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Thus I devoted the next thirty years to starting private ventures that I thought would open the space frontier. In addition to my work with the International Space University, these included three efforts to jump-start a space-tourism economy: the XPRIZE, Zero-G, and Space Adventures Limited.

It was thru the founding of Space Adventures
³
that I teamed up with Eric Anderson, my future partner in Planetary Resources. Back in 1995, Anderson, a recent University of Virginia aerospace graduate, joined me as an intern to help develop a company to leverage the vast assets of the once-powerful Soviet space program, now hungry for hard currency and willing to offer anyone with enough cash a ride into space. Within a year, Anderson worked his way up from intern to vice-president to president of Space Adventures (later CEO). Over the next fifteen years, he took the company to over $600 million in cumulative revenues—and if you've ever tried to sell a $50 million seat into orbit or a $150 million ride around the Moon, you'll respect the achievement.

Others, impatient for this same dream, took a different approach. On October 4, 2004, when aviation legend Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE with SpaceShipOne, Sir Richard Branson swooped in to license the winning technology, committing a quarter of a billion dollars to develop Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo—the
commercial follow-up to SpaceShipOne.
⁴
Next, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos committed over $100 million toward a secretive launch vehicle company called Blue Origin.
⁵
Perhaps most impressive was PayPal cofounder-turned-aerospace-disrupter Elon Musk, whose epic success with the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon capsule placed him in the category of “space god” and earned him a multibillion-dollar contract from NASA to ferry cargo to the International Space Station.
⁶

Certainly, these were all amazing successes, but, in the summer of 2009, when I got together with Eric for our annual “What's Next?” retreat, our outlook on the future of space was gloomy at best. Despite these great wins, everything was still moving too slowly. To really open up the space frontier we needed more than a dozen people heading into orbit—we needed hundreds of thousands. We needed the advantages of scale.

It had become clear to us that if we were ever going to open up space, then we needed to exploit the same economic engine that had opened every previous frontier: the search for resources. “Whether it was the Chinese pioneering the Silk Road or early European explorers looking for gold and spices on the other side of oceans or American settlers scouring the West for timber and land,” says Anderson,
⁷
“the search for new resources has always been the main reason for attempting the difficult and dangerous.” This was when Eric and I started having a serious discussion about asteroid mining.

We weren't the first folks to have this discussion. The idea of catching up to giant floating rocks, mining them for precious metals and ores, and hauling that loot back to Earth dates back to 1895, when first proposed by the father of the Russian space program, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky.
⁸
Between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, asteroid mining became a science-fiction mainstay, but it started to become science fact in the 1990s, when a trio of space missions (NASA's NEAR Shoemaker and Stardust, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa) all managed to catch up to asteroids (and two managed to scrape the surface of these and bring back
microscopic samples).
⁹
But the gap between those science missions and the full-scale industrial efforts that Eric and I were dreaming about was massive—and that is exactly the point.

To pull off such a massive moonshot, we're going to need help, a
lot
of help. And thus our first challenge—convincing anyone our dream was doable. This meant, for certain, we were going to have to give birth to this dream above the line of super-credibility.

Let me explain: In each of our minds we have a line of credibility. When you first hear a new idea, you place it above or below this line. If you place it below, you dismiss it immediately, often as ridiculous. If you place it above, you're willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, follow it over time, and continue to make serial judgments. But we also have a line of
super
-credibility. When a new idea is born above this line, you accept it immediately and say, “Wow, that's fantastic! How can I get involved?” The idea is so convincing that your mind accepts it as fact and your focus shifts from probabilities
to implications.

Plotting the Line of Super Credibility

Plotting the Line of Super-Credibility. (1) Non-credible rollout; (2) credible rollout, non-credible performance; (3) credible rollout, super-credible performance; and (4) super-credible rollout.

Source: Peter H. Diamandis

Unless Planetary Resources was introduced to the world far above that line, clearly it would be dismissed out of hand. We needed to assemble a team that people would intuitively trust to execute this vision. Chris Lewicki—who had run three different billion-dollar Mars missions at NASA's fabled Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)—was our first stop. With him as our president and chief engineer, we went on to recruit many of the top engineers who built, designed, and operated Mars rover
Curiosity
(we knew we were on the right track when Eric received a call from the head of JPL asking us to kindly stop recruiting his best people).

And had we stopped there, we might have launched in a credible fashion. We were certainly believable. Both Eric and myself are respected members of the space community. Our team was an assortment of the best and the brightest. But because we were proposing to do something as bold as asteroid mining, credible wasn't enough.

For this reason, we kept the company secret for nearly three years, spending that period pushing ourselves further toward the line of super-credibility. To that end, we recruited a bevy of billionaire investors willing to put their cash and their names behind the project. These were folks like Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram (Google's first investor), Ross Perot, Jr., Charles Simonyi (Microsoft's chief architect), and Richard Branson. Recruiting such big names gave us a number of advantages. For starters, just getting through the gauntlet of their due diligence meant getting the benefit of their thinking. Having the smartest folks on the planet pound on your vision can help turn dank coal into glittering diamonds. More important, when we finally did launch, these names drew a crowd. And that's the bigger point. It's hard to argue with the combination of the planet's top space engineers and most respected businessmen, so we entered the public eye far above the line of super-credibility. Which is exactly why the news in 2012, as Jon Stewart pointed out, sounded exactly like you thought the news would sound in 2012.

