Peter Harry Diamandis '83, SM '88
Building a Private Path to the Space Frontier
With skill, charm and relentless energy, space evangelist and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis '83, SM '88 drags "can't-be-done" projects across the finish line on a regular basis.
On October 4, 2004, millions of people watched SpaceShipOne, the first private manned spacecraft reach the border of space twice in two weeks. Burt Rutan collected the $10 million Ansari X Prize for winning this space-flight competition.
The X Prize was the brainchild of Diamandis and it's very personal. "Space is my passion. Since I was nine, everything in my life has been about my going to space one day," he explains. "I spent a decade of my life at MIT and Harvard earning medical and engineering degrees in order to become an astronaut." After a candid conversation with astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, he realized that he would not make a good government astronaut.
So Plan B meant finding a private sector route to space. To that end, Diamandis built companies and organizations to create the technology, the marketplace and the leadership required to irreversibly pry open the space frontier and lower the cost to get there.
"The X Prize lit a fuse," says Diamandis, "Twenty-six teams from seven nations generated over $50 million of investment." Starting in fall 2006, an annual X Prize Cup and a 10-day Personal Spaceflight Exposition will be held annually in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Competitive races with cash prizes will showcase Reusable Launch Vehicles designed to carry the paying public into space.
Prizes played a huge role in early aviation's development and are a big part of the Diamandis formula. "A prize gives people permission to take risks," he says. "A prize is typically not intended for incumbent players. They know it can't be done."
Diamandis has himself won notable awards, including the first-ever $500,000 Heinlein Prize in 2006, given for practical contributions to the commercialization of space, a 2006 Lindbergh Award, and a 2006 WIRED magazine Rave Award.
Diamandis is also the Chairman of Zero-Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company that offers weightless parabolic flights in FAA-certified Boeing 727-200 aircraft ($3750 per seat).
In 1987, Diamandis co-founded the International Space University, now based on a $30 million campus in Strasbourg, France. Forbes magazine dubbed ISU's highly-regarded 2,200 alums from 88 countries as "The Space Mafia."
As a freshman at MIT, Diamandis founded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) in 1980 and had 100 chapters in a dozen countries within two years. "I organized SEDS in my fraternity living room (Theta Delta Chi)," he recalls, "That experience was my de facto MBA.
"My decade at MIT was one of the most exciting and fun times of my life," Diamandis concludes. "I launched SEDS and the International Space University there. Paul Gray's '54, SM '55, ScD '60 encouragement and advice and MIT's practical support of ISU were invaluable. MIT gave me a lifelong network of friends and colleagues. It's a dream of mine to come back and teach someday. I love the Institute."
(First published in Technology Review, July 2005)
