The US Institute for Interstellar Studies was first incorporated in 2014 as a non-profit corporation in the State of Tennessee. It follows the set-up of the original company constituted in the UK and reflects the global ambitions of our strategic aims. It was set up to facilitate interactions of the global institute with US companies, industry and the Federal government. From article 3 of the incorporation documents:
The purpose for which this corporation is organized is: "to advance the ambition of interstellar flight through various educational, research and entrepreneurial activities. The mission of the Institute is to foster and promote education, knowledge and technical capabilities that lead to designs, technologies or enterprise that will enable the construction and launch of interstellar spacecraft. The vision of the Institute is to aspire to an optimistic future for humans on Earth and in space. Our bold vision is to be an organization that is central to catalyzing the conditions in society over the next century to enable robotic and human exploration of the frontier beyond our Solar System and to other stars, as part of a long-term enduring strategy and towards a sustainable space-based economy".
We are pleased to announce that as of 28th February 2017, Robert Kennedy Jnr became the legal President of the company. Kelvin F. Long will stay involved as Chairman of the board during the organizations transition to full-operational status. Currently, the US Institute for Interstellar Studies is focussed on the Foundations of Interstellar Flight workshop to take place 13-15 June in New York. Robert Kennedy has been involved in the Institute for Interstellar Studies project for the last couple of years and we are pleased that he has now agreed to take on an even larger responsibility in leading the I4IS presence in the United States, in collaboration with the UK parent company.
Robert Kennedy was educated in the classics and foreign languages since boyhood (Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Russian). He studied studied mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic (Pomona, B.S. 1986), with emphases in robotics, machine design, optical physics. Fresh out of school, he designed industrial robotics systems at the Douglas Aircraft Company (1987-1991) in Los Angeles, and pursued research in artificial intelligence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1987). Robert founded the Ultimax Group, Inc. (1992-present, www.ultimax.com ), a Russian-American company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a published commercial artist and author (nonfiction), and has written about space-based solar power, shell worlds, climate change, linguistics, energy parks, biofuels, and energy security. In 2011 and 2013, he co-organized and sponsored the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshops (www.tviw.us) in Oak Ridge Tennessee and Huntsville Alabama and went onto be a co-founder of the subsequent non-profit TVIW. He has lectured on geoengineering in Moscow for the Russian Academy of Sciences / Rosgidromet (their national weather service), and also at the International Academy of Astronautics in Aosta, Italy. His work has also appeared in /Journal of the British Interplanetary Society/, /Acta Astronautica/, the /Whole Earth Review/ and a cover story on Soviet Star Wars in the Smithsonian /Air & Space/ magazine. He has patents and trademarks pending for a number of optoelectronic, robotic, security, and space system inventions as well as the concept of Tetrageneration(TM). As the American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s 1994 Congressional Fellow, he spent his year working for the Subcommittee on Space in the U.S. House of Representatives. He participated in the First Interstellar Robotics Conference at NYU, and was a technical consultant on “Deep Impact” (Paramount/Dreamworks major motion picture released May 8, 1998). He is past-chair of the Oak Ridge Section as well as the Technology & Society Division; and currently sits on the Society’s national Energy Committee, tasked with writing Energy Talking Point papers for the 110th thru 113th Congresses and the Society’s Carbon Statement. Currently, Robert is a senior systems engineer at Tetra Tech.