
Bruce Cordell is an educator and consultant who writes and speaks on future trends in space exploration and technology. In 2013 at the University of Southern California, Bruce created a graduate engineering course on "Human Spaceflight" (ASTE 524) and taught it through Fall, 2018, when he left the Los Angeles area. He is co-founder of 21stCenturyWaves.com, which monitors global trends in the economy, technology, and geopolitics. Formerly a program manager with General Dynamics Space Systems in San Diego, he worked closely with NASA and the USAF on lunar bases and human missions to Mars, space transportation and resources, and national defense. His degrees are from UCLA (M.S.) and the University of Arizona (Ph.D.) in planetary and space physics, and he was a Weizmann postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. While a physics professor at the California State University, Bruce met Krafft Ehricke and participated with him in a public panel discussion on space at the Fleet Science Center in San Diego. Soon after he joined General Dynamics where Bill Rector asked him to help position the company to participate in manned lunar and Mars missions. Bruce organized a 10-member international team of subcontractors in support of General Dynamics. With ESA-veteran Otto Steinbronn, he developed a concept for a world space agency – “Interspace” – that featured equal management authority for the major global space powers and broad opportunities for participation for all others. Always fascinated by manned Mars missions, Bruce published the first systematic study assessing the potential for significant natural resources on Mars that could support human colonization. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Cordell developed a ground-breaking concept for interplanetary commerce featuring retrieval of water from the moons of Mars for transportation and industrial uses in the Earth-Moon system. He led the first study showing its economic advantages and technical feasibility. In 1996, Dr. Cordell published “Forecasting the Next Major Thrust into Space” in Space Policy, in which he sketched his new theory -- based on long-term trends in the economy and technology over the last 200 years -- that logically explained our romance with President Kennedy’s 1960s Apollo program and our retreat back to Earth orbit over the last 40 years. And more importantly, he was able to forecast that the decade from 2015 to 2025 will be the analog of the 1960’s. With several colleagues and friends this work has intensified over the last several years including the founding of 21stCenturyWaves.com and the introduction of the “fractal Maslow Window.”
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