D. R. “Rocky” Persaud

SPACE.com published the article Space Sports Closer to Reality which said

Busily working on the idea of microgravity sports is Rocky Persaud, President of IPX Entertainment Inc., with offices in Toronto, Canada and Houston, Texas. He plans to create a show called “Space Champions” — a reality TV show focused around a game created specifically to be played in zero gravity…
 
“The International Parabolic Sports League (IPSL) [will] start with seven U.S. based teams, plus one Toronto-based team. Initially all League games would be played from the Las Vegas, Nevada airport, but we’ll have ‘home’ games when the Zero-Gravity Corporation is able to bring their aircraft to that many cities over the time span of the league’s season.”

D. R. “Rocky” Persaud, B.A.Sc., B.Sc. is the owner of the space entertainment company, IPX Entertainment (IPXN), which will be sponsoring Mars Society Canada’s next mission, Expedition Beta, a follow-up to Expedition Alpha which he organized to train new young scientists and engineers in Mars analog studies. IPXN will be showcasing a documentary about Expedition Beta on SpaceChannel.TV some time in the summer of 2006. Plans are being developed for IPX and IPXN participation in Mars Society Canada’s “Expedition Three” that summer as well.
 
Rocky is developing a science fiction anthology series for SpaceChannel.TV describing a possible post-Singularity future of humanity. A prequel mini-series, called “The 5 Minute Empire”, would deal with worldwide events just before, during and after the Singularity itself.
 
He was a Science Collaborator on the NASA-led Haughton-Mars Project, and was a crewmember of Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station during the 2001 field season. For the Mars Desert Research Station, he was invited to serve on the first unofficial shakedown crew during a week over Christmas 2001 amidst its construction, where many ideas for a long-term research program was developed. These ideas led him to organizing and commanding the month-long mission of MDRS Crew 14 (which he dubbed Expedition One), the first of a series of international expeditions intensely planned and coordinated by a core group of researchers.
 
A member of several space advocacy groups, he was a director of the Canadian Space Society, a founding member of the Mars Society’s Toronto Chapter, former editor of the Canadian Space Gazette, a delegate to the Space Generation Summit, and recently retired from the board of directors of Mars Society of Canada after serving for more than 5 years in various leadership roles, including president and vice-president of research.
 
Rocky has two baccalaureate degrees in mechanical engineering and geology from the University of Toronto. He was born in Guyana a week after the last Apollo mission returned from the Moon, but was raised in Canada since the age of two. Rocky currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Mars Explorers, and led the organization of the 2nd Martian Expedition Planning workshop. Once again steering Mars Society Canada’s collaboration with the Mars Society of Australia, Rocky managed the science program for “Expedition Two” in Australia for August 2004, for which he obtained a supporting contract from the Canadian Space Agency.