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.

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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.

The post An interview with Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, Center Director, Goddard Space Flight Center first appeared on Federal News Network.

For my second interview with a NASA center director, we got a visit from Dr. James Kenyon. He’s the Director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio. He was nice enough to come by our studios while he was in D.C. for a headquarters visit. Now the Midwest may not be the first place you think of when it comes to NASA operations but I assure you, Dr. Kenyon told us all about how Glenn plays such a pivotal role for the agency.

Interview Transcript:

Eric White All right, so why don’t we start out just by kind of giving me an overview of the Glenn Research Center? I know you’ve only been there a year or so, but a lot of people probably don’t think of NASA being in in Ohio, but they are. And what does the footprint look like and what kind of work do you all do there?

James Kenyon Sure. So Glenn was actually established in Ohio way back as part of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Now, the NACA stood up in 1915 to really help us understand with the birth of flight, solving those problems and addressing those and getting government support to try to build that largely starting with World War I, then World War II, but also the commercial industry. And the NASA Glenn Center. Of course, it was the NACA Aero Engine research lab at the time, was placed there to really look at aircraft engine technology, how we could advance that technology in World War II. Groundbreaking at Glenn took place in 1941. So it’s really part of the World War II buildup. How are we going to make sure that our aircraft over the skies in Europe and in the Pacific have that capability, have that ability to dominate and win those wars? And so a lot of research there, a couple of reasons why place it there. One is back then, aircraft engines were piston engines. They looked a lot like car engines. And of course, the automotive industry was was growing there in the Midwest. We’re not that far from Detroit. We’ve got a huge manufacturing sector steel producing everything, all the things you need to make cars and car engines. So that’s one reason. Another reason is the world famous Cleveland Air races. Those happened at an airport right there that is now the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. And Glenn is right there adjacent to that airport. So that that’s the reason why to place it there. As our specialties grow out of that under NACA, we did aircraft engines and then with the dawn of the jet age, we transitioned to jet engines. And then when NASA was formed in 1958, we of course kept doing propulsion engines for spacecraft. And so now today what we do is we work on aircraft engines. We still have the aircraft engine part of NASA’s portfolio in aviation. We do in-space propulsion, which is thrusters for spacecraft, if you will. We do power and we do power for both spacecraft, for aircraft and future concepts, such as if we’re going to go and establish a presence that has people or robotic things on the surface of the moon, they’re going to need power. And so looking at surface power concepts for the moon and Mars and beyond, but all that, and then we do communications technologies we work closely with with Goddard on communications technology, we do a lot of the technology development. They operate a lot of our systems in space. And so there’s a there’s a coupling there. And then we do a lot of work in what we call extreme environments. And some of that is borne out of our work in propulsion and power that requires materials that can operate at extremely high temperatures. But then if you kind of look at the adjacencies to that extremely low temperatures dealing with cryogenic fluids, because our propulsion systems need things like hydrogen and other cryogenic really cold things. As well as rough surfaces. We do tires and materials for for rovers and even microgravity. We have a huge microgravity drop tower that gives us more than 5 seconds in ground testing, but more than 5 seconds of a microgravity environment so that we can look at things like how do flames behave when there’s no gravity? And so that’s the kind of work we do at NASA’s Glenn. And it’s exciting because you’re right, it’s not some place that you would think of is not a Kennedy Space Center where you see the launches going out of. But but we develop a lot of the research and technology. We’re what’s known as a research center. So that’s a role research in technology. But with the kinds of work we do with propulsion and power and communications, we’re in the middle of everything. I tell our our folks there, and I’ll tell anybody who will listen. No aircraft and no spacecraft has ever flown without propulsion, power and communications. And until we invent some new paradigm in physics, no spacecraft or aircraft will ever fly without propulsion, power and communications. And so we get to be part of everything that NASA does. It’s exciting.

Eric White Keeping up with the car theme, it seems as if the way you’re describing it, Kennedy is the test track, but you guys are the the factory that’s putting together these things. Is that kind of how you all see yourselves as your role in NASA’s missions?

James Kenyon In many ways, it works that way. There are multiple centers around the nation there. There are actually nine NASA centers, as well as an FFRDC, a federally funded research and development center. Each has a unique role, but there are several of us who are working in the research and technology work of different areas. We’re doing the propulsion in the power and the communications in the extreme environments. And then we’ve got we’ve got others who are working on things like aerodynamics or systems and controls and things like that. And so there’s a lot of different things that go on at the at the different centers. Some centers do the reentry systems, the ablative materials for the spacecraft as they reenter the atmosphere here or on the surface of Mars or things like that. And so a lot of different work. But you’re exactly right. We’re developing those technologies that are going to go into those those future spacecraft and aircraft.

Eric White Now, before we started talking, you did describe it as your big hole in the ground. What does that mean? Tell me what the meaning of that.

James Kenyon So so we have a microgravity. We have a microgravity test.

Eric White So that’s that. Okay. It’s that microgravity test.

James Kenyon And it turns out and I’m not I’m not an expert in this area, but our experts tell me that basically when you’re up in an orbit, you’re you’re basically we call it microgravity, but you’re in freefall. When you’re orbiting the Earth, you’re microgravity is effectively what you’re doing in freefall. And so we have a 500 foot chamber that goes into the ground below NASA Glenn, And we can pump it down to a vacuum. We can evacuate to take all the air out of it. And and then we can drop things. And when we do that, it gives us about 5 seconds of a stable microgravity environment without the influence of drag or air where we can test things in a real space environment.

Eric White And do people go into that or? Yeah. So great. So let’s there are so many other projects that you all are working on there. And I’m curious you’ve got that propulsion part of the center research. What aspect of on earth activities are are you all still involved with as far as commercial air travel and things of that nature?

James Kenyon We are very heavily involved in NASA’s efforts in sustainable aviation. There’s a there’s a larger goal. Of course, the whole world is working toward sustainability across all of those sectors, and transportation being a big part of that and aviation being part of that. And so in the U.S., we have this U.S. Aviation climate action plan that looks at and has a fairly challenging goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. And that’s a big driver for whatever our future regulatory environment is going to be. And by the way, the Europeans are looking at similar things and we have to be able to work in in whatever regulatory environment there is there. Our manufacturers have to be able to sell products and operate products there. Our airlines have to be able to operate there. But that’s going to drive a regulatory environment, that’s going to drive business environment. And there’s also a business imperative there because if you can reduce your energy consumption, you can reduce your operating costs. And so it’s a it’s a it’s a way where we can work hand-in-hand with industry interests. But what we’re doing there, if you want to get to that goal, you have to think about energy. And when you think about propulsion and you think about power, that’s energy conversion. And so so looking at your different kinds of energy, your different sources of energy. And so a couple of things we’re doing. We’re working on advanced jet engine technology. We’ve made tremendous strides in making jet engines a lot more efficient, but there’s still a long way to go before we get those things to where they’re at their best. So we’re working on projects to just dramatically improve jet engine efficiency. If you can reduce the energy burn, you help yourself in a whole lot of ways. Another thing we work on there is looking at alternative forms of energy. And specifically a big focus is on hybrid electric and electric propulsion. Instead of relying on petroleum fuels, using electrification as a way to either better optimize my my system and make it more efficient or just to use a different form of energy that that has a path to sustainability. And then a third, a third role we play, which is kind of more of a supporting role in the larger whole of government effort, is sustainable aviation fuels. Right now there are seven different paths to get sustainable fuels that are certified for use in aircraft. Our challenges, we can’t get enough. And so looking at ways to to support that. So the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy really have the lead to go and look at developing new pathways. But if they develop new pathways, they got to work in jet engines. And so we provide a test capability to be able to test those and make sure that they work as well as technology development capability to make sure that we’ve got engine technology that can work with different kinds of fuels. And so a couple of different ways that we’re supporting that. We’re also, though, looking at new forms of transportation, opening new markets, if you will, later on this year. We’re hoping to fly our X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft. Glenn has been supporting the propulsion integration part of that. But as soon as we figure out the point of the X-59 is to show that we can fly faster than the speed of sound, but not produce a really loud sonic boom. And so maybe we can open new market where instead of saying don’t fly any faster than Mach one speed of sound, we can say, I don’t care  how fast you fly, just don’t go be any louder than this. Right. That’s a game changer and will allow us to open that new market. Just imagine getting from L.A. back to D.C. or L.A. to Cleveland, and in a couple of hours, you can have that meeting all day and still get home that night. Pretty cool. And and but then once you figure that out, now you got to start solving the other problems, like the jet noise landing and takeoff noise. And we’ve already got some teams working on that problem. We’re also looking at advanced air mobility. This is that’s kind of the vision is this urban air taxi. You know, I can I can skip over the 14th Street Bridge and get straight from Reagan National or straight from Crystal City downtown with this little thing that looks like a taxi, except it’s got four or six or eight rotors on top and we just fly over. But there are a lot of other applications like like remote medical care, remote package delivery that that really opens up, flight to more people. And that’s going to have electric propulsion. A lot of the concepts have electric propulsion as we’re testing the propulsion concepts to understand their durability, the reliability which which feeds into making sure that they’re safe enough to carry people on. So a lot of work impacting a lot of different ways we do we do business in in aviation.

