Angel Abbud-Madrid

Recognized under Tier 2 — In-Situ Resource Utilization, Angel Abbud-Madrid is Director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, the world's leading institution for mineral and energy resource education. In that role Abbud-Madrid has helped establish the academic and technical foundation for mining the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids. Abbud-Madrid's research addresses the extraction, processing, and utilization of extraterrestrial resources — work directly critical to the long-term self-sufficiency of any permanent human settlement on Mars, where dependence on Earth-supplied materials is not viable. These contributions have helped transform space resource utilization from a theoretical concept into a maturing engineering discipline essential to sustained planetary settlement.