The 70th International Astronautical Congress met in Washington, DC, October 21 to 25, 2019. I booked the flight at the last minute.
A month earlier I had settled on a name for the company. Three months later I would start the M.S. in Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. In between was the largest space conference in the world, in a year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11, and I had no real reason to be there and no idea what I was doing when I arrived.
I went anyway. Sometimes you just have to go.
I could afford the flight and the conference ticket, not a hotel. My friend Maxwell Sissman let me stay at his house and picked me up from the airport. Without him I do not go.
What was in the room
Jeff Bezos spoke. Buzz Aldrin was there. I met Bill Nye. I sat in on the IAF Committee on Near Earth Objects and listened to the people who actually track the rocks argue about how to track them better.
At an AIAA panel introducing ASCEND, with Tory Bruno of United Launch Alliance among the panelists, I stood up with the microphone and said I wanted to start an asteroid mining company, and asked what someone in my position could do to get funded.
I do not remember the answer as well as I remember asking. What mattered was saying it out loud, in that room, to those people, before I had anything to show.
I also met Jim Krevela, founder of OffWorld, for the first time. Six years later we would be photographed together again at the Space Resources Roundtable that iGO sponsored.
Photographs