Eric White Appreciate all the local references. You can take the man out of DC and DC of the man. That’s James Kenyon, director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Time for another quick break, but we’ll have more from Dr. Kenyon after it’s done. This is the space our on Federal News Network. I’m Eric Weiner. You’re listening to the Space Hour on Federal News Network. I’m Eric White. Now for part two of my interview with James Kenyan, director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. So with all of those different projects that you all are working on for, you can call them ground transportation, I guess, just because it’s on Earth. How does that translates into NASA’s overall missions of getting to the moon, getting to Mars? I imagine that there’s some technology crossover there where having a more sustainable propulsion system, NASA could utilize that in some way, right?

James Kenyon Well the first thing before you get to space, you got to fly through the atmosphere. And that’s one thing that NASA’s has been able to leverage for a very long time, which has been exciting. But but when you start thinking about things like the electrification of aircraft propulsion, when you look at things like the spacecraft thrusters, those are largely electric. The so-called hall effect or the ion thrusters are electric. And so how do you generate electric power? So generating that electric power is a challenge, but then translating it and using that then to turn into a propulsion system that can drive a spacecraft, orient a spacecraft. The good news is up there, it doesn’t take a whole lot of thrust, but it’s still a challenge because these electric thrusters don’t necessarily produce a lot of thrust. But but it’s a good way to get there because it’s very, very efficient. Then when you get to the surface or you get out there, you have to have you have to have power. And so we’ve worked on technologies such as roll out solar arrays. These are arrays that you can roll up so you can make them very nice and compact for launch. But then when you get out to space, they roll out and we just the agency just deployed some on the space station in the in the last month or so. But looking at technologies like that as well as things like working with the Department of Energy, nuclear power could be a really good option for space travel and and for producing power on the surface of the moon and places like that. And so so making sure we understand and leverage those technologies. And that’s the kind of work we’re doing at Glenn in terms of power and propulsion for spacecraft.

Eric White And what can you tell me about the communications aspect of your all work? Because over at Goddard, I was shown a very cool thing about instead of radio waves switching it all to lasers and pointing and shooting, being able to get your comms up and running in a more efficient way. So efficiency doesn’t stop at fuel consumption there. What can you tell me about what you all are doing for that?

James Kenyon That’s right. Well, we’re working on the technologies we’re working on on how to make sure that the signals, the lasers have the right power, have the right density, that we know how to receive them, that we know how to control them and point them correctly. Those are the kind of technologies you have to work on to understand. Call it optical communications. Right. But is that is that light the laser that that you’re using to do that? So we’re doing the technology development to make sure that we’ve got the right control technologies, we’ve got the right receivers, technologies, that the things are transmitting and communicating the way they’re supposed to, and that we’re able to get the signals in and use them. And so that’s that’s the kind of work that we do at Glenn in terms of developing those foundational technologies that go into that. One of the cool things with that is that it works. We can use that. Of course, that’s great for Space Optical can be a little bit tougher here on Earth, but we also have terrestrial applications for those sorts of technologies too. And so looking at how we can leverage it across both air and space is something that we’re excited about.

Eric White All right. So let’s talk about the non-NASA folks who help out in this. Every NASA’s center has increased exponentially its relationship with contractors in the use of their technology and their talent, bringing them in to help with all of these great, amazing things that you all are doing. Is that the case out in Glenn Research Center as well?

James Kenyon Well, certainly, certainly it’s not really terribly new to us. And I’ll I’ll go back to aviation for a moment. Right. We’ve we have a very mature aviation aviation industry. And and so we’ve been working in partnership with or with aircraft engine manufacturers for a long time, finding those areas where the entire industry has a problem that they can’t solve and maybe NASA can help or looking at those things where where if we want to drive the industry in a direction such as reducing fuel burn or finding alternative energy sources and things like that, we can invest in those areas that encourage industry to take a little bit more risks, lean forward, go a little bit faster. And so we’ve got a long relationship with the aviation industry that way. But looking at how we work with commercial partners in a very similar way on the space side, for example, we’re working on one of the programs we’re leading at NASA Glenn, is the power and propulsion element for the gateway. When you look at our Moon to Mars mission and happy to share as much as you want to know about Moon to Mars. But but, but when you look at our Moon to Mars mission, one of the key elements is placing a basically a space station around the moon. And we call it the gateway. It’s the gateway to the moon was going to need power. It’s going to need propulsion. I need communications. And so we’re working on what we call the power and propulsion element, which will provide that sustainable power, provides propulsion that allows it to do station keeping and be where we want it to be in the orbit around the moon. And so we’re working with companies. The prime contractor on that is Maxar based out in Mountain View, California, but they also work with companies around as part of their supply chain. But we work with the companies as as partners. Where we lean in, we invest in where the risk is. We leverage some of their commercial technologies. Maxar is a commercial space company, and so we’re leveraging a lot of their commercial technology that helps us reduce our cost, helps us reduce our risk by using proven technology, but also allows us to invest in a way so that they’ll take it in a direction that they wouldn’t normally use for their commercial practices. And so it allows us both to bring the best of what we have to the table.

Eric White All right, twist my arm. We can talk about Moon to Mars details. Tell us a give us an overview of what that project is. And I imagine it involves going from the moon to Mars. But you go. Am I barking up the wrong tree there? Exactly.

James Kenyon Well, so we’ve we’ve set out really, And to say that we’ve just started would would would be a little misguided. But but we’ve just laid out a vision, the the vision for going back to the moon, establishing a sustainable presence at the moon, and then using that as a stepping stone to then go on to Mars and do the exploration of our solar system. And so we get asked sometimes, well, what’s different now? We went to the moon back in the Apollo days. What’s different now? The difference is we’re staying. And it’s going to be a combination of a human presence as well as a robotic presence. But this this moon to Mars activity is looking at getting us back to the moon, getting us back to the moon that allows us to stay for extended periods. When we went to Apollo, we would land on the sunny side of the moon. We would do however much you could get done in the short time they had and come back. But it even that short time just completely transformed our understanding of our solar system, our understanding of the origins of our planet and our understanding of our universe. Imagine what you could do if you could stay and actually get down in there and dig in and understand so much more. But then by doing that, you’re in space longer, further away from the earth. You learn about how to operate and live further away from the Earth, which gives you a better capability to go on toward Mars and then from Mars on out further into the out into the solar system. And then also establishing a presence is going to potentially open up pathways for industry to create new markets there, whether it’s exploiting some of the resources on the moon that we could use here. Space tourism, I know, is one thing that’s kind of far out there. But but I never say never any more. But a lot of things you can do if you start thinking about about ways you can live and work on the moon. And so that’s what that vision is. We launched Artemis one last fall, which was the first step, is the first time we’ve had a human rate of spacecraft back in the vicinity of the moon in 50 years. We learned a lot from that. It was incredibly successful. We learned a lot. And and our next launch coming up is going to be sending astronauts to the vicinity of the moon. They’re going to orbit the moon and go around the moon. And that’ll be the first time since Apollo. And then and then eventually we’re going to put people back. The people back on the surface of the moon. The first woman, the first person of color, the first Americans, the first people back on the moon since Apollo. And that’s exciting. We are going to have the gateway, the orbiting space station, which is going to give us the ability to stage logistics, stage people, to get to stage it, to come back to Earth. So a whole lot of things you can do with that capability as well. So this vision is really out there and we’ve got commercial partners  putting robotic payloads on the surface within the next year is just a whole bunch of stuff going on that’s going to get us that sustainable presence.

