← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
New Worlds and Space Cowboys.
00:27:38
Rick Tumlinson is the Founder of New Worlds. The event blends science, exploration, technology, art, music, and literature with exploring space.
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You're listening to the N2K space network.
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Where on the earth can you find science, exploration, technology, art, music and literature all melded together with the business of exploring space? No, seriously, where on earth would you find all that? Thankfully, it's not a hypothetical question. The answer is a real event. Let's learn more and dive into new worlds. Rick Tomlinson is a name well known in the space industry. He is the founder of New Worlds, an event that is being held in Austin, Texas on October 23rd through 25th and he joins me now.
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So my name is Rick Tomlinson. I have been in the space field for many years, part of what I like to call the space revolution, and been fighting for a long time for the concept of getting humanity and life off the planet. Along the way, I've done some stuff in Congress. I led a team, we took over the Russian space station for a while. I signed up the first person to buy a ticket to space, helped lead a project that found water on the moon way back in the day. All kinds of crazy stuff. I just left. I had a venture capital company called Space Fund that I founded and then I have a new book coming out called why Space the Purpose of People. And I also throw a conference called New Worlds and an amazing party called the Space Cowboy Ball.
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Rick, thank you so much for joining me today. And I'm actually really excited. I've never been to the New World Conference, but many, many people that I've interviewed over the years have talked about it in very good terms. They've loved it. It is a very unique event. So I would love to hear from you a little bit about sort of the genesis of this event. And also it is very unique. So tell me a bit about what it's like.
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Well, you know, I. Part of the genesis was that I've been to so many space conferences and thrown so many space conferences. I finally sat down and said, you know what? I want to create one that I would go to, but even more importantly, one where I would stay in the room because I go to conferences and I stand in the hall and I'm cutting deals and I'm hanging out and all of that, but very rarely am I actually in the room watching the speakers. So what we did was threw a bunch of different people together. The other core element is I'm a strong believer that edges are where cool stuff happen. What I mean by that is if you're hanging out with a bunch of people exactly like you, you're not really expanding your domain of understanding. You're not creating new connections. You already know each other, you know, and so this conference is definitely not a bunch of white guys trading business cards about aerospace, you know, or listening to speeches from NASA about what they plan to do someday. This is about Space Tribe. This is about the culture of people who I call spacers who believe in, work on and have as their goal in life supporting the expansion of humanity and life beyond the earth. And what that means is that we are able to bring in, we have artists, we have musicians, we have, I think four authors at this event. We have people from Space Force here. But you know, I'll give you a smattering. For example, we're starting with Akash Sood, who's a beautiful trance type musician. In the morning, then we're gonna do a guided meditation. This would be like Saturday morning. Then we're gonna do guided meditation. Then General John Olson, who helped stand up Space Force is going to speak, right? And so we're going through all of these kinds of shifts. Our luncheon speakers are Greg Autry, who's probably going to be the Republican CFO of NASA, and a guy named Bob Zubrin who basically wrote the blueprint that Elon's using to go to Mars. We also have Frank White, who coined the term overview effect in his famous book. And these are all old friends of mine and just bringing them all together. It's funny, earlier this week we had a meeting with all of the different speakers and I said, guys and ladies, I've conned you. It's all a trick. I'm bringing you together because I want you all to meet each other. You're all great speakers, you're all amazing. But what I'm trying to do is create a cadre of people who are creating just these incredible moments with each other. And that's what we find happens. You know, we. One of our regulars, he can't make it this year is Rod Roddenberry from the Star Trek family. And you know, I hear stories like last year of Rod and four or five people, five o' clock in the morning, you know, and they're debating the future of humanity in space. And that's music to my ears. Right. So it's that kind of thing. And then we move into the ball. If you wanted to talk about the.
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Ball, I did, because Space Cowboy, I was talking about Cowboy Bebop. And I love See youe Space Cowboy. Iconic. I don't know if those two are related necessarily, but I just couldn't help but think of that connection.
