X Prize Founder Peter Diamandis Has His Eyes on the Future

Photo: Nigel Parry

Peter Diamandis has a perspective that’s too expansive for a single planet. He built his first companies—12 of them—as social and technological thrusters designed to clear the way for human space colonies. Later, as founder of the X Prize Foundation and cofounder of Singularity University, he splashed down to focus on the most pressing problems here on Earth.


A child of the Apollo era, Diamandis grew up expecting the US government to colonize outer space. But decades of NASA timidity eventually convinced him that the only way to get off the planet was to build a private space industry. His breakthrough idea was to resurrect a brilliant notion from the early 20th century: Offer substantial cash prizes for achieving milestones of flight. Civilian aerospace would grow contest by contest, innovation by innovation.

It worked. The $10 million Ansari X Prize resulted in the first repeatable private flight to the edge of space and became the first in a slew of aerospace competitions. Diamandis then applied the same method to other issues like fuel efficiency, oil spill remediation, and health care costs. The upshot was a series of breakthroughs and a mini-boom in innovation-spurring competitions.

He soon realized that the same forces that enabled a small team of amateurs to make a lunar lander could empower cadres of bright, idealistic people to solve earthly problems. To that end, he founded Singularity University. Now in its fourth year, the 10-week summer school trains next-generation leaders in using fast-evolving technologies to address what he calls “humanity’s grand challenges.”

Oh, and then there’s his most recent undertaking: A company unveiled in April that’s devoted to mining platinum, water, and other extractables from asteroids that careen past Earth. The startup, Planetary Resources, has serious financing from Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as well as Ross Perot and former Microsoft software chief Charles Simonyi.

The technologies that power such ambitious dreams, as Diamandis writes in his book (coauthored with Steven Kotler) Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, are propelling us not only to the stars but, he fervently insists, toward an era of unprecedented prosperity.

Ted Greenwald: Have you always wanted to change the world?

Peter Diamandis: No. My first ambition was to get off the world. My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species. I believe we have a moral obligation to back up the biosphere, take it off-planet, and give ourselves the safety of ubiquity. Ultimately it’s what we do. We have the exploration gene.

Greenwald: What sparked your interest in space travel?

Diamandis: As a child, it was the Apollo program and the original Star Trek series on TV. A key memory: When I was 8 years old, I sat my parents down and gave them a lecture on the Apollo program. My dad gave me $5—the first money I ever earned in aerospace.

Greenwald: How did you end up studying medicine?

Diamandis: My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician. But I divided my life between premed and space cadet. In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn’t have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off! We had chapters at Princeton and Yale. Thirty years later, there are dozens of chapters around the world.

Greenwald: You didn’t just want to be a student of space, or even a teacher—you wanted to run the school.

Diamandis: I wanted to find like-minded people, and one way to do that was to create a university dedicated to the study of space. So while I was on leave from Harvard Medical School to do graduate work at MIT, I founded International Space University with two colleagues. In 1988 we held our first summer program at MIT for 104 graduate students from 21 countries. Today ISU is 25 years old, and we have 3,300 graduates and a beautiful $30 million campus in Strasbourg, France.

Greenwald: When did you shift to for-profit ventures?

Diamandis: I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher. We won a $100 million contract from the Defense Department, but we couldn’t finance the contract sufficiently. We ended up selling the company.

Greenwald: When did you give up on the government’s ability to open the space frontier?

Diamandis: I can pinpoint the moment. The 500th anniversary of Columbus was in 1992. The first Bush administration was supposed to start a massive effort to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. It fizzled. That’s when I got it: This was never going to happen. Any time a new Congress came in, it would cut NASA’s budget. Commercial industry was the only way to generate long-term funding for bold, risky projects. I thought, how can I create the economic engine that will open space regardless of the government’s ups and downs? That’s when I cofounded Zero Gravity, which let customers experience weightlessness on parabolic airplane flights.

Greenwald: How does experiencing weightlessness drive space exploration?

