Peter Diamandis stands at a whiteboard in an empty conference room at Moffett Field and excitedly sketches a diagram of the solar system, with messy lollipop-like dots for Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. His eyes light up when he draws a certain asteroid known to come close to Earth every few years.

"We're going to send out a flotilla of small spacecraft, dock on the asteroid, prospect it and lay claim to it," Diamandis said. "The goal is to make rocket fuel from a class of asteroids rich in hydrogen and oxygen, and use 3-D printers in space to build the equipment to mine the rock for rare metals like platinum."

The benefits, he said, will be nothing less than protecting planet Earth, creating the world's first trillionaires, and paving the way for humans to live off the planet.

"About 50 percent of near-Earth asteroids are easier to reach than getting to the moon's surface and back," Diamandis said. "It hasn't been attempted. That's fine. A lot of stuff I've done has never been attempted."

Diamandis is an aerospace engineer, entrepreneur and lifelong lover of space who grew up on New York's Long Island in the era of Apollo 11, made award-winning rockets as a kid and once cracked a friend's swimming pool while testing the chemical reactions of potassium perchlorate.

Founded 15 companies

He has helped found 15 companies and two universities, including Singularity U, an incubator for entrepreneurs. And through the X Prize Foundation, Diamandis offers multimillion-dollar incentive-prizes to people who can solve or alleviate some of humanity's biggest challenges, from ocean health and genome sequencing to more efficient cars and increasing happiness through biometrics.

"Peter has a really unique ability to convince people about participating in a new idea or a new venture because of its pivotal importance to the future of humanity," said Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering and artificial intelligence at Google and co-founder of Singularity U. "He's strong in motivation because what he says is true."

Hollywood producer and space enthusiast Bob Weiss was introduced to Diamandis in 1996 by a friend who said, "I've met a guy some people think is crazy but I think you two would get along." Laughing, Weiss, now president of the X Prize, said, "My verdict now? Peter is brilliant, not crazy. He is 100 percent committed to what he believes in, and he won't stop until he hits a wall. Then he'll go around the wall, or under the wall or find a way through the wall."

Diamandis, 53, divides his time between his home in Santa Monica and his work in the Bay Area and commutes by piloting his own Cirrus SR22T. In person, Diamandis buzzes with energy and gadgetry. His Samsung Galaxy Note 3 watch beeps with texts, e-mails and an occasional call from his wife of nine years, Kristen, who was an artist and creative director at 20th Century Fox when they met.

"Dick Tracy is alive," he said, smiling and apologizing for the phone distractions.

Told to 'be a doctor'

Diamandis' parents, Greek immigrants, wanted him to be a doctor; his father was a physician of obstetrics and gynecology. When Peter informed them he wanted to be an astronaut, his mother said, "That's nice. You're going to be a doctor." He earned his undergraduate degree in biology and molecular genetics at MIT and his graduate degree in aerospace engineering from MIT. He earned his medical degree from Harvard, but never practiced medicine. While a student, Diamandis helped launch several space organizations, including Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, which quickly grew to some 100 chapters (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was president of the Princeton chapter).

"The success of the students' groups got me thinking at a global level," Diamandis said, sitting in a conference room at Singularity U, on the NASA Ames base near Mountain View. "I started realizing I could do stuff on a global level, and that level of thinking and action was addicting. All of it was driven early on by a mission to open up space."

Idea for X Prize born

In 1993, while running a space company in Rockville, Md., Diamandis read Charles Lindbergh's "The Spirit of St. Louis." He was transfixed by the story of how nine teams competed to win a $25,000 prize offered by businessman Raymond Orteig. The prize was for anyone who could fly nonstop from New York to Paris or Paris to New York, at that time almost twice the record for a nonstop flight.

"Nine teams cumulatively spent $400,000 to win Orteig's $25,000," Diamandis marveled. Lindbergh, who won the prize, made the flight in 33.5 hours, became the most famous human on the planet, and changed the way people thought about aviation.

By the time Diamandis finished the book, he had the idea for his own incentive prize for a "suborbital, private, fully reusable spaceship." He called it the X Prize, not knowing who would put up the $10 million.

"I asked 150 people to fund this, and was told no over and over again," Diamandis said. "People wanted to know why NASA wasn't doing this, and the liability scared the s- out of everyone. All my friends told me to give up."

At the same time he was trying to find a benefactor for the X Prize, he co-founded Space Adventures, which sent the first private citizen, American businessman Dennis Tito, to the International Space Station in 2001. (Opera singer Sarah Brightman has contracted with Space Adventures to pay $54 million to go there in late 2015.) Diamandis was also running another space company, Zero Gravity, which allows public access to the weightlessness and parabolic flight training that NASA gives astronauts. Zero Gravity would eventually send the famous physicist Stephen Hawking into a suborbital space flight, and Diamandis would eventually propose to his wife on a Zero Gravity flight.

Benefactors found

Finally, in 2001, Diamandis met his benefactors, Anousheh, Hamid, and Amir Ansari, members of a family that has been successful in the telecommunications industry. The $10 million Ansari X Prize for the spaceship attracted 26 teams from across the globe and was won in 2004 by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan with backing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Their vehicle, SpaceShipOne, went into suborbital space twice in two weeks and marked the world's first nongovernment piloted spacecraft. It is now hanging in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum adjacent to the Spirit of St. Louis aircraft and above the Apollo 11 capsule.

