Al Globus has worked at the NASA Ames Research Center as a contractor since 1979, where he co-founded the NASA Ames Nanotechnology Group, and worked on projects for the Hubble space telescope, asteroid mining, the top-secret X37 space plane, space solar power and has published over 45 papers on these and other subjects, NASA has awarded him 11 awards, including a NASA Software of the Year award,
While at Nasa Ames, Globus also designed orbital space settlements (Lewis One and Kalpana One), and advocates for colonizing space as soon as possible, and believes that colonizing space is as important an event as “ocean-based life’s colonization of land half a billion years ago.”
One of the two big arguments in favor of space colonization is the discovery and extraction of new resources that could enable the further expansion, development, and growth of human civilization, this is certainly motivating the likes of Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin, Elon Musk and Space-X, as wells as Richard Branson and his stake in Planetary Resources. However, the survival of humanity in the event of an existential threat (or the collapse of civilization) is the second key driver and the primary motivator for many in the scientific community, as Globus says “Someday the Earth will become uninhabitable. Before then humanity must move off the planet or become extinct.”
Al Globus is an optimist who sees the better elements of society winning the fight for the future, and he wants to create a lifeboat for many more than just the elite — if anyone can engineer a way for all of us to thrive in space it is Globus, the man who would build Elysium.