MichSpace

SEDS@UM is proud to host Rick Tumlinson for our First Annual Challenger Memorial Lecture. Tumlinson is the co-founder of the well known and influential Space Frontier Foundation, which has been called “pound for pound the most effective space organization on Earth.” A protégé of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, Tumlinson is a space visionary and has been named among the one hundred most influential people in the space industry by Space News. He is also known as a catalyst to the “NewSpace” revolution, leading to the formation of private space companies by Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and dozens of other space entrepreneurs. He led the team which leased the Russian Mir space station as the world’s first commercial space facility, signed up the first so-called “space tourist” Dennis Tito (thereby starting the commercial space travel industry), was a founding trustee of the X-Prize Foundation, Chief Executive of the $25 million FINDS space research endowment, and a co-founder of LunaCorp – which produced the first television commercial to be shot in space (for Radio Shack aboard the International Space Station).


Over the years Tumlinson has been a lead witness in six congressional hearings on the future of NASA, the US space program and space tourism. In early 2004, he testified before Senator John McCain and the Senate Space and Technology Committee on the Moon, Mars and Beyond program. Tumlinson has given many talks and speeches in the field of space advocacy ranging from critiques and discussions of current national space policy, to the presentation of a "Frontier" ideology for opening space, to the how and why of returning to the Moon, to the search for other life and the reasons why humans are reaching for the stars. I hope to see you there!