Diamandis: Two forces have opened most frontiers: tourism and resources. People go for the experience or for the gold, spices, and tobacco. I had tried to get on NASA’s zero-g plane and couldn’t. I thought there must be a market for this, so in May 1993 I partnered with NASA engineer Ray Cronise and Byron Lichtenberg, a friend who had flown two Space Shuttle missions, and we raised $500,000. We walked into Federal Aviation Administration’s office and pitched the idea. They said the regulations wouldn’t allow an airplane to do parabolic flight and with passengers whose seat belts were unstrapped. I said that’s bullshit. I proceeded on an 11-year effort to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration. We finally became operational in October 2004, and today we’ve flown 300 flights for 12,000 customers, most famously Stephen Hawking.

Countdown to Blastoff

Peter Diamandis has been pushing for the exploration of space since he was a college kid. Here’s a timeline of his achievements.—Bess Kalb


As a sophomore at MIT, forms Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, which now has dozens of chapters.


While working toward a graduate degree at MIT, founds International Space University, a summer program held on MIT’s campus for space-exploration-minded grad students. Today ISU has its own $30 million campus and more than 3,300 graduates.


Envisions a for-profit company, later named Zero Gravity, that would let customers experience moments of weightlessness on parabolic flights. Because of objections by the FAA, the first flight doesn’t occur until 2004.


Announces the X Prize, a $10 million challenge to build a craft that can carry three people to an altitude of 100 kilometers twice within two weeks.


Space Adventures, a company he cofounded in 1998, arranges for millionaire Dennis Tito’s flight to the International Space Station. “Space tourism” is born.


Awards the first X Prize to Scaled Composites for SpaceShipOne, which beat out 25 other projects.


With Google cofounder Larry Page, expands the X Prize Foundation beyond spaceflight competition to spur work on other global issues like clean energy, education, and health care.


Takes the X Prize ethos to academia and cofounds Singularity University, an intensive 10-week program in which students and faculty study emerging technologies to address “humanity’s grand challenges.”


Backed by an eccentric squadron of visionaries—Larry Page, James Cameron, and Ross Perot among them—founds Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company that aims to build low- cost spacecraft to harvest fuel and

Greenwald: You unstrapped Stephen Hawking’s seat belt in zero gravity?

Diamandis: He told me, “One of my dreams is to fly into space.” I said I couldn’t fly him into space, but I could fly him into zero gravity. On the spot he said yes. The next day I put out a press release announcing our intention to fly Stephen Hawking. I got two calls that day. One was from our aircraft partner, who said, “Are you crazy? We’re going to kill the guy!” The other was from the FAA saying, “You’re only licensed to fly able-bodied people.” I was like, fuck that. We’re going to give this world-famous expert in gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity! It took six months to line up the approvals.

Greenwald: How did you do that?

Diamandis: I got four physicians to write a letter to the FAA saying they considered Stephen Hawking able-bodied. I purchased a large medical malpractice insurance policy. We set up a fully staffed emergency room on the airplane, and we ran a comprehensive test the day before the flight. I also sold 30 seats in the back for people to watch; that raised nearly $150,000 for the X Prize Foundation and several disability-related charities.
“Stephen Hawking got to experience zero gravity. he had this shit-eating grin on his face.”

We took off. All the doctors and nurses were there, and all the people were watching from the back. Stephen did fantastic! We did a second, a third parabola—the doctors said he was doing great—we did a fourth, fifth, sixth. After that, one of his attendants said, “He wants you to flip him around.” So on the seventh and eighth parabolas, we spun him around! The photos from that flight are amazing. Hawking is only able to control a few muscles in his body, and he’s got this shit-eating grin on his face.

Greenwald: Where did the idea of incentive prizes come from?

Diamandis: It came from Charles Lindbergh’s memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis. In 1919 a hotel owner named Raymond Orteig put up a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 to try to win. Lindbergh had the least experience. He was called the flying fool. But he won, and within three years there was a 30-fold increase in passenger air traffic. Aviation didn’t get easier, but his flight changed people’s belief in what was possible. I thought, this is how I’m going to get my butt into space! How many things don’t happen because people don’t believe they can? Getting the public to change its beliefs is the underpinning of an X Prize: demonstration leading to paradigm change.

Greenwald: How did you settle on suborbital flight as the benchmark for the first X Prize?