Eric White Listeners of this program know that my my favorite thing to dream about is HD cameras on the moon. You know, no more fuzzy, grainy stuff. I want to see clear images and just being able to see all that will be really cool. So yeah, I mean that all just sounds fantastic and you know, the way that you all are working towards that what are you just kind of what step are we in right now and where are you all working or what are you all working on, I guess, in the program to get us to those great things that you just described me?

James Kenyon Well, like I said, we we just launched Artemis one last fall. That was a huge, huge first step. That’s sort of the existence proof that says, yes, we can get back there with something that’s meaningful. And NASA Glenn played a big role in that. Canada, for those who may not be familiar we have the big rocket, which we call the space launch system that carried it up. But what it carried up was a spacecraft called Orion, and that spacecraft is human rated. And as it was going around the moon. And that’s the thing that got the cool pictures back from the moon. Of course, it needed power and it need needed propulsion and it needed all the utilities so that people could use it in work and it could go in the path that we wanted it to go. That is called a service module, which attaches to the spacecraft as kind of a segment that attaches to the spacecraft and powers it and carries it around. That was built actually by international partners. The European Space Agency led that. But our integration office to put that on the spacecraft is at NASA Glenn. So making sure the requirements flow is clear. Doing the verification and validation and then being on site to work with the Europeans for troubleshooting and just for the operations part of it. So we were right there in the Artemis One launch, and we’ll be there for all of the Artemis launches coming up. We’re doing the power and propulsion element for the gateway. And so that’s a that’s a big deal. Having an orbiting having a space station is a big deal. Having one around the moon is just pretty incredible if you think about it. And so doing the power and the propulsion for that and the communications that are going to enable all of that. And then that longer term vision, having people sustainably on the surface, having the power sources there as we’re starting research and technology development now that’s going to allow us to have the ability to have that power and that footprint and that infrastructure in place. The agency laid out 63 objectives in four different areas science, transportation and habitation, infrastructure and operations. And with the kind of work we do, Glenn is very much involved in all areas, but especially that infrastructure part because of that, that communications and that power infrastructure. And so a lot of work going on headed in that direction.

Eric White All right. And I just want to I do want to talk about you and your background a little bit. You’ve had a lot of experience in government. You worked in the defense side of things and in many different aspects, we know coming from the technology side. What can you tell me about your first year and making the transition from a defense agency to a science and exploratory agency?

James Kenyon Well, so so I’ve been actually with NASA for four years, but I started here at headquarters in Washington, D.C. And and but I’ve been out at NASA, Glenn, now for about a year. And I will tell you that the transition from from being in the policy shop, if you will, the policy and program and budgets and everything you do in Washington to being out in the field, the biggest thing that strikes you is the people. I am humbled every day to drive into the gate and be among 3200 of the smartest people in the world. And here I am, the center director. And I just it’s amazing and humbling to see the incredible work they’re doing. But even more amazing is their passion and excitement for the work. You can feel it when you walk on the campus or when you drive on the campus. And it’s it’s just a great feeling. They also know their place in their history and it’s a proud history. And so feeling and being a part of that history now has just been an absolutely incredible experience. I’ll tell you that you appreciate the challenges a lot more. I’ve got my my my cell phone will text me every time we get a water leak or a fire alarm or something that happens. And and you’re dealing with an old infrastructure. Much of the center was built in the Cold War buildup. And and so a lot of this stuff is getting old and still amazing the capability it has has but but some of these little subsystems but but you understand the challenges of of operating a large center. We have two campuses our main campus is right next to the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Got about 300 acres, about 100 buildings. And most of our workforce is there, over 3000 people there. We have a second facility about an hour west. It’s about 6500, 6600 acres near Sandusky, Ohio. And and there we have a smaller footprint in terms of people and buildings. But what we do there is very large space environments testing. We can test full scale spacecraft in the space environment, take it down to a vacuum, radiation vibrations, you name it. We can do all of that. And so that capability and again, just the people and their passion and their knowledge of how to use all of this stuff to really make the magic happen and literally rewrite the laws of physics every day. It’s just a cool place to be.

Eric White And not as many suits and ties.

James Kenyon No, definitely not as many suits and ties.

The post An unlikely location plays a big role in NASA operations first appeared on Federal News Network.

Earlier this summer, the Information Technology Industry Council announced it had acquired the Space Enterprise Council. They did this with the hopes of promoting U.S. national security space programs, space cybersecurity, and space education. I had to find out what that meant, and I got the chance, speaking to Gordon Bitko, executive vice president of Policy at ITI.

Interview transcript

Gordon Bitko The background is the Space Enterprise Council’s been around for a long time, for more than 20 years. It was created because the government, NASA and the Department of Commerce and others saw that there was a commercial space industry even back then, and they really wanted there to be a singular group that they could engage with and discuss critical matters. What’s happened, what’s changed over time is that commercial space has become much more important. You look at the portfolio of IPI member companies and many of them space has become more and more important. And there is this real overlap of interest now between pure space companies and technology companies. So this was a great opportunity for IPI, which is already working on many of the issues that matter to technology and space, for us to get a quick leg up and to start working on these space policy issues with David Logsdon, with a group of companies who’ve been doing this for a long time.

Eric White Yeah. Can you just lay out a couple of the areas that your member companies and some of the member companies, obviously, of the Space Enterprise Council, but what fascinates you all about space?

Gordon Bitko Well, I’m going to answer that personally first, Eric, and say I’ve been fascinated with space for my whole career in one way or another, and I’m going to date myself here. I started out in school as a studying engineering and actually studying aerospace engineering and hoping I was going to do something cool about space. And then the Cold War ended and a lot of what looked like exciting opportunities all of a sudden weren’t exciting opportunities anymore. But it’s always been something that was of interest and fascinating to me. So on a personal level, that certainly was not the most important factor, but not something that, it was always present in my mind that space is something really cool and interesting. But to get to the heart of the question that you’re asking, all of our member companies focus on critical issues, that there is this real big synergy now, artificial intelligence and the huge volumes of data that are growing everywhere. Space is just another way. Space observation systems are just another way that we’re collecting huge volumes of data for all sorts of important uses. There’s more than 50 different federal agencies who use or collect or manage or are involved in those processes in one way or another, collecting data from space for things like Earth observation. And so many of our member companies have been involved in a lot of that work for years at the terrestrial side, at the Where is that data going? How is it being managed? How is it being used? And most importantly now, how is it being secured? Cybersecurity is a critical matter. If space becomes a critical industry sector, and it certainly seems like that’s that the prevailing wind is blowing in that direction right now, Eric, then we have to think longer and harder and deeper maybe about how do we secure space than almost any other industry sector. The same challenges exist, but are even harder when you’re dealing with something that’s up in space and changing it out, fixing it, dealing with a problem, patching it. Is different than a terrestrial computer that’s sitting under your desk or in a data center that’s easy to access and easy to test fixes and make updates.

Eric White So that may have helped answer the next question I’m going to ask you, which is what role will ITI be playing in the Space Enterprise Council’s day-to-day activities?