'Just the beginning'

"I remember that day, October 4, 2004," Diamandis said. "I had climbed a mountain and all around me were higher peaks. I realized this was just the beginning."

He went on, "Space remains the centerpiece of my work. But the X Prize and Singularity U are two sides of the same coin. X Prize sets the big targets, and SU is about educating the people who are going to make those targets happen." Diamandis expects to host future incentive prizes for breakthroughs in creating more efficient batteries, carbon capture (capturing carbon out of a coal plant and turning it into a valuable product), autonomous transportation, organogenesis (taking your own cells and growing replacement organs), and global learning.

Singularity U was founded in 2008, Diamandis said, with a mission of inspiring students, entrepreneurs and executives to create companies that have an impact on a billion people positively within 10 years. The name Singularity U was taken from a term that Ray Kurzweil used to describe the point at which computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence. The unaccredited university holds a 10-week graduate level summer course for 80 participants (getting about 3,000 applicants from two dozen countries), and this summer is running a five-week pilot program for high school students.

In early June, Diamandis played host to an evening event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to welcome its new crop of international students.

Onstage, Diamandis, who has the inspirational, you-can-do-it mien of motivational speaker Tony Robbins, asked the students, "How will you improve the lives of a billion people within 10 years? How will you start a company that can serve one person on day one, but is serving a billion people in a decade?" He dotted his talk with valley buzzwords such as "interdisciplinary disruption" (taking people from different disciplines and bringing them together to brainstorm and start companies) and said, "We are living in the middle of science fiction right now. This is the most exciting time to be alive."


"Peter is unstoppable," chuckled Rob Nail, Singularity U's CEO and associate founder. "He spent 11 years fighting the FAA to make his company Zero Gravity work. Any other mortal would have given up. Same thing with the X Prize. And he's so personable and charming that you gotta love him."

Two years ago, with the backing of a dozen billionaires, including Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Diamandis and Eric Anderson co-founded Planetary Resources, the asteroid-mining and exploration company. Planetary Resources, with 40 engineers in Redmond, Wash., plans to test the hardware and software for its Arkyd 300 spacecraft in a lower Earth orbit launch this fall. The company hopes to send its Arkyd flotilla out to a certain targeted asteroid in two to three years.

"Our goals are audacious, but we live in exactly the right time," said Chris Lewicki, who left a 10-year career at NASA, where he directed the agency's Mars missions, to serve as Planetary Resource's president and chief engineer. "We will be expanding humanity's economic sphere. The mining of physical resources will allow us to repeat the industrial age in space."

In March, Diamandis started yet another new company - a new genomics and cell therapy business called Human Longevity Inc., with pioneering geneticist Craig Venter and noted stem cell researcher Robert Hariri. The goal of the San Diego company: making 100 the new 60.

"When I was in med school, I watched a show on ocean life and learned about sea turtles living hundreds of years," Diamandis said. "In that moment, I set a goal of a multi-hundred-year life span."

Sees bright future

As if running a handful of companies weren't enough - and giving some 40 major keynote addresses a year - Diamandis also is a best-selling author of "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think," and has a new book, "Bold," due out in 2015.

" 'Abundance' is where we're going to be in 20 to 30 years, and 'Bold' is how to get there," Diamandis said, whose view of the future is very different from the dire predictions he sees in the media. "We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities."

Childhood dream

Diamandis, a father of twin 3-year-old boys, Jet James and Daxton Harry, said that between his university work, longevity company, and his space quest, he is living his childhood dreams. He spends as much time as he can with his family - recently planting a vegetable garden with his boys. He also loves to jog, read, write and fly his plane.

"Earth is our birthplace," Diamandis said. "But we are an exploring species. We moved out of the savannas of Africa and into Europe and Asia and into every nook and cranny of the planet. Now we have the technology to continue this exploration. I think it's our destiny, and our moral obligation to back up our biosphere.

"I feel like one of the luckiest guys on the planet. This is my joy; the work comes from my heart and soul. It's fun and extraordinarily meaningful.

"Deep inside, I'm a 9-year-old boy who wants to fly off into space."

-- To follow Peter Diamandis' work and blogs, go to

10 of Diamandis' laws

Peter Diamandis has his own set of "laws," or sayings that have stuck with him through the years. He started creating the quotes when a friend of his wrote Murphy's law - "If anything can go wrong, it will" - on a whiteboard, and he crossed it out and wrote, "If anything can go wrong, fix it! To hell with Murphy!"

Here are 10 of Diamandis' 38 laws, from

-- When given a choice, take both.

-- The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.

-- When forced to compromise, ask for more.

-- If you can't win, change the rules.

-- When faced without a challenge, make one.

-- No simply means begin again at one level higher.

-- When in doubt, think.

-- Without a target, you'll miss it every time.

-- If you can't measure it you can't improve it.

-- The day before something is truly a breakthrough it's a crazy idea.
