon and announce their own commercial mission to the Moon. So guess what folks, we have the first commercial race to the Moon. It starts right now in the year 2000. It has begun. The revolution has begun.

In the mean time several countries and space agencies around the world that have not been looking necessarily at such adventures in space, groups that pulled back when we pulled back, are starting once again open their imaginations and reach out. The Europeans have some lunar missions being planned. The Indian Space Agency has just announced its interest in going to the Moon. Others are coming on board. The Russians, some of their private firms, are also going to be involved in these projects. Solar sails are being developed to fly out to Lunar distances. These are happening right now and people are actually financing some of them. The culture is starting in a very tiny way to understand they have the power to open space themselves. We have the power to open the frontier. We are the frontier. And given that state of affairs I have a lot of hope. When I look around this room and see some of the people I have known who have been digging their way out of the trenches, dodging bullets, dodging T-Rex's feet, and doing all kinds of things to survive and keep going, I am proud.

I see the people who are really going to open the frontier in this room with me, and I am proud to be amongst you. From now on we can say we are in the revolution. It isn't coming, it is here. We are on our way. You are part of a new family. A family of people who have decided to move to the frontier and challenge it. And you and this family are going to do all kinds of things, some crazy wacky things in fact, things that are going to upset the status quo, but that is what frontiers are all about. Frontiers are about change. They're about challenge. They are about transgression. They are about going beyond today's borders of thought and reality and pushing those borders back. Pushing them outwards. Bit those borders are so often not the physical, scientific, or engineering borders so much as they are the borders of our own psychology. And it is those we push back now. We are finally giving ourselves permission to dream. Permission to go out and grasp those dreams and make them real.

Have a wonderful two days at this event. Let us know what you think about this thing we are doing, and how it goes for you. We want to see you back next year. I am excited about this. I think we are at last starting to create some momentum. There are a not a lot of people in this room, a hundred or so, but believe me, when some of you succeed and the first commercial missions are on their way to the Moon or already there, by next year this room will be packed. Pioneers always go out in small groups at first, ones or twos of into the wilderness. Crazy guys in coon skin caps, brave ladies in wagons with their families moving out to build new homes and farms from the wild unknown. And then eventually the culture realize oh my, look, we are bigger, and there are new ideas out there lets go for as we know where I live in Hollywood, everybody wants to be first to execute a proven idea and that is the kind of thing we are dealing with. So thank you very much for coming. Again, have a great two or three days here and let's have some fun.

By the way, the main gambling here is not downstairs, it is us betting on the Moon. (and yes, I know a couple of you will come back in a few years and tell us how you financed your Lunar project in Las Vegas.) I wish you luck. Thank you.