Speaker: Dr. Bruce Damer
Title: Bay-Area SID Annual Dinner – Next Space: SHEPHERD and Economic Expansion into the Solar System
You and your guest are invited to the BA-SID Annual Dinner. Join your local display-industry peers for a summer evening of good food, good company, and fascinating information. The speaker at this event is someone you won’t want to miss — Dr. Bruce Damer has been developing and modeling innovative spacecraft architectures for NASA and the aerospace industry for over twenty years. In a new collaboration with the SETI Institute and others, he has designed SHEPHERD, a radically innovative spacecraft that utilizes gas filled enclosures to capture, relocate and extract resources from asteroids. If implemented by New Space entrepreneurs, SHEPHERD may be the key technical innovation to open the solar system to sustainable human presence and economic development by the mid 21st Century.
Abstract: Dr. Bruce Damer has been developing and modeling innovative spacecraft architectures for NASA and the aerospace industry for over twenty years. In a new collaboration with the SETI Institute and others, he has designed SHEPHERD, a radically innovative spacecraft that utilizes gas filled enclosures to capture, relocate and extract resources from asteroids. If implemented by New Space entrepreneurs, SHEPHERD may be the key technical innovation to open the solar system to sustainable human presence and economic development by the mid 21st Century.
Speaker Biography: Dr. Bruce Damer is an entrepreneur in design and science, having developed some of the first user interfaces on PCs in the 1980s, pioneered innovative uses of multi-user virtual worlds in the 1990s, and spacecraft designs and architectures in the 2000s. He holds a post at UC Santa Cruz working on chemical models for the origin of life and has built one of the largest collections of vintage computer hardware and software in his DigiBarn Computer Museum in the Santa Cruz Mountains.