Alan Wasser is shown above with a small piece of Martian “real estate” he already owns — a piece of the Martian meteorite that landed in Zagami, Nigeria in 1962.
Mr. Wasser served as Chairman of the NSS Executive Committee from 1991
to 1994, and held a variety of other executive level positions from
1990 to 1996. Active in both the National Space Institute and L5 Society
since 1980, Mr. Wasser was also President of New York City L5 in 1981
and 1982. He is a former member of the Boards of Directors of ProSpace
and the NYC NSS chapter, and has been a Senior Associate of the Space
Studies Institute since 1984.
Mr. Wasser came to NSS from a background replete with diverse interests.
As an undergraduate at New York University, he majored in both Political
Science and English. His work there was sufficient to garner as invitation
to join Phi Beta Kappa. He has also studied at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, focusing there on physics with a particular interest
in astronautics. Through the U.S. Peace Corps intensive course at U.C.L.A.,
Mr. Wasser completed a course of study on the peoples, politics, and
customs of Africa. He is also a member of the Political Science honorary
society, Pi Sigma Alpha.
Mr. Wasser’s broad
interests and talents have led to a unique combination of career paths.
For 11 years, he owned and operated a successful international export
business firm. Prior to that, he pursued a career in broadcast journalism
for 13 years. Numerous successes in those fields polished his writing
and research skills, as evidenced by his career “moonlighting”
as a space journalist and author (with Subotnik, Summer, & Kassen)
of “Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grow Up,” published
in 1993 by Ablex Publishing.
Mr. Wasser has published a series of articles proposing
U.S. land claims recognition legislation to get private enterprise to
settle the Moon and Mars (see The Space Settlement Initiative). This was developed in publications such as
“A New Law Could Make Privately Funded Space Settlement Profitable”
in the July 1997 Ad Astra and in the Explorers Journal,
the official publication of the Explorers Club (v76 n1, 1998).
Mr. Wasser’s 1990 Ad Astra article, “Power
Tower,” suggested that lunar settlement might best be established
on a permanently sun-lit mountaintop at the Lunar pole. He followed
up several years later with the “Most Valuable Real Estate Off
Earth,” in the May 1995 Ad Astra. This article predicted such
a mountaintop at the Moon’s south pole, with an ice lake at its feet. Fellow NSS member, Ben Bova,
has since written a wonderful novel, Moonrise, which involves
an intense Japanese/American competition to claim ownership of just
such a mountain at the Moon’s south pole. Mr. Bova was kind
enough to call the mountain “Mt. Wasser”.