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Well, I'm a space guy and my family helped found Texas, so the Cowboy comes in there. Although usually I get called out. Maybe you can see it behind me. But the pirate thing, we actually flew a pirate flag on the Russian space station when we took it over, and I think it's the. It was the only one ever flown. Richard Garriott actually flew one on the space station himself, but. Wow. Yeah. So I kind of go back and forth with the cowboy pirate thing. I used to roll a pirate flag over the podium in the 90s and the early 2000s, and I would say, welcome to the revolution. And that would be the beginning of all my. It was kind of my shtick, you know? Yeah. But right now, what we're about this year, the Space Cowboy Ball, it's a costume dance awards ceremony party. I can tell you that the winner of the Space Cowboy Award this year is Tom Marcusek, who's the founder of Firefly Aerospace.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yep.
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And in previous years, we had Jeff Bezos. These people show up. We don't give awards to people who, like, send us a tape. And so Bezos got it one year. Gwen Shotwell, who runs SpaceX. Jared and Jared Isaacman, who was supposed to be the head of NASA and may yet again be. I heard that he met with Trump.
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Yeah, there's some rumblings about that. It's interesting, isn't it?
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Very interesting, yeah. And the funny thing is we have John Olson, General John Olson, who helped stand up Space Force speaking. And his only excuse for not showing up is that he's getting interviewed for the job as well. So. But hopefully he'll be there. And. Yeah. So the ball is. You wear costume. It's Austin. That was the point, right?
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Yeah.
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Back in the day, when I was planning this, I was like, yeah, and then we'll have the awards ceremony at the end. And my friends were like, it's Austin. Nobody's going to wear a tuxedo. And so we just kind of leaned into that and said, okay, let's just go crazy. And it's amazing, you know, if you look. I mean, Comic Con, all the Cons, they were started by Nerds be clear. When nerds dress up, they party. And so this is space nerds partying. But this year, we're raising funds for a charity that we're just starting. It's called Space for Ukraine. I have a deep, deep caring about Ukraine. I did a speaking tour in 2017 over there and all over the place, and I met with a lot of the young techies, and I'm sad to say, I'm sure some of them, you know, have been killed. Others of them are over there building drones and working on the technology. But Space for Ukraine is about the children of Ukraine, the idea of inspiring them, that, you know, the stars will come out tomorrow. Right. That rocketry clubs, stem, steam, education, robotics, all of these types of things. So we're gonna be kicking that off at the ball.
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That's awesome.
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And we've got an amazing musician, a guy named Deepak. Look him up. DP A K. He is incredible. Mary Liz Bender, who goes under the name ANU as a performer. She'll be working with us. It's just gonna be a great time. Every year, we get such rave reviews for the event.
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Yeah.
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And we bring in, like, Renaissance Fest people and all of that to walk around. We have a. There's a group called the 501st, which are people who dress up like Star wars and they go to hospital.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. They're amazing.
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Yes, they are.
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We have them every year. And, yeah, it's just a lot of fun. It's a way to recognize people. And I can say this. There are two other awards we're giving. One is the permission to dream, which is a line from my book. The idea of permission to dream is you give yourself permission to dream, and nobody else can take it away from you. And once you have permission to dream, then you can start focusing on your purpose in the universe. And that's core to Earthlight. And we can talk about that in a moment, but sure. Yes.
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Yep.
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Permission to Dream is going to a gentleman who actually carried a load of telescopes into Ukraine. And it's a great story because the kids reached out to him. He runs a group called Astronomy, or was one of the leaders of a group called Astronomy for Equity. And the kids from Ukraine reached out and said, you know, we've got all these blackouts, and we can look at the stars, so bring us some telescopes. And he did. Wow.
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Yeah.
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It's a beautiful story.
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That's wonderful. Yeah.
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Yeah. And then we're giving an award called the Lone Star Award. It's a little more local to a guy named Dr. Bonin who's in the legislature. He's the one who led the push for the Texas Space Commission to be.
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Created, which has been huge. Yeah. Yep.
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And I started pushing for that in 2011, so I'm so thrilled to see that happening. And yeah, we're just excited about that. Yeah, if you're a student, you can get in for 50 bucks a day with your ID and yeah, I'm just really pumped about it, you know.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah, I'm actually putting on a good face because we're two weeks ahead and this is the time of year where I go, I'm never going to do this again.
