The B612 Foundation is a California non-profit, private foundation organized under the provisions of 501(c)(3).  Contributions to support its work are tax exempt.  Its principle offices are in Mountain View, CA.

The name of the organization derives from the Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s story The Little Prince, who lived on an asteroid called B612.

Meet the Team:

Ed Lu

Ed Lu is a former NASA astronaut who flew 3 space missions including 6 months on the International Space Station. From 2007-2010, he led the Advanced Projects group at Google, where his teams developed imaging technology for Google Earth/Maps, Google Street View, and energy information products including Google PowerMeter.  He holds a PhD in astrophysics from Stanford University, and a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. He is currently Chairman of the B612 Foundation.

Rusty Schweickart

Rusty Schweickart was the Lunar Module Pilot on the Apollo 9 mission, 3-13 March 1969.  From 1979-1983 he was Chairman of the California Energy Commission.  In 1985 he founded the Association of Space Explorers and served as President of ASE-USA until 1989.  From 1990-1999 Schweickart was founder and CEO of several space and internet startups.  Schweickart served as Chairman of B612 Foundation from 2001-2011. Full bio

Clark Chapman

Clark Chapman is a planetary scientist whose research has specialized in  studies of asteroids and cratering of planetary surfaces, using  telescopes, spacecraft, and computers.  He is a past Chair of the  Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical  Society and was the first editor of the “Journal of Geophysical Research  – Planets.”  He is a winner of the DPS’s Carl Sagan Award for  Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Sciences.  He has been  on the science teams of the Galileo, Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous  (NEAR-Shoemaker), and MESSENGER missions.  He has undergraduate,  Master’s, and PhD degrees from Harvard (astronomy), M.I.T.  (meteorology), and M.I.T. (planetary science), respectively.  For many  years he was at the Planetary Science Institute (SAIC) in Tucson and has  been at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder since 1996.

Dan Durda

Dr. Durda is a Principal Scientist in the Dept. of Space Studies of the Southwest Research Institute’s Boulder Colorado office. He has over 20 years of experience researching the collisional and dynamical evolution of main-belt and near-Earth asteroids, Vulcanoids, Kuiper belt comets, and interplanetary dust. He is an active pilot, with time logged in over a dozen types of aircraft including the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-104 Starfighter, and was a 2004 NASA astronaut selection finalist. He serves as a flight astronomer for the SWUIS-A airborne astronomical imaging system flown aboard NASA and military high- performance, high-altitude aircraft and has spent over 84 minutes of time in zero-gravity conducting experiments on NASA’s KC-135 Reduced Gravity Research Aircraft. Durda is one of three SwRI payload specialists who will fly on multiple suborbital spaceflights on Virgin Galactic’s Enterprise and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx.

Piet Hut

Piet Hut is a professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where he is also the head of the Program for Interdisciplinary Studies.  While his main specialization is in stellar and planetary dynamics, many of his more than two hundred articles are written in collaboration with colleagues from different fields, ranging from particle physics, geophysics and paleontology to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy

Geoff Baehr

Geoffrey Baehr is a technical advisor to numerous venture capital firms, startups and other companies. He previously was a General Partner at US Venture Partners, managing a  >$2B portfolio of diverse startups. 

Prior to this he was Chief Network Office (CTO) for Networking at Sun Microsystems for 13 1/2 yrs, in charge of technical directions in networking and scaling, protocol design and implementation. He also led Advanced Development, Network Security and other areas. He also has been a licensed paramedic, is a POST qualified level II Reserve Police Officer and is head diver for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office Dive Unit. Geoff has worked as a commercial diver, recreational dive instructor, salvage and at other underwater activities. He is a qualified sidescan and sector scan sonar operator, 
underwater search and recovery specialist and captains various vessels, both power and sail.

Harold Reitsema

Harold Reitsema is a Planetary Scientist who discovered moons of Saturn and Neptune with ground-based telescopes. During 26 years at Ball Aerospace he helped to design and build many NASA space science missions including Deep Impact, Kepler, Spitzer and instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope. He holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy from New Mexico State University. He is currently a consultant to the aerospace industry and a co-investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.