Gordon Bitko Yeah, great question. The Space Enterprise Council is what we would call an affiliate program of ITI. What that means is that there are companies that are members of just the Space Enterprise Council. They’re not full members of ITI. A lot of the companies that are in the Space Enterprise Council are our space startups. There’s a huge booming community of small companies who see lots of opportunities in space. They’re not really fit for purpose, aligned well with ITIs broader membership in that there are these more focused companies just working on space issues. There are some larger companies there as well that are focused on space. So there’s a lot of synergy, but we think of them as an affiliate program. We’re not going to represent those companies on broader issues that ITI works on. Tax and trade, for example. But at the same time, many of the issues that I just mentioned, cybersecurity or emerging innovative technologies, things like artificial intelligence, there is a really good alignment. And so it’s an opportunity for us to advocate effectively on both fronts on the broader ITI front, and on the space specific front on those issues where frankly the policy needs and challenges and interest, they do match really well.

Eric White Got it. And in your fascination with space and ITIs reviews of it, what are some of the cybersecurity issues that you see prevailing in the commercial space industry? And on the public side, what else can NASA be doing to improve cybersecurity overall?

Gordon Bitko Well, I think a lot of that starts, Eric, at the same point that we would say cybersecurity needs to start in general, which is there needs to be a really good understanding of the risks. What are the threats that are out there? How are those being managed effectively? And there is, of course, a full spectrum of solutions both in general and with regard to space. Many of those go back to some of the principles that the administration is pushing as broader cybersecurity solutions, zero trust architectures being a really good example of that, the understanding that you want to minimize who has access and manage privileges and take the defensive assumption that there are intruders and they’re gaining access. Those sort of things, you can apply that model to space systems, as well as you can to anything else. And we certainly are very supportive of that. You can apply the same principles for secure software development that we see emerging in the general commercial space. So you need to understand the provenance of your software, how it’s been developed and how it’s being used, and how are you assuring yourself and your customers that it’s reliable. If anything, things like that are even more important when, again, you’re talking about a space system that, as I noted already, might be harder to maintain an update once it’s been launched, once it’s been in operation. It can’t really afford to have downtime. You can’t really afford to patch it or maintain it or make changes in the same way that you can. But the same model applies, the same understanding of think about the risk and think about how do you manage that risk? And that’s again, an area where we see that there’s this great overlap, there’s this great synergy. I think one other thing to think about, Eric, that’s an important challenge to understand is, we’re at a time where on the ground computational power is almost unlimited. You can always throw more servers, more hardware, more solutions. You can’t always do that in space. And so the reason why I bring that up as an example, is right now we’re about to embark on a journey where we’re going to change our cryptographic systems. We’re going to move from our current standards to ones that are resistant to quantum computers. And that is a necessary thing from a cybersecurity standpoint. But also, it takes a lot more computing power to do that. And that’s the sort of thing that we need to think about. How does that applied in space? Are we going to have the right sort of computing power to do that to ensure that we’re maintaining secure and reliable cryptographic systems between ground and space?

Eric White Got it. And every industry that where industry and government intersect, there are these good government groups, and I guess coalitions. You’re one of them for the IT sector. What role does the Space Enterprise Council play? Just because, they lean on each other a lot more industry and government than any other sector, I feel like. At least in my study of it, my brief time looking into it.

Gordon Bitko There is, I think, unique interdependency relationship between government and industry when it comes to space. You’re right about that Eric. One of the things that we’ve seen that was a motivating factor for driving ITI to move in this direction to acquire this program, is the increasing emphasis on that important interdependency. I’m sure you’ve seen the [Federal Communications Commission (FCC)] announced their Space Bureau recently. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission made recommendations about identifying space as a critical industry sector. Kemba Warden when she was out at [National Security Agency (NSA)], the acting national cyber director, made reference to the critical importance of space as a sector. [Department of Defense (DoD)] just opened a number of new offices that are focused on commercial space activity, and the list goes on and on. So there is an incredible interdependency and an understanding of that, I think, on the part of both industry and government that success is only going to come together. And that’s even more true here than it is in technology writ large. What does that mean then, for what the role is of the of the Space Council? The Space Council, the Space Enterprise Council has already done work, has a really great track record, working with CISA, for example, in the development of some of their thinking about space as a critical industry sector, and what would a zero trust architecture look like in space. And I would envision that we’ll continue to do even more of that type of work as space becomes more and more important to our national economy. And they’ll go even beyond that, Eric, to note that the Space Enterprise Council actually has had and will need to renew. But we are moving forward with this memorandum of understanding with partner associations in other countries who are also heavily involved in commercial space. And so I think that there’s a role there as well to ensure communication and collaboration, globally when it comes to these space policy issues, it’s not just solely a U.S. issue.

Eric White You talked a little bit about what federal agencies are doing right now to recognize the importance of commercial space. Is there anything more that can be done other than just keep on collaborating and keep the lines of communication open? I’ve seen some pretty good relationships between regulators and companies. You haven’t heard too much about dustups going into the public realm and people complaining about they can’t do certain things, but what could be done to help grow it even more?

Gordon Bitko Yeah, the answer is there’s always more that can be done. But you’re right, as the working premise, Eric, that I think relationships in general are good so it’s not a we need to fix a broken relationship or repair anything. But on the flip side, technology, the pace of it is accelerating every day. We hear about new use cases for artificial intelligence or for other emerging technologies. Lots of different federal agencies trying to use those technologies, also benefiting from space, from data that are collected and being used. Really, the question is, as we’re thinking about things like artificial intelligence and putting in place risk management frameworks, and parameters about how those technologies can be used to think about space as one of those use case scenarios to understand how is that sort of technology going to be used and what are the unique aspects of it for space? When does it makes sense to have a unique set of space requirements for those types of technologies? Agencies really need to work with industry on that and say, Hey, we see this great capability, we see this great technology, how can we apply it and help us manage this huge volume of Earth observation data that we’re collecting now? For example. And what does that mean for Department of Agriculture programs that are dependent on all that data to make land use decisions? So it’s not we need to fix regulation. It’s we need to understand where is the technology going? And how is it evolving and how does industry work effectively with government so that we can all move forward collectively on that front?

Gordon Bitko Just to be clear, while we are managing the program as an affiliate, it is a part of ITI. The Space Enterprise Council is not a separate organization. It’s the membership of the Space Enterprise Council is open to ITI companies or any other companies who want to participate in space specific policy. It’s not a one or the other, and we certainly are already talking to any number of our current member companies who have interests in space to have them participating and hear their voices. So I just want to be clear about that point, Eric, it’s not two separate organizations. The membership, we’re managing it according to our requirements, but we’re not going to think about it as cybersecurity policy and cybersecurity policy for space. We’re going to tackle those issues collectively. So I think that’s one thing. But then to the other, what are we doing going forward? I think that there’s an unlimited number of things that we can be doing going forward. There are so many use cases, like I said, across all of these different agencies that people don’t even stop and really think and understand that the role that the space industry has, the role that the commercial space sector has across our lives nowadays. And so I think that there are a lot of opportunities where now that the Space Enterprise Council has this home at ITI, we’re going to look to leverage those relationships across government to really try to drive effective policy across the board.

The post ITI Council acquires Space Enterprise Council first appeared on Federal News Network.

Eric White got the chance to speak to someone who was among the first technology experts in the U.S. Space Force. Preston Dunlap was the first chief technology officer and chief architect officer of the U.S. Space Force and Air Force. He’s now an independent director on corporate boards and advisor for companies such SOSi. Here is that interview.

Interview Transcript: 

Preston Dunlap I had the privilege of being part of getting two tech startups off the ground in the commercial world and working for four secretaries of defense. Most of the time spent running the Pentagon’s equivalent of an investment committee and diligence teams on how to effectively spend wisely about $700 billion a year in five years for pictures. And then most recently had the privilege of being the first chief technology officer and chief architect for the U.S. Space Force and Air Force after working national security programs for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. And now I founded Arkenstone Ventures to be able to provide consulting and strategic advice to tech companies that are growing and trying to create real change in the tech world with a lot of emphasis on space and other deep technology areas, as well as work with private equity firms to increase investments in this still underserved area, but a real area of promise.

