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PRESIDENT Rikko Wakamatsu | Company President Rikko Wakamatsu has 25 years experience of the Japanese travel industry, having founded the successful specialist travel company Traveltopia in 1972, and being a founding partner of Abercrombie & Kent (Japan). He is also a venture capitalist, being involved in a range of new business ventures, including software production and electronic publishing. In 1985 he was an investor in the first ever space tourism project, the pioneering "Project Space Voyage" based on the "Phoenix" launch vehicle designed by Pacific American Launch Systems. Since that time the key technologies required for low-cost passenger space travel have advanced; the end of the Cold War has led to major restructuring in the world aerospace industry; and global economic changes and privatization of government activities have made the climate for space tourism services promising.
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VICE-PRESIDENT Patrick Collins | Vice-president Patrick Collins has been studying the potential for commercial development of space for more than 20 years. A consultant to the European Space Agency (ESA) in the late 1970s, he taught Business Economics at Imperial College Management School, London University before moving to Japan in 1991. He has been a Visiting Professor at Hosei University, and a Guest Researcher at the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), the Research Center for Advanced Science & Technology (RCAST) of the University of Tokyo, and the National Space Development Agency (NASDA). Author of more than 100 research papers, and co-author of the first book published on the coming reality of space tourism, he is Chairman of the Business Research Committee of the Japanese Rocket Society's pioneering Space Tourism Study Programme started in 1993. He is also a member of the "SPS 2000" project to build a pilot plant to transmit microwave power from space to Earth, and edits the newsletter "Equatorial Times" concerning the planning of receiving antennas in the equatorial countries.
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