The twenty-second Space Resources Roundtable met at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, in June 2022. It was the first SRR I attended.
SRR had not met in person since 2019, so XXII was the field coming back together. I was a graduate student then, months from finishing my M.S. in Space Resources, with a company that existed as a conviction and not much else. I still did not know how any of this would actually get done. What I knew was that the room was full of people who had been working on it for twenty years, and that I should be in it.
Brad Blair
Among them was Brad Blair. Brad was a general partner at NewSpace Analytics, held three degrees from Mines in engineering geology, mining engineering, and mineral economics, and had spent nearly thirty years arguing that space resources had to make commercial sense or they would not happen. He built the first commercial lunar resource business model for NASA’s Exploration Team in 2002.
We met over an argument. Brad gave a presentation, and during the questions the two of us got into a short, friendly disagreement about space-based solar power. It was the subject of the independent study I was finishing to graduate that December, so neither of us was going to let it go quickly. Brad’s position was not that it could not be done. It was that it had better be done safely, and without giving anyone a reason to fight over it. That was how he thought about all of it: the engineering was the easy part, and the hard part was making sure the thing you built did more good than harm.
We talked for a long time after the session ended, about everything, and agreed to work together. These are the photographs from that afternoon.
Brad died of a heart attack on June 25, 2022, weeks after this meeting. We never got the chance to work together. He left a wife and children, and a field that is smaller without him.
One afternoon of conversation changed how I think about this work. I came into that room certain that space resources mattered. I left understanding that being right about the resource is the easy half, and that the harder half is the one Brad spent thirty years on: making the economics real, and making sure what gets built off Earth is worth having built. Most of what iGO insists on now traces back to that conversation.
Rest in peace, Brad.
Photographs