Eric White What goes into, and forgive me for making it sound so simple, but what goes into being the CTO and chief architect officer of the Space Force and Air Force?  I imagine a lot of technology needs are are pretty high up there in the realm of things. But what can you tell me about that position?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, I really credit the secretary at the time who was overseeing the department at the time was just Air Force. And you might recall that the president decided to create and stand up the Space Force at the time, a second service inside the same department. And the secretary recognized that the way the government often manages programs and development  is as if there were sort of individual islands of themselves. And so although the there weren’t necessarily technologists that were running the department at the time, they recognized that there was something that didn’t feel right about simply having a thousand sort of flowers moving and blooming and instead ought to think about technology more as an integrated approach like a successful company might. So you want to not just have a bunch of widgets that you sell or produce, but you want to be able to have a coherent strategy that reinforces each other and some application of the technology development as an enterprise approach across your whole set of product lines. And so to begin to think about the military and the Defense Department intelligence community as not simply a series of individual activities, but a coherent plan to achieve perhaps some of the most strategic and critical objectives for our country and those around the world makes a lot of sense to be able to set up a teams of people, to be able to think about how to build products and capability more quickly and how to do so thinking about them as a collective whole, because we use our capabilities together. And so not just fighters or submarines, but we bring them together to deter and if necessary, take action. And so you want to be able to build that in from the beginning and to think about a coherent technology strategy. And part of that is being able to bring in things like commercial technology for many elements that are critical to the military but are not as organically grown by the military like they used to be. That’s the chief technology aspect. The chief architect side of the coin was another great idea, which is to be able to ensure that the engineering across in our department about $74 billion of research, development and procurement activities are actually done in a way that works together from the beginning and experimented and tested and evaluated and deployed together as family of systems or families of capability. So great honor to be able to do that for just over three years.

Eric White How far along from your perspective, has space technology come in the U.S. from a defense standpoint? Everybody knows about the great movements that satellites have have upgraded to themselves. But from a defense standpoint, what have you seen over the years in those positions and now in the commercial sector?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, this is sort of near and dear to my heart. Back when I was working as an executive at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, I was having some conversations with the White House senior staff at the time. This would be 2015, 2016 timeframe. And the the thesis that I was sort of making was that there is a tectonic shift that’s about to happen and maybe even is happening at the time, which was a rapid trend towards less so having government preponderance in space and more so having the preponderant player be commercial and other ecosystems up in space. And so you’re you’re right to note that change in trajectory that but that necessitated a new thinking inside the government and that new thinking caused myself and a team to then run for Vice President Biden at the time, and then a second set of activities for Vice President Pence, exercises with the cabinet and the vice president chairing those activities. And what became known as the National Space Council that President Trump and VP Pence stood up. But in the backdrop of all those more public forums, we were looking at what it looks like to have policy and programs that would need to be developed. And you saw activities come out of that like the stand up and focus of US Space Command, a military command oriented on the domain of space that started in 2018 and formalized in 2019. We have others that are geographic focused, like Pacific or Europe or and so on. But this recreated a focus specifically on space. So there was that’s the operational side of the house, the users. At the same time, there was another public debate on the Space Force establishment that also got established in December 2018, and that was to then organize, train and equip programs, people and processes to be able to then enable and support military and other capabilities in space and a large emphasis, an increasing percentage of emphasis on either adopting commercial technologies or relying on commercial companies. And so we see a more clear need to do that as aggressive actions have happened in space from others. And so we want to make sure that we have a stable and secure space economy just as we ensure that we have a stable and secure maritime domain and other locations around the world and hand in hand in glove with our partners across the globe.

Eric White A nice segue into my next question, which is is the space economy, the U.S. space economy and international space economy up to the task of providing those needs that the government has? Or are there still some gaps of where there’s whether it’s a lack of competition or lack of innovation that the defense side and the intelligence agencies have needs that are not necessarily being met?

Preston Dunlap Yeah, there’s two ways to think about that question, Eric. So one is from an investment perspective, so there’s a significant amount of money, an increasingly amount of money goes into building space capabilities across the globe, about a portion of that. So let’s see, two years ago was about $250 billion investment in space, but 90 of that across governments, about 55 billion of that 92 from the U.S. government and about half of that sort of split roughly between Space Force or Space Force and the NASA. That that that dollar amount is large by most of sort of our standards, however very small relative to significant technology domains in other areas or sectors like enterprise software and so on, if you sort of add up the aggregate. So it’s a good number, but it’s not sufficient to be able to address all the commercial the day to day needs that are needed from phones and GPS to imagery and agriculture. And so what you need to do then from a government perspective is focus those dollars on systems and capabilities that you need specifically or uniquely for defense and intelligence missions, and then leverage the vast investments out there in the private sector, building products for commercial entities that we can dual track. Some people call it dual use. I prefer the term dual track so that you’re not distracting from the commercial business case, but a dual track into the government case where we can you rely on that an increasing way. Not simply, originally the argument I think was for resilience and redundancy, to be able to have multiple pathways of information and the but now I think we’re seeing companies be sophisticated enough that they can actually sort of be hand-in-glove and be integrated into algorithms that create insights and leveraging of machine learning and AI to be able to pull not simply one type of image or one type of information together from space, but actually have a very strong fabric or a collective whole that is that sort of makes one screen, if you will, not on a commercial screen that you’re looking at in a government screen, but one that’s blending the two together. And we’re always going to see specialized capabilities or needs that the government is going to have in that, both in space, space for space as well as space to earth. I don’t think that’s going to change. Same thing with with missile systems or aircraft. There’s not a lot of commercial need for, say, a hypersonic weapon, but a lot of military needs, those kind of things. It’s a nice, clear example of something that may not be a commercialized product, or at least I hope it isn’t, but it’s something that the government would need. And there’s moral equivalence of that in space.

Eric White Yeah, the space race is back on between the U.S. and its near-peer competitors. I just want to gather your thoughts on what you think about U.S. companies being able to maybe work with other other countries who have those same needs as well. Where does their allegiance lie? And as a former CTO, what were you hearing from the Space executives when this topic came up?

Preston Dunlap Well, we’re seeing a large, I think, increasing trend for countries around the globe to be more interested in getting into space. The really the flexible point or the pivot point that happened to enable new entrants into the space is the dramatic reduction of things like launch costs. Where it was something like 25, $50,000 a kilogram back on space shuttle days all the way down to 2000 a kilogram for Falcon nine. And if Starship Bay gets off the ground, literally, that could be much, much, much reduced. And so those those create opportunities to be able to and reduce barriers for others to be able to enter. And so I think we’re looking at lots of partnership conversations across the landscape, countries thinking about whether they want to have their own sovereign capabilities versus leverage others. And I think from a United States perspective, we’re we are doing very well in the space domain. And a lot of companies want to come here and work or be part of the US ecosystem for good reason. Got a lot of great technical talents, a good focus on this and and an environment and government structure that’s very supportive of increasing commercial companies. And so I think we’re going to continue to see companies doing that, not simply for a first, it’s going to be in looking, I’ll call it space to space to Earth, but Earth observation and other more obvious categories. But as communications are built and transportations and our costs are reduced both to get to low-Earth orbit, but then eventually here we’re going to see beyond low-Earth orbit, you’ll see more and more companies and governments working together to be able to have things like taxi systems in space and potentially other interesting businesses that could be established on top of this foundation. And so all the more reason why there’s good economic reason for it, good commercial reason for it. And to be able to support that, you want to make sure that you’ve got a stable and secure environment with rules of the road to be able to operate together as an ecosystem from country to country and company to company.

Eric White Yeah, finishing up here and you provide another great segway to this question, which is which is where is this all going and where do you see this all going? Are we going to see you mentioned those taxi services, are we going to have planes that are going to be flirting with that line between low-Earth orbit and and actually being considered on earth or what what are some of the things in the pipeline that you can foresee as somebody who’s been in this industry, an area for so long?

