Dennis Tito

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Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

On the Russian side (left) can be seen Alexander Derechin, Victor Legostaev, Yuri Semyonov, a translator, and Valery Ryumin. On the American side are Jeffrey Manber, Gus Gardellini, and Walt Anderson. Not seen are John Jacobson and RickTumlinson. Jacobson/Gardellini. 15. Dennis Tito (left) with crewmates Talgat Musabayev (center) and Yuri Baturin (right) prior to launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 28 April 2oo1. Courtesy of Space Adventures, Ltd. i6. Every private-paying space tourist to date from Dennis Tito to Guy La Liberte has launched on a Soyuz rocket. The same pad used for Yuri Gagarin in i96i is still in use today to launch crews to the International Space Station. Courtesy of Space Adventures, Ltd. 17.

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STS 51-D payload specialists 9. Bill Nelson preparing to eat a freshly peeled grapefruit to. The Soyuz TM-zo space crew it. Helen Sharman during a medical examination 12. Alexei Leonov seeing off the Soyuz TM-za crew 13. Walt Anderson standing in front of a Soyuz capsule 14. Negotiating the MirCorp lease 15. Dennis Tito, Talgat Musabayev, and Yuri Baturin, z8 April zoos 16. Soyuz rocket 17. Anousheh Ansari 18. Eric Anderson and Richard Garriott 19. Gary Hudson next to Rotary Rocket's Roton ATv zo. Roton ATV on display zi. Jeff Greason in front of xcOR's Ez-Rocket vehicle zz. Rick Searfoss in front of the Ez-Rocket 23.

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Completely financed by MirCorp, a Soyuz spacecraft carried cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Alexander Kaleri to Mir to bring it out of its hibernation and prepare it for human occupancy. Ironically, the piece of the business plan that the press found most laughable was the piece that fell into place most quickly. When Rick Tumlinson spoke at a space tourism conference about MirCorp, a former NASA scientist turned financial consultant named Dennis Tito happened to be in the audience. During the Apollo era, Tito had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory plotting rocket trajectories. He parted company with NASA during its massive cutbacks in the early 1970s and went on to study finance at the University of California, Los Angeles. Forming the investment firm Wilshire Associates, Tito attacked the stock market as though it were a rocket trajectory, using computer modeling and mathematical analysis.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

More recently, Dutchmen Bas Lansdorp and Arno Wielders formed the nonprofit Mars One to launch one-way trips to the Red Planet, which they say are scheduled to land in 2025 (after previously landing cargo craft, habitats, and rovers). It plans to pay for the venture by selling broadcast rights. However, the group not only doesn’t have a rocket or space-craft that will get it there, it has only recently signed a contract with Lockheed Martin to study the feasibility of creating such things. Then there is Dennis Tito, the first private citizen to buy his way into space by paying the Russians a reported $20 million. His nonprofit organization, Inspiration Mars, optimistically plans to send a small spacecraft—perhaps the Crew Dragon spacecraft under development by SpaceX for manned flights to the International Space Station—to Mars with a married couple aboard in 2021.

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SpaceX designed the Dragon spacecraft for delivering crew and cargo to Earth orbit. CEO Elon Musk has a far larger and more complex spacecraft in mind for a Mars journey. The Crew Dragon, SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft, can carry seven astronauts. It is targeted to launch by 2017 under NASA’s Commercial Crew program. Inspiration Mars, a nonprofit founded by Dennis Tito, has proposed using the Crew Dragon spacecraft for a 580-day husband and wife flyby of Mars in 2021. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (pictured) and Dragon spacecraft completed six cargo trips to and from the International Space Station within the past three years. Currently in development, the Falcon Heavy rocket will be the most powerful rocket in operation and will be capable of launching manned flights to the moon and even Mars.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

He’d had a quick conference call the week before with Elon and Adeo, thought they said all the right things, and took Elon’s accent to be British. Adeo made Peter laugh knowingly when he said, “I think every geek is a bit of a space buff.” Peter talked about Blastoff, the XPRIZE, ZERO-G, and Space Adventures, his company with Eric Anderson, which had brokered the final part of the deal to send the world’s first space tourist, Dennis Tito, to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for $20 million. Peter talked briefly about how NASA had tried to stop Tito from flying, but Tito had launched on April 28 and landed safely in Kazakhstan on May 6. It was big news in space circles that Tito, an American, had to fly with Russian cosmonauts and was not allowed on the U.S. side of the space station.

