and is, to take the rest of you into space.

It's during our lifetime that we're going to take the Earth,

take the people of Earth and transition off permanently. And that's exciting.

In fact, I think it is a moral imperative

that we open the space frontier.

You know, it's the first time that we're going to have a chance

to have planetary redundancy.

A chance to, if you would, back up the biosphere.

And if you think about space,

everything we hold of value on this planet --

metals and minerals and real estate and energy -- is in infinite quantities in space.

In fact, the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources.

The analogy for me is Alaska. You know, we bought Alaska.

We Americans bought Alaska in the 1850s. It's called Seward's Folly.

We valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill.

And then we discovered these things -- gold and oil and fishing and timber --

and it became, you know, a trillion-dollar economy

and now we take our honeymoons there. The same thing will happen in space.

We are on the verge of the greatest exploration

that the human race has ever known.

We explore for three reasons,

the weakest of which is curiosity.

You know, it's funded NASA's budget up until now.

Some images from Mars 1997.

In fact, I think in the next decade, without any question,

we will discover life on Mars and find that it is literally ubiquitous

under the soils and different parts of that planet.

The stronger motivator, the much stronger motivator, is fear.

It drove us to the moon. We literally in fear, with the Soviet Union,

raced to the moon. And we have these huge rocks,

you know, killer-sized rocks in the hundreds of thousands or millions out there,

and while the probability is very small,

the impact, figured in literally,

of one of these hitting the Earth is so huge

that to spend a small fraction looking, searching,

preparing to defend, is not unreasonable.

And of course, the third motivator,

one near and dear to my heart as an entrepreneur, is wealth.

In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids,

there's a class of the nickel iron

which in platinum group metal markets alone

are worth something like 20 trillion dollars,

if you can go out and grab one of these rocks.

My plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market,

and then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one.

And that will fund the actual mission to go and get one.

But fear, curiosity and greed have driven us.

And for me, this is -- I'm the short kid on the right --

this was -- my motivation was actually during Apollo.

And Apollo was one of the greatest motivators ever.

If you think about what happened at the turn of -- early 1960s,

in -- May 25th, JFK said, "We're going to go to the moon."

And people left their jobs and they went to obscure locations

to go and be part of this amazing mission.

And we knew nothing about going to space.

We went from having literally put Alan Shepard in sub-orbital flight

to going to the moon in eight years,

and the average age of the people that got us there was 26 years old.

They didn't know what couldn't be done.

They had to make up everything --

and that, my friend, is amazing motivation.

This is a -- this is Gene Cernan, a good friend of mine, saying,

"If I can go to the moon --" this is the last human on the moon so far --

"nothing, nothing is impossible." But of course,

we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there.

But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there.

The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier.

The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch.

That's a pathetic number. It's unreasonable.

We shouldn't be happy in standing for that.

One of the things that we did with the Ansari X PRIZE

was take the challenge on that risk is OK, you know.

As we are going out there and taking on a new frontier,

we should be allowed to risk.

In fact, anyone who says we shouldn't, you know,

just needs to be put aside, because as we go forward,

in fact, the greatest discoveries we will ever know is ahead of us.

The entrepreneurs in the space business are the furry mammals,

and clearly the industrial military complex --

with Boeing and Lockheed and NASA -- are the dinosaurs.

The ability for us to access these resources

to gain planetary redundancy --

we can now gather all the information, the genetic codes,

you know, everything stored on our databases,

and back them up off the planet,

in case there would be one of those disastrous situations.

The difficulty is getting there, and clearly, the cost to orbit is key.

Once you're in orbit, you are two-thirds of the way, energetically, to anywhere --

the moon, to Mars. And today,

there's only three vehicles -- the U.S. shuttle, the Russian Soyuz

and the Chinese vehicle -- that gets you there.

Arguably, it's about 100 million dollars a person on the space shuttle.

One of the companies I started, Space Adventures, will sell you a ticket.

We've done two so far, we'll be announcing two more on the Soyuz

to go up to the space station for 20 million dollars.

But that's expensive and to understand what the potential is --

(Laughter)

it is expensive. But people are willing to pay that!

You know, one -- we have a very unique period in time today.

For the first time ever we have enough wealth

concentrated in the hands of few individuals

and the technology accessible

that will allow us to really drive space exploration.

But how cheap could it get? I want to give you the end point.

We know 20 million dollars today, you can go and buy a ticket,

but how cheap could it get?

Let's go back to high school physics here.

If you calculate the amount of potential energy, mgh,

to take you and your space suit up to a couple hundred miles,

and then you accelerate yourself to 17,500 miles per hour.

Remember, that one-half MV squared -- and you figure it out.

It's about 5.7 gigajoules of energy.

If you expended that over an hour, it's about 1.6 megawatts.

If you go to one of Vijay's micro-power sources

and they sell it to you for seven cents a kilowatt hour --

anybody here fast in math?

How much will it cost you and your space suit to go to orbit?

100 dollars. That's the price-improvement curve that --

we need some breakthroughs in physics along the way,

I'll grant you that.

(Laughter)

But guys, if the -- if history has taught us anything,

it's that if you can imagine it, you will get there eventually.

I have no question that the physics,

the engineering to get us down to the point

where all of us can afford orbital space flight is around the corner.

The difficulty is that there needs to be a real marketplace to drive the investment.

Today, the Boeings and the Lockheeds don't spend a dollar

of their own money in R&D.

It's all government research dollars, and very few of those.

And in fact, the large corporations,

the governments, can't take the risk.

So we need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space.

Today's commercial markets worldwide, global commercial launch market?

12 to 15 launches per year.

Number of commercial companies out there? 12 to 15 companies.

One per company. That's not it. There's only one marketplace,

and I call them self-loading carbon payloads.

They come with their own money. They're easy to make.

It's people. The Ansari X PRIZE was my solution,

reading about Lindbergh for creating the vehicles to get us there.

We offered 10 million dollars in cash for the first reusable ship,

carry three people up to 100 kilometers,

come back down and within two weeks, make the trip again.

26 teams from seven countries entered the competition,

spending between one to 25 million dollars each.

And of course, we had a beautiful SpaceShipOne,

which made those two flights and won the competition.

And I'd like to take you there, to that morning,

for just a quick video.

Video: Pilot: Release our fire.

Richard Searfoss: Good luck.

(Applause)

RS: We've got an altitude call of 368,000 feet.

(Applause)

RS: So in my official capacity as the chief judge

of the Ansari X PRIZE competition,

I declare that Mojave Aerospace Ventures

has indeed earned the Ansari X PRIZE.

(Applause)

Peter Diamandis: Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do

was raise the capital for this. It was literally impossible.

We went -- I went to 100, 200 CEOs, CMOs.

No one believed it was done. Everyone said, "Oh, what does NASA think?

Well, people are going to die,

how can you possibly going to put this forward?"

I found a visionary family, the Ansari family and Champ Car,

and raised part of the money, but not the full 10 million.

And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry

and buying a hole-in-one insurance policy.