Preston Dunlap Yeah. So there’s a lot of potential and you could do a lot of dreaming about what in space activities can look like and then space activities that support what’s what’s happening down here on Earth, the road to be able to get there if you want to build it or the bridge from today, it’s tomorrow.  We started with the changing the way launch happens, both in terms of the weight and where you can go and what the costs are. I think the next thing that’s interesting is then the communications to be able to then support that. By that I mean how do you talk to people or things at great distances and to set up the communications infrastructure to be able to support movement out and beyond and pathways to do that? And once you’ve got communications set up, allows greater autonomy and systems to work together, which create an environment that allows things to be built and to work together out in space. And I think we’ve got a somewhat of a it’s not a blank canvas, but I think there’s a lot of creative opportunities here for those that are are investing or looking in the potential of once a few of these things lock into place to create that that bridge. That could be a very fascinating future in space and that there could be not simply things like civilization or people living places, which we often talk about or people think about. And there’s certainly the possibility of that. But there’s also various things in space that are useful as well, and not just for economic advantages, but to be able to help make make life better here and more productive, more useful, more stable. So I think we’re going to see a lot of creativity, opportunities for companies and governments that are trying to do that and want to rely on on countries to then make good policy and good rules to be able ensure that folks play well together and reinforce each other in a way that’s stable and fair to support that flourishing for companies and let the let those companies be creative and take bold steps with how they use their dollars time and talents to be able to to make that future actually be realized. I think spaces is something that we often take for granted. It’s in our cars and our phones, on our computers. And every every day that goes by, space is going to be a more integral element in our daily lives. Often if we do that right, we may not even notice that that trend is happening. But what that means is you’re able to have a more globally connected set of communities across the world, which creates a new opportunities to partner and understand others better and work together more collaboratively. So whether that’s for location services or agriculture, the maritime issues or just talking to each other let alone the opportunities up in space, there’s whether we see it or not, or recognize or not space is going to be a part of almost everyone’s life at some point here in the in the coming future. And I think that’s that’s a good future to go into. And we should do it wisely and thoughtfully and support those who are making bold more choices and investments to be able to help get us there safely and securely.

The post The future of DoD and space technology first appeared on Federal News Network.

The U.K. based company Space Forge recently announced plans to launch U.S. manufacturing operations in the United States, showing how global space interests have become overseas. The person they picked to run those operations is Andrew Parlock, who’s worked for major American companies, but also a microsatellite manufacturer in Finland. Like I said, global. I found out what his plans are and get his take on the industry.

Interview transcript

Andrew Parlock So Space Forge just had some really great success in the U.K. and gotten amazing support from U.K. government, U.K. [Ministry of Defence (MoD)], and then the kind of defense industry and space industry in the U.K. So it just becomes the natural progression of events that the U.S. is the largest space market and largest defense market. And so it just works. It just works and just makes sense strategically. What do we need to do here in the States? We’re slowly building some brand awareness. We’ve already got, believe it or not, a little bit of brand awareness at the national lab level. The people that are paid to know what the next most innovative things are. So you can imagine our Air Force research labs, our friends at Defense Innovation Unit, they’re aware of what we’re doing and we’re going to be leveraging that awareness as we move forward. So that’s kind of where we are. And business development, getting that brand awareness and building it to the point where people know who we are and know what we do.

Andrew Parlock But then there’s this good old fashioned blocking and tackling. We’re going to be doing manufacturing here in the U.S. We’re going to be building an entire team. What that manufacturing looks like, no pun intended, the sky’s a little bit the limit. Space Forge brings a really unique opportunity. It’s the entire value chain, not just of space, but of manufacturing. So you have spacecraft R&D. We’re doing some really novel and innovative things with the spacecraft, in particular with our return technology and our reusable technology. Then you have spacecraft manufacturing, and then we’re going to be bringing up payloads. And so you have the payload R&D. Right now, we’re focused in the semiconductor and semiconductor substrate market. So what is the research and development there look like? And what does the manufacturing of the payload look like? And then, of course, you have, well, we’ve got to launch. We’ve got to do our manufacturing on orbit and then return and recover. It’s a whole new piece of the pie that most folks outside of a very select few just don’t think about. So there’s the recovery, the return and the recovery, and then refurbishment. We’re going to be taking these satellites, refurbishing them. Upgrading the payloads, upgrading the satellite and putting them back on orbit. And we’re going to be providing product, we’re going to be bringing product down from orbit. So then there’s a post-processing of the product. And then the product entering whatever value chain for us, initially, it’s going to be the the global semiconductor supply chain. So you have this entire value chain of opportunity in front of you, whereas in a quote unquote, traditional space company or even a new space company. You have spacecraft R&D, a little bit of payload R&D, you manufacture the satellite launch and you move on to the next one. This is a really cycle, a full process from R&D to payload to manufacturing and repeat. So there’s a lot happening. So we’ve got to worry about the manufacturing of the satellites, we’ve got to worry about the focus on the manufacturing of the payloads, get these things built, get the team assembled, build launch capacity, the ability to recover, which is a whole new ball of wax that a lot of folks aren’t even thinking about, outside of our our friends at Space X returning with a very active return down in Kennedy and then out in Vandenberg when they launch out of Vandenburg, there’s very little return. So that’s a whole new piece of the pie that we need to worry about, that’s not just a technical challenge, but a regulatory challenge. So we’re working with state and federal government to understand what’s going to be the challenges there. So there’s a lot happening with building the U.S. team, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Eric White Yeah, it sounds like quite the to do list. You mentioned, and you talked a little bit about it and in establishing yourselves in the U.S. space market, the question of asked of who are we? So what do you answer when people ask you who are Space Forge? And where do you all fit in that process that you just described?

Andrew Parlock Yeah, that’s a really good question. Who is Space Forge? And it’s funny, even in the four and a half years that the company has been around, I think there’s been an evolution of who Space Forge is. If you had asked us before I even joined company a year ago, we would say, Hey, we’re a new space company that’s doing on orbit manufacturing. OK, that’s a good answer, and that’s right. But if you really think about what Space Forge has evolved into, and how the vision has evolved, we’re really an advanced materials company that uses the near perfect environment of space, that being microgravity near perfect vacuum, nearly contaminate free environment to produce advanced materials. So right now, we really talk about ourselves as an advanced materials company that is using the environment of space and novel space technologies to create that next generation of folks have called it super materials, but really advanced materials on orbit. Who is Space Forge in the kind of global space ecosystem? Well, it kind of goes back to the last thing I said. We’re the entire value chain. So we’re going to be partnering with a lot of different folks that a traditional or even a new space company might not partner with? We’re going to be partnering with advanced material manufacturing companies. We’re going to be partnering with folks that are using semiconductors. We’re going to be talking to people within the [Department of Defense (DoD)] and the commercial markets that need a10x improvement in their current semiconductor technology. The aperture on who we are, what we can do and where we can go in the market is exceedingly wide. There’s a lot of cliches there, but I’ll keep it at that. We have a lot of opportunity in front of us. Right now, what I’m talking to our consultants and the team about is getting focused on a couple key very high value opportunities and executing, because we are so new in the U.S. and staying focused and making sure we execute as flawlessly as we can, I’ll say as with as few flaws as we are able, is going to be key to our success as we move forward through ’23 and into ’24.

Eric White Taking an industry wide view, speaking on those opportunities, where do you think that the most opportunity lies in the space field nowadays? Is it going to be in the defense and intelligence area? Because that is, what we are seeing a lot more people like yourself are being hired by companies to get into those areas. Is that a key movement in the direction of where things are going?

