Note: This is cross-posted with the Cosmo.Sphere blog at the Houston Chronicle, where I am also a contributing author.

The Advanced Planning Office at Johnson Space Center has recently started a series of presentations on-site for the JSC community to help NASA civil servants and contractors learn about other perspectives.

I had the privilege and honor of listening to Dr. Peter Diamandis - founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation - talk about how he got the Ansari X Prize going in the first place, what he’s up to now, and his hopes for the future.  I had heard before that his enthusiasm for spaceflight is unbridled and, for lack of a better word, infectious when I saw Burt Rutan give the Lindbergh Lecture at the National Air & Space Museum in 2005.  Dr. Diamandis did not disappoint.

For our readers that aren’t familiar with him, Peter Diamandis has almost single-handedly sparked the rush in private spaceflight and rocketry that we see today.  He has an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from MIT and a medical degree from Harvard.  Diamandis is a co-founder of Space Adventures, which negotiated the first space tourist flight and will soon be sending the first second-generation traveler into space.  He is also (among his many commercial accomplishments) one of the founders of the International Space University and Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

To say that human exploration of space is his passion is an understatement.  His first words to the group assembled in the Building 30 auditorium were that his life’s mission is to help open up humanity’s path to the solar system.  I truly felt that I was in the presence of a kindred spirit, as I also believe that humanity’s future is in the settlement and eventual departure from these eight planets.

Everything began when Diamandis read about the aviation prizes that characterized the rapid advancements in civil aviation during Lindbergh’s era.  Nearly $400,000 was spent in 1926-1927 to try to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize that launched Lindbergh into history.  Diamandis realized that a similar revolution could occur in private spaceflight by setting achievable goals with enough of a payoff at the back end to get entrepreneurs to take a look.  (By comparison, the winners of the Ansari X Prize spent about $26 million on a $10 million prize.)

Dr. Diamandis pointed out that it is the entrepreneur who will ask “how do we rethink how we do things?”  It is the entrepreneur who will be willing to “take more risk to spend less cash.”  All this leads to “revolution through competition.”  In the case of the Ansari X Prise, it worked.  With backing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne made its second 100-km-altitude flight within two weeks on the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch.  I’ll note that SpaceShipOne now hangs next to the Spirit of St. Louis in the National Air & Space Museum.

Now, Diamandis is focused on three big ventures.  As CEO of the X Prize Foundation, he is intimately involved in the Google Lunar X Prize, the Archon X Prize for Genomics, and the Progressive Automotive X Prize.  The Google Lunar X Prize is one of the first “big” competitions to come out of the Foundation, both in its scope and its payoff.  The winners will use private funding to land a robot on the Moon that can travel 500 meters and return Hi-Def images and data back to Earth.  Bonuses will be awarded for additional accomplishments, and there’s even talk of somehow working that in with the Lunar Communications initiative I talked about in my last post.

After eleven years of tenacity to get FAA approval, Diamandis’ Zero Gravity Corporation is also a success.  It is a commercial parabolic flight services organization that fills the role once performed by the “Vomit Comet” at Ellington.  They have motion sickness down to 1-in-50 participants by limiting flights for air tourists to 15 parabolas and scaling from Martian to lunar to zero gravity (free fall) rather than hitting passengers with zero-g right away.  Today, Zero G begins their contract with NASA to do parabolic flights for microgravity research and personnel training out of Ellington Field.  I need to see how much a ride costs…

Diamandis also shared with us the pictures from when they took Sir Stephen Hawking on eight parabolas.  Despite the coronary they gave the FAA, Zero G made Hawking’s dream a reality.  Even with the ALS debilitating most of his body, the sheer joy of experiencing weightlessness was clear on Hawking’s face.  I completely understand why Diamandis wouldn’t take that experience back for anything.

Most of Diamandis’ efforts to date have been geared towards filling a need for the government by the private sector or overcoming technical barriers.  His third big project is aimed squarely at the entertainment market.  The Rocket Racing League intends to be a truly 21st centry sport.  Diamandis told us that it was borne out of his first trip to see a NASCAR race.  He said that he got bored pretty quickly and that he starts thinking about strapping rockets on things when he gets bored.  (Did I mention yet that I was in the presence of a kindred spirit?)

The Rocket Racing League will be like Star Wars pod racing crossed with NASCAR.  Teams will compete on virtual tracks in the sky that are displayed on monitors at the race, on the Internet, and at home on TV with real-time visualization.  Think like the first-down line on the TV in a football game.  Each rocket plane will have multiple on-board cameras that fans online can select from to choose their view.

The RRL also owns the aircraft company that builds the airframes for the racers.  That means enthusiasts will be able to buy pusher-prop versions of the rocket planes for personal use, much as NASCAR fans can buy commercial versions of the cars on the raceways.  The RRL also plans to take a lesson from other professional sports in promoting a series of video games where players will be able to compete against each other and emulations of the performance from the real pilots!

Diamandis pointed out that the real cost in rocketry is operations - not fuel or even manufacturing.  So, while the RRL is geared for fun, there will still be lessons in high-performance, high-speed rocketry operations that can be applied for space exploration.  We already have a parallel in all the safety features for our cars that were derived from NASCAR and Formula One.

The biggest thing that struck me in all of this talk about his space and rocketry ventures is how, ironically, down-to-earth Diamandis was.  He was engaging, he was enthusiastic, he was optimistic for the future.  He was also very cognizant of the balance between risk and reward and the perils of biting off more than you can chew.  Peter emphasized several times that you have to actually get out and do something and, then, build on that.  As much as we would like, we’re only human and we can’t do everything all at once. He mentioned that successful ventures meet at the “intersection of audacity and achievability.”

In the Q&A session after the presentation, Diamandis also discussed how his projects always have a back-end business model in mind.  The Ansari X Prize led to a nascent suborbital space tourism industry.  The Google X Prize could lead to private lunar exploration and support.  The RRL is explicitly an entertainment business. One of the biggest hurdles he has faced has been the regulatory agencies that often do not know how to handle new initiatives.  In the end, though, the X Prize brought down regulatory risk and opened a path for others to follow.

As I am a co-lead of the JSC team looking at breaking down barriers to inclusion and innovation at the center, I took the opportunity to ask Diamandis how he has dealt with that issue in his organizations.  He asked me how old I was and seemed pleased when I replied that I was 27.  Diamandis then reminded the group that the average engineer during the Apollo program was about the same age.  He said that the best thing any organization can do is leave the door open to new ideas and not get stuck in a ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ mindset.  Small, unconstrained groups can do amazing things when innovative thinking is allowed to flourish.

In terms of the implications for Johnson Space Center, I think this means that we need to come up with a mechanism for harnessing both innovative thinking and operational experience to give ownership of the mission across the generations.  I do believe the center is taking positive steps in that direction, though I also believe figuring out the best ways to make those connections will be one of the hardest things we do as a community.

As for me, I think I need to e-mail Dr. Diamandis and ask about that X Prize internship he mentioned… =)