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Amir felt guilty for having given up on his space dream so easily compared with Peter. He and Anousheh both grew up watching Star Trek in Iran and dreaming of interplanetary travel. But no one from Iran had ever flown in space. NASA was not taking paying customers up there. There had been only two tourists—Dennis Tito and South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth—and they’d forked over tens of millions of dollars for rides into orbit aboard Russian launchers. Anousheh listened to Peter in that first meeting and tried not to smile. She had never met anyone with Peter’s passion and commitment. With this guy, if you close one door, he’s going to open another, she thought.

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Erik Lindbergh was nearby, along with the Ansari family, and Pete Worden, now brigadier general in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s center for space transformation. A few seats away in the crowd was millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, whose GlobalFlyer was being built by Burt to try to set a speed record for an around-the-world solo flight. Also present was space tourist Dennis Tito, and Kevin Petersen, head of NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. Buzz Aldrin was in the front row. Burt was introduced by Academy Award–winning actor and good friend Cliff Robertson. Suffering from a terrible cold and a hoarse voice, Burt began, “This is not just the development of another research aircraft.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

These “citizen astronauts” were somehow persuaded to pay amounts that started at $20 million a trip, which escalated to $25 million, $35 million, $40 million and then over $50 million. Eric’s company is even offering a trip around the Moon for over $100 million. At the start Eric went to scientists and financial fund manager Dennis Tito to get funding to launch his business. Tito told Eric: “I really don’t want to finance your company, but I will pay to fly into space.” Eric negotiated with the Russians and came back and said that for $20 million he could fly up and stay on the International Space Station. Dennis Tito agreed to the deal. This was perhaps the second great boost to New Space activities comparable in importance to the XPrize competition. Thus Space Adventures was launched, and the idea of “space tourism ” went from dream to reality.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

In 1999, MirCorp was formed to use the aging Russian space station for tourism. It was funded mostly by American entrepreneurs. MirCorp partnered with a Russian launch company to boost Mir into a higher orbit and it signed an agreement with NBC and Mark Burnett, who had recently produced the Survivor TV series. American engineer and millionaire Dennis Tito was announced as the first self-funded space tourist. NBC even ran ads for its upcoming Destination Mir reality TV show. But trouble was brewing. NASA officials and members of Congress heavily criticized MirCorp for interfering with international space treaties and for trivializing space exploration.

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At Mars, we’ve been given a wonderful set of moons which can act as offshore worlds from which crews can robotically preposition hardware and establish radiation shielding on the Martian surface to begin sustaining increasing numbers of people.”18 Two new ventures are trying to put Mars within reach without using any government resources. Inspiration Mars is the brainchild of Dennis Tito, the engineer-turned-tycoon who was the world’s first space tourist in 2001. Tito plans to keep costs down by not landing. His billion-dollar flyby plans to use an upgraded version of the SpaceX Dragon capsule. With a cleverly designed trajectory, he can get there with a single burn of the engine.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

* * * FOLLOWING THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union, Russia had devolved into a nuclear-armed pawn shop, with anything you desired—minerals, guns, people—available for the right price. Even a seat on a rocket. In 1990, a Japanese TV station paid an estimated $12 million to send one of its reporters into orbit to tape broadcasts and make a documentary about the rain forest. The reporter conducted experiments on Japanese tree frogs. Others went, too, including Dennis Tito, an L.A.-based investment manager who, in 2001, paid the Russians $20 million for a ride to the International Space Station. Tito, and others who followed, got the full experience—feeling the fuel slosh in the tank during liftoff; the “moments of terror” mixed with “pure joy” that followed; the lonely sound of ticking alarm clocks that filled the cabin after burnout, “like waking up inside the workshop of an old Swiss clockmaker”; the sight of a purple-hued galactic sunset reflecting off the trusses of the space station.

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they billed the Japanese TV station: Thomas Ginsburg, “Japanese Company Critical of Soviet Business Practices,” Associated Press, December 8, 1990. Tito inherited his ticket from: Fisher, “Very Stunning, Very Space, and Very Cool.” NASA officials barred him: Peter Jennings, “NASA and Russia Feud over Millionaire Dennis Tito Going Along for Ride to International Space Station,” World News Tonight transcript, March 20, 2001. later threatened to bill him … listening to opera on his headphones: Todd Venezia, “NASA to Space Tourist: You Owe Us,” New York Post, May 6, 2001. “I just came back from paradise”: Marcus Warren, “Trip Was Out of This World, Says First Space Tourist,” Telegraph (UK), May 7, 2001.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, follow your passion, George Santayana, Lao Tzu, large denomination, personalized medicine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the map is not the territory

As a result, the “final act” of adventure has been declared with each new global discovery or development over the last two centuries, from the exploration of inner Africa to Hillary and Norgay’s ascent of Everest. In recent years, the very notion of adventure travel has sometimes been written off as a self-deluded farce. In 2001, when millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million to travel into space with Russian cosmonauts, pundits groaned in disdain. “A tourist in space illustrates an age in which there are very few places left where adventure travel can’t be found,” wrote Boston Globe editor H. D. S. Greenway. “No remote village in the Himalayas or jungle clearing in Borneo is beyond tourism’s reach.”