Andrew Parlock It’s really interesting. If you look at where I’ve come from, and that being signals intelligence and then earth observation, the key and core markets for those technologies will remain national security for, I think, a long time to come. There is a lot of commercial application there as well. But Space Forge is interesting. You can start to look at applications, of course, for advanced semiconductor materials within the DoD, and we’re going to take advantage of those opportunities as best we can. But I do think there’s going to be much more of a balance, in particular, with Space Forge as it moves forward commercial and DoD. The new space market has followed the old space market, and that has leveraged, as it’s grown up and kind of gone through adolescence, if you will. It has really leveraged the old space market, not being DoD and national security. But the opportunity, the commercial opportunities in front of space, commercial space station. You see some of the stuff that Sierra Space is doing, and a few others that are really focused on commercial space station and with a few companies are doing  in orbit, on orbit or what we call in space manufacturing, these are things that even just a few years ago would not be economically viable. And now today they are. And tomorrow it’s going to be expected. I think it was Bezos who recently said let’s offshore all of manufacturing into space as a mechanism, as a as a climate, as a battle against climate change. Now, do we get there? Do we offshore all manufacturing to space? Probably not in my lifetime. But do we start seeing the viability of space, both economically, technically and socially? Yeah, definitely. So I do think we’ll leverage a lot of the DoD and what’s happening in the DoD. But for us, I think commercial is really going to be where it’s at as we move forward and we enter those advanced materials into the global supply chain.

Eric White And you brought up a couple there, and I’m just curious because I can obviously hear the passion in your voice about how excited you are about certain aspects of the commercial space industry. But is there a field or a new technology that you feel will be the game changer coming up that you are excited about the most, I guess, is the question.

Andrew Parlock Boy, I don’t know if we have time for me to answer that whole question. Yeah, I am really passionate about it, so I’m glad that’s coming across. But in space manufacturing, it’s funny, Varda got their vehicle up there first. And I just think that’s awesome. We’ve got to have a healthy, viable in-space manufacturing ecosystem. To me, the concept that we’re going to move some of these technologies that have been really held back, the development of certain alloys, the development of semiconductor substrates, pharmaceuticals, biopharma, things that simply couldn’t happen in the quote unquote dirty gravity environment of earth, the technology and the advancement that we open up by bringing that into space and on orbit and then bringing it back and returning it. Man, that is exciting. So for me, the thing that I’m most excited about is to see this nascent in-space manufacturing community grow and develop technologies that are going to push the limits of what we know is capable today, so beyond. And in doing so, I think it was Einstein that said we’re not solving today’s problems with the technology of today. The problems we create today, need to be solved with problems that with technologies that we’re creating tomorrow. And I think that’s one of the promises of in-space manufacturing is bringing back technologies, bringing back products that can solve some of the most intractable problems around climate change, around pharmaceuticals, around delivery of products. If you’re returning from space, where you return and your supply chain becomes a whole really interesting thing. We can return anywhere on the globe with equal ease, I can return to the east coast of the mid-Atlantic, North America, United States, the same way I can return in the Indian Ocean, whatever the case may be, I’m coming back from orbit. I choose where I come back. So this concept of how the supply chain changes, how the ability to develop these new materials changes, I don’t even think we can answer this. I mean, it really takes a lot of thinking about the art of the possible. And here we are creating some of those things today.

The post UK space company to set up shop on U.S. soil first appeared on Federal News Network.

When I use the term Space norms, what does that mean to you? Well as it turns out, defense norms have been a part of foreign policy for a while now. They out line what falls under the category of good manners when it comes to actions taken by nations. So what about space? How this concept be applied, or can it at all? These are the questions I posed to Robin Dickey, a space policy and strategy analyst at the Aerospace Corporation who wrote about this issue recently for the website War on the Rocks.

Why Norms Matter More than Ever for Space Deterrence and Defense

Interview Transcript: 

Robin Dickey Well, first of all, the space norms are defense norms, or many of them are. There’s a lot of challenges between the space community and other communities in national security, that space has a lot of aspects of it that are unique. There’s a lot of crazy physics going on. There are a lot of unique issues that have not yet come up yet or been fully explored in space just because of what kind of activities we have or have not done in space. And so all of this means is that the international community, space actors, defense and national security folks are all trying to figure out what behaviors should be considered acceptable or unacceptable in space. And although some of those behaviors are really more focused on safety and sustainability, things like trying to limit the amount of debris in space, because that can pose a lot of challenges for operating easily in the space domain. A lot of these norms really do relate to national security and notions of defense and deterrence, because norms in any domain, including space, are used to coordinate with partners and allies. They can be used to help prevent miscalculation and misperceptions, to help better understand each other’s intentions, and in turn, can help to recognize hostile or aggressive behavior before it escalates. So hopefully, that’s a good intro to you for what I was thinking of on this topic.

Eric White Yeah, absolutely. And I’m just curious, well, so starting from the bottom up where would building space norms start for U.S. policymakers and those defense officials when they are trying to consider what is a hostile act and you know what to do about it? How would they go about that?

Robin Dickey So identifying the content of norms can be a big challenge. And sometimes is in the eye of the beholder. But the Department of Defense has already kind of got the jump on thinking about what behaviors are responsible, irresponsible and threatening in space. The secretary of defense published five tenets of responsible behavior for space two years ago, and it since just this year, the US Space Command, which is the combatant command focused on the space area of operations, has helped to elaborate some of their own behaviors that they interpret as responsible. So somewhat the focus in those two efforts has been looking at what is responsible and what behaviors the DoD is already following to ensure that they’re being responsible in space. And then you can help to extrapolate and interpret from there what the inverse is and what might be irresponsible. There’s a lot of discussions going on in the United Nations trying to figure this out in between different country perspectives. But there’s a lot of different ways in which you can come up with the content based on operational experience. One thing that I do in my research is looking at analogies and comparisons to other domains. So I’ve looked at everything from anti-personnel land mines on the land domain to incidents at sea, to cases in which states shot down commercial aircraft, all to look at potential comparisons for behaviors that could be translated to space and therefore understood by DoD, by the international community, what to follow, what to do, what not to do. And then from there, the process of actually turning those ideas into norms is is quite complicated and could take many forms. Happy to dive into that if you would like, but I’ll pause there.

Eric White Absolutely. Yeah, we can get into that. But I did hear you say something that kind of segues into my next question, which is the obvious thing of it’s hard enough to know what’s going on out at sea or a battlefield. Is it tougher in space to try and figure those things out? I imagine it is. And so how would go applying the norms may be difficult just because you don’t have all the answers and it may take a while to even find out without looking at the piece of equipment that was sabotaged or whatever.

Robin Dickey Absolutely. In space, you can’t just look out the window of your satellite and see what’s going on, especially because the objects that might be most concerning to you could be at the moment on the opposite side of the world, just because of how orbits intersect with each other. Objects are traveling incredibly quickly. So there’s a lot of factors that make situational awareness really difficult for space. And so that means situational awareness requires a lot of advanced technology, and it also requires a degree of trust if you’re not the one operating the sensor, the technology that’s actually looking out there, which is a huge problem for norms in the international community. One example that I can demonstrate from space was that in December of 2021, China filed a formal complaint with the United Nations, saying that several StarLink satellites had made close approaches to their crewed space station that were close enough and in China’s opinion that they were risky and that they had to move out of the way. In the complaint also said that when China had tried to communicate with StarLink in the US that they hadn’t gotten a response. But the U.S. response that came after that was not only did they not receive those attempts to communicate, but they also, using their own sensors and analysis, had judged that those StarLink satellites were not close enough to the space station from China to be concerning or to require a maneuver. So there’s situational awareness problems. Each actor might have a different threshold for what they consider analytically to be risky or not, even if they have agreement on where things are or where they’re going. And then communication once you identify that there’s a problem is really challenging.

Eric White We’re speaking with Robin Dickey, who is a policy analyst at the Aerospace Corporation. And getting away from our near-peer competitors. What about allies? What kind of a role would space norms play in working with our allies in space? Which sounds kind of odd just because space is everybody’s. But what would it look like there?

