Chairman, SpaceFund

A “godfather” of the space revolution, Rick Tumlinson has spent 30+ years defining, enabling, and founding many of the pillars of what he has named the Frontier movement. He has been called one of the world’s top space “visionaries” and is credited with helping create the commercial space industry, often referred to as NewSpace (he helped create the term). As a result of his world-changing work, in 2015 he won the World Technology Award along with Craig Venter of the Human Genome project. He is a founding partner of SpaceFund, a new type of investment firm at the intersection of digital financial technologies and space development. He led the commercial takeover of the Russian Mir space station, signed the first space tourist, co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, and was a founding board member of the X-Prize. A leading writer, speaker, policy expert and Congressional witness, Rick has influenced and consulted on space policies involving the private sector, property rights, contracting and space resources for the US and other governments and at the UN level. Currently, his non-profit organization, the EarthLight Foundation is changing the world’s conversation about space, as his New Worlds Institute, develops the people and technology to settle the Frontier.

Rick came from the working-class family of a US Air Force Sargent and English mother known for her pioneering work with the elderly and poor in Texas. He grew up in the UK, West Texas and California, was heavily involved in scouting and worked on several school papers. His ancestors helped found Texas, including a central role in creating the Texas Rangers and starting and fighting in the Texas revolution and the Alamo. This pioneering background, and reading lots of science and science fiction, led him to found the New York City L-5 Space Society in the early 1980s. He then worked for Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill and Dr. Freeman Dyson, godfathers of the human space settlement movement, at the Space Studies Institute at Princeton. While there he led the first effort to kick start what became the Lunar Polar Orbiter project that first detected the signs of water ice at the poles of the Moon.

Rick also co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, the first space organization to take on the “aerospace industrial complex” in Washington DC (once called “pound for pound the most effective space organization on Earth”) and led the charge for space settlement and commercial space policies – including those that ended the space shuttle program and are now enabling commercial spaceflight and the private sector takeover of the opening of the frontier. During the same period he produced the world’s first pro-space public service announcement to be run on commercial radio stations.

In the 1990s Rick co-founded the company LunaCorp which attempted to place a commercial lunar rover on the Moon and flew the world’s first commercial to be shot in space on the ISS. Around the same time he produced the advertising for the world’s first sweepstakes to offer a ride aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.Working with telecom mogul Walt Anderson he co-founded the Foundation for the International Non-government Development of Space (FINDS). This $25M endowment funded research in solar sails, asteroid mining, laser launch systems, and gave the Mars Society its first founding donation. As featured in the documentary Orphans of Apollo, he instigated and led the team that took over the aging Russian space station Mir, flying one crew to the facility and leading to his signing of Dennis Tito to fly on the International Space Station. During this period he worked with NASA to help establish the concept of civilian flights to the station. His relationship with some of NASA’s leaders led to his help establishing what became the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) now the foremost NASA sanctioned organization for global scientific Lunar community.

Later, he started Deep Space Industries, a space resource and asteroid mining company. He signed the world’s first commercial contract for resource exploration with Luxembourg, then assisted in the development of space resource policy there, in the UAE and in the US Congress that helped set the stage for today’s focus on in space resources.
The EarthLight Foundation hosts the New Worlds conference and throws the annual Space Cowboy Ball in Austin, Texas – considered a must attend event celebrating space education and the heroes of space fiction and reality. His Space Declaration has already begun to create a following in the space settlement community as a set of core principles for opening the Frontier, and his book “The Space Manifesto” will be published in 2021.