Most people who know of me think of me as an information-technology expert, someone who probably lives in California and invests in edgy Internet startups. In fact, my formal residence is in New York City, but I am about to spend most of the next five months in Russia, training to be a cosmonaut in Star City, just outside Moscow.
It all came about in a number of ways. First of all, as a kid, I just assumed that I would go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen. I just took it for granted that, by the time I was 40, space travel would be a common thing. My father was involved with the US space program and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was no big deal.
Then I got distracted for about 40 years. A few years ago, however, I started paying attention to space again. A lot of people I knew in the IT industry were doing the same: Elon Musk, a cofounder of PayPal, founded Space-X; Jeff Bezos of Amazon started a spacecraft company called Blue Origin; Jeff Greason, a senior manager at Intel, started XCOR Aerospace (in which I’m an investor). In 2005, the last year I held my PC Forum conference for IT entrepreneurs, I started a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in space and private aviation.
Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his government about its IT policy. One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to VeriSign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the second “space tourist.”
One evening, the group sat around a campfire as the sun set and around 50 African schoolchildren were bussed in. Altogether, there were about 100 of us, Mbeki included, around a roaring fire. Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed home videos from space. He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on. The kids loved it and I’m sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.
Eventually, I invested in Space Adventures, the company that organized Shuttleworth’s trip into space. Later, I went on a tour that they organized to watch the launch of Charles Simonyi, the fifth (and soon seventh) space tourist, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. (Simonyi wrote the Microsoft Word program, and now has another startup, Intentional Software, and a foundation, as well as a Web site, CharlesinSpace.org.)
Soon after, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team. Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space costs US$35 million to US$40 million, whereas backup training costs “only” US$3 million.
So I had vague thoughts that I might go into space sometime in 2011 — the year that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is (very) tentatively slated to go. Space Adventures was pushing for last year, but I was pretty busy.
Then something happened last spring: My sister Emily discovered that she had cancer and had a double mastectomy — she is doing well now and, in fact, just won a mini-marathon. A couple of weeks later, I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity at the same time somewhere else. “Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had a double mastectomy: I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”
Good grief! I realized my priorities were all out of whack. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy — a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience.
It is also the answer to another question I hear a lot because of my work on human genetics through 23andMe (www.23andme.com) and the Personal Genome Project (www.personalgenome.org): If you learned you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do? Why, I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course. And why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s? Next month, I will write about what training to go into space actually involves.
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, healthcare, private aviation and space travel.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
Heavy rains over the past week have overwhelmed southern and central Taiwan, with flooding, landslides, road closures, damage to property and the evacuations of thousands of people. Schools and offices were closed in some areas due to the deluge throughout the week. The heavy downpours brought by the southwest monsoon are a second blow to a region still recovering from last month’s Typhoon Danas. Strong winds and significant rain from the storm inflicted more than NT$2.6 billion (US$86.6 million) in agricultural losses, and damaged more than 23,000 roofs and a record high of nearly 2,500 utility poles, causing power outages. As
The greatest pressure Taiwan has faced in negotiations stems from its continuously growing trade surplus with the US. Taiwan’s trade surplus with the US reached an unprecedented high last year, surging by 54.6 percent from the previous year and placing it among the top six countries with which the US has a trade deficit. The figures became Washington’s primary reason for adopting its firm stance and demanding substantial concessions from Taipei, which put Taiwan at somewhat of a disadvantage at the negotiating table. Taiwan’s most crucial bargaining chip is undoubtedly its key position in the global semiconductor supply chain, which led
RSS