Theme: Life After Gravity

Each TEDxMidTownNY program will feature 2 live speakers, and 2 presentations from http://www.TED.com, followed by discussion and networking.

TEDxMidTownNY takes place about 6 times a year at the Hotel Beacon NYC and is sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation. Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/158907

TEDxMidTownNY is dedicated to presenting luminaries of the NewSpace Industry, along with local inventors working on exciting, related technologies. Our audience includes financiers, investors, space enthusiasts, inventors, artists, musicians, educators, and entrepreneurs. The post-presentation discussion with the audience and these two speakers should be particularly interesting as Tom Shelley's company Space Adventures has flown 7 private astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) over the past 10 years (including Anousheh Ansari who spoke at our September 2010 premier), while Noah Zerkin is studying the effects on people of living in microgravity conditions such as are found on the ISS.

Hotel Beacon NYC
Broadway Room
2130 Broadway
New York, New York, 10023
United States

Tom Shelley

President of Space Adventures, Ltd., the only company providing human space missions to the world marketplace. He will provide an “Overview of the Human Spaceflight Training Market”. Tom will share his insights and discuss developments in commercial space transportation and other related industries. Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world’s first private space explorers, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company’s advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

Noah Zerkin

Noah Zerkin, Research Engineer - Neurology Department at the Human Aerospace Lab at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Noah designs and fabricates prototype sensor modules for automated mobile neurovestibular evaluation of human subjects using research-grade motion capture equipment. Noah is part of an international team that has implemented a full-motion flight and driving simulator system for evaluation of subjects who have spent extended periods in microgravity (i.e. at the International Space Station), and that has validated a vestibular stimulation device used to induce a state analagous to that caused by prolonged exposure to microgravity. He is helping build a data-rich neurophysiological research and evaluation environment supporting the implementation of compact and inexpensive devices for mobile self-evaluation. Noah is also the inventor and developer of the Zerkin Glove, a low cost glove for interacting with virtual objects in an augmented environment, and the author of Augmentation featuring his views on the coming AR revolution.