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I, I was going to say, I, I have this knack of talking to people within weeks of their major massive event happening and I'm always like, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You must be losing your mind right now.
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Oh yeah, completely.
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We'll be right back.
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Completely I'm, you know, I'm kind of known for being a little bit blunt and honest about things and I'll tell you it's crazy time but, but you know, and it's funny because you build up for months for Basically three days. And. And yet it's so rewarding. It's so incredible. And we've been doing this a few years now. We started in 2015, we took a few years out for the Plague.
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Yeah.
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But I will tell you this. When somebody comes up to me and says, hey, I won a business plan competition at your event and now we're in our third round of fundraising, or somebody says something you said on stage changed my career or my life, then it's all worth it. You know, I was telling our speakers just the other day, I said, look, you guys are amazing speakers because we have some of the best speakers on any space stage. Because I'm picking them on purpose because they're great.
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Yeah. These are people that you know and you've, you've accum. You've. You've got an incredible community that you've grown. I mean, that's truly. Yeah, yeah, yep.
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A lot of new rising talent. And that's the great thing, because it is curated, it is under our control very closely. And almost all the talks are TED talk links. We have two kinds of talks. StarTalks, space technology, art and research, which is basically me not licensing ted. And then we have enterprise updates, which are business plan. So we have 13 or 14 startup companies that are going to be sprinkled among the other speakers. And rather than kind of putting them in a business plan competition ghetto, we're putting them all through the event. Right.
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I like that. I'm sure they like that too, because then they get a nice cross pollination effect of all the different attendees who are gathering at this incredible event. Because, I mean, listening to you describe it, I've been trying to refrain from boxing it in and making comparisons like the inevitable. It's in Austin. I'm gonna compare it to south by, which it's not. Or, you know, it sounds a little bit like Burning Manny. It's none of those things. It's its own thing entirely. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of like Burning Ethos and like the really cool cross. Yeah, I really. I mean, I have many friends who are burners. So I'm hearing you describe this and I'm like, this sounds awesome.
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Somebody once described it as Burning man on a rocket ship.
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Love that.
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It's that kind of countercultural blend of throwing all these people together. Right. Left, up, down, and, you know, and again, the talks, I mean, you know, we're going to have somebody talking about dark matter in the universe. We're going to have one of my trans friends talking about Exclusion that, you know, when somebody's in a spacesuit, you can't tell who they are. Right. And we need everybody to be able to go. But then again, we have Space Force. We have all of these things. One of my favorite talks I'm looking forward to. It's a friend of mine, Guillermo Sonloin, one of the early space investors. He was also, interestingly, one of the founders of the company that built the Titan submarine. Um, but he left. He left. But he has a good. He has a book out. But he's also the leader of a group called. I think it's like the Venus Society or something like that. And he's going to be talking about the cloud cities of Venus, which I did not know. I did not know that building cities in the skies of Venus was a thing. And it is. And it turns out that there's all these arguments for it. And, you know, Venus has about the same gravity as the Earth, so you could come back to the Earth seamlessly, which you can't do from the Moon and Mars. He pointed out. I don't want to go off into too much detail, but he did point out.
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I'm kind of fascinated by the pitch, though. So I'm in. I'm in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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He pointed out that if you built a glass bubble the size of Super Bowl Stadium and put everything in there, buildings, everything else, that you would need pressurized it under one Earth atmosphere.
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Yep.
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That the density of the Venusian atmosphere is so high that that bubble would float in the sky of Venus. Right. So you could literally go full Lando Calrissian here.
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Okay.
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That's a very interesting thought experiment. I mean, I've never heard that. That is interesting. I will be chewing on that for some time.
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Yeah, that's what I did. I've got to talk to a couple of my physicist friends and stuff to make sure his numbers are right. But he's a pretty credible dude, and it kind of makes sense, actually. And then somebody says, well, why would you want to live in the clouds of Venus? And I actually talk about this in my book. People live everywhere, and people want to live everywhere. People. You know, I think in my book, I talk about the fact that if you ask somebody who lives in the Sahara about life in Manhattan, they would be like, who the hell would want to live in these concrete canyons? And so close to everybody. You know, human beings just go everywhere. And, you know, that's. I celebrate that. So, Venus, let's go. Yo. I'm in.
