Robert Zubrin

Founder and President, Pioneer Energy

Dr. Robert Zubrin is the founder and president of Pioneer Energy. Dr. Zubrin has a B.A. in applied mathematics from the University of Rochester, an M.S in aeronautics and astronautics and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, both from the University of Washington.

He has 26 years industry experience, more than 200 technical and non-technical publications in various areas of astronautical, aerospace, fossil fuel, and nuclear engineering, and 14 U.S. patents. He is also a best-selling author, with eight books to his credit, including The Case for Mars; Energy Victory, which lays out a bold plan for breaking the economic stranglehold that foreign oil has on North America; and Merchants of Despair, which exposes the history of the deeply anti-human ideology that underpins today’s environmental movement.

Zubrin is known internationally as one of the most creative engineers working in industry today, and he and his work have been subject of much favorable press coverage in The Economist, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The London Times, The Washington Post, Fortune magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Denver Post, Air and Space Smithsonian, Popular Science, Space News, and many other publications. He is president of the Mars Society, a contributing editor of The New Atlantis, and a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy.

After working for seven years at Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin in the area of space technology and interplanetary missions, Zubrin left to found Pioneer Astronautics in January 1996. As president of that company, he has led more than 60 highly successful R&D projects for NASA, the DOD, and the DOE, achieving an unbroken track record of success in rapidly taking novel technical concepts to hardware demonstration. In the course of that work, he developed several technologies he realized could be useful for terrestrial energy production, and filed for his first patents in that area in 2006, which were subsequently granted. On the basis of this intellectual capital, his track record, and his team, Zubrin was able to find investment capital, successfully spinning off Pioneer Energy as a separate business in 2008. Since that time, he has led Pioneer Energy in its successful development of new technologies, including the Mobile Alkane Gas Separator (MAGS), a field-mobile system for capturing natural gas liquids and useful dry methane out of flare gas, which has now begun mass production and operational deployment.

Prior to his career in aerospace, Zubrin worked in the areas of controlled nuclear fusion research, commercial nuclear power operations and radiation safety, and as a high school science teacher.

Robert Zubrin Contributions

November 9, 2016
  • Government & Politics
  • Climate Change
  • Taxes
  • Regulation
  • Environment & Energy
  • Government & Liberty
  • Education
  • Health Care
  • FIRE
  • Economy

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