Diamandis: When I read Lindbergh’s book in December 1994, the cost of going into space had not changed in 30 years. There was no commercial incentive to reduce it. By the time I finished the book, I had written in the margins “X prize”—X was the person who would give the money—and “suborbital flight.” I pitched the idea to a few people who thought I was crazy, which was great encouragement. It took five more years to find the Ansari family, who funded the purse. We named it the Ansari X Prize in their honor, and the X stuck around. Scaled Composites won it with SpaceShipOne in October 2004.

Greenwald: It sounds like being told no only energizes you.

Diamandis: I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see. Years ago I first saw a poster of Murphy’s law: If anything can go wrong, it will. That’s ridiculous. So I wrote a set of alternatives. I call them Peter’s laws: If anything can go wrong, fix it. “No” means begin again one level higher. Do it by the book, but be the author.

Greenwald: When did you realize that the X Prize could be a series of challenges that address a variety of other problems?

Diamandis: I saw that it was an incredibly powerful engine for innovation. The $10 million Ansari X Prize drove $100 million in investment by the competitors. It resulted in 26 designs from seven companies.SpaceShipOne was inducted into the Smithsonian, and it’s hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, right above Apollo 11, right next to Spirit of St. Louis.

At that point, we had to decide: Do we declare success and shut down because we’re out of money, or do we turn what we’ve learned into a platform for creating more breakthroughs? I was invited to speak at Google, and afterward a guy in a backpack and T-shirt walked up and said, “I’m Larry Page. Let’s have lunch.” He funded the foundation to look at other areas, and the scope of the X Prize was broadened to address more of humanity’s grand challenges in exploration, including space and oceans, life sciences, education, global development, energy, and the environment.

Greenwald: What contests do you now have in development?

Diamandis: Perhaps the most audacious and important one is the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. It’s a $10 million challenge aimed at developing version 0.9 of the Star Trek tricorder, the medical device that allowed Dr. McCoy to assess someone’s health status. By 2020 the US will be short 91,000 doctors. There’s no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off. You’ll talk to this device, cough on it or do a skin prick, and it’ll diagnose 15 disease states more accurately than a board-certified doctor.

Greenwald: What is the X Prize doing in energy and the environment?

Diamandis: The Tri-State Carbon Capture X Prize is 50 percent funded. Sequestering carbon from a coal plant’s smokestack currently takes up to 30 percent of the plant’s energy. An energy company called Tri-State has put up not only half of the money but one of its plants as a test bed. Teams will tap the facility’s effluent at full pressure, temperature, and CO2 concentration. The team that captures the most CO2 and turns it into the most valuable product takes the prize.

Greenwald: Do you ever know ahead of time who’s going to win?

Diamandis: No idea. When the BP oil spill was going on and on, James Cameron, who’s on our board of trustees, said, “We need to do something about the spill.” We looked at the opportunities and saw that the cleanup technology hadn’t changed since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. So we established the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge with a minimum goal of doubling the rate of cleanup. Out of more than 350 entrants, seven teams doubled the cleanup rate. The winner quadrupled it. The fascinating thing is that one team that doubled the rate was a bunch of guys who met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor. They were upset about the spill and wanted to do something about it. They came in with a fresh point of view and were able to change the game.

Greenwald: What’s the key to creating a contest that works?

Diamandis: It’s critical to have a clear goal and measurements along the way. In Lindbergh’s case, the goal was getting from New York to Paris, and the metrics were the number of stops in between. And constraints are critical. If you give people unlimited time and money, they’ll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they’ll either give up or try something new. And the requirements must be audacious but achievable. If they’re too audacious, you won’t get a benefit because no one will do anything. If they’re too achievable, you won’t get a breakthrough. Finding that balance is the art of designing a prize.

Greenwald: You cofounded Singularity University to train people to think about the exponential pace of technological change. But it has become a magnet for entrepreneurs.

Diamandis: I tell people it’s two sides of the same coin. X Prize sets the targets and gives the inspiration, and Singularity University students are the activators, the instigators. We’re training people to think globally and exponentially. This year, 2,700 graduate-level students from around the world applied for 80 spots in our 10-week summer program. They spend the first five weeks learning about artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, networks, synthetic biology, and nanomaterials. In the next five weeks, their job is to conceive of a product, service, or company capable of positively affecting a billion people within a decade. We’ve spun off 24 companies. About half of them have received funding or won awards.