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

Johnson himself would have stood and cheered, he quotes a few obliquely instructive lines from Nirvana’s “In Bloom” at the bemused throng. He talks for a while about the Earth being at the centre of an expanding bubble of life and the challenge of redefining the boundaries between public and private endeavour in this new realm. Then he slickly hands over to a panel of experts, the first of whom is Dennis Tito, the mathematician who traded NASA for Wall Street, then chose to spend some of the millions his skills there brought him on becoming the first space tourist. Against NASA’s wishes, he went up with the Russians and stayed at the International Space Station for a fee that the papers reported as $20 million, but was in fact more like $12.5 million.

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There are still a lot of platitudes and things I’ve heard before, like, “I sort of look upon it [the Moon] as an old friend,” and, asked about the view of Earth, “It’s an oasis, very, very precious, and we’ve got to take care of it … we’re doing a lousy job …” and, regarding millionaire space tourists like Dennis Tito, “I think people who have that much money should sponsor a fund to send an artist or a poet up there.” Someone raises a hand and says: “My five-year-old son would like to know what’s it like to walk on the Moon?” To which Scott offers a prosaic description of its pristine appearance which will have had as much purchase on a five-year-old’s imagination as a command to tidy his bedroom.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

These “beta books” were forerunners of the enhanced “beta” assessments that Barr Rosenberg at Berkeley would develop with such success a few years later. O’Brien unwisely sold the business to a partner: Clowes, The Money Flood, p. 111. The partner was his former Oliphant employee Dennis Tito, whose previous employers included the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2001, Tito became the first private citizen to “buy a ticket” to outer space, paying $20 million to travel on a Russian spacecraft to the International Space Station. See online Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Dennis Tito. he was routinely scouting for new ideas: Leland–O’Brien interview 2014. Best of all, he was a gifted communicator: “Some people have said that he is the ultimate salesman,” one observer noted.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

The exploitation of space need not be of this nature; it may need some public regulation, but the impetus can be private or corporate. There are plans for week-long trips round the far side of the Moon—voyaging farther from Earth than anyone has gone before (but avoiding the greater challenge of a Moon landing and blast-off). A ticket has been sold (I’m told) for the second such flight but not the first. And Dennis Tito, an entrepreneur and former astronaut, has proposed, when a new heavy-lift launcher is available, to send people to Mars and back—without landing. This would require five hundred days in isolated confinement. The ideal crew would be a stable middle-aged couple—old enough to not be bothered about the high dose of radiation accumulated on the trip.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

As such, Alt.Space companies are competing directly with NASA and other national or international government space organizations. Who, just a few decades ago, would have thought that billionaires would one day be in a race to invade space? The first private passenger on board a rocket (a space tourist) was Dennis Tito, who paid around $10–20 million for a return ticket to the International Space Station via the Russian Space Agency. Others who’ve taken the trip on a Russian Soyuz rocket include Mark Shuttleworth, Anousheh Ansari, Charles Simonyi and Guy Laliberté. As you can see, space tourism is a bit of a man thing, but this may change.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

Although I’d hate to think of her shivering in the landing craft when the water teat runs dry, looking at the stars and thinking, ‘The Cheryl Cole God must be angry with me.’ Scientists will first have to perfect turning urine into water. Tricky, though I’ve got away with passing it off as whisky when refilling a hotel minibar. The man behind the Mars space programme is Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million to the Russians in 2001 to be sent into space and who to this day holds the record for the longest period anyone’s spent being jiggled about in a blacked-out caravan in the car park of a Moscow Halfords. There’s also talk that the European Space Agency is to mount a €1 billion mission to Jupiter.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In fact, in April 2012 — and with backing from the likes of Google cofounder Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson — Peter Diamandis, creator of the XPRIZE, alongside Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures Ltd. (the private space tourism company that flew Stephen Hawking into zero-G and sent billionaire Dennis Tito to the International Space Station), announced Planetary Resources Inc. (PRI), a newly formed asteroid mining company. This time, it was Comedy Central host Jon Stewart who summed things up nicely: “Space pioneers going to mine motherfucking asteroids for precious materials! BOOM! BOOM! YES! Stu-Beef is all in.