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I wanted to make sure to ask you about Earthlight. You did mention it also. And I wanted to ask you to tell me a bit about the Earthlight foundation and its mission, because it's really. I was reading about it at the footer of the event website and it's really fascinating and I wanted to give you an opportunity to tell me about that a little bit.
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I was an employee of a gentleman called Gerard K. O', Neill, who is the father of everything that you're seeing right now, directly or indirectly in terms of humanity breaking out into the solar system. Everything you see comes can be tracked Back to Jerry O' Neill and the Space Studies Institute in the 70s and 80s. And his premise was basically that humanity and life should expand beyond the Earth. And I got hooked on it. My little buddy Peter Diamandis got hooked on it. There was this guy in Florida who had a book club named Jeff Bezos. And so this little guy with this book club, Jeff Bezos, got hooked on it, right? And we are all believers in this concept. Elon came at everything from a slightly different angle. But if it hadn't been for a group called the Space Frontier foundation, which was, I co founded and we were pure o', Neill, we come from that. That world. We protected his budget. There would be no SpaceX without space frontier. So it really does all kind of go back to Jerry at the end. We used to call ourselves Jerry's Kids. We were like the misfit toys, right? We all share this belief and this passion, and we have all branched out and had a huge effect over time on the movement. And so Earthlight now is me swinging back around after a lot of activism. Different businesses, different projects that succeeded, different projects that failed, and looking at the core assumptions, the core drivers in our heart as to why we do this thing. Earthlight has what we call the principles of purpose. Principle number one is to protect and expand the domain of life. In other words, the mother world is precious. We don't want to just save the Earth, though. We want to carry her seeds to places that are now dead. We want to carry life out there because we believe life is sacred. By the way, if there are other species out there carrying life out from their planets, we're on the same team. We love it all. If we run into life, we go around it. So that's number one. Number two is to honor and evolve human civilization. We honor everybody. We honor wherever you came from, whatever your beliefs, whoever you are, you got to this point with us. And by honoring you, we are asserting that we're not Going to make these mistakes again. We're not going to take a place from somebody. We are not going to conquer other people. Okay, maybe the little moon people need to be conquered, but other than the little moon people. I'm kidding. We're not conquering anybody. We love everybody.
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Wait, so you've heard about the moon people super base?
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Yeah, yeah, you heard the Sprays and the Reptilians and they're going at it and. No, whatever. No, seriously. We want humanity to rise together and to learn from the mistakes we've made and get it right this time. And when we talk about evolving humanity, that is both culturally. There's one place in the solar system right now where Russians and Americans love each other, and it's a space station. And I've talked to them. When they come down, they love each other, they care about each other, they're family. And then also physical evolution. I believe humanity will branch. I believe there'll be Homo spatialis, Homo marsialis, Homo linaris, on and on as we go out into the universe and including the variations of digital humans, let's call them, you know, the AI, Si, silicon intelligence, whatever. We're going to go out there together on this grand mission of expanding life. And then there's the third principle, and that is to. And this is the fun one, to explore and experience everything in the universe without sensing beings, without beings that can interpret, enjoy, taste, touch, feel, interact with the physicality of the universe. There is no universe. It's dead. It doesn't exist without beings that can call it into existence by saying it exists. And so it's our job, and the job of any other sentient beings, wherever they are in the universe, to get out there and call it to life by experiencing it. And yes, you can. Under each one of these principles, you could go one layer deeper and say, oh, that one means get off the freaking couch. Right? Right. Go down the street, say hello to somebody, hug a tree, look at a star. You know, these kinds of things. It's all about waking humanity up. We're all walking around with our heads bowed down to this little rectangular machine that we pray to and, and rules our lives. It's time for us to sort of put that thing down and look up, you know, it's time for us to. To raise ourselves up to, to become what is possible. And I do believe, I'm a huge optimist about humanity, that as we go out there, as we have done almost every time we have taken a great leap, we get a little bit better. You know we're basically apes with rockets right now, but I think we can get better.
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That's T minus Deep Space Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Or you can send an email to space2k.com we're proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how@n2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Peter Kilkenny as our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.
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