From Here to the Stars Episode 12: Jeff Greason

From Here to the Stars

In this episode of From Here to the Stars, host Stephen Euin Cobb sits down with Mr. Jeff Greason. Mr. Greason writes, "I grew up with middle class parents in rural Oregon, with some of my earliest memories being Star Trek, the Apollo 17 launch, and reading classic science fiction. As far as I know, I've always been interested in science and technology. I thought that by the time I was an adult, there would be plenty of work for electrical engineers in space, and I liked circuits, so I studied engineering, and took vocational electronics training while in elementary and middle school. That was when I realized that part of what was missing in the NASA/Star Trek kind of space vision was - how was this going to get paid for? I found the work of Gerard O'Neill that began looking for answers to that question. It didn't seem necessary to me to work on space transportation then as the Shuttle promised to dramatically reduce spaceflight costs. And since July 2016 I have served as chairman of the Board of the Tau Zero Foundation, a non-profit developing advanced propulsion technologies with relevance to both advanced near-term missions and long-term potential for interstellar probes. The Tau Zero Foundation is also laying out options to U.S. policy makers for very frequent, small payload, unconventional launch strategies to enable affordable space strategies such as boost-phase missile defense."