Eric Anderson
Co-founder, President and CEO, Space Adventures Ltd.
Eric Anderson co-founded Space Adventures in 1998 with several former astronauts, Peter Diamandis and other figures from the aerospace, adventure travel and entertainment industries. Since then, Space Adventures has sold and organized more than $150 million in spaceflights for the world's only private space fliers (so far) - Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi - working with the Russian Federal Space Agency. (Your friendly workshop host, Esther Dyson, was on hand to see Simonyi fly into space from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in April last year.) Software game developer Richard Garriott, who will fly next fall, has been invited to speak at Flight School in June.
Space Adventures' planned projects include the first private voyage to the moon (passengers not yet disclosed), and future suborbital spaceflights.
The company operates as a general contractor for a variety of commercial human space flight activities, and is an active promoter of the space tourism market. So far, the company has raised several million dollars in capital from investors including Esther Dyson and Peter Diamandis.
In addition, the company was an early investor in Zero G. It recently acquired all of the remaining stock from other investors, and will run Zero G as a separate subsidiary.
Before Space Adventures, Anderson was the principal and co-founder of Starport.com, an online space-content company which was eventually sold to Space.com in 2000. He was also lead engineer and business development lead for aerospace software firm Analytical Graphics for two years. He has also held various consulting and research positions with NASA, where he worked in areas ranging from space tourism and launch-vehicle analysis to the economics of space-related ventures.
Anderson graduated magna cum laude from the University of Virginia with a degree in aerospace engineering. He is a director of the X Prize Foundation.