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

Branson has spoken of his desire and determination to ‘[be] a part of starting a population on Mars’ within his lifetime, but has no firm plans. A few years ago two different private agencies, Mars One and the Inspiration Mars Foundation, prominently challenged NASA’s aim of sending humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, proclaiming they could do it far more quickly. The Inspiration Mars Foundation was founded by entrepreneur Dennis Tito in 2013. It was immediately viewed as overambitious; the organisation was aiming for a manned mission to Mars in 2018, but no landing – a fly-by. While this would still be difficult, with no landing, rendezvous, docking or other complex manoeuvres it was potentially feasible on such a short timescale.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

A year later it was Helen’s turn to retire. She was ready to go; there were no regrets. The room swelled as engineers from decades of JPL’s history, even some from the 1950s, came to share their memories in tribute. Everyone loved Helen. She smiled at the crowd of familiar faces and warmly embraced Dennis Tito, a former engineer at JPL turned billionaire space tourist, who had come to celebrate his favorite human computer. In the heat of the late afternoon they talked about old times, no trace of tears on their cheeks, since they knew that the friendships they formed would long outlive their careers in the lab.

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Winters Keegan

call centre, Colonization of Mars, company town, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, drop ship, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the payments system

But by the time Cameron returned to the United States, the Mir space station was being shut down due to lack of funding. Energya called Cameron and proposed that he go to the International Space Station instead, which sounded great to him but meant involving NASA, a cautious bureaucracy that had just been embarrassed by the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, arriving on a Russian ship without NASA’s blessing. “I said that I didn’t just want to be a space tourist,” Cameron recalls. “I wanted to stay on the ISS for a month and make a 3-D film about living and working in space.” Cameron’s filming mission was gaining momentum. He got commitments for nearly $30 million in funding, but he needed more, for insurance.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

The link offers photos of, among other things, a Hummer in a standoff against a buffalo, another proudly knocking aside trees as it plows up an incline in a forest, and a third nearly submerged in a pretty mountain stream. Now what will Ford counter with, an even bigger SUV called the Extinction? WEIGHTLESS TOURISM Hummers on the streets of Manhattan. You might call them Saddam’s revenge. Or Ho-Hummers, if you compare them with yet another way to drop big bucks. In 2001, American Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist, for only $20 million. The next year, South African Mark Shuttleworth followed, for the same price.6 In June 2004 SpaceShipOne took off on its first flight, rising sixty-two miles above Earth and entering officially into space.7 Soon, seats will be available for as little as $100,000.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Indeed, if there is a practical flaw in Musk's personality, I would say that it is his difficulty in sharing credit with others. That is why the public has very little knowledge of the rest of the SpaceX team. This could cost him some of his best talent in the end. It also makes it difficult for him to join forces with others—for example, when, in 2013, billionaire Dennis Tito started his Inspiration Mars effort to launch a two-person Mars flyby mission, Musk gave him the cold shoulder.6 But I don't think his aloofness is due to egomania. Rather, I think that what fundamentally drives Musk is a desire for what the ancient Greeks called kleos—eternal glory for doing great deeds.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

After I had done a stint at a French business school, the spectacular story of MirCorp caught my interest. MirCorp was the company that tried to turn the Russian MIR space station into the first commercial orbital hotel. (In the end the hotel bit didn’t work out, but MirCorp did deliver the world’s first space tourist – Dennis Tito – to the International Space Station in 2001.) I hunted down the MirCorp founders, and cornered them at a conference in Amsterdam. A couple of weeks later I had a job. I used my tried and tested strategy: try me out for free (I offered to make them the subject of my business-school research thesis) and, if it doesn’t work out, don’t pay me.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

He then founded a small brokerage firm, with offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, that advised pension funds on how to pick money managers and allocate their investments. O’Brien Associates, as it was called, also launched its own all-market stock index, the O’Brien 5,000. In 1971, O’Brien became worried that his little firm would not survive the looming deregulation of brokerage commissions. He sold out to his more optimistic number two, Dennis Tito, and took a job with a larger brokerage, A. G. Becker of Chicago, that did performance measurement for money managers. It was a bad decision. The old firm thrived as Wilshire Associates, with Tito making enough money to pay his way into orbit years later as the first-ever space tourist. The O’Brien 5,000 became the Wilshire 5,000.