Greenwald: What persuaded you that the world is headed toward an era of unprecedented abundance?

Diamandis: As I watched what small teams could accomplish with powerful, change-the-world technology, it struck me that the world’s biggest challenges are also its biggest market opportunities. Multi-hundred-billion-dollar industries will form at the leading edge of exponentially developing technologies. Think about AI and robotics. Each one of these fields will displace and reinvent existing billion-dollar industries. We’re on the verge of reinventing life. In the next five years, people will program living systems the way we program computers today. I became utterly convinced that abundance is where we’re going to end up. That’s the direction we’ve been heading for 100 or 200 years. A Maasai tribesman in Kenya today has better mobile communications than President Reagan had 25 years ago. If they’re on a smartphone, they have access to more information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. Their Google is as good as Larry Page’s.

Greenwald: Could anything derail us from this path?

Diamandis: Yes: the risk aversion we’ve developed as a society. Lawyers have ubiquitous power. If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. I got this from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain: We’ve gone from a society where if something wasn’t prohibited then it was legal to a society where if something isn’t explicitly permitted it’s illegal. In the early days of aviation, you could do anything you wanted as long as it wasn’t illegal. Now the laws are so extensive that they say, “Show me where it’s allowed.”

Greenwald: Your most recent enterprise, Planetary Resources, aims to mine asteroids. That’s bound to test legal limits on the space frontier.

Diamandis: We’re working with the US government to define regulations that allow commercial exploitation of asteroids. Unlike oil reserves or even the oceans, which are limited, resources in space are infinite. Anyone who wants will have access to them, so everyone benefits when a company like this succeeds.

Greenwald: What resources are you after?

Diamandis: Asteroids called carbonaceous chondrites, also known as dirty ice balls, are up to 20 percent water. You can use solar energy to break up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel, so you can create filling stations for deep space operations or oxygen and water for human consumption. Launching water beyond Earth orbit costs $20,000 per kilogram using the lowest-cost launch vehicle, so you save a lot by mining it in space. We’ll also be looking for what I call strategic metals. Another category of asteroid is rich in platinum-group metals such as palladium and osmium, which are used in medical devices, computer hard disks, LCD screens, and other electronics. They’re rare on Earth, but not in space.

Greenwald: NASA talks about spending $1 billion on a single asteroid mission. How can you mine asteroids cost-effectively?

Diamandis: Our goal is to bring down the cost of deep-space satellites for doing the imaging, remote sensing, and reconnaissance by a factor of 100. We can do it by reinventing how we design, build, test, and operate these systems. That’s where exponential technologies come in: Robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and new materials will make it possible.

Greenwald: What’s your timeline?

Diamandis: Our priority for two to five years is finding targets. Within 24 months, we’ll be putting up a series of imaging systems that can identify near-Earth-approaching asteroids. The next-generation system will include propulsion, so it can go out to the asteroids and start the first stage of remote sensing. The generation after that, which should be ready in a decade, will land and begin the early stages of what will ultimately be processing. This is a decade to multidecade proposition—but then, so were X Prize and Zero Gravity.

Greenwald: How do you maintain your optimism amid the deadening barrage of bad news from around the globe?

Diamandis: Our brains are wired to look for negative information. The amygdala is the danger center. Our senses are routed through it before they get to the cortex. When we heard a rustle in the branches, we thought tiger, not wind. That’s why, in the news, if it bleeds it leads. But the facts are absolutely clear. The world is getting better at an extraordinary rate. The technologies available for solving problems are becoming more powerful and empowering more people. Will there be problems? Disasters? Pandemics? Terrorist attacks? Of course. But humanity picks up and keeps moving. In this country, lifespans nearly doubled in the last century. Per capita income more than tripled, and the cost of food, energy, transportation, and communications have dropped exponentially. That’s my source of optimism. That and a realization I made early on that if there’s a problem, I’m going to solve it. Once you see the world that way, it’s a different place.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/mf_icons_diamandis/all/
Ted Greenwald (@tedgreenwald) wrote about startup guru Eric Ries in issue 20.06.