100 miles to the southeast, masses were gathering in the desert for Coachella’s first April weekend. But this small crew of space scientists, synthetic biologists, investors, entrepreneurs and one partygoer with flamethrower had higher ambitions.
NASA engineers, synthetic biologists, angel investors and others converge on the Mojave Desert for the Betaspace confab to explore ideas about settlements in space.
By jet, bus and more than a few Teslas, they came to this desolate valley for Betaspace: a one-night, invite-only confab for the not-quite-yet-burgeoning space settlement industry.Through sheer force of festive networking, its organizers hoped to spawn the companies and concepts that could allow humanity to establish bases on Mars or “terraform,” as they say, our nearest neighbors into habitable worlds and spin off technologies for us earthbound humans in the process.
Most had ignored the style suggestions in the event’s Pinterest lookbook, heavy on flowing robes, which had been emailed to participants in advance. Bryan Johnson, the man who made hundreds of millions selling Venmo to Paypal and now runs the neural interface company Kernel, rubbed elbows with Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange.
“I'm going to put an institution of higher learning on the moon,” said Bruce Pittman, a longtime NASA engineer at the agency’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. He hoped it would serve “as a proving ground and as a talent pipeline for the expansion of human presence across the solar system.” His interests lie in the terrestrial byproducts of space expansion, such as how NASA technology led to LASIK surgery and high-efficiency solar panels, or how pharmaceutical companies today regularly buy berths on rocket launches to grow purer crystals in microgravity.
A little more than a year later, Betaspace was born — and Cumbers sounded as if he was working for the chamber of commerce.
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