Mr. Henry Vanderbilt, Space Access Society
Henry Vanderbilt thought space was cool from the start. At age six he was watching a Mercury launch on TV when someone explained that the Atlas rocket cost ten million dollars and they threw it away each flight, and he realized that nobody was likely to pay for him to go. Fast-forward twenty-four years, when an early computer conferencing system (BIX) lured him into writing about space. That quickly led him to a lateral leap from itinerant techy into a job in space politics at the L-5 Society. He soon discovered that grand schemes for what to do in space were a dime a dozen, but everybody was waiting for someone else to solve the problem of how to get there affordably. He found like-minded people, got involved in efforts to solve the transportation problem, discovered that the ball kept being dropped because everybody had day jobs, and ended up founding Space Access Society in 1992 to focus totally on promoting radically cheaper space transportation. He semi-retired from running SAS in 2006, cutting his role back to organizing the annual "Space Access" conferences (sometimes described as "Hackers" for rocket people) in order to take a day job with one of the leading startup rocket companies. Four years later, he's back at SAS full-time, trying to help make the most of the insurmountable opportunity of the new NASA exploration policy. See http://www.space-access.org for details of the next Space Access conference.