Of course, right now, you're probably thinking this super-credibility advice isn't much good for entrepreneurs without billionaires in their Rolodex. Certainly, when Eric and I started on our investor recruitment mission, we already had a network in place that gave us access to investors like Branson and Page. This is not going to be the case for everyone. But that doesn't mean all is lost. In fact, my entire thinking about the line of super-credibility dates back to a time in my life when I had little credibility, when I was a college student—in the pre-Internet, pre-Google, pre-Facebook days—with access to few beyond friends and family.

This story starts in 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, when I founded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).
¹⁰
SEDS emerged from my passion to open the space frontier and my frustration—already mentioned—with NASA. Alongside early SEDS leaders and fellow “space cadets” Bob Richards and Todd Hawley,
¹¹
we stitched together an organization of thirty college chapters from around the world that were all committed to promoting student participation in space. In 1982, because of SEDS, the three of us were invited to Vienna, Austria, to present at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It was there we met and befriended Arthur C. Clarke—author of
2001: A Space Odyssey
and inventor of the geostationary satellite.

“Uncle Arthur,” as we called him, shared stories about how close the space inventors, engineers, and visionaries of the 1940s and 1950s were to one another. It was the power of their collective friendship, knowledge, and vision that ultimately gave birth to the Apollo Program. The idea of such a tight network got us dreaming about creating an International Space University, or ISU, a place where the space cadets of today could dream up tomorrow. Even bolder, we imagined having our campus in orbit, an off-world university where students could live, study, and do
research.
¹²

Of course, for such an institution to come into existence, people were going to have to believe it was viable and worthwhile. And because we were just graduate students, being credible wasn't enough. We needed to be super-credible. So how did we do it? Here's our playbook, laid out one step at a time.

Step One:
Familiarity matters. We started by recruiting the help of people who had seen us succeed over the previous five years with SEDS. This may sound obvious, but in meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years, I've discovered that many of them have forgotten the obvious: The very best people to help you with your next project are those who helped you or watched you succeed with your last.

In the start-up game, especially early in your career, backers are typically close friends and family, the people who already know and trust you. Once you've moved beyond that circle—or if you don't happen to have that circle—the folks most likely to invest in your success are those who have already watched you succeed. So if you're lacking a track record, make one. Start your bold project with a much smaller effort aimed at letting others see you pull it off. Then tap that network for your next step. For sure, we could never have pulled off ISU without first having succeeded with SEDS.

Step Two:
Slow down and build credibility. Instead of rushing headlong toward our bold goal of a space university, our first step was to organize a conference to “study” the feasibility of a space university. Many entrepreneurs skip this step. They have a bold idea, get a little traction, and mistake that vote of confidence for a sign that big dollars are around the corner. Perhaps, but real traction means more than just a little confidence; it requires a lot of trust. Investors love ideas, but they fund execution. And for us, well, a conference was already something we knew how to run.

Over the course of a few months we managed to raise $50,000—mostly around the idea of holding an aerospace “jobs fair” at MIT in parallel with our ISU feasibility conference.
¹³
Our big break came when Bob Richards—who was then living in Toronto—managed
to get the commitment of the head of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to come down and speak. Then we leveraged our luck. With CSA attending, we were able to convince the European Space Agency (ESA) to attend, then based on having both CSA and ESA, the Japanese agreed to join, followed by the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Administration, the Indian Space Research Organization, and finally even NASA. Slowly, bit by bit, we were climbing toward super-credibility.

But there was a ways to go. Thus, onto Step Four: Messaging matters.

In the six months before the conference, the three of us brainstormed what a space university would actually look like, drilling deep into the particulars of what we would teach and who would attend. We also developed a detailed plan and ceaselessly bounced it off of our advisers—getting as much engagement as possible. This engagement mattered so much because getting our plan adopted depended both on the quality of our ideas and—the bigger point—on who presented those ideas to the world. At our conference, rather than present the plan ourselves, we asked our advisers to do the talking for us. Dr. Byron Lichtenberg, two-time Space Shuttle astronaut and cofounder of the Association of Space Explorers, presented the academic plan. Dr. John McLucas, past secretary of the US Air Force and CEO of Comsat, presented the financing plan, and Dr. Joseph Pelton, then head of international affairs for INTELSAT, presented our governance plan.

And it worked. So credible were both the ideas and the folks presenting them that we jumped far above the line of super-credibility. An event that was billed as a conference to study the idea of ISU quickly became the ISU Founding Conference. So how far can super-credibility take those with little credibility? Before the weekend was out, we'd raised the seed capital to launch a summer program—our first step on the road to an actual university.