SpaceWatch.Global An independent perspective on space 
11 November 2015
Noordwijk, NL, ESA ESTEC
At the TEDxESA event on 11 November 2015, 12 stellar speakers took the stage and presented their visions of how science takes us beyond fiction.
Space is hard, so why should we go? Let Rick Tumlinson give a clear answer in this TEDxESA talk. He wants to plant a tree on Mars and see a butterfly on the Moon. Rick also wants to lead people, to allow them to be inspired and give them hope.
Rick Tumlinson has been called one of the world’s top space “Visionaries” and was listed by Space News as one of the world’s top 100 most influential space leaders. He helped create the NewSpace commercial space industry.
He helped found the International Space University – http://isunet.edu/ – the Lunar Prospector Project that discovered water on the Moon, and the Mars Society, and founded the commercial space suit company Orbital Outfitters Inc. In 2004 Rick was one of only 20 guests invited by the White House to hear President Bush announce his plans to return to the Moon and explore Mars. Often a public critic of the agency, he helped start NASA’s prestigious Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, edited the book Return to the Moon and organized the first three Return to the Moon conferences.
He is currently working as Chairman of Deep Space Industries, an asteroid mining and space resources company located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.
His latest projects are the EarthLight Foundation and the New Worlds Institute that held its first conference in 2015 in Austin, Texas, and is designed to be a focus for the development of technologies and ideas to enable the coming human expansion into space.
Tumlinson conducts many talks and speeches in the field of space advocacy. Topics of his talks range from critiques and discussions of current national space policy, presentations on a “Frontier” ideology for opening space, the how and why of returning to the Moon, through to a spiritual discussion of our place in the universe, the search for other life, and the reasons why humans are reaching for the stars.
Here is the video of Rick Tumlinson’s TEDxESA talk:
