The professional organization AFCEA International has launched its 139 national chapter right in Orlando, Florida. It’s meant to help facilitate connections for members of the space industry with government agencies. It’s even calling it the Space Coast Chapter. To learn more about how this came together and what the chapter has planned, I spoke to Tony Brown, who is Director of the Products/Software Division for TM3 Solutions, Inc. and will be leading the new group.

https://spacecoast.afceachapters.org/

Interview Transcript: 

Tony Brown  So, this all came about through a series of some funny things that I probably wouldn’t want to say on air, but I could say, because it’ll make people laugh. But basically, I came to the Florida region from Washington DC, after COVID. I was kind of looking for scenarios to kind of grow my networking because I was still flying back and forth, back and forth to DC for meetings and after COVID things kind of, you know, shut down or they did shut down. And so, I started to look at venues and the Florida area for networking. And I was already doing some work with our exploration with SOCOM and the combatant commands over in Tampa. The Tampa AFCEA chapter is a very strong chapter within AFCEA. Of course, they support the combatant commands, so CENTCOM, a lot of the tenants out of MacDill Air Force Base. So, I started getting involved there. When I got there, it was still the Tampa chapter, became the Small Business chair of that chapter, and started to really get involved. And then at some point, we decided to call ourselves the Central Florida chapter. And within our logo, it had Cape Canaveral, and also Orlando, saying that the Tampa region was so how should I say, well established with their AFCEA chapter, when we voted to extend our region and call it the Central Florida chapter. I kind of looked at Orlando and I said, well, I don’t know very much about Orlando. I am physically based near St. Augustine. So, I’m on the east coast of Florida. And knowing that there was really not much representation for the Canaveral area, I started to dip my foot into what that could look like. Ironically, Eric, a funny thing. I went to a trade show or trade Expo down there. And we actually had an AFCEA a table that one of the purses, the tradeshow venue had actually given us. And I didn’t have any collateral about AFCEA. And as people would come and say, hey, what do you all do? I was like, Well, I’m with AFCEA. While I’m thinking I’m in DC, and everybody knows what AFCEA is. And people are like, what’s AFCEA? And I’m like, oh, God, I remember leaving that venue, very distraught and wondered how this was going to happen. As we had some other meetings, I met someone his name is Justin Filler. He’s with a company called NewSat. He says, hey, if you’re really interested in doing this, we’ll make sure we get people that are interested. But let’s keep you know; we have to keep it moving. Because there have been efforts to get a chapter started a while ago after the other one, the previous Canaveral chapter when you told it. there been some efforts, but it didn’t. It didn’t grow any feet. So, we started having a what we call it space coast presence events. And Eric by the third event, something really unique happen. The participants at the event, were chanting AFCEA Space Coast, and that’s when I knew it was real. And at that point, we really put a lot of efforts into getting a solid chapter started. And it took about took 11 months, but within a 10th or 11 month it started getting real and here we are now as though 139th AFCEA chapter.

Eric White  Wow. So clearly, there was a lot of enthusiasm to start this chapter. What about it is going to make this one unique. I guess I should ask there you just said 139 chapters, the Space Coast chapter probably one of the more unique names Some of the chapters that I’ve seen, at least from an AFCEA perspective, what sets you all apart?

Tony Brown  Totally agreed. And I’m glad you picked that up. So, I think a number of things, as I look at it, when I first got down to the Florida region, I would come down to the Canavero region, because it’s so point of entrance, right? And I would come down, and I was like, ah, it looks like it’s growing, but it’s not quite there. And then, as you saw, when Space Force was starting to get settled, and actually started, launches, for whatever reasons, may be undisclosed, and some disclose the ULA launches with NRO, and then also SpaceX. So, as I’m seeing all these launches, and some of them being federal, and then also you had NASA, I said, Wow, this is this is this region is really starting to grow with the space programs, as they have been over the last three years, and especially with Space Force. So I thought, and I thought as the community, the and the tenants down at Patrick, I really believe that an AFCEA chapter would be instrumental as this whole area is growing, and also just very unique, and the mission for Space Force and all of the other all the other tenants at Patrick to be able to have kind of an app co platform, which would offer the collaboration, and your stem, scholarships, all of the all of the values and virtues that encompass the AFCEA organization as a whole.

Eric White  And so yeah, you kind of finished up by discussing what I was going to ask you next. What does this mean, now for all of those folks who have really grown with the Space Coast, it’s crazy that you say, you know, it wasn’t quite there yet, when it was referred to as the Space Coast. And it just, you know, wasn’t prime for the picking just for from a government standpoint, but now, with the growth of the Space Force and the really the reinvigoration of US air or US space travel? What does this mean for the industry as a whole, especially down there?

Tony Brown  Eric, it’s, again, you know, fun, I don’t mean, to be cliche, in my, in my responses, it’s kind of the sky’s the limit. I mean, the projects, and the missions that are that are going on down here are just actually mind boggling. So many of the any, any of the military establishments, even, you know, NASA civilian, also, you know, foreign partners. There’s just so much going on with space right now. And again, I’m gonna do it again, I hate to do this, but it’s, it’s the final frontier, right? It’s one area, that we as a nation, and also not just for exploration, and the good of mankind, as we’re speaking up, like with the NASA projects, but also in the DOD, in the DoD sector with trying to achieve space dominance and make sure that our nation is protected.

Eric White  Yeah, you’ve been at this for a long time, if I could just, you know, finish it up here, pick your brain on what, you know, where you see things going. And you say the sky’s the limit. But, you know, what does that mean? Are we going to see just continued growth in this sector? Or is there a saturation point?

Tony Brown  In my mind, but from what I can see, I don’t really see a saturation point. I mean, if you look at, I kind of look back at the army, I looked back at Navy, I’ve looked at Intel agencies, and scenarios like their missions. Right. And certainly, I would say that the US Air Force has air superiority across the world, I would say the Navy, the same in the same token, right? And space, now that’s an open area. And I think a lot of our adversaries are well, I don’t think but we know that a lot of stories are or are looking to achieve space dominance. And by the way, whatever that means. For all intents and purposes, I just, I don’t see a saturation point anywhere soon.

Eric White  Looking towards the future, anything that you all have set up on the horizon, so far, is there anything that we can certainly plug for you here.

Tony Brown  On the AFCEA side, one of the things that I think is important with this region and, and the tenants over at Patrick, one of our goals is to really have a collaborative set of communications with them. So, we want members, the tenants of Patrick, which, Eric, I gotta say something else. I got down here. And I thought it was just Air Force and Space Force and a couple of other tenants that were out of Patrick. Well, I got down here and I learned that there are a number of very high value and very well-known tenants that are down here. So, I’ll tell you a quick story I was I was going to a meeting at an agency under defense human resource agency called our administration called Domi, which is a diversity platform within a DOD sector. So, I thought that was interesting, right. And then, as I’m getting directions from the guard, that he says, go past the State Department hanger, you’ll notice that there are a couple of Coast Guard planes outside of there. And I’m thinking Coast Guard State Department I didn’t like that. I know NRO is down here and a National Recognizance office. And also, as I went past as one of the tenants here that has really been instrumental and participation with AFCEA has been AF tech. And I believe that’s the Air Force Technical applications, technical applications. And when I found out about their mission, I was like, wow, just out of curiosity. Have you heard of AFtech?

Eric White  No, I have not.

Tony Brown  Okay, well, Air Force to technical applications. I think it is center, but they’re responsible for monitoring nuclear treaties around the world. And I’m like, wow. So, as I started to learn about a lot of the tenants here, I really wanted this AFCEA chapter to be a collaborative organization or platform where we could talk to leadership with these tenants and find out what they could use from AFCEA as a platform to help them fulfill their mission. We just really want support from the community down here. I I’ve had a lot of folks ask about volunteering efforts. We plan to do, you know, a bunch with a scholarship with scholarships and also work for us development and also the students. It could be K through 12. Kind of, you know, introducing them into a potential career opportunity and, and also grooming the next workforce in order to support the commands here.

Eric White  Tony Brown is leader of the new space coast chapter for AFCEA International.

The post A prominent industry group creates a new chapter right on the space coast first appeared on Federal News Network.

The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low-earth orbit. NASA has a Space Environment Sustainability Advisory Board to help guide policy for an area of space that is starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges. For more, The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the associate administrator for NASA’s office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, Charity Weeden.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low earth orbit. NASA has a space environment sustainability advisory board to help guide policy for an area of space that’s starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges, and here with more, the associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, Charity Weeden joins me in studio. Ms. Weeden, good to have you with us.

Charity Weeden Hi. How are you doing?

Tom Temin All right. Good to have you in here. And let’s begin with a definition here. What is sustainability in space to begin with?

Charity Weeden That’s a really important question to ask, so we’re all on the same page. In layman’s terms, it means what we do today, make sure it doesn’t negatively impact what we do tomorrow and those opportunities. When it comes to space, make sure our activities are responsible in orbit so that we can continue to use space for all the benefits we get from it, and future generations can use it as well.

Tom Temin And let me just ask a technical question before we get into the broader policy issue. Lots of companies are launching space items, small satellites, maybe, in fleets of them, sometimes clouds of them for various purposes of earth observation or communications. When they do that, what is required of them? Can they just say, “Tuesday, I’m going to launch”? And then, Tuesday afternoon, the belly of the mothership is going to open and these things are going to get ejected? Is there any rules of the road now, for, well, “you can do it at 3 a.m., but you can’t do it at 3:15 because you’ll be too close to the last week’s satellites”?

Charity Weeden Well, private operators do need a license from the government. And this comes back to an international treaty called the Outer Space Treaty, where every nation is responsible and liable for private and citizens and their actions in orbit. So in the United States, that means your activity in space needs to be licensed. And there’s several license authorities in the United States. NASA is not one of them, but there’s the FCC, there’s NOAA, there’s FAA, to name a few of some satellite companies would have to go through those license authorities first.

Tom Temin But is there a protocol for making sure that when they are released into the low earth orbit, that they are done in a way that they won’t crash into something that might be orbiting by two minutes later?

Charity Weeden Right. So, in that license process, there are questions asked about their debris mitigation plans. The FAA has some of that. FCC certainly has the requirement to show your debris mitigation plans. So, that’s part of the license process. But it’s not 100% clear the entire world is using the same rules, and that’s where we are right now. Space is congested. We’re not quite sure where everything in orbit is, especially the small stuff. And we’re not quite sure what other actors are doing in orbit. And that can create havoc when you’re trying to get good science done, inspire new generations to look towards the space environment. And so it’s important to have common rules, like you said, to have that authority and supervision and make sure we keep the space environment clean.

Tom Temin And two other questions then, do we have a sense of the order of magnitude of quantity of satellites in low earth orbit at this point?

Charity Weeden Well, we certainly have a good understanding of the number of satellites in orbit. It’s on the order of 5,000 or so right now. The problem is, we don’t necessarily know exactly where all the small pieces of debris are. And we modeled upwards of 500,000 or more pieces of small debris that we can’t even track. And that could be really devastating for a mission. So that’s the essence of the issue; if you can’t maneuver out of the way of debris, then we have more debris getting generated.

Tom Temin By the destruction of satellites that run into debris.

Charity Weeden Right. In low earth orbit, satellites are really going fast. And you talked about the highways and the Beltway. That’s a great analogy because there are orbital highways, common orbits that we use for earth observation or communications. And so those are getting crowded as well. And debris-generating events, they could really create havoc. If you can imagine on the Beltway, a bunch of cars, you know, crashing into each other, what that would look like.

Tom Temin And are there other effects of this crowding? Could it be not just debris and crashing situations, but is there RF interference or some degradation that could happen in what the satellites are doing if they come too close? Is that a possibility also?

Charity Weeden So, in the license process, the RF interference issue is dealt with by the FCC. We’re talking here about the physical process of making sure we don’t run into each other in orbit.

Tom Temin And therefore, then, to add this all up then, sustainability for this strategy that we’re about to talk to, is having to do with just the crowding issue and the collision issue.

Charity Weeden The strategy is really about what NASA can improve in its processes, decisions, what technologies we can start to invest in to help mitigate the situation. So it’s really looking internally across the organization, at the agency and making sure we can be the best to help solve the issue.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Charity Weeden. She’s associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. And so the strategy has laid out the strategy for sustainability. I guess it’s one of a series you’ll be doing, the first one dealing with low earth orbit. That sounds like the most critical.

Charity Weeden Correct. Yes. The most immediate issues right now are the inability to track the small debris, to create a sustainable space environment in the low earth orbit, which is getting very crowded. But also, there are other regions we need to start thinking about, like the cislunar environment. We’re going back to the moon. And it’s not necessarily the same situation around the moon as it is here around earth, when it comes to mitigating debris. So, we need to start thinking about that as well. And even looking forward to the rest of the solar system. How are we going to be responsible space actors when we’re going to Mars?

Tom Temin Sure. Well, we don’t want to be like two shoppers, you know, trying to get the same parking space at Christmas time, with us and China. “No, I’m there first! No, you’re going to—” bang. You know, here we got both in the same spot at the same time. Not good. Anyhow, the sustainability strategy so far then lists five challenges the agency and I guess the world is facing with respect to this. What are the principal challenges? I think you mentioned one is simply situational awareness — knowing what’s up there, including the debris.

Charity Weeden Right. So, one of them is knowing those uncertainties. What do we not know? What can we use our technical and scientific understanding to understand the environment a little better, understand how debris interacts with other debris? That’s an important issue. So is making sure that NASA is organized for success. We have a lot of stakeholders across NASA that do something to do with space debris, and we need to integrate that a little better. And so, part of the strategy is to organize for success and have that integration and collaboration across the agency, and hire a director of space sustainability to champion that.

Tom Temin All right. So, what measures could sustainability itself take? Because people need to do this launch, it’s an open, almost a wild West, really, with launching now that it’s become such a commodity and the satellites are so small and numerous. What can NASA do and who do you need to cooperate with, or who needs to cooperate with NASA to ensure the situational awareness and greater sustainability?

Charity Weeden Right. We all use space right now. You and I are probably using space. Those that are listening in a car, probably using space right now. It’s a benefit to our society. We get satellite communications, earth observation, you name it. We also get to explore and leverage space that way. So what this strategy is doing is, first and foremost, building a framework of what are all the pieces that go into creating a sustainable space environment. And that’s a complicated thing to put together. But it’s an important one, because based on this framework, NASA can take those insights and understand where are those gaps. Where are those gaps in knowledge, the gaps in technology, the gaps in policymaking? And then go out and engage, engage with all the stakeholders, not just amongst the U.S. government, but it’s important to recognize that the commercial industry is thriving, and we want to keep it thriving and create inputs from industry as well. And then further, this is not just a U.S. issue. I want to make clear, this is six decades of the world going to space. This is the world accessing space now and reaping those benefits. So, we need to engage with international partners and come up with a common plan of how to move forward from here.

Tom Temin Do you get the sense that even nations that we might be in conflict with in other domains, agree on this general need, say, like, Russia? You know, they’ve been pretty good in space over the years also. And they could be designing a satellite to shoot down all the other satellites. But on the other hand, they have some semblance of a commercial system also.

Charity Weeden Right. This is the back and forth of making sure we all get to use space in a peaceful manner. And here, I point you to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, a committee specifically designed to have this dialogue. Russia’s a part of it. China’s a part of it. There’s over 100 nations in this committee coming together to build out guidelines on how to make space more sustainable, and that’s going on right now.

Tom Temin And with 500,000 pieces of debris and maybe 5,000 satellites, which could be 6,000, you know, in another year or two, what can be done with what’s already there? Because it may be unsustainable already with 500,000 pieces of debris. What are the sources of debris, and is there anything that can be done to filter them out, like a big giant mesh in space to catch it all?

Charity Weeden Well, the earth-orbiting environment has a kind of a built-in cleaning system very low down.

Tom Temin Called gravity?

Charity Weeden Well, called drag. The atmosphere extends actually way past, even though it’s very thin. And there’s drag on some of these objects, and that will eventually burn up into the atmosphere. Saying that, there’s a certain level where this stuff is not coming down. If you generate debris, it’s expensive to go track it and retrieve it. So, we have an economic problem here as well. And so we really need to prevent any future debris, create the rules so that we prevent that future debris, but also start to think about remediation techniques as well.

Tom Temin What produces debris, by the way, in the first place?

Charity Weeden You know, so, it’s just simply launching. Sometimes there are objects that come off of the launch that aren’t part of the payload. Sometimes satellites just don’t work and they have an incident and there’s eject —  you know, there’s pieces of satellite that come off of that. And sometimes we don’t know what happens. But there’s an event whereby two satellites might have hit each other, or a piece of debris might have hit a larger satellite, and now it’s defunct and we don’t know what happened. So, there’s a lot of sources of debris. And the largest stuff is the upper stage rocket bodies, you know, meant to take all this great capability into space, but sometimes it’s left there. And these are large multi-ton objects that just linger, for decades, sometimes.

Tom Temin Wow. And, also, the satellites themselves eventually die out.

Charity Weeden Correct.

Tom Temin And then that renders them into debris.

Charity Weeden Well, there’s a trend going on that some satellite operators are deorbiting their satellites while they’re still active, so they can not create a bigger problem on space debris. And so that’s the trend we’re seeing. Also, there are companies building satellites to capture other satellites. So, we’re in this new world of not just collecting ones and zeros and transmitting ones and zeros in orbit, but we’re actually having a lot of vibrant activity called in-orbit servicing and manufacturing.

Tom Temin Wow. Crazy world. And by the way, while we have you — your office, Technology, Policy, and Strategy — what do you cover? That sounds like a pretty broad portfolio.

Charity Weeden It is broad. It’s meant to bring data-driven decisional advice to the NASA leadership on a number of issues to do with technology, policy and space sustainability, and space debris is one of those issues. I mentioned this earlier, but there’s not a lot of research on the economics of all this. And as the commercial community is relying on the ability to get into orbit and generating revenue, here we have an opportunity to put a dollar number to what is a space clean environment worth to us. So I think that’s a really important research that my office is doing that can contribute to the bigger conversation.

Tom Temin Charity Weeden is associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. Thanks so much for joining me.

Charity Weeden Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin And we’ll post this interview along with a link to the space sustainability strategy itself at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Hear the Federal Drive on demand. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

The post NASA’s worries are not just about space, but about space sustainability first appeared on Federal News Network.

So we’re trying to send folks back to the Moon and potentially Mars. However, the longer people are out there, the longer they could potentially come down with something. Yes much like the fisherman and pioneers back in the day, even the most simple of conditions can become dangerous when you’re far away from home. So obviously technology will be needed to help prevent, diagnose and treat anything crew members could potentially come down with. To help spark some innovation, the Canadian Space Agency recently wrapped up it’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, in which the winner got $500,000 in grant funding. To learn more about the ideas brought forth during the contest, I spoke to Annie Martin, she’s the Health Beyond Portfolio Manager for the CSA.

Interview Transcript:

Annie Martin The deep space health care challenge that was first initiated to ask our innovators in Canada to develop, new, medical technologies for, diagnostic and detection of, for health care. And it was driven by the need to better understand what will be required for deep space mission. So, when we will, set up a settlement on the lunar surface for prolonged time, and when we’ll fly to Mars, the crew will need to be more autonomous in the way they manage their health. And mainly because of the challenge, like communication delays going from a couple of second on the moon to, 20 minutes one way on the surface of Mars. So that drives the need for a solution that will empower them to manage their health. And right now, just as a piece of information on the International Space Station, the crew has real time access to, flight surgeon on the ground and all the experts. So that’s why we need that paradigm shift. And innovation, you know, is moving fast. And we know that, you know, globally, but also in Canada, there are a lot of companies that are developing new approach to facilitate the work of healthcare practitioners. So, we decided to use a challenge price approach to simulate innovation and to have novel solution proposed to us. So, this challenge started about a bit less than two years ago, I would say, and we had more than 100 organizations who registered, proposed their concept. And then we had semifinalists that were asked to do a proof of concept. And from that list of 20 semifinalists, there were five finalists that were invited to do a demonstration of their, solution to our jury. And, we just announced, couple a couple of weeks ago, the grand winner and application and who won the big prize. So, these are all, all our, semifinalist, solution, were really designed to help diagnose or detect, health problem with a particular aspect of being applicable, here on Earth. So, the way we crafted our challenge that it needed to address immediate need on Earth and be applicable in a time frame of 5 to 10 years for space, we know that there is urgent need here, for a remote, remote healthcare, solutions, and the challenge are similar. If we think of northern Canada, where they don’t have access to expert, emergency evacuation or difficult. So, solution can help them address, just like it will support astronauts, in space.

Eric White So correct me if I’m wrong. You just called North Canada. Mars. Is that?

Annie Martin Well, I’m not saying they are Martian. Not at all. But there are lots of synergies between some of the challenges that they are ongoing. And, you know, when we invest in technologies, we are very mindful in terms of, you know, doing meaningful investment that can also benefit Canadian. And we specifically target those similarities in the challenges. And at the same time, you know, there’s a much bigger market on Earth. If you think of the number of astronauts for now. Yes, at some point we’ll democratize space and, more people will fly to space. But for now, since there’s a limited number of people flying into space, we’re conscious of the need for those companies to expand their markets here on Earth.

Eric White You mentioned the winners were MD applications for the Easy Resource Solution. Was that something that they had already invented prior to this challenge, using it in those scenarios that you had mentioned, or did they come up with this just for this challenge and now it’s being applied everywhere else?

Annie Martin It’s something that they already started to develop. So, the idea of the easy resource application, it’s to support, health care practitioners that, you know, in the moment of an emergency, need to focus on the patient for resuscitation. But at the same time, there’s so many things happening around they need to calculate the dose for the medication and all the process, the processes that they need to perform. So, their idea was to facilitate resuscitation for and health care providers. And so, they started to develop that. And when they saw the challenge they thought of, oh, it applies well for the challenge. So that, you know, it was kind of, a stimuli for them to invest more time and money to really develop that. So, they developed their application for terrestrial health care, and it is used globally. Now. They have, I think, more than 5000 users. So, so it, scaled up, quite rapidly. And the challenge, the health care challenge was an occasion for them to really get to it and get it done. And which was a good thing because, the grand prize was, $500,000 in grant funding.

Eric White Was that sort of the trend you saw with some of the other semifinalists that it was a particular technology that they already had, or where a lot of folks, you know, saying, okay, challenge accepted. Let’s try and create something specifically tailored for space.

Annie Martin I would say for the first stage, when we got more than 100 applicants, it was a mix of both. So, we had people that really wanted to solve a problem and let it go and do the challenge. But the semifinalist and it was solution that, you know, was already at a certain stage of maturity, not necessarily commercially available, but at least that the proof of concept was already done. And identify their market opportunity in order to, to make the to bring their technology, to market.

Eric White And let’s not leave out those who should get an honorable mention, which are those who are the semifinalists. I’m not going to make you go through the litany of them, but were there any, you know, 1 or 2 that had similar, technologies that, you know, didn’t win but still had something impressive to show you all?

Annie Martin Yes. And maybe if you allow me to maybe focus on the five, the finalists. So, in addition to, issued visas, by application. And there was an AI solution for tele robotic surgery, by the center for Surgical Invention and Innovation. They are building a solution that can do autonomous biopsy. And it’s all the idea to bring some, diagnostic capabilities to areas where experts are not located, necessarily. And, we know, Canada’s expertise in space robotics and their solutions is also, you know, derived from the work that has been done for and the Canadarm. So, it’s really interesting to see the application of some of those space technologies for, for health care. There was also another company called Indigenous Tech AI, for dermatology. So, the idea with a nap, you know, and to take a picture and, with artificial intelligence, you know, it helps identify, if the skin condition requires, a specialized dermatologist to, look at it. So, there’s that telemedicine connection as well. So, the expert who is located remotely can look at it. And, you know, we can say that this is also an important application, when there’s no dermatologist that travel northern of Canada or number of indigenous community, but with a technology that you can provide timely diagnosis and ensure that, you know, it can get treated, more rapidly. Because just to make a parallel, you know, if any one of us living in an urban center, you know, we see, something on our skin, you know, we could say, it’s nothing. Let’s just wait. But, you know, we could more easily access an expert if we need to. If you’re remotely, you know, you know, it’s something that may tend to drag more because the access to a physician is so rare. So that’s why such a solution can really help the health care practitioner there, whether a nurse or a physician, any specialist. So, so these are interesting. And then there was another one looking at virtual reality, Sonic with their sievert cardiac to help a remote expert support diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular disease. So, the expert wearing, the virtual reality goggle or helmet, you know? Can see the same thing as the person who’s okay with the local. And then better assist the person, you know, because expertise and training are a concern. You know, when we think of rural, remote site here on Earth. Mainly because, you know, there’s, you know, there’s no experts first that are, you know, there on the permanent basis and you know that the population is there’s less population. So, a physician who’s there, maybe they’re on rotation or may not see specific spatial cases frequently. So, when something new come up, it’s not necessarily easy to go back and to you when you learn those skills, you know, years ago. So, with virtual reality, it’s possible to easily access an expert and get, you know, proper health management and support the patient. That’s what health care practitioners want to do in rural and remote communities, to be able to support the patient without necessarily having an emergency evacuation, because this is something that we often see. If there’s a doubt in the health care practitioner’s mind about the health care condition, you don’t want to risk waiting. And it kind of degenerate. So, then the person would fly. But there’s lots of consequences in flying. Someone in an urban center does the isolation from the family being alone, being far away. So, there’s, you know, that philosophy of, you know, aging at home and that’s good for urban center or remote center, but how to ensure care is appropriately, provided locally and technology can support that. And the last and the last final is, was neuroscientists. So, they are building a solution to manage neuro vestibular and sensory motor, disruption. So, you know, when you feel imbalance or when there are any, any type of issue that comes from the inner ear. And when we think of space in microgravity, the neuro vestibular system is impacted because, there’s rapidly there’s the liquid in the ear and there is hair. When the liquid move, it sends signal to the brain to give information to the brain. How the head is positioned in space, in, in the environment, I would say. And in space, the liquid, you know, there’s no gravity. So, then the brain cannot take the signal from the ear. So, when astronauts come back on Earth, then suddenly the brain is receiving those, those inputs from the neural vestibular system, and it caused them to feel, to, to lose balance. And that’s why we see astronaut, you know, unable to walk straight when they come back on Earth because, you know, all these new signals that come to their brain, you know, kind of oversee. It’s all there’s overstimulation. So, the neural vest and there are also disease or health problem on Earth that also affect the equilibrium. So, this type of solution can help. Correct. And it was interesting because one of my colleagues wore the device during their, demonstration. And it was interesting the, the stimulation and how, how it works. So all different finalists, all different technologies, but all addressing specific health problems that are relevant for both space and the and also for.

Eric White On those demonstrations that you just mentioned. You know, those are all impressive, pieces of technology to come up with, you know, space or using them in space or on Earth. What went into the decision to award MD applications the top prize? I imagine it was a tough decision.

Annie Martin I can tell you it was really tough decision. And, and so the jury have that tough, tough choice to make from stage one. So, looking at the 100 more and plus application and then, and then define the, the winner, it was it was really hard. But, you know, they were looking at what the technology can do in terms of improving access to health care. How is it solving the problem of, remote communities, but also looking at how innovative is this, you know, what’s the innovation behind, what’s the market? You know, so to answer that, it’s also solving a problem here on Earth, this usability as well. How is it design, how is it used. So as much as, you know, practical aspect of how to use the technology, how could it really deliver on the benefit for both space and, remote, communities? And they were good debate. I can tell you I was part of the I wasn’t I was not a jury member. But I can tell you that there were lots of, interesting debate because all the tech, you know, and even when we were getting to the final. So, with the 20 semifinalists, you know, we discovered, great technologies, here in Canada.

Eric White Final question here. And I feel free to brush me off if this doesn’t fall under your expertise. But in your research, what are some of the most common diagnoses given to astronauts who are, you know, up their long term on the International Space Station or taking long trips to, you know, the moon? Did you find anything in your research for, what is the most common illness or medical condition that is diagnosed up in the space realm?

Annie Martin So, when we think of the International Space Station, you know, we send crew members that are very healthy. So, the screening is really, intense to make sure that the astronaut when they are selected, don’t present risk for a condition, that could lead to, important problem in space. So, they have, strict, selection criteria for selecting astronaut. And then when they are selected for a mission, they are also qualified for flight in terms of their health condition, to ensure that there’s no problem. I’ll give you an example. If they had a minor surgery. You know, pending on where it is, this could be a problem for future flight mission. So that’s why they need to be, qualified so that when they fly, they are, very healthy. So, what we are observing in terms of health condition, it’s very minor. On the space station, because of, we managed your risk alert, prior to spaceflight. But the effect of microgravity, you know, make them nauseous when they are in space can make headache, because when you find space that there’s no gravity. So, the blood tends to, accumulate more, and we say they have a puffy face. So, so this this is, so, you know, they would take the same medication as we would take, here on there because, you know, it’s based on, evidence-based medicine here on Earth, how we treat the astronaut in space. We also know that they lose bone, bone mass, when they’re in space. So, there’s always a risk for, renal stone. They’ve not been big case, but we’re very careful about that. They were some mild symptoms of cold. You know, because, you know, there’s always the risk of a late latent virus, you know, that maybe doesn’t manifest when you’re, you know, in the present time, but then would emerge, at a later time. So that’s something that we’re very careful. But again, you know, it would be, it’s pretty minor. In the first era of human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit. There were some, condition of tooth problem. And it’s also related to the bone, the bone loss, as well. So, nothing major. But it’s because of that risk. But when we think of Mars mission, a three-year mission with important dose of radiation, and we know radiation can be very harmful. So, there’s a new there’s a notion of risk that just open in front of us. And we need, to be prepared, for that. So, you know, we are preparing for risk of infection, a potential cardiac problem. It’s a complex system. There’s always risk of, you know, if there’s a system malfunction and there’s an electrocution or something like that. You know, there will be potentially DNA mutation on the Mars mission. But, but, you know, would we start, chemo in space and there’s lots of questions about the risks. So here are the risks. And which one do we choose to? To care for. And, you know, a space vehicle is limited in space or right now. So, you can see that I’m going in every direction. But I mean, there’s not a specific list. You know, with NASA, there has been the publication of a list of 100 and something condition that could happen in space. If there’s an international effort in terms of quantifying the risk and identifying, okay, considering mass volume, what will we bring? For that? So, so, you know, the cardiac, issue that we need to monitor, any infection that could, that could emerge because of, you know, all the surface and, you know, because everything floats in space. So, it’s not like if it’s settled, like here on Earth, you know, so it can, it can, you know, go into respiratory system and all that. So, getting ready for every type of infection, a urinary tract infection is something as well. And then an interesting question in the community, is also the, you know, the risk of appendicitis because that you have no sign and there’s no genetic, you know, you can have it and that it could be problematic. So, this is not answering your question. There’s one thing we’re looking at is how can we monitor so that we can have kind of early warning or early prediction so that we can see who is going somewhere? We see that there’s a, the change there’s a trend in some of the health parameters. How can we act before a medical condition becomes to a point that we’re unable to treat it? So, and then maybe one condition that is important that we should not forget. I only talked about physical health, but there’s also all the mental health, a three-year mission to Mars being away from home. You know, there will need to be, you know, strategies to cope with, with ensuring that they are mentally, healthy in space.

Eric White Yeah. The list of risks is long. It would definitely be a bad time to develop a food allergy. So, on that note, you know, since there are so many different risks that you’re trying to counteract and account for before they get off the ground, what is the future plans? Are you going to be running more challenges like this, looking at different aspects of diagnostics or, medical preparation that can, like you said, get you as ready as someone can for a three-year trip off of the Earth.

Annie Martin So the challenge approach that we use, is, is one of the many ways that Canada is, asking innovators to come up with new ideas. So, we are currently looking at what could be the potential, challenges. But there are also other means of, we have the Space Technology Development program in Canada to fund Canadian organization, to do, research and development. You know, we some we sometimes have directed, contracts, you know, a year and a half ago, we launched a connected care medical module contract where we asked innovators to create a medical system, and shipping containers. So, there’s different way, but I can really speak for that. The, the benefit of, running a challenge in terms of the incentive to innovators and, and the, the outcomes that we take. So, I hope that the Canadian Space Agency will, we’ll have more challenge. And there’s one that just closed on a water on the moon. There was one that we announced the winner for a food production in space. So, Canada has an interesting model for running challenge, so looking forward to seeing more of that.

Eric White Annie Martin is health Beyond portfolio manager for the Canadian Space Agency.

The post Canadian Space Agency hosts challenge for new tech in astronaut healthcare first appeared on Federal News Network.

The concept of nuclear power kind of makes sense for space travel doesn’t it? Taking a small amount of material and being able to harness energy from it to create a vast amount of heat, electricity, and power. I’m not breaking any news with that thought, as there have been and are currently a lot of smarter people that are trying to make that idea a reality. One of them is Robert O’Brien, who was recently appointed as the Director of the Center for Space Nuclear Research with the Universities Space Research Association. I got the chance to ask him about where things currently stand and how nuclear power could become more prevalent in the space field.

Interview Transcript: 

Robert O’Brien I’m just stepping into the role of director of the center for Space Nuclear Research, which is a Universities Space research association or USRA’s institute. The institute, or the CSNR, was formed in 2004, in partnership with the Department of Energy. We’re focused on working with the talent pipeline, developing a future workforce for the space nuclear industry, which is a very, very focused but strategically important work force that we need to develop for the nation. But in addition to focusing on the town pipeline, we’re also engaged in the development of national programs. And, and really doing all of the above for development of advanced technologies in space, nuclear power and propulsion.

Eric White Yeah. You know, the melding of space and nuclear. It’s not something that my that wasn’t the first place my head went to. Where do things currently stand as far as the use of nuclear energy? Is it to actually power spacecraft or is it used for other methods in space currently, or are you guys still looking into that?

Robert O’Brien So, you know, let’s go back to the origins of the space industry. Wernher von Braun knew that we needed high energy density, power, and propulsion in order to explore the outer solar system. Even to go to Mars. We were looking at, nuclear fission systems to be able to enable human exploration. It’s also an incredibly important technology that you have to explore robotically as well. Being able to close missions in the lifetime of a principal investigator, which normally is unheard of to do 2 or 3 missions in the career lifespan of a P.I., but with the engagement of nuclear technology being able to maneuver faster than ever before, we’ll be able to close those missions and get, you know, a seasoned experience into the science community and, and closing missions that were normally once in a lifetime. And so, this is not a new technology area. This is very much an area that’s been looked at since the dawn of the space age. What we’re doing now is really refining those technologies and stepping out from what we would describe as 1950s and 60s technologies. Which is primarily driven by radioisotope decay, for our nuclear systems to date, the world has changed. The ability to generate enough fuel for those radioisotope systems is proving to be challenging as all the programs closed out and facilities were closed. We’re now looking at systems that are perhaps more storable, being able to assemble technologies that can sit on the shelf and be ready for flagship class missions, and also can be used by the commercial space industry, which is really an exciting new chapter for, for the space sector. Looking at commercial spaceflight both to the moon and beyond. And I think as we look at, exploring systems from a commercial perspective, we’re also looking at prospecting for minerals and materials that we can use for in-space manufacturing and even bringing materials back to Earth to help enrich human life here on Earth, as well. And all of this is going to be possible, using high energy density systems, systems that use nuclear fission for both generation of electricity process heat and propulsion as well. Being able to maneuver without regret. Being agile, and, you know, really enabling new trajectories for spacecraft, that, couldn’t be closed easily or affordably with chemical propulsion. So, a very exciting, chapter, I think, ahead of us using this, this technology. But the main takeaway is we’ve really used nuclear energy already done that successfully since the 1950s for spaceflight. And, you know, we’re now looking at, the next chapter, which is, you know, very safe, efficient systems, that enable human and robotic missions.

Eric White Yeah. You mentioned that term high density. It seems as if. Yeah, it makes sense. Nuclear power is almost tailor made for space because that you get a lot out of a little bit of, fuel. What are some of the drawbacks of, using nuclear power in space? And you had mentioned some of the challenges that you all are running into. As far as getting an efficient and consistent, power source from these, sorts of materials.

Robert O’Brien So as we move into, you know, the next chapter where we’re looking at, technology. Is that robust. We’re looking at materials that can endure at very high temperatures to be efficient. One of the biggest challenges that we face when we’re generating electricity, as one example, is being able to remove the waste heat. And what waste heat means is on the outside or the rejection side of any kind of, cycle. Or if you think about a power conversion cycle like Brayton power or a Stirling engine, some of the most early types of heat engine, you put heat in, but you also do work and have to reject heat. And it’s that heat rejection that is the biggest challenge in terms of mass penalties as we face being able to close a mission design that doesn’t spiral out of control when it comes to mass and mass penalty. So, in order to overcome all of these challenges with rejecting waste heat, instead of using a lot of dead mass, which is essentially a radiator panel, that radiates heat to space. What we have to do is minimize that mass. We have to do that, using the Stefan Boltzmann law, which there’s that term temperature, the power of four. So, in other words, if you can increase the temperature significantly, you can dramatically increase the efficiency of the overall radiator technology and the ability to radiate to space. All of that reject heat. And there were some legacy programs that looked at fission systems. Those systems, looked at, you know, pretty low temperature radiator technology. It was the best that was at hand back, even up through the 1990s through the early 2000. Those temperatures may have been around 500 Kelvin, 525 Kelvin. With some of the legacy programs and those the challenges there is that you need hundreds to kilometers of, square, you know, square area that, that you need to reject heat from. And so, if we can bring temperature up to in the realm of 900 Kelvin to even in the future 1200 Kelvin, where that could be a sweet spot where we’re in the meter squared, not thousands of meters squared. That is really interesting and very exciting because every meter squared has mass attributed to it. And so, if we can keep the square meter down, then we can keep the mass down of the overall system. And remember that that that mass doesn’t do anything but push heat to space. So, it takes away the amount of useful payload that we can put on a spacecraft, instrumentation, even people and essentials for life support so that that’s what we can bring back to a mission if we can bring temperature up. So that means development of new radiated materials and potentially new fuel systems, and even new reactor technologies that work in the realm of 3000 Kelvin. So, lots of exciting work on materials manufacturing side. All of this to say that we need people to solve those problems, and we need the facilities and infrastructure across the nation to, to really develop those new technologies.

Eric White Yeah, we’ll get into the talent aspect of this, in just a second. But I do want to ask, you know, what sorts of research efforts are looking into those things? How do you how do you experiment with this? You know, it’s pretty finicky technology already here on Earth. I can’t imagine, you know, having to conduct sort of these experimental works in space, you know, are there any research efforts that you’re currently involved in, or you have been involved with in the past that look into trying to address those challenges?

Robert O’Brien Absolutely, yes. This is this is where the programmatic side, of the, the technology areas is really, starting to, to pick up a lot of momentum and getting a lot of great results already. If we think about the NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion project, which is run out of the STMD directorate at NASA, this is, a really exciting program that’s been going for several years now, making immense progress with respect to developing new fuels that perform incredibly well at 3000 Kelvin for the nuclear propulsion side, we’re looking at nuclear thermal propulsion and nuclear electric propulsion. One aspect is generating electric to be able to power, thrusters like whole thrusters, ion drives, even technologies like VASIMR where the future looking being able to be very efficient, looking at different power levels. Everything from the kilowatts, megawatts. We’re making great progress, across the industry sectors as well as, within the NASA centers and the Department of Energy, all working together to solve materials problems at those high temperatures. And, you know, 3000 Kelvin for fuel, is over 2500 Kelvin more than, we’re doing today on Earth for fuel systems that, that are looking at, fission technologies and, existing fleet of reactors like the pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors across the country. So those technologies are a very robust well understood. And they operate in a very safe and low temperature areas. We’re looking at temperatures now that are pushing the boundaries for space exploration, that are pushing the boundaries of the physical or the solid state, if you like. We’re on the verge of melting fuel when it comes to nuclear thermal propulsion, but we do that because we have a robust matrix to encapsulate the fuel. So, we’re looking at technologies like ceramic matrices and ceramic metallic matrices. The matrix itself holds everything together. It maintains a cool geometry as we take the fuel up to 3000 Kelvin. And the fissile material, the fuel itself is embedded in that matrix. Being able to make that material is an area we’ve made immense progress over the last decade in partnership with industry and the national lab capabilities across the country.

Eric White And so, yeah, as you mentioned, this is a huge undertaking, and you are in need of the people and the researchers to do this work. You know, being a nuclear engineer is hard enough. There’s probably not a lot of them to go around. How do you attract a nuclear engineer to say, hey, you know, why don’t you look above the stars for once and instead of focusing on nuclear power here on Earth?

Robert O’Brien Yeah, talking to stars. You know, it’s like there has to be alignment of three stars. We have to align the people. We have to align the infrastructure and capabilities, and we have to align the national priorities, the programmatic strengths. In other words, the budget to be able to resolve and develop the technology and accelerate it to beyond where it was in the 1960s, to where we’re going over the next decade. And so those three things have to be hand in hand. How do you attract people to an industry? Well, there has to be definitely demonstrated evidence. There are jobs on the outside of participating and engaging in a in an education program that will lead to that job. So, in other words, taking a nuclear engineering degree, taking the specialty course credits, or taking the specialty training that allows you to align with, being able to close some of our gaps that we have in the space nuclear powered propulsion arena. That’s really important. So, as we see more and more active programs, companies hiring companies, looking at bidding on programmatic effort for the country, I think this is a really good signal to the future talent pipeline that the area is healthy. It is definitely needed from, both a science and strategic perspective for the nation. And there are places that they can get jobs. And so, now what we have to do, demonstrating the evidence that there’s a job ahead of them, is we have to connect the dots. And that’s where the Center for Space Nuclear Research can really help both on the industry side, the national labs side, the NASA side, but also on the academic side as well. We are an arena that, allows collaboration and affordable collaboration. That’s the other part to say as well, we’re trying to develop people and develop capabilities. We have to and the low TRL sense to that in an affordable way and not, not cost the Earth because these technologies are expensive. The, you know, the real cost of flying, efficient system in space is, you know, is high. However, the return on that investment, the, the long standing, infrastructure, and capabilities and quite frankly, the national leadership that we gain from, from enabling that technology in space is immense. And so, the benefits completely outweigh the cost. So, I think by developing people, alongside the technologies, we’re really going to help push the nation forward. From a leadership perspective.

Eric White Yeah. And bringing the focus back to yourself, you’ve been at this for a while now, in this role, as you know, returning to the Center for Space Nuclear Research. Do you see yourself more as now a facilitator? And rather than being on the actual front lines of research? And, you know, also, if we could get into, you know, what made you want to go towards the space arena when you first got interested in nuclear engineering?

Robert O’Brien So, so I started, actually in the space sector, essentially, I always wanted to support the development of technology for space exploration. I wanted to be part of the space industry or the academic world that was exploring space, trying to develop science and return science to Earth and adding value and enriching life on Earth with, with space technology. I’ve always enjoyed the talent pipeline aspects as well. Growing others and collaborating with others. And I think that’s what’s exciting about this, this role, as I return to it, what brought me into then, space nuclear was really solving a problem that the general science community had. And we were looking at a mission. I was at the University of Leicester collaborate. Rating with a number of schools, including the University of Bristol in the UK and the British Antarctic Survey. We were looking at performing an experiment in Lake Vostok and, in, in, the Antarctic, and we were looking at trying to deploy a system that could be used on Europa to be able to explore the ice under the icy moon, for example. And really that that challenge was, was really compounded with the amount of energy that we can take to enable that mission. And, you know, we’re using chemical energy storage, like even the best technology, like lithium-ion battery technology is, is really, really challenged by temperature. And as you go to very cold or even cryogenic temperatures, the capacity of batteries, the best battery you can build, it’s roughly 30% of its maximum capacity at room temperature. So that was one challenge. So, you have to have large amounts of energy storage in a mission. And essentially the battery can just displace all of the science. So, I was faced with that problem and developing a technology at the University of Leicester that would work in that arena. And, you know, very quickly concluded that the only way to do this would be for nuclear energy. And so, I began studying ways that we could empower, a small robotic system in Europa and, looking for an isotope source that made sense for the UK. And, the UK faced a lot of challenges, in the 90s and early 2000, doing the same thing that we did here in the US, which was demolition and destruction, reduction of capabilities and actual capabilities. Being able to produce isotopes was difficult. What the UK had was the mock stores with americium 241, and I think the community’s going to hear a lot more about americium, and its ability to power space missions in the future with the work that’s ongoing at the University of Leicester and that, you know, we’re interested in supporting commercially here for the US industry needs as well as international needs as well, so that that real problem solving got me into, trying to trying to look for, for sources that that could help us enable space exploration using nuclear power. And, you know, I soon realized that to do big things, we need a lot of power. And so, radio isotopes worked really well at low power, up to about 100W electric. But as soon as we get into the Kilowatts electric, to be able to do that today here in 2024, with current capabilities to produce isotope materials and the commercial, supply chain for radio isotopes, we’re really looking at kilowatts and above as fission and sub kilowatt is enabled with radio isotopes today. And so, both have a bright future ahead. I think both have, a great, set of solutions that they can close, and, yeah, really, really looking forward to, how my experiences can grow other people’s capabilities and interests in this field and then, ultimately support the, the national programs to come.

Eric White Robert O’Brien is the newly appointed director of the center for Space Nuclear Research, part of the University Space Research Association.

The post The future of space travel could be nuclear first appeared on Federal News Network.

Beginning today with the ISS National Lab. It’s the government funded organization which manages all non-NASA research and investigations. It recently announced a new funding opportunity for in-space production applications, which can leverage the unique space environment to develop, test, or mature new products and processes. To find out more about the potential here and it’s role overall in U.S. space research, I got the chance to speak with Ryan Reeves, who is a material scientist with the ISS National Lab.

Interview Transcript: 

Ryan Reeves The ISOs National Lab was created by Congressional Act in 2005. The purpose of that was to open up the opportunities to the access to the International Space Station, for applications and for research beyond those that that NASA was pursuing at the time, so that any U.S. based person and company could access the unique facility that is the International Space Station. So, we took over managing the national lab in 2011. And largely what we do is reach out to industry, to academia, looking for researchers that could use the microgravity environment, the space environment, to test out some of their ideas, some of their research and technologies and, and really kind of push those technologies forward.

Eric White And so I imagine this helps speed up the process a little bit, maybe, you know, rather than having to go through a lot of the bureaucracy that would be required if they wanted to work straight with NASA. This may be a little bit of a way to streamline them, just so that folks can get up there and get to work.

Ryan Reeves Right? Yeah. And, you know, I’d like to say that that we’re a super streamlined organization and everything is going to come in and fly right away. You know, in the early days of our, of our history, we have 50% of the allocations or 50% of the research that goes up to the International Space Station is from the National Lab. You know, in those early days, the there was more allocation than there were projects to fly. Now we’re in the, the reverse where, you know, we have a lot of really good ideas, a lot of things coming in. But yeah, the idea is, is now we have specific calls out, national lab research announcements or NLRAs, as we call them, so that this offers an opportunity, a pathway by which people can, can seek to prove out their technologies to in some cases, you know, where you’re a lot further advanced on your technology readiness levels. You’re able to conduct that in a relevant space environment and now be able to say that you have flight validated hardware. So that that’s been really useful for a number of companies.

Eric White It can give me just a couple of examples off the top of your head of some of the developments that have been made using research and development tactics, actually on the station.

Ryan Reeves Yeah. So, you know, one example is, from the pharmaceutical industry. So, Merck sent up one of their cancer drugs, a, Keytruda. And so, what they were looking for was to see if the crystallization happened in a different manner, if they could get different structure, different properties from that. What they saw was that the crystal structure was, and the crystals in general were a lot more, uniform. They were smaller overall, but they were a lot more uniform. And as a result, that led to potentially being able to use these as opposed to being having to be conducted in an IV drip and have more lifetime limitations. Now, they could be injected intravenously, and so the handling of them was a lot easier from a patient perspective. Now, you might be able to spend less time at the doctor’s office, you know, in those sorts of treatments. Other examples of that includes, you know, more on the technology development side. We had Orbital Sidekick sent up a hyperspectral camera. So, this is a camera that’s able to be viewed and, you know, the infrared, the visible region, the far infrared, you know, many different regions. And they were looking to target customers that might be looking for gas pipeline leaks or, you know, rare mineral earth deposits, things of that nature. So, they proved out the technology by operating on the O source. And since then, they’ve had a number of customers that they’ve been able to sell their products to and have, included these, these satellite, imaging technologies for Earth observation. Since then, one more example of one of those is Orbit Fab. And so, there’s a number of satellites that are up in orbit, and they have a limited lifetime, mostly because of the fuel limitations. Once they’ve kind of consumed their fuel and, you know, they’re not able to make maneuvers within orbit to reposition, they kind of outlived their usefulness in that regard. So, one of the biggest ways that we can prolong the life of that is if there was a refueling opportunity. So, Orbit Fab did a series of tests with us on the International Space Station using a special autonomous robot on the ISS called Astrobee. And they showed that they could use their technology to refuel when you don’t have, gravity to automatically kind of drain out the fuel from one side to another. And just recently, I saw that they had shipped out many of their, their nodes for refueling to a number of customers. So once those are eventually launched in orbit, and orbit five is able to get their operation up and going, there will be ports that they can go into and refuel those satellites.

Eric White Very cool. So, in this new initiative that you all have, again, it’s a new funding opportunity to sort of further in space production. Can you kind of define that for me? Because it’s kind of a buzzword that I’ve heard from many of my other interviews. And, you know, it seems as if it’s something that might be more pronounced further down the road. But right now, is it in its beginning phases and what exactly is going on with in in space production?

Ryan Reeves Right. So, you know, this has been a goal for of NASA. But, you know, all around the world, all space agencies, as soon as we started putting up humans into space and we started sending research, the goal was there must be something that we could produce so uniquely, in space are of such quality that, we could bring it back down to Earth and it would change various industries. And so this goes back to Skylab, it goes back to the Mir space station’s, you know, going all the way back, the first kind of product that was potentially produced in space, that was brought back and then sold on Earth, arguably there, NASA worked with NIST to produce space beads. These were poly, polymer beads that were of, very uniform, sphere like construction. Right. The sphericity of them, or the uniformity of that was so high that they could use those as calibration standards. So, in the 1983 time period, they produced a bunch of them and then NIST sold them on their website. Since then, there’s been kind of a gap in terms of products that were produced in space and then brought back down here on Earth. But we’ve seen through the research that’s been done on the International Space Station over the last 20 years, that there are a number of technologies which seem ripe for that opportunity. So, one of those is an exotic optical fiber, we call it Z blend that stands for the chemical elements in there. But these Z blend optical fibers have the potential to have orders of magnitude less losses than, traditional silicon optical fibers. But when we draw them on Earth, because of those, chemical elements have very different densities, they start to separate out and they get form these crystals, which interferes with that optical transmission. What they showed NASA, did a series of studies in the 90s that showed that if you are able to draw these fibers in space, or at least in a microgravity environment, that you could eliminate that crystallinity and potentially get much better, quality from that. So, one of the things that we have seen, the first commercial attempt at drawing fibers in microgravity occurred on the ISS. We sponsored a payload and by which those were drawn in 2019. And since then, we’ve had at least four companies that have gone and tried to produce an optical fiber in in microgravity, the most recent being Flawless Photonics, which was able to do kilometers of draws of these fibers, which is much higher than we have seen in the past.

Eric White Okay. And so, with this new funding opportunity, are you all looking to further the advancements already made in producing certain products? Are you looking at potentially new kinds of products that could fit that mold? Because obviously we don’t have any no zero gravity environments down here that I’m aware of. So, you don’t really know until you try. Or do they already know before they try?

Ryan Reeves Yeah. So, I mean, certainly we would want to see some evidence that shows why you think that there, you know, that microgravity would improve the, the quality or the, or the structures, something about the material. But no, it doesn’t have to be something that has already been tested. We realize that while we’ve been doing space research, you know, on the ISS for the past 20 years on, you know, going back much further than that, we are cognizant of the fact that there’s a lot more to discover and things that we haven’t even thought of, the opportunities that we foresee right now, you know, in kind of some of the preliminary data has been a lot in the area of crystallization. So that could be on the organic side with, protein crystals or, or drug crystal formation that could be on the inorganic side. So that could be things like, semiconductors or simulators for detectors. So, there are opportunities out there. We have things in additive manufacturing, whereby, you know, particularly on the biological side with soft materials, you’re able to produce materials with and tissues which don’t collapse under their own weight, but instead are allowed to mature and strengthen over time in the microgravity environment, so that when you bring them back down to Earth, they’re able to support their own weight. And you don’t, you they don’t collapse into a puddle. So, you know, the answer to, to your question was both. You know, there is a number of projects which have already proved out some potential, but we’re open to hearing new ones because we know that there, you know, that, that the new the next technology is still out there as well.

Eric White Understood. All right. And so, what is the potential here? Obviously, you know, we know that the ISS won’t be up there forever. NASA has already said that. Could we see a future where there are more stations up there just for the purpose of either studying or manufacturing these kinds of goods?

Ryan Reeves You know. Absolutely. And what? We’re already starting to see that now. So, NASA has funded a number of companies to continue on after the ISS. And so, these commercial Leo destinations, like, an Axiom Space, the orbital reef from Blue Origin and Sierra Space, one from Voyager, those are coming down the line. And, you know, their goal is to be up there before the ISS is decommissioned and are in and around 2030. But even outside of that, we’re already seeing Lavada, just sent up a capsule that was looking to produce crystals up in space for biomanufacturing. They just returned those samples and released some of the data. So, we’re already seeing opportunities whereby there’s more opportunities out there beyond just the ISS. And we expect that to grow even more in the future.

Eric White And what do you see the role of the National Laboratory once the ISS days are done, or do you continue to see yourself as a sort of liaison between the research and private sector and getting folks up to research in space?

Ryan Reeves Yeah. So right now, the ISS National Lab, our cooperative agreement is tied to the ISS itself. So, our goal here is to accelerate all of these technologies such that they’re able to bridge the gap when the ISS is decommissioned, and they can go and start doing business to business transactions. With all of these commercial space stations. They’re likely will be a need for some sort of entity to provide those that those functions whereby you’re helping to translate, you know, ground based science into what can be done on station, who that will be, will ultimately be up to NASA in terms of how they want to restructure that. But one of the things that I haven’t talked about yet that we’ve served a role in is, you know, we’ve been working with government agencies that don’t traditionally work in space. So, we worked with NIH in these tissue chips, looking at, different systems of tissues and how they interconnect in, in a microgravity environment where you start to see accelerated aging. We’ve also worked with NSF in two different calls, expanding over the course of nine years. So, I would think that some sort of entity, you know, post ISS still serving that role. That would make a lot of sense.

Eric White Yeah. Plus, you’d like to see your babies all grown up, right?

Ryan Reeves I mean, we’re happy with the progress that we’ve seen so far and we’re excited for the future of these technologies. So yes, we have solicitations that go on throughout the year. So, while this one’s focused on what sort of materials can we produce in space to be able to bring back down here and use on Earth? We also have an opportunity out there now for Stem education and workforce development. So, if you go to our website ISSNationallab.org, you’ll see all of the opportunities that we have out now, as well as the ones that we project out in the next year or so.

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You hear a lot about zero trust controls in government tech circles, especially here on Federal News Network. Could this approach to cybersecurity which requires constant verification before access to a system, be applied to protecting space assets? The U.S. Space Force certainly seems to think so. It recently granted a a $17 million contract to the company Xage Security to help the branch achieve zero-trust access control and data protection. To learn more, I spoke to Geoff Mattson, CEO of Xage Security.

Interview Transcript: 

Geoff Mattson You know, in the old days, people erected protection in the middle of the network so they would give up things like firewalls that would sit between, you know, interior network, the big internet and your internal system and things like VPN servers. It would allow you to do jump over the firewall and access your, your internal resources and things like that. The principle of zero trust, instead of having these incremental, you know, middle boxes sitting in the network we need to do is set up a secure session from one end to the other. Right. So that there is no way that an attack could occur, you know, in the middle or an attacker could, you know, penetrate, you know, for instance, get past your firewall and start roaming around internally in your in your company. So that’s the principle of zero trust. Establish a session that’s secure between the client and a server or a resource and the user of the resource for a specific amount of time and safeguard it properly as well. If it happens to be a privileged session, something that could do damage. And Xage security is, has taken this architecture and come up with a way to apply it to areas that are difficult to apply to such as industrial systems and space systems.

Eric White Specifically in space of how can zero trust be applied in space, what sort of applications are there, and what sort of tools are in need of having zero trust protections?

Geoff Mattson Yeah, well, space is really a great challenge for security in general and zero trust in particular. Because if you think about it, there is several layers, to protect the satellites themselves don’t actually work very well if they’re not connected to a functioning terrestrial network. So, we need to protect the terrestrial network. We’ve seen from recent events that attacking, you know, Viasat attack, that attacking the modems. So, attacking industrial equipment that is a modem could render, satellite communications inoperational for some period of time. And then we have the satellites themselves have to be protected as well. Our adversaries are looking at ways to try to compromise them both through supply chain attacks, you know, basically sort of putting, you know, malware or things like that into components in the supply chain or by using some sort of active attack, living off the land attack. So, there’s several components that have to be protected. And then on top of that, there’s actually the data itself. So that the data is streaming from a satellite is really what’s provides value to, you know, in our case, what we’re focused in on is the warfighters. And we need to make sure that the data is available to partners that need it. But not all of the data is available to all partners. So actually, sort of controlling access to those partners and individual basis. So, each of these, each of these layers, each of these segments, we can protect with a zero-trust strategy. And the data itself we can protect with a zero-trust strategy. It’s not without its challenges, but it’s you know, absolutely the right thing to do. As you mentioned.

Eric White You know, on those challenges, you know, just coming from the Space Force, IT. And hearing that zero trust is going to be at the forefront of protecting US space assets. Can you highlight a few of those challenges in implementing it actually. And you know, is zero trust going to be a blanket approach to solving a lot of the cyber security concerns that we see?

Geoff Mattson Well, you know, I’m glad you used the term blanket approach because, you know, that’s what I think is the best strategy, especially in terms of considering the fact that the overall strategy for Space Force is, you know, rather than having just a few high altitude, military satellites, it can, you know, relatively easily be targeted by adversaries. The intention is to use commercial low orbit satellites as well. So have thousands of commercial low orbit satellites, you know, much, much harder to attack. But in doing so, you need to be able to apply the same type of security, operations to these broad third-party commercial systems that you do to the, to the military ones. So, our approach to zero trust is we use an overlay approach. So basically, we sit in a network, but we’re completely invisible, to, to the user. On both ends of the network, and we can sit between, you know, any type of legacy device or something like, for instance, you know, a satellite which might currently not be able to be, you know, reprogrammed to have a lot of zero trust logic on its own. We can sit in between, in between the user and that system and enforce principles of zero trust. So, the idea is to do this as an overlay to it to be dropped in place. You know, we can actually come be brought up in a day in any of these third party commercial providers, and extend the coverage that Space Force has, you know, to these other commercial operators, without them noticing any change in their operations, without them having to make any configuration changes. So, you’re exactly right. You know, it needs to be a blanket approach, and a blanket need to be a blanket that covers, you know, the entire footprint, including third parties.

Eric White Speaking of the footprint, we’re not talking about the things just in the air, but what about down on the ground and the architecture there that is relied upon to actually operate these, space vehicles? I imagine that there are some cyber vulnerabilities there. Could this technology, be put into use in protecting those assets?

Geoff Mattson Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, that’s probably the easiest area to attack from a cyber perspective right now is the terrestrial network or the modems. And so, the principle of zero trust that we employ. What it does is it not only allows this end-to-end protection, which can encrypt and make sure there’s integrity and secure a connection between, say, you know, a satellite and a consumer of the information a satellite is, is transmitting. But we can actually protect the network itself from attacks. And one of the reasons this is very important too is you’re seeing you might have seen in the news if you follow the cyber world, the greatest growing threat vector right now is network equipment and security equipment. That’s legacy. Right. So, there are a lot of a lot of products on the market that have been developed over, you know, even decades that have accumulated a lot of technical debt and are near peer, you know, adversaries and even criminal groups have found ways to compromise that. An example of this is, you know, the Avanti VPN server, Avanti, formerly Pulse Secure. It’s one of the most popular, you know, VPNs among, you know, large companies and used by the federal government as well. And, you know, CISA last month put out a warning instructing all federal agencies to pull out their Avantis immediately. And then there was a follow on warning from Five Eye countries as well as the FBI, you know, saying that the situation was even worse and that the, VPN services were being actively compromised and there was no way to actually, you know, verify whether or not, they were under attack and there’s no way to actually fix them if they are attacked. So, it’s legacy systems like that that have coded, you know, accumulated over a 20-year period that may be easy to, to attack. Those are the types of network security protections that don’t really work in this realm. And so, in principle of zero trust, using a product that’s developed with, you know, with the military called Secure by Design, so built in security principles, heavy use of, pen testing. And then, you know, official certification to a set of security standards is really what’s necessary to protect them.

Eric White Yeah. How would you grade the current cyber security landscape when it comes to, U.S. space assets? You know, I guess we can just stick to federal side of things for the moment because, you know, they are probably the highest, have the higher value for, any adversaries or malicious hackers. What would you say about the current situation?

Geoff Mattson Well, I’d say it’s a great question. And I would say that, you know, things are rapidly changing because as I mentioned, you know, the strategy now is to leverage, the whole commercial, satellite ecosystem as well. And so, if you look at that, there is a hodgepodge of different security solutions, that those providers have in place. What we offer as a company is, a, you know, this blanket protection that can be dropped in place with those commercial partners, with any commercial partner as well as Space Force, and provide that type of end to end protection and even protect against, you know, some commercial providers may not have the most stringent security in place. You know, cyber security is an area of growing awareness in this space. You probably know. But having said that, any drop in a solution like ours in place can significantly mitigate the effects of a compromise in another area of the networks say if one of these legacy devices were used and significantly, slow down, an attack from a near peer competitor, or hacktivist or any other type of, of attacker.

Eric White If any of our listeners were playing a drinking game, the keyword would be zero trust to take a sip. Getting past zero trust technology. Are there any other tools that might be in the holster for protecting these very, you know, new and, as you said, ever changing networks.

Geoff Mattson Well, I think a layered approach is what’s needed. And so, you know at Xage we have, sort of built in, you know, it’s called defense in depth. So, in addition to sort of setting up the encrypted and carefully monitored, authenticated end to end communication, which is the ZT buzzword that I won’t mention again, I’m going to start the drinking game off. Yeah. Give me a break.

Eric White Yeah. Give him a break.

Geoff Mattson Yeah, I yeah. So, what we need to do is also embed in that past, you know, various checks for things like files that may be infected with malware for behaviors that seem to be unusual. You know, we need to enforce normal network patterns, but then we also need to notice if something is trying to deviate from those patterns. So, you know, behind the scenes behind this, ZT end to end protection, you know, in the middle, there’s also a lot of attempts to detect, contain and mitigate any type of attack. Right. So, it’s just like a duck that looks, looks like it’s, gliding along the lake, but, you know, underneath the surface, it’s, paddling very hard. You know, what is required, for our broader national security is, you know, being able to find any of the weak links in these networks and in these, chains that serve that, provide, defense, and provide critical services. And it’s the area that is not protected is the one that the bad guys will find very quickly and be able to exploit and then, you know, move laterally. So, you know, having an approach where we can drop in place protection, and it can go anywhere, it can be deployed. And, you know, satellite can be deployed in harsh conditions on that on the ground. It can be deployed, in areas that might have intermittent or no, network access and being able to cover every spot and cover it very quickly with an overlay solution is, you know, what we think is really necessary for us to have resilience built into our national infrastructure. You know, both civilian and critical infrastructure and defenses as well.

Eric White Geoff Mattson is CEO of Xage security.

The post A zero-trust approach to space cybersecurity could be the answer first appeared on Federal News Network.

Two commercial space companies have agreed to work together on enhancing national security capabilities in the commercial space domain. Voyager Space and Palantir are using their abilities to help support and protect new technologies to be used on the International Space Station, and the soon to come Starlab commercial space station. I wanted to find out more about what this agreement means and get an overview of those involved, so I spoke to Matt Kuta, Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Voyager Space.

Interview Transcript: 

Matt Kuta Voyager Space and Palantir are both Denver based companies. And Voyager, we’re a space technology company, largest commercial user in the world of the International Space Station. Notably, we’ve also are prime contractor to build through a public private partnership the replacement of the International Space Station, owned by private industry. And when we think through a space station and, the platform, there’s a lot of data that is generated in space, structured and unstructured data. And for lack of a better analogy, the ability to send all of that data down the pipes are restricted to pipes are kind of clogged. It’s very difficult to send all the data down to Earth to transmit it. So when you think about how do we capitalize on all this data that is, generated on a space station that’s privately owned, and then think through the concept of maybe computing on the edge, or you’re using a company like Palantir, and they’re proving credibility and capability of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically kind of transmit down to the customer, the end user, the answer or and a few options of answers for them to then go use however the customer might need. That’s how you kind of arrive at this really unique partnership with Palantir and Voyager space, where Palantir is not in the business of building space station. Voyager is. At the same point Voyager is not in the business of, creating from scratch in organic AI machine learning capability. So that’s kind of, how it came about.

Eric White So when you say AI and the machine learning capability, you primarily mean creating a mechanism that can take all of the vast amounts of data that, you know, whatever machine you have up in space right now is gathering at all times and being able to do what with it, break it down, or just categorize it in a way that’s actually useful because it’s a lot it is a lot of data, as you mentioned.

Matt Kuta Right? Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I, I actually turn out to say it’s a little bit of what the customer needs. Right. So, some customers might say, hey, here’s our constraints and our, our desired outcomes and send me the answer like it’s maybe it’s to track, certain things in the ocean or something like that, or send something down to a warfighter on the battlefield. And it’s a very precise solution we’re delivering to a customer. But it can also be to your other point, hey, you know, we have all this data. Here’s more curated assemblage or smorgasbord, if you will, of options for you to kind of go and use. But the bottom line is, how do we leverage a space station’s higher power supply computing on the edge to partner with a company like Palantir to send a much more concise, user friendly answer versus giant packets of data that, might not be able to all complete and be able to be transmitted down to Earth.

Eric White And so let’s focus back on those said customers. Who might that be? Would that be government agencies, I imagine, and maybe some other entities that could find that data useful. Who are you looking to work with? And what are the fruits of the labor going to look like?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, I say, as I mentioned today, Voyager is the largest commercial user of the International Space Station. As a matter of fact, Voyager and Palantir have actually already worked on a joint proposal to a Department of Defense customer already. So, they think to replace that ISS. It’s a spectrum of it’s a continuation of stuff we’re already doing today and what will occur in the future, if you think to those customers, certainly national security customers. But, given the future space station called Star Lab will be a commercial station, it can certainly also be both national security and commercial use. So, example could be maybe in Star Lab, we’re serving, a DoD customer, for example, maybe like United States Navy or something like that to help support naval assets. But we think through a commercial application. Maybe there’s some, tangential or direct application of helping a commercial company with our shipping vessels. Something like that.

Eric White Got it. We’re speaking with Matt Kuta. He is the president of Voyager Space. And so, as you talk about these national security implications, you know, just from a person who covers this, beat, and sees the amount of business that these commercial space companies have been doing with defense entities all over the world really, that amount of work together has exploded. And it’s part of the importance, you know, in defense industry and Defense agencies seeing the importance in space. But can you talk about a little bit about that and how, you know, how much more are you working with, government entities for national security purposes?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, it’s a bad a bad use of the word when talking to a space guy about the industry exploding. oh. Yeah.

Eric White Sorry. We’re full of puns here at Space Hour.

Matt Kuta Right, right. But when you think through rapidly growing, if you will. Yeah, it’s really exciting time to be in a space, sector. Commercial space sector. You know, just a couple things. One, the I’ll call it the national security apparatus is in this transition. And what you know it won’t happen completely for many reasons. But it’s in this transition where instead of the U.S. government owning some of these hard assets, government owned, government operated for decades, they’re seeing how efficient the private sector can be and looking to capitalize on that efficiency, both in the capital markets, that innovation nimbleness speed to execution and completion, and have the ability to buy it as a service. You know, we talked about the space station. You know, the International Space Station today is owned by the government. It’s really five space agencies, five kind of government entities. It’s NASA, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos, JASA, the Japanese space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It’s effectively owned and capitalized by those five entities. And when the International Space Station is deorbited in 2030, which is publicly announced, the United States government will never own another low-Earth orbit space station. It will be owned by private industry. That’s what we’re working on. And when it is in orbit, the industry will own it. And then the customers governmental customers like NASA, ESA, national security customers, commercial customers like pharmaceutical companies, life science companies or basically build a microgravity laboratory. We’ll use it as a customer. And it’s an infrastructure investment. And there’s a precedent for this. If you go back in time to the late 1990s, early 2000s, and you ask yourself, well, who owned the space shuttle with the wings, you know, come in and land? That was the government. Government owned that NASA. And then, early 2000s around 2006 seven, the US government ended the space shuttle program. And so, we have to privatize it. And at a time, two companies want a public private partnership contract called a Space Act agreement. One was Orbital Sciences is with now orbital ATK, owned by Northrop Grumman. They built a Cygnus resupply vehicle down to about two dozen times to the ISS. And the second company was a four-year-old SpaceX. It had never launched a rocket. And fast forward 15-20 years, if you ask anybody, well, who owns SpaceX, who owns the rockets? No one says the government. They say, well, the company does, the investors do. And then the customer, the government, venture capital backed satellite companies, tourist, whoever pay SpaceX as a customer to launch their payload and they charge margin. You’re seeing it you being used in applications like in the in the Ukraine conflict with Russia and Planet and Max are you know, governments are buying imagery from commercial companies now. So, there’s lots of exciting, you know, developments in us.

Eric White And talking a little bit about the past, before I talk about the future, I’d like to get a little bit more into Voyager’s past itself. You’ve mentioned a couple times now on how you’re the biggest commercial user of the ISS. How did you all get to this point? And, you know, where did you all start? Where did you all actually start out?

Matt Kuta Yeah. So, over the last few years, Voyager has been basically vertically integrating core parts of the space station supply chain in anticipation that the US government was going to look to deorbit the ISS and privatized ISS. Over the last couple of years, Voyager has a series of seven acquisitions as part of our space station supply chain, strategy. And so, Voyager itself, the company is, just over four years old, the underlying operating history of Voyager, it goes back, you know, about 20 to 30 years.

Eric White And so now, towards the future, what is it looking like? You know, you just spoke a little bit about how you’re preparing for that deorbit of the ISS. But, you know, as this moves forward, do you all see you yourselves going into other areas of space acquisition or, you know, working in other sectors as you increase, you know, in the national security realm as well?

Matt Kuta Certainly. I mean, as I mentioned, we do a lot of work on the ISS today. We do a lot of work, in communications. I think, we have around over 4 million space flight hours in communication technology and in orbit. I think we have about 450 assets in space today. So, when you think through space station and the space station replacement, that’s, a very marquee program. It’s very exciting. It is a strategic asset. It’s a demonstration of sovereignty in orbit, to the to the United States and our allies. But at the same point, there’s a lot of other exciting, opportunities both within space sector that Voyager, you know, is already capitalize on. And we’ll continue to we’re very excited about the continued development of cislunar infrastructure, basically the place between Leo and in the moon, a lot of, for lack of a better word. Railroad tracks need to be laid between, the Earth and the moon. There’s a lot of stuff happening on the moon. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity here or there over the next, you know, 10 to 20 years. And, of course, always, close to home. And Leo is kind of the government agencies have ceded through, you know, ceding investment, if you will. The lower Earth orbit, geography, and economy, they’ve been working on it for 70 years. And what you’re seeing in the last ten years is a slow transition, where now NASA and the government can free up budget dollars to go deeper into space. As they hand the baton and the keys to private industry for the stuff closer to home, in low-Earth orbit.

Eric White Matt Kuta is the co-founder, president, and chief operating officer at Voyager Space. Find the rest of this interview at our website at Federal News network.com. Search the Space Hour.

The post A joint business venture to help maintain national security in space first appeared on Federal News Network.

You may remember our interview last year with Collins Aerospace. A subset of RTX, it’s working with NASA to develop the next generation spacesuit. Well the company has hit a new testing milestone, recently demonstrating its capabilities in a zero-gravity environment. One of those who got to give the suit a test drive was Danny Olivas, chief test astronaut and director of mission systems at Collins Aerospace. I got the opportunity to ask him about the new suit and where things stand currently.

Interview Transcript: 

Danny Olivas So I joined Collins Aerospace probably almost a year ago, today. And I have, I was brought on initially, within engineering to help them build the next generation spacesuit, which is a follow-on spacesuit to the international space suit, which the NASA currently uses. And, this job really intrigued me, because one obviously has an affinity and, a special place in my heart for the EMU, the spacesuit which is on orbit. Did you know, five spacewalks? You know, back in my days at NASA. And so having an opportunity to participate in the next generation space suit, to me was a really exciting venture. Not only because I’m working on spacesuits, but when you consider the EMU was built by the same people at Collins Aerospace 40 years ago, and it’s still functioning today, you know, really gives me an opportunity as an engineer to contribute to something that, you know, could well outlive me. And then certainly is, is a testament to where this company is going, in the future of space exploration, human space exploration. So, it’s exciting to be part of that. You know, that that that bold venture. We are headlong into our test program. We’ve completed our preliminary design review of that replacement suit for ISS. And, we have just completed a couple of milestones. I’m happy to tell you about those, a little bit later on.

Eric White Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, why don’t we just get right into those milestones? You know, I imagine there’s got to be quite a bit of testing when you’re, designing a new spacesuit. What is the most recent one that has been accomplished?

Danny Olivas Well, so for those who don’t know the difference between the old suit and the new suit, the best way to consider them is by considering what’s the same about them. And basically, they have two arms, two legs, a helmet, and they’re white. Beyond that, everything is different and there’s a reason why it’s different. The old suit had for the workhorse that it was for the International Space Station and NASA’s space shuttle program. Is that it was it was conceived at a time when we didn’t know what really the suit was going to be asked to go do. And then we went we built the International Space Station. Well, since then, we have learned a lot. And Collins is embedded those lessons learned into understanding what we can do for the future of space suit building. Some things, for example, that we learned were that the design of the suit was such that it was very restrictive in its motion. Weren’t really sure how the suit was going to be used. And then once we realized how it was going to be used, we realized, well, we could have made some improvements had we known then what we know now. So, we’re actually doing that. We’re taking what we have learned and actually embedding that. So, mobility is an issue. Also being able to fit the anthropometric range that NASA has been hiring astronauts for over, you know, since the beginning of the shuttle program. Originally, the space shuttle was built, to handle astronauts that were between the fifth and 95th percentile of the U.S. population. We are building a suit that will handle the, an opportunity to fit between the one and 99th percentile of the entire global population. So, it’s really a diverse suit. And with that comes all sorts of challenges of, of correcting things that, that you saw in your previous design and implementing them for future designs. So, we just have come off of a series of tests. One was a 1G test, basically just some basic demonstration of mobility and fit in the suit in a 1G environment. And then more recently, in January, we completed our Zero-G test, or microgravity tests, where we subjected myself and another colleague of mine, Dan Burbank, to 40 parabolas each over the Gulf of Mexico, 22nd increments of micro G environment to do a variety of demonstrations to give confidence to NASA that not only do we know how to build a suit, but it can satisfy all the objectives and more. What’s going to be required of the suit in the future?

Eric White So specifically in the tests, you say 20-second increments. Are you okay on the next 20 seconds, I’m going to try and do a flip for Croucher. And you, you know, obviously you’re probably looking at more than just actual movement, but what are you trying to test within those 20-second increments?

Danny Olivas Well, you know, it is one of those things where you just like doing a spacewalk, you know, you develop a choreography if you don’t know what you’re doing when you go into a test, you’re not going to know what you’ve done and whether you’ve done what you thought you were supposed to go do. So, we actually started planning early on the test team and we would practice in our laboratory downstairs and basically, you know, lay all the equipment out on the floor that we were going to be evaluating. And then we would go through each one of the parabolas. So, you know, for those who are unfamiliar with the Zero-G flight profile, you basically, you know, fly these, you know, giant arcs. You know, you go up really high in about 35,000ft and come barreling down to about, you know, 16,000ft. Then you pull back up again. And during that time frame of the fall, the plane is supposed to match roughly the equivalent acceleration of gravity, so that inside the plane you feel like you’re weightless because it happens pretty quickly. Each one of those parabolas, you experience micro-G for about 20-seconds before you kind of have to start pulling yourself back up because you don’t want to go into the ocean. That’s a that’s a bad day, right? So those pull ups or pull outs are actually, somewhere in the order of like two G’s. So, you go from a series of zero g to two Gs to zero G to two Gs to zero G to two G’s. That’s all of 40 times during the flight. Hence the name is lovingly called the Vomit Comet. Right? And so that term before it is a very provocative flight profile, but it’s really the only way to test in a micro-G environment here on planet Earth. There is no other place. We don’t have a room at NASA that you can push a button, and all of a sudden everything starts to flow. That just doesn’t happen. And so, it’s a way for us to test those things that we cannot test in a 1G environment. It’s also meant to test things that we cannot necessarily test in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which actually is going to be the next step for us now that we’ve completed this, these series of tests, I should say. Our next objective is in the next couple of months is to get into the big, you know, swimming pool at NASA. You know, take our suit, throw belly button inside, toss it inside the tank and have them kind of work around on the space station, similar to what the current EMU does. That is what we refer to as us as our task capability assessment. You know, and the system that we’re testing right now, by the way, is a pressure garment system. You know, we have, as you might know, we actually have two, two teammates, ILC Dover and Ocean Air and Space Systems. ILC Dover is the prime on the pressure garment system. That’s the thing that the astronaut is in when they’re doing a spacewalk. Now, that’s something that we can test in zero G and one G and a Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Collins Aerospace is prime on the primary life support system. So, it’s a backpack in place. Now it turns out that that that primary life support system only functions in the vacuum. And all. It’s meant really to operate in space. So, you can’t test that, like in a Zero-G environment or in a, in a swimming pool environment. We have some tests that are slated later on this year, which will ultimately, you know, you know, it’ll the apex of that is going to be a test where we put a person most likely me, in the suit with a primary life support system in a vacuum chamber. And we have one of our other, partners. Oceaneering is providing, a lot of our interfaces with the ISS. So, at that point we’ll be testing their interfaces out as well to make sure that, you know, that everything works together. And, you know, we can do what we need to do in order to be able to get the crew ready to go outside to do a spacewalk.

Eric White Gotcha. Okay, so you said most likely yourself as a former NASA astronaut, you’ve worn the old suits. I’m just curious, you know, when you first got involved with this, was there something at the top of your list where you were like, okay, the first thing I’m suggesting is, you know, more space in the crotch area. What was there something that was at the top of your mind that you were like, please do this first?

Danny Olivas Yes. And it’s actually been my rallying cry for everything that I do. And that is diversity. You know, one of the things that the astronaut that the, EMU was unable to do was to take advantage of the full diversity, that the crew office provided, primarily because it was built for what at the time, we didn’t know really know what kind of astronauts, typically male astronauts. Right. So, as it turns out that, a guy is almost six foot tall, you know, I weigh 200 pounds plus. Don’t tell anybody. Right? It’s just between the two of us. And would you believe it or not, the smallest suit that was available is the one I trained in. And it was actually the medium sized, because they do make a small. Now, there’s a variety of reasons as to why and how we got to the point where we never ended up making a smaller version. But people who were anthropologically much smaller than I am, which is a large percentage of the population, by the way, meant that that suit fit was not like an ideal suit fit. So they had some strategies that they would use everything from putting foam and cushions and harnesses and whatnot inside the suit, but it put a portion of or a crew office in a kind of an unfair disadvantage in their training for EMUs, which meant that if you take a look at the backgrounds. So, if you take a look at the people who actually gone off and done EVAs what you’re going to notice. Very few females actually have done EVA’s. And the reason being is because unfortunately, they were hampered by an ill-fitting suit. So, by designing this suit, really for the full anthropometric range that we’re really targeting with the suit, we’re going to open up human exploration tremendously, because now you’ll have a much more diverse population that can actually participate in that. And so, to me, that has been one of the most important things in that I have front of my mind. Safety first and foremost. Right. But equally up there is the fact that this suit has to basically fit everybody and for a suit that was a workhorse for as many years as it has been. We’ve really been able to leverage into what we’ve learned about the previous suit, to be able to make those really kind of not just incremental changes or like, you know, significant changes in the suit to allow smaller crew members to be able to actually operate effectively and efficiently in the suit.

Eric White Yeah. You know, with the EMU, you know, why? Why weren’t those little incremental changes able to be made? Was that just, you know, you either have to make the whole suit and you can’t really make the changes was not designed that way. Was that part of the issue or was it coming down to the almighty dollar?

Danny Olivas Yeah, that’s a great question. And I would say it was a mixture of both programmatic economics and then just geometry. The first talk, first about the geometrical aspect of the geometry of the suit is that on the front of the suit you have the display and control module. That’s the intelligence that you need to communicate with everything that’s in the, in the backpack, the primary life support system. It’s what controls your fans and your power and your communications, etc., etc.. So it turns out that if you’re going to make a smaller, hard upper torso, which was kind of the, like the vest, if you will, of the suit, right, that you attach your arms to and you attach the legs to that was made out of fiberglass. And so, if you made the chest portion of that too small, like you brought the shoulders in too narrow. Now the DCU or DCM wouldn’t fit. And so, there was a geometry problem, right. And then there was the fact that, you know, there was also programmatic issues of like, okay, we have a lot of competing things at NASA that we’re having to go fund. Where are we going to put our money? And then it was like, how much is it going to cost to actually build a very small hut in order to be able to accommodate these, you know, the rest of the, the office. And so now you spent a lot of time looking at that, you know, I don’t know exactly how and the real behind why each one of those decisions were made. But the fact of the matter is, is that we never got to the point where we had a small hut available. You know, so now we are actually building a hard, a hybrid upper torso. So, it’s part hard and part, soft, like the, like the arms and the legs. Right. So, this hybrid system actually allows us to really only offer two sizes. And it turns out that the overlap in the sizes is significant enough that we should very easily be able to accommodate the entire anthropometric range that there were looking for. So not only is a suit want to be more robust in its ability to be used by other people and different types of people, but it’s also going to be safer. One of the other challenges that we had with the previous suit is that the shoulder joints, because of the way that they were oriented and the fact that it was a hard upper torso resulted in a lot of shoulder injuries for your astronauts. I think I heard one time a, one of the flight surgeons reflect that 85% of the people who did spacewalks actually suffered some level of shoulder injury or trauma. And, you know, so we had shoulder injuries. We had, you know, people who had, you know, severe hand injuries and numbness. We had, you know, back strains and things of that sort. So, the idea is to build a suit that is more comfortable and more accommodating to the astronauts. That’s safer for the astronauts. It’s, you know, comfortable for them. That’s intuitive for the astronauts. And, you know, we have a slogan that we like to say that this is a spacesuit that is by astronauts for astronauts. And we really do mean it is like we’re taking the astronaut experience it, and we’re embedding it in everything that we do.

Eric White You mentioned a few of the tests that you have coming up, where you yourself could be stepping into a vacuum chamber. I’m wondering, you know, do you miss space? And do you ever see yourself being the first one to wear this suit? Actually, on the on the or not on the ground, I guess, in the air, back up in space.

Danny Olivas Well, look, Eric, I’m going to be honest with you, I, I’ve had an opportunity to do my do. You know, I was blessed to have flown on the space shuttle when I did. I don’t I’ve never said to myself, boy, I could fly in space again because I did have my opportunity. And that’s part of why I’m here, is because I feel like it’s a way for me to pay back the opportunity that I was given. I’m working with the same group of, you know, same company, the same group of engineers and people and many of them that were here back when I was with the program and their suit kept me safe. Brought me back from five spacewalks. You know, basically in a place where human beings were never meant to live and work. And yet this suit allowed us to do so as human beings. Right. And so, it’s my opportunity now to give back to the next generation of astronauts. You know, this suit. What makes me excited about this suit is it’s not just a suit about going up and replacing the one it’s on space station. You know, after space station’s gone, we’re going to have commercial destinations. Those are going to be there. CLD is going to have, you know, maybe one, two, who knows how many types of space stations which will be on orbit. That’ll be commercial. And, anytime you build a space station out there, you need to go outside and do work. And so, this suit is basically meant to be a microgravity suit. Additionally, the technology is 90 to 95% extensible to the lunar surface. So, we’re not just building the suit with the intention of if it only existing in low Earth orbit. We’re looking at a cislunar. So, between here and the moon we’re looking at gateway, which is going to be orbiting the moon. And then also boots on the ground at the lunar surface. This suit will be able to do well once you get to the lunar surface, you have some different requirements that you have to meet. But again, it’s only going to be 9 or 5 to 10% of the additional changes. Mostly, the suit will be the exact same suit that you see on ISS.

Eric White And they can be as short as they need to be, astronauts.

Danny Olivas Exactly, exactly they that while I like to think I do like to think of it from a standpoint of flight, I just like to think that it’s going to it’s going to greatly allow for the full complement of astronauts that are out there. It’s going to diversity is an important thing for me, being, you know, Mexican American, you know, being the, you know, the first Hispanic or first Mexican American to do a spacewalk. And I know the importance of, of enabling these kinds of, of opportunities. And so, I’m excited to be part of this and give back in a way that I feel like I’m, again, paying back for the opportunities that I was given with the space shuttle program. This is not a spacesuit about astronauts. This is a spacesuit about human beings here on Earth who put the suit together for those astronauts. You know, I’m so proud to be working alongside all the engineers that I work with. They’re the ones who I wish you could talk to because they’ve got great stories. You know, I was just having lunch with, you know, five of them today, young, young engineers. And it was just it just so exciting to see them excited about the work that they’re doing, the contributions that they’re making. And everyone has zeroed in on this mission of building, you know, a safe space suit that is going to take the lessons that we learn from the past and propagate them forward. You know, many of our names will never be remembered in history. I know mine; I don’t care if anyone remembers me in the history, but the fact that my thumbprints show up on the suit alongside many of the other thumbprints from everybody else I’m working with here today, gives me a great sense of pride. And so, this is why I’m an engineer. This is why I do what I do. This is why I’m happy to be where I’m at is because it’s really about that. This accomplishment is really about a testament to the teamwork here at Collins. And so, I’m just very proud to be here. And I’m happy for people to know that, that this is an engineering endeavor that makes human spaceflight possible.

Eric White Danny Olivas is chief test astronaut and director of mission systems at Collins Aerospace.

The post A major milestone for developing a new spacesuit first appeared on Federal News Network.

We all share life on this big blue rock, and we all share the space around it as well. So in order to get the most out of it from a business and defense aspect, the U.S. is going to need allies. So how are the relationships between the U.S. and strategic partners when it comes to space-related goals? The RAND Corporation was recently tasked with looking into that very topic. To learn more about what that research found, I got the chance to speak with Bruce McClintock, Senior Policy Researcher and lead of RAND’s Space Enterprise Initiative.

Interview Transcript: 

Bruce McClintock So in about the 2022-time frame. Lieutenant General Whiting and he was at the time was in Space Operations Command commander, a Beatles commander in United States Space Force, asked Rand to take a close look at how the US was currently cooperating with select allies on space operations matters and where they’re all ….. those relationships. So that was very active in the project in that time.

Eric White All right. And so, in looking through that, you know, what entities did you speak with, and how did you go about trying to find out those answers for them?

Bruce McClintock So we used a very rigorous approach where the project started off by. Well, throughout the course of the project, we conducted over 140 interviews with more than 115 people that represented 24 different organizations. And those organizations included representatives from select allied countries, NATO Space Center, …, Space Command headquarters, EUCOM headquarters, several Department of Air Force organizations all the way up to senior policy level. And then below, on top of those interviews, we actually conducted 13 different site visits, to include visits to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and then several U.S. military networks. In conjunction with all that, we then analyzed close to 200 different documents, ranging from U.S. policy documents to plans for space operations to country specific documents. So, it’s a pretty rigorous, very holistic approach to conducting the research for the project.

Eric White All right. And so, then the next question is what some of your findings were. So, let’s go through it. You did a lot of site visits. You talked to a lot of allies. When it comes to space and U.S. space policy, you know, what were some of the concerns that that you were hearing from counterparts in other governments?

Bruce McClintock So one of the most common things that we heard from counterparts in other governments are what they often euphemistically referred to as the gap, or the policy or practice gap, if you will. And what they mean by that is that the U.S. was often cited as being very much publicly committed to integrating allies in the space activities and operations. But at the end of the day, in many cases didn’t deliver at the level where it was stated publicly.

Eric White Were there any, you know, examples of this that you can give me that were brought up? And, you know, I don’t need you to go through the litany of, of any policy failures, but just an example of what they meant by that.

Bruce McClintock Sure. So, you know, one of the most frequent, especially in interviews with specific allies, one of the most frequent examples that we would encounter once the failure of the US in many cases to fully include exchange officers from other countries in space related discussions or activities. And I think it’s an important distinction here. In the U.S. parlance, there are two types of foreign officers involved in activities. There are liaison officers, which are officers that represent the interests of their country, but their liaison with the United States. So, it’ll be a representative of their foreign country that might be assigned to the US or another nation as a liaison. On the other hand, there are exchange officers which are intended to be a foreign national that are embedded in the US positions of filling US roles and responsibilities. And often what we heard was that means these allies will put into exchange ops or billets. And were told they were going to be doing a specific job in support of US national interests. Often weren’t given access to information that was necessary to perform the job that they were posted to. But that’s just one example. There were many others, but that’s not that was a very common.

Eric White Yeah. This comes down to you know, disclosure policies. I mean, the U.S. works in many arenas with its allies, whether it be, you know, on the waters or even in ground operations or anything like that. My question is, why is space such a vexing problem for when it comes to what information we can disclose to our allies and what we can’t? What exactly are the hurdles? Or, you know, is it just, you know, bureaucratic? Oh. I’m sorry. You know, you should have access to this, but you for some reason, don’t.

Bruce McClintock So I think it’s a combination of at the highest level and it’s just an evolution, based on information sharing between two different major departments in the U.S.. So that’s Department of Defense and intelligence community. At that very high level, even though their guidance flowed originally from the same executive order, they’ve both taken different approaches to that kind of process for information sharing. And then it does flow down because of that high level disconnect between those two organizations. It does flow down to lower levels, where there are essentially bureaucratic impediments that could be overcome, but there’s not necessarily motivation to overcome those impediments that exist.

Eric White Yeah. And what were some of the solutions that you all garnered? And then we can also get into some of the other, other aspects of this report. But as far as that solutions go. What is the idea there of, you know, making sure that everybody is at least on the same page when it comes to information sharing?

Bruce McClintock So one of the one of the very high-level things we recommended was that we thought there should be a deputy secretary defense level coordination effort with the ODNI. Obviously, director of National intelligence that really spanned that divide between DoD policies. And what is generally referred to as the ICC, the intelligence community policy on information sharing. And that that would be a very high-level effort, a working group if you will, that we thought would take a couple of years, but we thought we could be that high level because there are still disagreements within DoD components and uncertainty about their own internal DoD roles and responsibilities. So, because of those two aspects, we recommended a very high-level working group billet.

Eric White We’re talking here with, Bruce McClintock. He’s a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and also the lead of the Rand Corporation Space Enterprise Initiative. So, let’s get a little bit more holistic here. What is the optimal amount of coordination that needs to happen between the U.S. government and its allies when it comes to space? What would be the ideal situation there?

Bruce McClintock I’d say before we get into the actual optimal level of involvement, I think the first step to the United States is just come up with a coherent holistic policy on involving our allies, and that doesn’t exist right now. That contributes somewhat to the capacity do gap problem. Some of the outstanding options, and one of the things that we would say more about holistic approach is it’s not every ally is going to be treated the same way. Right. So, this isn’t about opening the floodgates that we will and sharing everything with every ally. There needs to be a thoughtful approach to how much we’re going to share with people allies. But the US need to be clear upfront about mutual relationship levels so that that’s point one. I would note on that. Once you have decided on those different levels. And by the way, this is what this is a relationship that goes two ways. There are different allies that want different levels of interaction with the United States. Not every ally wants to be fully integrated with beyond states in terms of space operation. And that’s, of course, their national sovereign right. So, both sides need to be clear with each other. Once you establish those different relationship level expectations by ally, then you set up a U.S. structure that addresses those different levels. And the U.S. has made some progress in this area. Some of that starts with just basic information exchange and information sharing at the fully unclassified level. So, this is not always about having a very highly qualified conversation. That makes sense.

Eric White Yeah it does. And you know, not to be you know, two to our own horn or anything. We’ve got a pretty good space program especially you know; we’ve got the Space Force that now is doing its own thing. What exactly does the U.S. need or rely on its allies? You know, the major allies out there? You know, since their space programs may not be as advanced, what exactly are is the U.S. getting from these, allies in the space arena?

Bruce McClintock Two broad terms to describe what the advantages to working with allies, because the US don’t have a very robust, very strong space program when you speak about national security in general. But the first thing I would talk about is coverage of sector one, diversity. And there are other aspects that we could talk about later in life. So, the coverage thing, I think, is the one that is arguably the most important commercial quality, because space is not just about putting things on orbit, it’s also about being able to detect, characterize and track things that are on it. And that requires geographic locations across the globe. Right. So, we’ve been doing a little use of the parameter space power. Now we need geographic access to other territories to be able to improve our space situational awareness network and also our space domain awareness infrastructure. And the same is true for potential future adversaries like China. Like, so we’re out pursuing locations to be in the satellite tracking territory and not China. So that’s one very obvious example. It’s the information sharing like space situational awareness, which is the most fully developed program in the U.S.  The U.S. has a large number of agreements signed with other nations and other entities or SSA Galaxy. So that goes to the coverage piece. But there’s also value in diversity and space capabilities. Things like things that are on orbit but also ground stations become more vulnerable to threats. It’s good to have a diverse set of resources available.

Eric White Are there other areas. And you talked a little bit about it as far as intelligence sharing and coordinating with ODNI, are there other areas where the U.S. government works with its allies, you know, in other arenas that these space policy folks can draw from and see? Okay, so that’s how they do it. You know, maybe we can apply that idea when it comes to, coordination on the space end when you’re up, up higher a little bit.

Bruce McClintock So for our research, we took a pretty close look at a couple of other domains to draw lessons in best practices from those other domains. And the first area that we looked at in particular was nuclear weapons cooperation. For a couple of reasons. We thought that would be an interesting case. First of all, nuclear weapons will probably be most carefully guarded about capabilities, most sensitive, even more so than space capabilities. And so, we wanted to see if there was even any potential share at that level. And there was, in the mid-1950s, we had the United States had exceptional capabilities in that domain, but the Soviet Union was a threat to us. And so, the United States worked closely with the United Kingdom to come up with, neutral …. That were related to nuclear weapons. There was some level of data sharing between the United States and United Kingdom. And there was other, information exchange and coordination that, was important if you consider to be best practices. We also looked at, special operations, any newer area where there has been much touting about being able to cooperate with allies and share information in a way that hasn’t been demonstrated yet in inspection of it. So those are two areas that we looked at. Looked at the two others, two clearly are in charge and sharing opinions, see, and the three primary areas limiting jamming.

Eric White All right. And so yeah, there’s really nothing more that you can say about what’s at stake when you talk about nuclear weapons, but what’s at stake when it comes to space. And, you know, if we don’t get this right as far as working and we’re getting the most that we can out of these relationships with our allies in that domain.

Bruce McClintock I think it, I’ll start at the lowest level of what’s at stake. It’s just a reduction in efficiency. And by that, I mean, in some cases, if allies feel like they can’t depend on the US to share important national security related information about space, then these allies that have significantly more limited resources than the United States has, they feel obligated to invest in their own capabilities for things as simple as space situational awareness, which I talked about earlier, whereas we had a much more robust information sharing, relationship where it was maybe not fully reciprocal, but it share the pieces of information that they could invest, that those resources in other aspects of space security that could be to the benefit of the U.S. So that’s one example. It’s reduced efficiency if we just don’t cooperate as well with our closest allies. If you move up the scale in terms of the significance of the impact, the adverse impact. If we don’t, find ways to become allied by design. There are things like reduced trust and willingness to depend on the United States in times of crisis when it comes to space. So those are now obviously more extreme, but they are package, and I don’t feel like they could count on the United States to share information when the quote unquote chips are down. Then they sometimes say, well, we need to figure out ways to be not only independent but have our own capability. And then there’s less of a need for them to turn to the US on geopolitical policy decisions.

Eric White Wrapping up here, I’ll give you a chance to say anything else on this topic that you think is important for the conversation. But if you could run through also just, you know, some of the other recommendations that you all made, based on what you found in, you know, talking and also what did DoD have to say about this? I guess we could actually ask them and include them in this.

Bruce McClintock Yeah. So I would say as far as what the DoD has to say about this, first of all, you know, I applaud the Department of Defense, starting with, Gerald Whiting for taking an interest in this topic and asking somebody like Rand to look at it because they knew that they were going to get an independent, objective and rigorous analysis of the problem. That we weren’t going to just tell them what they wanted to hear. So not only by initiating process, but then listening to throughout the course of the last couple of years and they provided preliminary insights and recommendations on our final findings and recommendations. I want to applaud, you know, the Department of Defense for being so willing to listen, because it’s not always easy to listen to something that might be tough love. They’re not telling you exactly what you want to hear. And in that vein, I think over the last couple of years, the Department of Defense has taken on some of the recommendation, not all of them by any means, but that’s their prerogative. But they have done things like made expanded the interaction with allies in select venues. So, they have grown and see SPO initiatives that combined space operations in which, you know, that used to be seven nations, it now 10. They’re working on our international space cooperation strategy that was informed by this Rand research. And it’ll also want to applaud a recent announcement from OSD, where they signed a memo that removes a lot of the legacy classification barriers that have inhibited the United States’ ability to collaborate across the U.S. and with allies. Now, that’s a direct example of a recommendation we made, not necessarily because of the Rand report, but in line with the Rand report’s findings and recommendations that the department backs. So, there been great steps taken. There’s a lot more to be done.

Eric White Bruce McClintock is senior policy researcher and lead of the Space Enterprise Initiative at the Rand Corporation. There is indeed more to the interview. You can find it along with a link to the report at Federal News network.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next. Governments aren’t the only ones joining forces to improve national security in space. Some commercial entities are as well. This is the space our on federal news network returning after this break I’m Eric White.

The post How well does the U.S. work with its allies when it comes to space? first appeared on Federal News Network.

NASA has made it’s latest grant awards for its Bridge Program, run by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The program aims to improve diversity in the science and engineering communities, as well as NASA‘s workforce itself.  The Space Hour wanted to hear more about this program and some of the projects it’s sponsoring this go round, and I did so by speaking with Padi Boyd, who is the director of the Bridge Program at NASA.

Interview Transcript: 

Padi Boyd The SMD bridge program is a program whose goal is to expand the opportunities for research experiences to students from a very wide array of institutions, many of which do not partner with NASA traditionally. So, the goal of the program is to make basically triads of faculty at what we call under-resourced institutions. Students at those schools, and scientific researchers at NASA centers to work together on cutting edge research that is important to NASA and can be a really, great bridge for the student into a Stem career.

Eric White Yeah. So, bridge there, you obviously use the title of the movie within the dialog, you know, as a bridge, how does that work? You know, you’re working with these folks and, you know, is that’s just sort of a way for them to build a relationship and say, you know, hey, maybe I’ve made some connections, and I might be able to make a career out of this.

Padi Boyd There’s I would say two goals. There are short term goals for students, to either propel them into a Stem career or help them to persist in something that they’re interested in by having a really exciting experience with NASA research. But there’s also, a very intentional desire to build new partnerships between NASA research projects and the people who do them and faculty at under-resourced institutions.

Eric White Yeah, you all definitely get something out of this as well. You know, DEIA has been a big push for all agencies because it’s been a big push of this administration. Where does this lie within NASA’s overall DEIA hopes?

Padi Boyd So I would say not, like 100% DEIA program specifically. But certainly, it was encouraged by executive orders and presidential directives, that basically, at the top level, have the goal of making the federal workforce look like America. And if you look at the science and technical workforce, demographics, they are far from that. So, there was a report, that’s done every decade called the Decadal Survey. Each science, area does something like this. And the 2020 decadal survey in astrophysics had a finding that bridge programs, which already exist out there, are something that is showing some promise in this area, giving opportunities to students from different schools, rural schools, small schools, community colleges, an opportunity to do research in an area where they’re connected by this type of bridge to a place where the research is going on, does help students persist in those careers. And these are great careers, right? Stem careers are high paying. They’re very exciting. They really are helping humanity do the next great thing out in space. So, the subject matter is very, very intriguing, motivating. And this is a program that is definitely looking to expand opportunities to get your foot in the door to research while you’re still a student, to students at a wide array of, of institutions.

Eric White Working in an arena, as NASA does, where innovation is so important. I’m wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about how you personally have seen how important equality efforts are and diversity efforts are in the Stem realm.

Padi Boyd Well, I think innovation is basically baked into what we do at NASA. The missions that we launch are first of their kind. And when they get old, and they start to break down in space, you don’t just fly out there and fix them. Many times, you are trying to fix them from the ground, and you need all kinds of ideas, and you need them quickly. And of course, people bring to the table their experiences, their lived experiences. And when you see innovative ideas coming into the table, to the discussion, these are often ideas that are not traditional ideas that are coming from, you know, kind of the tried-and-true methods. A lot of times you’re seeing ideas coming in from left field that are like, well, I hadn’t really thought of that. That’s a solution we should try. So, innovation is really important to get us new ideas. You know, things to try that we may not have thought of before. And it’s definitely true that people bring their experience in life and their ideas to the table in these types of situations. So, diversifying the people in that conversation can lead to great new, innovative ideas for sure.

Eric White So let’s turn the focus back to the project itself. You all have made the selections so far for 11 projects that are being supported within this program. I want to first get into the selection process. How do you all choose which one you would like to undertake for this program?

Padi Boyd Great question. So, before we even began the project, we spent a good amount of time. Listening to the community of potential partners, and we did that through a community workshop that took place over a week virtually in October of 2022. And it was organized around the goal of hearing from communities that don’t traditionally partner with NASA. What do the faculty want to see in a program like this? What do their students need? Students were involved as well. NASA was involved. What would NASA like to see out of this program? What existing programs at NASA are similar to this? Where are there gaps where we could fill this meaningfully? So, we spent a lot of time listening to the community discussing the program and what a new bridge program would look like. And based on what we learned, there’s two pieces of the puzzle going forward. We’ve got a workshop report that’s public, and if you look for the SMD bridge program online, you can find a link to the public workshop report. And it includes many statistics about students, their desires from the faculty for this program. What could we do new. And we took the perspectives and themes found in that workshop report. And we wrote what we call a call for proposals. And this is the way that NASA gets the majority of its grant funding out to the community through calls for proposals. So that’s sort of like a piece of the machinery that’s been, you know, existing, at NASA and other federal agencies for quite a while. But we got to design our program in our call for proposals to reach out to new institutions that don’t traditionally partner. And one of our first steps that we were very committed to was offering something called seed funding. So, if you’re looking to build a new partnership and you don’t have a partner yet, how do you fix that? You don’t just, you know, pick up the phone and, expect somebody on the other end to be, you know, yes, let’s be new partners and let’s write a proposal quickly. So, the seed funding opportunity is, what we have on the streets now. It’s still open. It’s what we call new due date proposal opportunity. We’ve selected, the first 11 teams, as you mentioned, from the first review of proposals that came in, over the summer of 2023. And one of our main goals is to fund new partnerships, based on something that is of interest to NASA. So, what’s strategically relevant to one of the science divisions of the Science Mission Directorate? And we’re also looking to hear what the faculty will get out of that. So, what new research will they be doing that can propel their career forward? What proposals do they see themselves and their new NASA partner, proposing for together in the next five years? But then, most importantly, we would like to see the faculty and the NASA researchers really focusing attention on the mentoring of the students. That will be, it’s a critical part of this triad, the student research experiences. So, we ask for a mentoring plan. One of the goals of the mentorship for the student, for the faculty, for NASA. And those are the elements of our proposal. Tell us about your partnership. Tell us what the impacts will be and tell us how the mentoring will work. And those proposals are reviewed by a panel of peers. And that’s how we select the best ones according to the peer reviewers’ opinions.

Eric White I hope I don’t get you into any trouble here for this one, but I’m going to ask if there are a couple that you could highlight for me from the projects that you did select this year.

Padi Boyd So I think one of the elements that was very exciting to see is how the faculty and the NASA folks worked together to, design research programs that were really relevant to the environment that the students live in. So, some of the most exciting proposals that have come in have focused on things like, you know, what can we learn about, say, wildfires and responding to wildfires from space? So that’s got a lot of relevance to NASA. What we do in space, how we observe the Earth from space. But it’s also very relevant to students in California’s lived experience. And how do wildfires impact their lives, the lives of their families? We saw some other proposals coming in about water health. And, you know, how do you monitor the health of waterways? Proposals about mosquito borne illnesses. And those are the just the ones that are focused on, you know, science that is really relevant to people’s lives on Earth. I think that was very rewarding and motivational, from, from the whole program. But we’re also seeing some, proposals coming in from engineering department. So, NASA does cutting edge technology development that leads to future missions. So, this is the type of thing that NASA invests in long term. You know, how are we going to design a mission that, say, will launch in 25 years, that might be able to disentangle the fingerprints of atmospheres of planets around other stars, to tell us if there are potential biosignatures, signs of life in those atmospheres of planets. That’s a very lofty goal, and it requires exquisite technology development. And people who develop technology are often engineers, and many small schools may not have an earth science major or an astronomy major, but they certainly have engineering and computer science programs. So, it was also very exciting to see, you know, some cutting-edge technology development proposals coming in from faculty at engineering, departments that is directly related to. The types of observations that NASA wants to be making from space in the next generation. And of course, those students will be the ones that will, you know, benefit from the fruits of that labor because they’ll be the scientists of the future.

Eric White Right. And it seems as if, you know, some of these ideas listed, you know, just additive manufacturing of electronics, you know, that could have implications within like the space industry itself. Even if they don’t come on to work for NASA, they could very well create a, a product or a technology that NASA could use down the road to make their make the agency’s job easier, no?

Padi Boyd Absolutely. Thank you for highlighting that, actually, because NASA is only one part of, you know, a very rich and vibrant space ecosystem. And we’ve got commercial space companies that are thriving and growing and doing, you know, all kinds of new things and exciting things and really expanding that envelope of what we can do as humans from space. And all of those careers are very rewarding. So, we’re not really necessarily singularly focused on the NASA workforce of the future. We’re focused on the Stem workforce of in the US in the future, and there are great jobs there in the commercial space field as well. And I’m very excited to think that students may see themselves in that role in, say, the next ten years.

Eric White And there is actually still time for other people to send in those applications to be part of the program. Can you just talk a little bit about how anybody who’s listening to this might still be able to be a part of it?

Padi Boyd Sure. If you are a faculty or, NASA researcher or even a student at a smaller institution, please check out the call for proposals. It’s part of something called ROSES, which stands for Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences. And the 2023 ROSES includes the bridge seed funding. Call for proposals. We’re still accepting proposals through March 29th of this year. I mean, those proposals will lead to projects that we expect will start by the end of the calendar year. And we’re also planning to be offering new opportunities. And the next ROSES. So, ROSES 2024 will also have some proposal opportunities for the bridge program coming forward.

Eric White If there’s somebody yourself, you are an astrophysicist. You’re in sort of an administrative role now. And I just want to pick your brain a little bit about, you know, what that transition has been like instead of, you know, are you still kind of working in the field? Do you still consider yourself an astrophysicist or what do you see yourself as now?

Padi Boyd I absolutely still consider myself an astrophysicist. But, you know, careers, they grow, and they evolve just like human beings. I mean, that’s a really important part of the human experience, I think. So certainly, now where I am, my role is not necessarily so focused on my own personal research output. You know, what data am I collecting? What papers am I writing based on that? My conclusions am I drawing and where would that go? You know, forward with me in that role personally. But a huge part of what I do now is the development of younger scientists. And you see this in the scientific community at large. You know, students come along, they find an advisor. Hopefully that person is also a very good mentor. And in that relationship, they’re sharing the load on the research. And at some point you, you know, you hand that research down to your student and they take it to a much higher level than you ever could. So, I, I’m very focused on developing scientists of the future. And I still see that as a very key role to astrophysicists, working astrophysicist. And I hope that we all see it that way.

Eric White Let’s turn the clock back. And let’s say Patty Boyd is a student sending in an application to NASA Science Directorate. What area would you be sending that application for? What would be something that you would be excited to study if you were an up-and-coming student?

Padi Boyd That’s a great question. So, these proposals come in from faculty, but they’re focused on student opportunities as well as faculty opportunities.

Eric White Yeah. Yeah. I mean, come on. It’s all hypothetical. I’m doing my best.

Padi Boyd The first thing I would have to do is convince one of my, professors to apply for the program, and I think they would have been very excited about it because I went to a small, undergraduate focused institution. And in fact, if you look at the Stem workforce of today, 80% of the students, of the working scientists today were students at smaller institutions that were focused on undergraduate work or even community colleges. So, I think my faculty would have been very excited to get involved for our school. We had a ground-based observatory, so a small telescope on the top of a building there at the university. So, I think we would have looked into expanding that into combining observations from the ground and space. And I think one of the most exciting areas where you can do that today is in exoplanet detection. So, you’re looking at light dimming of a star when a planet crosses in front of it. That’s called a transit there. What is being used by the test mission and was used by the Kepler mission before that to detect now thousands of exoplanets just in our Milky Way galaxy. So, I would really encourage my faculty to think of putting a proposal in so that we could combine our telescopes on the ground and what’s going on in space to confirm some of those exoplanets and, you know, find those Earth twins out there someday in the future. I would add that we’re, you know, very excited about the teams that we have selected. We. Are looking to build community as well. So, another important part of a student’s experience is the other students that they know, and you know, getting through it together and supporting each other. Same thing is true of new partnerships. We want to make sure that we’re nurturing new partnerships. And so, we’re very excited to take some opportunities, within the SMD Bridge Program at NASA to start building some community between the teams that we’re selecting. And we definitely want to be, learning from them as we go. What about the bridge program is working and where it could be better? We would like this program to grow and evolve, as we bring teams on and learn more about, their needs and their desires from the program.

The post NASA makes grant awards in program to increase diversity in the STEM fields and its workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

Thirteen academic and corporate thinkers have received awards from NASA, to develop ideas for transforming future missions. It’s part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Federal News Network’s Tom Temin got more from program deputy executive John Nelson, and acting program executive Mike LaPointe.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The program itself, I guess you call it NIAC, the basic program, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. That is not new, right? You’ve been doing this for a number of years.

Mike LaPointe That’s correct. Actually, it was reconstituted in 2011 as a NASA program. And so, it’s been around for a while. John and I have been, involved with it for the last couple of years. Kind of came on as acting PEO a couple of years back. And John came on, about a year ago last October.

Tom Temin All right. And looks like a challenge grant type of program where you give small amounts of money to a lot of people to develop ideas. Is that basically how it works?

Mike LaPointe It is it’s, actually a three-phase program. And I’ll let John talk about it in more detail. But basically, phase one is, projects that we’ll talk about today is our initial, basically a feasibility study. It’s a nine-month, 175 K, technology development effort. Basically, a study to tell NASA why your idea is a good idea that we should pursue. And then after that, we have, phase two, which is a two-year, 600 K, more of a viability study to put more meat on the bones of the concept. And then phase three, which is very rare. We do basic one of those years, $2 million, two-year effort to really advance the technology. So, John any more you’d like to say about that?

John Nelson Yeah. I’ll just add that while we do have three phases and, you know, phase three does involve some actual technology development. You have to remember, put this in context. This is all very early-stage stuff. So, unlike a lot of technology development programs, we’re not looking at a mission that’s five years out or often even ten years out. We’re looking at capabilities that don’t currently exist. Visionary, truly transformative ideas that may not come into fruition for 20 years or more, and some cases a lot more than 20 years. So that’s why we start with that, that small phase one feasibility concept. We don’t expect all these ideas to work. We’re exploring whether or not the idea has any feasibility at all and is worth further development.

Tom Temin And when you launch a round, just for example, like the one you just awarded, do you focus on a particular area, for example, going to Mars or sustaining human life, or looking back down at the Earth or just anything that might be useful to NASA?

Mike LaPointe That’s exactly right. It’s a wide-open call. We are actually open to anyone in the US, any organization, academia, other government agencies, individuals that, that are registered with sam.gov. But it’s a wide-open call any technology area that’s of interest, for future missions to Mars that they could help us do our job or we’re interested in hearing about.

Tom Temin And how do you spread the word so that the right people will know about it?

Mike LaPointe So that’s a good question. We have a very good network of folks out there that are very applied. And, and they spread the word a lot for us. We also do a solicitation every year, which is also posted in Fed Biz Ops. The synopsis comes out in fed biz ups. A lot of press that we get each time we, we do a phase one call, or phase two call. And that helps us spread the word for us as well. And Kathy Reilly, I believe is still on board is our, strategic outreach and communications manager, and she does an outstanding job of spreading the word for us.

Tom Temin Yeah. Because you don’t want to just be in fed biz ops, because then you’ll get the usual contractors. Fair to say?

Mike LaPointe Absolutely. We have a really good presence on the NASA website. And I should mention to you that we do have a website that lists all of our prior studies, as well as all the key dates and a lot of information about the program. So, your listeners are more than welcome to visit the site.

Tom Temin Any particular exciting technologies that have come to fruition and were deployed by NASA that you can point to in the past.

Mike LaPointe We have, John, you want to take a first shot and I’ll follow up.

John Nelson Sure, sure. So again, we’re focused on really long-term stuff. But that isn’t to say that there can be near-term applications or spinoffs. We’ve actually got one that’s getting ready to fly, hopefully in March scheduled for March. So, the idea was originally a large inflatable reflector balloon that could be used as a telescope. This was from Chris Walker, University of Arizona, and freefall space. Well, he and his students took that idea and shrunk it down to basically a large aperture, antenna for CubeSats. And they’re actually testing that in space. Again, hopefully in March. So that’s one example. But we’ve had many others as well.

Tom Temin Mike.

Mike LaPointe So that’s the one that’s going to help us. And we’ve had a phase three program project called, from Trans Astra to look at, optical mining of asteroids, where they would go out and actually capture an asteroid and use intensely focused, solar energy to mine the volatiles off an asteroid, which, of course, is very far term. But as a spinoff of that, that, asteroid capture process can be used. And they’re looking at it now is, through an SBIR to, for the debris remediation to go and actually capture debris and bring it back into the atmosphere. So, things like that. And one of the things we also point to, as we all know, ingenuity fluid’s last flight on Mars, just recently. But that actually was inspired by a NIAC program. The original NIAC concept in an original NIAC program. We like to take credit for that as well. Where one of our prior PIs did a study on rotorcraft on Mars and on Titan and, the Pi for ingenuity, happened to attend the talk that he was giving realized that, hey, we could do a rotorcraft on a helicopter on Mars, which led to the ingenuity project. So.

Tom Temin Yeah, that was kind of famous. That little, tiny helicopter. I think it just finally gave up the ghost recently. Right?

Mike LaPointe It did just the other day. Yep his last flight, 72 flights. It was pretty impressive.

Tom Temin All right. We’re speaking with Mike LaPointe. He is the acting program executive, and John Nelson is deputy executive for the NASA Innovative Concepts Program. And this latest round, you’ve given 13 awards. What are some of the highlights?

Mike LaPointe John you want to lead us off.

John Nelson Sure. I tell you what, since we were talking about ingenuity, let’s talk about, flight on Mars. So, we just funded a project called Maggie. This is for basically a fixed wing, solar powered plane, vertical takeoff and landing, capable of going. I think it’s something like 180km per flight. That could make it all the way around Mars and give us global access for scientific study. So basically, taking the idea of ingenuity, and just running with it in terms of access to, to the planet, and there have been, studies on fixed wing aircraft on Mars in the past. It’s extremely difficult because of the very thin atmosphere. And most of these concepts were really huge and had a lot of challenges. And certainly, a lot of challenges with this. But the design they proposed has promise and we hope that it shows feasibility.

Tom Temin Yeah. What are the engineers say if you apply enough thrust and control the angle of attack, you can fly a barn door, but maybe not so much on Mars right now. Yeah. All right. So that’s a good one. A couple of others we can hear about.

Mike LaPointe Well, closer to home, we’re funding something called a lightweight, fiber based, radio frequency antenna. These are used for Earth science applications. In this particular case would be used for, looking at, soil moisture. And the reason for that is, you know, once you’re ground saturated, additional runoff causes floods and such as well as on the opposite side of that, you can have a very low soil moisture content with drought. So, this is a way to map, soil moisture content, around the Earth. And the idea here is of a very long, extensive fiber-based array, which is which is new. It’s very difficult to get long extensions in space from, you know, a confined payload. But this is a way to actually use a fiber with an embedded antenna to roll out and get a really long baseline that you can do extremely accurate measurements, for soil moisture, as well as things like sea salinity and other aspects of it. So, earth science application there, going the other extreme, we have, funded a concept to fly out to Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri, with a swarm of very small Pico satellites, gram ground-based satellites. You know, this has been looked at through project, Starshot. We use, like, gigawatt class lasers to fly these very, very, very small payloads out, to the nearest star. The is there as you don’t get much communication back. Right. You’re at a very far distance and these things are very, very power limited. But if you fly a swarm you can actually do a coherent signal back. And so, the idea here is you fly a bunch of them, you get out there, you assemble on the way a nice coherent swarm of these little, tiny satellites. And when they get there, they do their sensing, and then they actually put an optical, signal back to Earth that you can pick up with an Earth based telescope.

Tom Temin Well, that one, just to delve in a little bit, Proxima Centauri is that’s the nearest star or something. I mean, how long would that take?

Mike LaPointe So light takes about 4.2 years to get out there and about 4.2 years to get back. So, they’re going to fly these at about 20% the speed of light. So, it’ll take about 20 years to get out there. And then it’ll take about four years to get their signal back.

Tom Temin 20% your speed light’s pretty fast.

Mike LaPointe That’s pretty fast. That’s. Why do you need a 100-gigawatt laser?

Tom Temin You know, really.

John Nelson This is not one that’s 5 or 10 or even 20 years out.

Mike LaPointe Yes, this is a little further out.

Tom Temin So at least you can reasonably assume to live to see the results as opposed to going to somewhere much further away. And. Then one of the awards went to someone from NASA’s Glenn Research Center, Jeff Landis. Something that can survive Venus, which is pretty hot.

Mike LaPointe That’s a really interesting mission. It’s, basically a balloon floating in the atmosphere and an airplane that will go down, pick up a sample, a surface sample, not just an atmospheric sample. Bring it back up to the balloon, which has a rocket attached, transfer the sample to the to the rocket canister, and then fire the rocket back so we can actually get a sample return from Venus. It’s a really interesting way to do this. It’s complex, but it’s fun, which makes it very NIAC(y). And it’ll be the first time we can actually get a sample back from the surface of Venus.

The post A NASA challenge grant program brings up 13 promising ideas first appeared on Federal News Network.

Whether you know it or not, the U.S. is definitely in a new space race. The destination is the same, but the purpose is a little different. Russia. China and the states are looking to get back to the moon first to attempt to harvest the potential water located there. But that’s just one aspect of current affairs. To get a clearer picture, Federal News Network’s Eric White spoke with Ellis Brazeal and Brett Richards, both of whom are legal professionals within the space industry for the firm Jones Walker.

Interview Transcript:  

Ellis Brazeal I think you need to go back to the parties themselves, do the countries themselves consider that they’re in a space race? Well, if you go back to March of 2019, Vice President Pence came to Huntsville to the Marshall Space Flight Center. And he declared, you know, back when he was president of the National Space Council, which had been reinstituted under President Trump. And he came to Marshall, and he said, we’re going back to the moon. We’re going to have human boots on the moon by 2024. Well, let there be no mistake. They were in a race because one month later, the Chinese came out, the Chinese space agency came out and said, you know, we were going to the moon by the late 2030s. We’re now moving that up in about ten years. So, I think China is now saying that they’re going to be at the moon, and we’re both going to the South Pole, to the Shackleton crater. They believe that they’ll be there by 2030. And so, you know, are we going to get there before or not? I don’t know. Hopefully.

Eric White All right. And so, Brett the race is on, and you know, are you picking up what Ellis is putting down and you kind of see the same thing as, you know, that’s the finish line where things are heading towards right now?

Brett Richards Well, I mean, I think it’s always good to remember perceptions, reality of these things. Right? And so, while we are in a space race, do the American people actually know that. Right? If you went out and pulled ten guys off the street or went out street, right, would they know that we’re in a space race? I’m not so sure that we do. And so, I think that, you know, a good first step in my mind is to get Congress involved a little bit more, right? I mean, I’m a Capitol Hill guy. That’s what we talked about. And so, you know, currently there’s like about a handful of legislators who are really sort of driving space policy. Right. And that’s great. And they’re really good and committed and smart and know what they’re talking about. But that’s not the American public. And to get anything past, you know, any sort of policy moving forward, it’s going to take a buy in from everybody.

Eric White Yeah Ellis, this space race doesn’t seem to have, and I wasn’t around back then, so forgive me for my ignorance. Doesn’t seem as if it has the same sort of stakes involved as the last one. What does a win look like to you? As Brett was just laying out, you know what he sees.

Ellis Brazeal Brett’s exactly on point about that. I mean, would the average person on the street think they were in a space race with China. Yeah, very few, presumably. And I was alive during the 60s. I was 8 when we set on the moon. And Kennedy is one of my favorite presidents because of his foresight in you know, going to the moon. And he did it because, you know, back in that period in time. Well, you know, Kennedy said we’re engaged in this tectonic struggle between the East and the West, between communism and anti-communism. And he wanted countries that were choosing whether to go with, you know, the democracy, style of government or communist form of government. Who were they going to ally with? He wanted to demonstrate our technological superiority. I don’t think we have that going on here. Well, and it was a matter of national pride, like Brett pointed out. I mean, that is huge for the American people. The thing about the Chinese space race is twofold. One it’s economic. So, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs predicts that by 2050, there will be $3 trillion in global revenues from a space-based economy. Now, that doesn’t just involve what we do on the moon, which is going to involve excavation of minerals that may have value back on Earth. That $3 trillion also includes, you know, space, space power and things like that. But space and who dominates space could really have significant economic considerations for our country going forward. And secondly, both from an economic standpoint and then from a military standpoint, it will have security ramifications for our country, national security ramifications. And a good friend that retired from NASA who said, you know, there’s the old adage of the person with the high territory, the high land, has the benefit in any sort of military engagement. And he said, what’s higher than territory on the moon? So, I think from an economic, and then from a national security standpoint, it matters that to Brett’s point and to your point Eric, I don’t think that case it’s really been made to the American public.

Eric White All right. So, let’s revert it back to DC. And Brett, I’ll tap into your brain for this one. What can you know both branches of government involved in this both the legislative and executive branches, what can they do around to ensure that the US is best suited for this space race, even though it seems as if we may not be fully in one?

Brett Richards Well, I mean, I think that we are in one, right? And I don’t think the American people realize it. And so, I think having a candid conversation with the public is the first thing that we should do and let folks know. And then obviously, we’re going to need investment right where that comes in federal dollars that will be brainpower, to NASA, to Space Force. You mean you’re going to need sort of buy in right on the race. And then we need the plan, right? We need to know how we get out of here. Not about how do we win, right, and why we’re doing this. Is a benefit to the American society as a whole, right? And so, what can Congress do in the short term? But that’s not a long-term big picture, right? Short term, you know, I don’t see a whole lot going on. Right. They had a markup last November, I think, on the Commercial Space Act 2023. You know, it was a partisan vote, party line vote I should say. The parties did agree to come back to the negotiating table, right. And see where they can come through. I mean, what’s Congress going to do at all in 2024? Right? I don’t see a whole lot happening. And so, this is where it gets kind of tricky, where politics gets involved. Right? I don’t see this being on the campaign trail a whole lot. But any sort of legislation that gets any sort of play on the House floor, the Senate floor, everybody’s going to be talking about it, including the big elephant in the room, Donald Trump. Right? I mean, so, you know, what I don’t see much space, no pun intended, between the Biden and the Trump administration sort of goals here. But are we as the House and the Senate, are they going to make time on the actual legislative side of things to do this? I don’t see much happening in that regard. So long term we definitely have some work to do. Short term, I don’t see a whole lot happening. There’s just other stuff that people are more worried about right now and more involved in right. It doesn’t make it less important; it just makes it what it is. You know that’s just the way American politics goes.

Eric White We’re speaking with Brett Richards and Ellis Brazeal, who are both attorneys in the space realm, we can say with Jones Walker. And so, we’d be remiss to not include in this conversation about government involvement in, you know, making sure that things are safe for any new technologies the US would like to place. And there is the Space Force. What can you tell me about the support that the Space Force is now getting from Congress? Because, you know, there was kind of an idea of that most folks thought was kind of funny at first, but now it’s getting up there as one of the most important branches of the military side of government.

Brett Richards Yeah, you’re exactly right. I think it did kind of start off as like, wow, do we really need this type of deal? You know, it was during the Trump administration again, everything that came out of that administration as most things do in our American politics these days, kind of get looked at through that sort of prism. But one thing that I would like to point out, I think it’s important and it’s a small gesture, but it’s something that is worth noting. In the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 last year, where for FY 24, included a provision that established the legislative liaison Office of the Space Force. This might not sound like much, but it’s really important to see where it was before. Right. And so, the Space Force legislative lays out perhaps were with the Air Force underneath the Air Force team. And so, it doesn’t take rocket scientists to see why the Space Force will benefit from having its own formal relationship with Congress. And this goes back to our original point of being able to socialize these issues around Congress, right, without this formal relationship. Well, now that we have a formal relationship with Congress and the Space Force, the Space Force is able to tell their story. Right. And they prior, it was the Air Force that was having to tell the Space Force story. And you want to be the guy telling your story, right? You don’t want somebody else telling your story, particularly to the folks who are controlling policy and money, and all the other things that Congress does. So, you know, having this relationship started. It just passed last I think December was when it was signed into law. My understanding let’s focus on Capitol Hill. The legislative offices are actively being set up right now. And so, there’s a, there’s a real effort to get this formal understanding really moving so that that’s it. That’s a positive step in my opinion. Again, one that, it goes under the radar, right? Like legislative office, but it really is important for folks who are making the policy to be able to hear directly from Space Force themselves.

Ellis Brazeal I think I’ve got to throw one last thing in. I teach space law as an adjunct, and because I teach space law, we have to look at what’s going to happen on the moon once we get there. And so, both the US and China are headed towards the South Pole, towards the Shackleton crater, where there’s believed to be water ice, which they can, you know, we won’t have to haul water to the moon, if it’s there in the form of ice. We can also use it for industrial and other purposes. Well, whoever gets to the moon first, will get to set kind of international norms or public norms for how they conduct themselves. And one thing I didn’t realize until recently, I was talking to this lawyer at NASA. He’s at the technology office for NASA, and he’s a lawyer. And he said, look Ellis, when you land on the moon, it kicks up all the regolith. I’m sure you know the regolith. And it’s a real problem. It was for the Apollo astronauts. Well, I didn’t realize that once it gets kicked up, the regolith keeps circling the moon at high speed because there’s no atmosphere, you know, until it finally subsides due to gravity. So, people are going to set up safe zones to protect their activities from others. And they’re entitled to. But how big are those going to be? The US, I think, will set up reasonable, safe zones. That’s what’s envisioned under the Artemis Accords. China, on the other hand, is evidenced by, you know, their activities in the South China Sea, Antarctica, some other things. I’m not sure that they’ll act in the same way that we will. So, I think it’s important to get there first to set the international norms.

The post It may not feel like it, but the U.S. is in a race back to the moon again first appeared on Federal News Network.

Meet the career NASA researcher who’s focused on the nearby planets and their geologic behavior. Lori Glaze is director of the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. She spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin host on the Space Hour.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin Work, planetary geologic behavior. That’s volcanoes and the movement of the surface and things happening on the planets. Tell us more about the purpose of that research.

Lori Glaze Well, a lot of what we’re interested in is trying to understand how all of the planets formed and how they evolved and changed over time. And of course, volcanism is a major process that happens on the Earth and on Mars and the moon and Mercury and Venus, all of the terrestrial planets. And so that’s really trying to understand how volcanism has shaped what those planets look like today.

Tom Temin So you’re basically a dermatologist of the planet.

Lori Glaze Kind of. Yeah. Understanding the surface of the planets.

Tom Temin And how does that inform the missions, or is it just the pure science to understand that is the mission?

Lori Glaze So that’s a part of what we’re trying to understand. And we’re really trying to understand the planets as a whole and the roles they’ve played in our solar system formation and the evolution of the solar system. So, our missions from NASA, we take the next step from looking through a telescope. We actually send spacecraft to the planets to look up close, either orbiting around the planets, I mean, getting lots of images so we can understand the planets from images and other geophysical information. Or sometimes we land missions like Perseverance rover that’s now driving around on the surface of Mars. And that’s another way that we can explore.

Tom Temin By the way, my own ignorance. Have we landed anywhere else besides the moon and Mars.

Lori Glaze At this point? Those are the major planets we’ve landed on. Although there was a European lander that landed on a comet, and we actually have sent a couple little landers, or I think JAXA sent a couple of landers, that’s Japan Agency sent someone to an asteroid. But yeah, the main planets would be the moon and Mars.

Tom Temin And speaking of asteroids, that’s another area of interest for you, the near-Earth object that, yeah, I guess potentially could endanger the Earth.

Lori Glaze Yeah, that’s a big part of our program. We call it planetary defense. We’re planetary defenders, meaning that we’re on the lookout all the time looking for asteroids or comets that could eventually, perhaps run into Earth and be dangerous for us here. We don’t want to experience something like the mass extinction that happened, the big asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. So, we’re looking out for those big ones. And then just last year, we tested a mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, where we actually, on purpose, crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid so that we could see just how well we could change its orbit.

Tom Temin Right. And we found that even that little bit of impact an inch in space is millions of miles by the time the thing gets here.

Lori Glaze Exactly. If you have enough time, that little, tiny change over time turns into a big difference. And for planetary defense, our goal is to make sure that when that asteroid passes over Earth’s orbit, Earth is out of the way. We’ve already moved, and it comes in behind us instead of smashing into us.

Tom Temin Sure. And as a girl, were you the type of child who, when everyone else got Barbie dolls for Christmas, you got a telescope?

Lori Glaze Well, actually, no, I was still into Barbie dolls, but I was always really into math and science, so I really did enjoy building sets and things like that, L egos and erector sets and things like that. I was really into that. Both of my parents were engineers. My brother ended up being an engineer, so lived in a household that was pretty conducive to that sort of thing.

Tom Temin And when looking at the planets, I mean, we still use telescopes. How much of the research is observation and how much is calculation if that makes sense?

Lori Glaze Well, that’s a really good question. And particularly for myself, my personal background, my research area was in the kind of theoretical research I did a lot of modeling work, meaning that I would develop a mathematical equation that could describe how a lava flow moves on the surface of Mars. And then I would use imaging data from our spacecraft to compare with my model, to help us better understand how those volcanoes would have worked on Mars in the past. So, it kind of all works together.

Tom Temin Right, so on Earth, volcano flows have a certain characteristic. And then if you build in the factors of temperature, gravity, atmospheric makeup, you can then maybe extrapolate what would happen on Mars if we could watch a volcano.

Lori Glaze That is exactly right. And then we can see today lava flows on Mars that erupted millions of years ago. We can see what they look like when they finished flowing, and we can use our models to work backwards and tell us, well, what would that have looked like? You know, again, changing the gravity and the atmospheric conditions and that sort of thing. How would that have erupted? What would it have looked like while it was erupting? And what can that tell us about how volcanoes work on Mars?

Tom Temin I’m getting the whiff of artificial intelligence coming into this type of work.

Lori Glaze It could eventually.

Tom Temin All right. We’re speaking with Doctor Lori Glaze. She’s director of the Planetary Science division at NASA and a Presidential Rank Award winner. And why did they pick you for a rank award? Come on. I mean, you’re one of a couple of hundred. So, you’re an elite person here?

Lori Glaze Yeah. Well, I will tell you the things that went into my nomination this go round were that, you know, we recently went through the depths of a pandemic. And one of the things that we were able to do that I was able to help my organization during that pandemic was to make sure we got that. Mars Perseverance rover launched. It launched in July of 2020. So many of us may recall that in March of 2020, we were all sent home. But that was kind of at the peak time that that mission really needed to finish all of the final integration of all the piece parts. We shipped the spacecraft to Florida to be integrated onto the rocket that was going to launch from Cape Canaveral. And that was really hard to do. We had to basically mobilize the entire agency to make sure we had safe at work practices for all of the individuals we you know, we put people’s health first and foremost, certainly above the launch of a spacecraft. But as stewards of taxpayers’ dollars, we recognize if we missed a launch date, you could only go to Mars every two years. And that’s fairly expensive to wait another.

Tom Temin I mean, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lori Glaze Hundreds of millions of dollars. You’re exactly right. So, we didn’t want to do that. So, we worked really hard to keep our personnel safe. We worked on ways to transport them across the country so that, again, they kept their health and didn’t put them at risk. And we were able to successfully launch that mission, as well as two others that came along a little later than that, but still had the bulk of that work going on during the pandemic. And that was a big part. There were other things as well, but that was one of the main things.

Tom Temin So you had a challenge maybe similar to, say, the FAA, where people have to operate consoles and monitor things in close proximity to one another. Did the technology available as of 2020 enable people to do some of this remotely, as it did in a lot of industries actually,?

Lori Glaze We did move a lot of the work to be remote. A lot of the workforce, you can imagine software development were things that we were able to move those folks’ home, and they were able to stay at home and stay safe and complete that work in a remote environment. But a lot of our work is hands on. When you’re getting ready to launch a spacecraft, it is hands on people in what we call a clean room. So, we already have processes that we require when we assemble spacecraft, they have to be dressed in what we call a bunny suit with masks and gloves and hats and, you know, the whole thing. But we had to then work the protocols for how we made sure as they transitioned into those clean rooms, that everyone was healthy and safe and not interacting with each other. And, you know, so we put a lot of extra steps in the process.

Tom Temin Yeah. Because clean room gear, say in semiconductor manufacturing or something like this, the particulates they worry about are much smaller, I think, than the microbes that are harming people. So, once they were in there, okay. Has the robotic capability of the rover been able to take its mask off?

Lori Glaze It definitely took its mask off. As soon as it landed on Mars, it was ready to go. And Percy’s been doing a great job now since February of 2021. So, we’re coming up almost on three years of activity on surface of Mars, doing an amazing job.

Tom Temin And on the research front, let’s get back to that. What are your priorities of the moment? What do you hope to do next? What are you working on?

Lori Glaze So we got a couple of big priority.

Tom Temin I mean, you were a director, so do you still do some research hands on?

Lori Glaze Well, I don’t actually get to do a whole lot of research myself these days, but my role I see is primarily enabling our entire planetary science community across the United States to do the research and can keep that science moving forward. So that’s my main job right now. But I’ll tell you from our division standpoint, from NASA’s standpoint, the next big things for planetary, we’ve got a big mission that’s going to be launching next October. It’s a mission to fly a spacecraft to a moon of Jupiter called Europa. Europa is really exciting. Its ice covered, but beneath the ice is a global ocean that could actually support life today. And so, we’re going to orbit around Jupiter and fly by Europa and understand whether or not that ocean might be habitable. We also have a really big year coming up for the moon. We’ve been working a lot with our human exploration side of the house. Humans of course, we’re working with Artemis that are going to send humans back to the moon, but this year we’re sending several NASA payloads to the surface of the moon in a brand-new program where we’re using commercial capabilities. Brand new commercial companies that have never sent planetary missions before are going to be landing on the moon. And the first two of those are expected to launch in January. So, we’re really excited.

Tom Temin Yeah, so that the planetary in the geologic type of research that your group does, does inform what the missions are doing in terms of sending probes out there.

Lori Glaze Absolutely. It’s the science really, that drives the big questions. And then based on those big questions, NASA determines which missions we want to fly to answer those questions.

Tom Temin And by the way, how big is Europa?

Lori Glaze So Europa is a moon of Jupiter is about the size of our moon, approximately. It’s a pretty cool place. I’ll just mention that part of the big spacecraft that’s going to fly. The Power and Propulsion unit was actually built at Applied Physics Lab, just up the road here in Laurel, Maryland. And I can also just give a quick plug for folks that if you want to send your name on the spacecraft, we have a program called message in a bottle. We’ve got 2 million names already. People are sending their names to Europa. You too can do that.

Tom Temin All right. And just a final question, I guess philosophical or scientific philosophical. But we can calculate what’s going on with a lot of algorithms based on what we know of a planet, and we can observe it from a certain distance, either from Earth or from closer. But in launching a probe that would actually orbit something like Europa, you’re really right there. So that the closeness of observation is really important as well as the calculating side.

Lori Glaze Yeah, it’s incredibly important to be this close. There’s some things that we can do in that proximity that there’s no way we can do from Earth or further away. One of those things is we think that it’s possible there could be geysers on Europa that are spewing out water, that if there were biology in that ocean, might be represented in those geysers. We can fly through those, perhaps, and sample those.

Eric White Dr. Lori Glaze is director of the Planetary Science division at NASA, speaking there with Federal News Networks Tom Temin. That’s going to do it for this month’s episode of The Space Hour. You can find all of today’s interviews and past interviews at Federal News network.com. Search the space hour.

The post What it’s really like on the planet Venus? Ask this NASA scientist first appeared on Federal News Network.

NASA is taking a page from big time TV streaming services as it revamps its multimedia offerings. The agency relaunched its longstanding NASA TV service – now called NASA plus, with a new mobile app to go with it. For more, Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu spoke to Rebecca Sirmons, executive producer for NASA TV.

Interview Transcript: 

Jared Serbu Okay, Rebecca, a lot of multimedia assets to talk about here today, but let’s start with NASA plus. How should people think about it differently than the NASA TV that we’ve come to know and love over the last many years?

Rebecca Sirmons Well, NASA plus is NASA’s new official ad free, on demand streaming service. Kind of like, a Netflix, but NASA. So it has some of the greatest stories ever told all in one place. You know, one of our taglines is we’re putting, you know, the universe at your fingertips. So, it’s premium content. It’s the official home for live broadcasts, and tons of NASA’s infamous archival that goes over decades. So, I’m really excited to have it all in one place where people can find it.

Jared Serbu And what was kind of the inspiration for the for the idea that you needed to relaunch this? And in essence, I mean, it could because it’s not just a rebranding of what you had been doing before. It’s, I think it’s more of a transition from linear content to more on demand. Is that about right?

Rebecca Sirmons Yep, so when I got here, you know, I come from the private sector. I’m a TV person, right? I was a television executive for almost 20 years out in L.A., and I came out here and I was honored to take this task on, and I knew it was going to be a massive effort. The great news is I didn’t have to do it by myself. We had tons of content already there. It was just a matter of going around and collecting, all of this amazing content that they have been making for years now. Also looking at some of the future missions and what we have coming up and also like current activities as well, looking at, okay, how can we make an amazing documentary? How can we tell this NASA story through the resources that we already have? You know we didn’t go out. I didn’t have a budget. We didn’t have a budget to do this. It was a matter of what can we do? What can we work with? You know what we already have? And it’s, you know, it’s incredible. The difference between, you know, linear TV and what we have now is that everything’s on demand and you can watch it when you want to watch it. It’s free, there’s no subscription required. There are obviously no ads. And it’s one of the things that I’m personally proud of is its family friendly, right. Like there aren’t that many places you can go to. As far as a streaming service is concerned, that’s family friendly 100%. So, something that I’m really excited for the future generation to see.

Jared Serbu And the new relaunched app is one way people can get access to NASA. Plus, I must say the app the UX is better than most commercial streaming services apps that I’ve seen.

Rebecca Sirmons Thank you. Wow.

Jared Serbu It really is. I mean, talk a bit about how you approach that and what you prioritized as you decided to, redo the app.

Rebecca Sirmons Yes. And I will say it’s a tremendous, team effort. You know, I’m going to give a shout out Jason Townsend, who, you know, was kind of leading the overall team for the app development, you know, as well as the web modernization. You know, there were several things happening at once. I was brought on to do NASA plus. So, handling kind of all the overall layout and the content and kind of getting new stuff on there, treating it as it were, like a network. Right. And then of course, we had our web modernization team. So, it’s been tested. They went through, several changes over the years. But this is something that we can all be proud of. And yeah, it’s about, you know, kind of stepping into the times and really showing people that we know what’s cool and we’re going to do that.

Jared Serbu Talk about how you went about developing this with no budget. Was this pretty much all internal? Did you have some contract support? How do you go about it?

Rebecca Sirmons Internal? I mean, it’s a lot. You know, it’s funny coming from the private sector. I worked in documentaries. To start out, you literally you learn how to do something with nothing. And the thing that we have at NASA is talent and we have creativity. I will say it’s the most creative place I’ve ever worked already, hands down. Because you’re, you know, you kind of have NASA it, right? You have something, you’re like, okay, how can we do this? And so, it’s looking okay. We have an amazing team here. So, I can go to that team and say, here’s what I need to do. Let’s try and figure out how to get there. And I was able to do that. I mean, working across the enterprise at NASA, I mean, there’s centers all over. It isn’t just a headquarters here. I’m working with Goddard, I’m working with Johnson. Kennedy, you know, all the centers were part of this. And so that was kind of the most beautiful thing about this, is really seeing the enterprise come together, you know, because we all wanted this to happen, and, so it’s something that we’re really proud of as an agency.

Jared Serbu And you said earlier, this is mainly a new way to present a ton of content that you already had and make it more accessible. I wonder, though, having these new channels and content delivery mechanisms, does it change the way NASA thinks about how it creates new content or create new opportunities for you to make new stuff?

Rebecca Sirmons Absolutely. So, I mean, already, you know, when I first started this job, I looked at, I was like, okay, well, obviously we’re going to need to figure out, you know, distribution and how we’re all working to do differently, you know, and, and so that’s that those methods are have already been established from day one. Now it’s more of, okay, how do we create content differently? You know, as far as, you know, putting together outlines, creative, you know, and going through and looking at it from like a more premium, point of view, because it’s all about storytelling and it’s how we tell that story, and the great thing that I’m extremely grateful for every day is the fact that we have talented people here already, you know, and that they did this not me. I just know how to kind of pull the levers, you know?

Jared Serbu I know it’s early days since the launch, but what kind of audience feedback have you gotten so far? Were you able to see anything in analytics that shows that you like this better?

Rebecca Sirmons So that’s something that I’ve been tracking daily, and we’ve gotten some great feedback. Obviously, there are little bugs here and there. That’s just how it is. That’s tech, you know. But as far as feedback, everybody loves it. You know, I will say as a parent, just hearing people say, oh my gosh, there’s a place there’s kids’ content, there’s NASA, kids’ content. I’m like, yes, you know, schools are watching it. You know, I was talking to a pediatric doctor recently. They’re like, oh, yeah, I actually showed kids at the hospital this. It’s incredible. The launch was, was seamless and now we’re looking at it as any, you know, streaming platform does. Okay. What can we move around. What can we make more effective? How you know, how do we look at this moving forward. And so that’s something that we’re constantly monitoring.

Eric White Rebecca Sermons is executive producer for NASA TV now NASA plus speaking there with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu. You can find this interview at Federal News network.com. Search the space Hour coming up. Whether you like it or not, the US is definitely in a new space race. This is the Space Hour on Federal News Network. I’m Eric White.

The post NASA wants to be your new favorite streaming app first appeared on Federal News Network.

Today we’ll be airing two separate interviews I did with two directors of two of the NASA’s largest space centers. Did I mention I did two of them? That’s right, first up is Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, Director of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. Having only assumed the role back in back April of this year, I got the chance to speak with her right around the end of her first 90 days, to discuss how she’s getting along and her plans for the center.

Interview Transcript: 

Makenzie Lystrup So far there have been a lot of things coming at me that kind of need direct attention. And so what do you do in a job like this? You just kind of dive in and start deciding where you’re needed, and where you need to pay attention, and the things that you hear that you say, Ok, I know that’s going to be an issue, but I’m going to put that off for now because it’s not right in front of my face. But also really have been spending a lot of time thinking about the strategy and the vision for the center, thinking about what we’re calling Goddard 2040, and really listening to the workforce. Having a lot of forums to listen to the workforce in various levels, and then also hear from our external stakeholders as well. Again, thinking really about what does the future of Goddard look like?

Eric White And we can get into some of those things that you mentioned. But yeah, on that vision and strategic direction that you were discussing, can you tell me some of the major projects that are in the front of your head right now? You were just on a call it pertain to anything that is ongoing here at Goddard that you can talk about?

Makenzie Lystrup Yes. So my goal of being here is to certainly ensure that we are executing on all of the amazing NASA’s mission that we have here at Goddard right now. But I am very much focused on the future and where we’re going. And taking into account where all of our partners are going, where the whole sector is going globally, and also the needs of NASA and the needs of the government really taking that into account. Thinking a lot about Goddard’s future in Earth science, and how we can be even more impactful in the science that NASA is producing in Earth system science, and thinking about how we bring in more external partners into that endeavor. And that goes to one of my initiatives, which is really kind of opening up Goddard more. We’ve been relatively insular, and I’m very interested in broadening our partnerships and deepening our partnerships. So when I think about the Earth science endeavor, and how we want to kind of be the center of mass for that here at NASA, here at Goddard, really thinking about, hey, there are people in the private sector, whether they’re building hardware, whether they’re launching missions and instruments or whether they need the information to make good decisions, a lot of people out there working on this area. And I want it to be easier to work with Goddard and to collaborate with Goddard. So that’s one major thrust of looking at the future. Another is Habitable Worlds Observatory. So this is the next sort of giant segmented telescope in space after James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. And that’s a long term process of a telescope that is in an observatory that’s designed to be able to find evidence of life on planets outside of our solar system. So it continues on with Goddard’s really strong history in astrophysics, and also takes a lot of the technology we’re developing right now to really make sure that we are answering some of the most exciting questions in astronomy and astrophysics in the future.

Eric White And before going on to the next part, I just want to try to explore. You said opening up Goddard, working with more private sector entities and things of that nature. How do you do that? And is it hard to do? What did you see coming in here that maybe wasn’t being done that you think can move you towards that direction?

Makenzie Lystrup Well, I think where it has been done is at Wallops Flight Facility. So Wallops is part of Goddard. It’s NASA’s only range that it actually owns. And Wallops has really gone under a transformation in the last few years. They’ve been a really strong facility, in terms of supporting government launches, both on the sort of small and medium rocket scale. And they’ve been the heart of our suborbital and balloon programs, which are really important for scientific discoveries and scientific measurements. But in the last few years, they have been working with Virginia Spaceport to really enhance the commercial nature of what they do. So they’ve brought in rocket labs. And Rocket Labs has really formed this partnership with Wallops, where they’re using wallops as one of their fundamental range sites and launch sites. And this follows on with our great relationship with Northrop Grumman. So Northrop Grumman, for their commercial cargo resupply program, they’ve been launching from Wallops for a number of years. And so we had this great commercial customer, and now we’re bringing on even more with Rocket Lab and looking at how to expand that. So if we look here at the Greenbelt campus, where we do our science missions, where we look at our operational missions in land imaging and in weather and climate, really looking at what is industry? And what is the private sector doing? And what is Goddard uniquely positioned to do, What is NASA’s uniquely position to do? And lets really focus on those areas, and then bring in partnerships where others have strengths and have capacity. So I want Goddard to be working on the most important science questions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. I want us to be at the forefront of developing the technology for those science missions, future science missions. But we have a very mature industrial base, and we have a growing private sector base in space. And we need to use really everybody’s expertise. And that’s going to allow us to do more in the future. We all have limited resources, and the needs on the science front are great. And so I want to make sure that we are really leveraging everything going on in the private sector, in the university sphere, in the nonprofit sphere, and figure out how we really augment that.

Eric White It’s calling all hands on deck, so to speak. So let’s talk about the facility itself. You want Goddard to be the front and center of a lot of the science projects that NASA has ongoing. What makes Goddard unique in that it’s able to fill that role? I know you all have some plans on expansion. There’s a lot of land out here on this campus. So what aspects are you trying to grow the campus itself, maybe or utilize special parts of it to fulfill that goal that you have?

Makenzie Lystrup Yes. Part of what makes Goddard really special is our ability to be able to implement complex science missions end to end. We have expertise, everything from the early stage ideation, all the way through to launching missions and producing data products and sharing that out with the science community. And that means that we have facilities that support all of those aspects of the process. So it’s important for us to maintain that core capability. And some of our facilities are aging, and some of our facilities are less relevant than they have been. So as we look at our master plan moving forward for the facilities and the infrastructure, we’re looking at, not necessarily how do we grow the campus, but how do we evolve the campus to meet the current science needs. So I see that as some modernization, and that’s a challenge across the government for infrastructure and facilities dollars. So there you know, there are real challenges there. But also how do we again leverage our relationships with the private sector to be able to use some of their capacity as well? I would love for Goddard to be a more walkable campus because it is a large campus with a lot of buildings, but it’s beautiful. We’ve got trees, we’ve got grasses, we’ve got Meadowlands. It’s actually a really beautiful campus. So finding out more ways that we can help people move around the campus more easily. So, for example, our master plan, one of the things that we’ve moved out recently is we moved our main gate, so our main security gate from one location to another, this was part of the master plan. But part of that effort is making our access to the campus easier for pedestrians and easy for cyclists. That’s a really big component of the commuters who come here. So we’re trying to make this a more accessible campus.

Eric White And the taxicab service, of course, I saw the signs for. So once again, you’re reiterating on private sector partnerships to build and grow the campus itself, and do more on the facility. I am just curious of someone from your perspective, how that relationship is going. Obviously, it is going, but I always ask folks, could more be done? And nobody really has any complaints or anything like that. But it always feels as if there’s just so much room for growth that maybe things could move faster. Just want to get your thoughts on that.

Makenzie Lystrup Yeah. Coming from, having been in the private sector working in the aerospace industry, I have a pretty good handle on what’s out there in industry and in the private sector, including on some of the data analytics side and people who are really looking at how to use Earth system information either to sell as a product or to use for important decision making. So I think that, yes, there is a lot out there. I think that Goddard does a really good job of partnering. Every mission we do has partners, whether that’s a university partner, an international partner or a private sector entity, say an industrial partner that’s building a spacecraft for us. So we’re very good at creating those, what I call bagless environments, where people are working side by side together from a number of different organizations, but all working toward the same effort. So I think that we’re good at that. I think where we can expand is thinking more creatively about,  how again, how do we use our facilities? How can the private sector help us to use our facilities to greater impact? How might we use their facilities? And then also, where are there places that really don’t know much about NASA, and don’t know much about Goddard, but can benefit from the science that we produce? So sharing that more out with the Earth Information Center that was newly opened at NASA’s headquarters. Reaching more people, reaching more sectors of the economy so that people can use that information for human health and life and prosperity. That I think is a real growth area, and it’s an area that the private sector has kind of tentacles into. But no one’s really coordinating some of that yet. And I think there’s a lot to grow there.

Eric White Do you think the private sector ready or do they have the capabilities to fulfill all the needs that, not just your center has, but NASA as a whole, do you think that they’re in a good spot to innovate, to get to that point where NASA’s can always turn to somebody in the private sector if they have a problem that they need solved?

Makenzie Lystrup What we need is a private sector that is very strong in what they do. And so that NASA can focus on the things that only NASA can do, should do, would do. And so when we look at the capabilities that are out there in industry, yeah, I think they’re very robust. Everything from instrumentation to spacecraft builds to ground systems, launch vehicles.There’s a lot of capacity out there and a lot of capability. So I do think that we have a very strong sector, but we don’t expect them to do everything themselves. Goddard, NASA we are going to maintain being a science exploration technology and engineering organization. And so it’s really to me about what are they doing out there that we can use, so that we can use our resources for things that are really critical priorities for the agency.

Eric White Something that often gets overlooked of the private sector’s role in mass operations is just the formation of talent. STEM talent is the golden nugget that everybody is searching for. Can you just talk a little bit about that, about how NASA is utilizing the growth of the STEM talent that comes from maybe like yourself, up and comer in the private sector and then finds herself working at NASA?

Makenzie Lystrup Yes, the workforce issue is on everyone’s mind, because everyone seems to need more workforce. The contractors that we have on site here at NASA provide really a critical function for us, because they do bring in a lot of new talent and they can kind of ebb and flow a little bit as the the work needs change. But they’re also able to bring on folks with maybe key skills that we don’t have civil servants yet, being able to work. So, yes, they are a really important piece. I think that we could do more kind of interaction between Goddard and other organizations to understand, Hey, where might we exchange people just for the experience of understanding what’s done in another type of organization back to ours? And we’re also looking at how we grow our workforce in the communities in which we operate. So Greenbelt here in Prince George’s County, we’ve got a lot of schools, we’ve got a lot of talent here. How do we bring those folks in? Similarly, at Wallops, which is in quite a rural area and the independent Verification Validation center in West Virginia, how do we build some of the workforce locally so that we’ve got a good center of workforce pipeline, but also that people can get good jobs in their communities that might be more rural than out here in Greenbelt.

Eric White That’s Makenzie Lystrup, director of the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Hear the second part of my interview with her after this break. I’m Eric White.

Eric White Back on the space our on Federal News Network, I’m Eric White. We now continue my interview with Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, director of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. So let’s bring that focus to you, if you know your mind a little bit. You were in senior level positions  with different companies, and now you find yourself here running a NASA center, one of the major ones on the East Coast. Can you just tell me about that adjustment for you? And what the some of the differences were? And was there a lot more paperwork? I don’t know.

Makenzie Lystrup It’s funny that there are many similarities. People go into the space business, whether it’s on the government side or in the private sector, because they love space, they love the mission. And so you find a similar culture, right, where people are really excited and really passionate about what they do. And they know that it really has an impact on the science on people’s lives. So that part of it not too dissimilar, I would say. There are certainly differences in the kind of end stakeholders. So if you’re in a private company, you’ve got investors, you have shareholders that you know you are responsible to, and that changes the calculus some. But I have found that, again, in this business, we’re kind of all in it together for the right reasons. And the fact that we do have some private sector pressure means that they can drive their prices down. They can drive their costs down, and that benefits us. And so we can focus again on like, we are just mission focused, what is good for the nation, what’s good for NASA writ large. And I think that having people with different stakeholders is a kind of diversity in our ecosystem that I think is important and can help us produce better outcomes.

Eric White So it sounds like you’re enjoying yourself. You’re almost getting the best of both worlds kind of thing. Can you just expand a little bit on what you meant by that?

Makenzie Lystrup Yeah, what I mean is that, because it’s not just government working on these projects, we have to worry about cost. And we have companies that have to worry about costs. They have to worry about their financial security. So they’re going to make decisions that take that into account where we wouldn’t. And those kinds of tradeoffs, in terms of who are the stakeholders you have to satisfy? Again, I think it’s a diversity that helps us think differently about our different pieces. And then when they come together, those puts and takes help us be creative. My career, I’ve been very focused on how do I enable really great science, engineering and technology outcomes, that’s what I get a lot of energy from. And so having worked as a research scientist, having worked on the Hill and an industry and now here at NASA and leading Goddard, I see it as again, a diversity of experience. And we talk about diversity and inclusion a lot, but it’s so important to what we do. And again, it’s those diversity of stakeholders, diversity of approaches, diversity of experience, diversity of thought and all of the other kind of aspects we think of when we say diversity, that helps us think better, that helps us get to better outcomes. So I think bringing in people who do have a variety of experience is really useful and I’m eager to help our folks inside of NASA also get some external experiences?

Eric White I know you touched on it a little bit already, but Wallops, I have to ask you about just because it is almost one of the more unique space facilities on the whole East Coast. For those who don’t know, it’s on the eastern coast of Virginia, right by Chincoteague Island, which is very pleasant as well. So do you have a favorite between the two stations?

Makenzie Lystrup Oh, I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t say. Wallops is a really special place, and it’s such an important piece of what we do and important piece of NASA. And so some people aren’t that familiar with it, because it is a little bit tucked away and it’s a little bit smaller. But I look forward to raising its profile because it is a special place. It’s beautiful out there and it’s a great place to do innovative things. You asked about innovation, and I do see a lot of innovation really across all of the sectors. And that includes here in government, there’s a lot of innovative work going on. And I think that at Wallops kind of encapsulates a lot of that innovation. It’s where we do our CubeSat work, it’s where we do those suborbital programs. So these are like sounding rockets. So these are projects that from beginning to end are not very long in duration. And so we can have our scientists and our engineers go and get hands on experience leading a mission from beginning to end. And they can get that experience before they come and do it at for a large program, say at Greenbelt. And that is a really critical piece of our training of the workforce. And again, being out where they are, they have the opportunity to do some innovation without necessarily being part of the entire apparatus.

Eric White All right. And wrapping up here, I know you talked a lot about the some of the projects already. But I always like to get a gauge on what folks are thinking. People major players in the industry, in the space business like yourself, what is still exciting to you and what is on the horizon that you see coming soon that it may be, 40 or 50 years from now, but what do you see that excites you and for the next generation of space workers?

Makenzie Lystrup Yeah. I think one thing is the future of space astronomy, I’m an astronomer myself, so I have a little bit of a bias there. But I’m really looking forward to the future of adaptive optics in space and our ability to be able to do on space or on orbit assembly. Being able to take up and build, help build our large aperture space telescopes in space. So we’re not confined by the launch fairing size. We got to we had to fold up JWST to get it to fit inside of the rocket. And so, well, what could we do with three of those launches? And really try to assemble things in space. That’s something Goddard’s working on, and I think is really exciting. And then I just want to close with we are in a very rapidly changing world, and it’s really a privilege to be able to be a part of Goddard that really does produce a lot of very important Earth system science. And it’s a hopeful thing that we do. We are producing the kinds of measurements that will help us make better decisions around the world. And being able to have that connection to the impacts is really powerful.

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