Robin Dickey Well, when you’re working with partners and allies in any domain, but especially in space, interoperability and having common standards and definitions of different terms can be really important since there’s so many technical aspects to space. It’s really important that if you’re talking about a certain issue or a technical concept that the other side of your partnership is understanding what you’re talking about. But this can be even more literal in terms of interoperability. Things like for International Space Station and different crewed systems that might dock with the station to have the same hatches. So the Artemis Accords, which is an agreement between the U.S. and now I believe 27 total signatories to this agreement is trying to establish principles, including interoperability, to make sure that when we’re going to space with partners, that we’re actually doing so in a means that we can support and interact with each other. Because if you’re systems can’t talk to each other, if you’re not speaking the same language, just in a technical sense, it’s really hard to get anything done in space. And that’s where misperceptions or accidents could happen.

Eric White Yeah. With new technologies pretty much coming out on an almost daily basis, how hard would it be to drum up new norms any time there is a new way of getting into space or a faster way of communicating? Just the the changes that occur so fast, what would be needed to keep up with that? Would a whole international body just need to be created just for that purpose, maybe?

Robin Dickey So there are a lot of different ways to get to norms of behavior. I use such a broad definition, this idea of general agreement on what is acceptable or not, because that encompasses so many different options and depending on, say, how flexible or fast changing the technology is, depending on the level of political will to actually negotiate different kinds of agreements that will affect the approach that you could take for a norm and therefore what the timeline could look like. So when it comes to stuff like international treaties or organizations, that takes a ton of political will. It often takes a ton of resources and a really high level of trust and often the ability to verify or enforce behavior, all of which adds up to extremely long timelines. However, when it comes to norms that are perhaps non-binding, then that might take less time to negotiate in the United Nations in the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space or COPUOS. They’ve negotiated a number of non-binding, voluntary guidelines for different kinds of space behaviors. Some of those still took years, even as much as a decade, to get guidelines for the long term sustainability of space. But others have gone quite quickly. The big one that I would point to is one year ago, just a little over that, the Vice President announced that the US was committing to not conduct destructive anti-satellite weapons tests. This is direct descent missiles that go up and blow up a satellite while it’s in orbit and the U.S. is committed not to do tests of that. And so this commitment was pretty quickly followed by other countries making very similar unilateral commitments. I think we have around 13 countries that have done so. And also within the year there was a U.N. resolution where over 150 countries voted in favor of this idea, which diplomatic timelines, that’s pretty darn fast.

Eric White And let’s finally talk about the folks that are a little bit more pessimistic about agreements like this. As in red lines are there to be crossed. How do you keep everybody in line and sticking to those agreed upon terms such as maybe I’ll secretly be making missiles that can take out satellites?

Robin Dickey Well, and so just to clarify, the norm that I was just talking about is only about testing. It’s about behavior. So that norm does not apply to the development of any specific kind of technology. It’s really hard to verify what the capability of any particular object is. So that’s why norms of behavior, which are a little more observable, more verifiable, potentially have been a focus. But one key thing to note about norms in general is that the strength of the norm is not measured by whether no one ever violates it. The strength of a norm is shown by the breadth and the intensity of the response when someone does break it. So that means that there need to be incentives, either implicit or explicit in the development of the norm to encourage the good behaviors and discourage the bad behaviors. This could be something as simple as many different countries and companies going public in condemning bad behavior when it happens, or it can come to the support for if you share information, then you get to participate in and receive information from different systems. You might get to benefit from more partnerships and support a lot of different incentives, and there’s no one size fits all solution. So ideally you’d be combining multiple options, looking at multiple different paths and incentives to get that support for implementation and to get folks on your side if there’s someone violating the norm that needs a response.

Eric White Yeah, and taking that approach could be even more effective in space because you’re all alone up there, so you really do need all the help you can get when it when you’re talking about space operations.

Robin Dickey Any one actor’s behavior in space could affect everyone because of debris, because of how interactive space objects can be just based off of orbits. So, yeah, absolutely. You really have to be able to pay attention across the whole international community. And that’s why norms are really valuable, because you can’t just go it alone and expect everything to work out.

Eric White Got it. And finishing up here, I’m just curious about you talk about having these general behavior norms that can apply to a wide array of behaviors. I’m curious about the interpretation aspect of it. China says that Starlink’s crafts are getting too close to their manned space station, and then the U.S. says, no, that’s not the case. How do you avoid those smudge ups where I think one thing and you feel the other way? Well, I guess that’s where we’ll leave it at.

Robin Dickey So there’s a spectrum of ways that you could respond to that. One possible norm would be if all operators agreed that they were going to set a certain level of risk. So one in a thousand, one, one 10,000 risk is what their threshold was for concerning in terms of probability of collision. But you could also just have a norm where every operator shares what their threshold is, so it doesn’t necessarily have to match up. But if you at least had a sharing of what your expectations were and what you would consider threatening, then others can adjust accordingly. That those who do not want to get into a tiff about this can make sure that they avoid that level of risk. And that, again, speaks to when we’re looking at deterrence and defense, using norms as a way to identify hostile intent, not just thinking about preventing behaviors. But if you know what the expectations are, then you can observe if someone is willingly breaking those expectations.

Eric White And talking about the environment itself, people obviously space is huge, but the area for operation is not as big as most people would think. So these ideas and these practices could become more and more important as more activity in space is increased.

Robin Dickey Yeah, the common term that people like to say is that space is getting contested, congested and competitive. Congested being the piece of that in which more and more satellites and also more and more debris are up in space in some of those key high traffic areas. So absolutely worth paying attention in the future. Space is infinite. But the space that we’re using for purposes on Earth is not necessarily that infinite. Just to highlight, of course, I’ve spent years thinking about this and can’t sum it all up in just 15 minutes. So if those are curious, there’s a number of papers that I’ve published. I am a big girl when it comes to puns. So the titles of my papers are called Normentum and they can be found on our website for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy.

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NASA may have been voted the best place to work for the last 11 years, it may still have some work to do in diversifying its workforce. According to a recent report from the agency’s inspector general, it’s made little progress in increasing the representation of women and minorities in its civilian workforce or leadership ranks. To discuss some of the IG’s findings and what NASA’s doing to fix it, I spoke with Tekla Colon, director-Mission Support Audits in the IG office.

Interview Transcript:

Tekla Colon So the audit was what we call self-initiated. Meaning it was an audit that our office, as an OIG had planned to conduct through our annual audit planning process. Given that diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives have really been a part of the agency’s recruitment and retention efforts over the last decade. And because of its mission, NASA’s relies heavily on a scientific and technical workforce to perform its critical space exploration and scientific research functions. We know that this federal scientific and technical workforce has struggled with diversity in the past. And so we determine, based on those factors, that it was the right time for us to conduct this audit. The objective of the audit was to evaluate, the agency’s efforts to increase diversity in its workforce. The work the audit team did included assessing efforts to advance diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, determining how the agency was updating policies and procedures to further diversity efforts, and then evaluating whether the agency was collecting sufficient and appropriate data to monitor its progress.

Eric White All right. And so let’s get into that work. What did that involve? I imagine a lot of interviews and probably a lot of data that you had to oversee. But how big of an undertaking was this?

Tekla Colon So you are exactly right. This was a big undertaking, as I think is true with with most audits conducted at the agency level. But let me try to kind of set the stage here for you. So we did look at three items when conducting this audit. The first was really focusing on the agency’s demographic data. And the approach we took was to analyze ten years worth of civil servant demographic data. So we looked at 2012 through 2021, across the agency level, at the individual center level. And then we dug a little bit deeper looking at the senior level demographic data. And in addition to that, we also looked at veteran hiring data. Over that same ten year period. So we interviewed and talked to multiple officials across the agency from the highest levels of leadership to recruiting and human resource managers at the individual centers and also folks from employee resource groups. And then lastly, we also looked at both federal and NASA criteria policies, procedures and the agency’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility strategic plan to really gain an understanding of the agency’s efforts.

Eric White So it was more a programmatic view, rather than going from center to center or worksite to work side sort of deal.

Tekla Colon Correct. We looked at it in a couple of different ways. So again, the data at the agency wide level, kind of across the workforce, we drove a little bit deeper looking at individual centers, and then we dove a little bit even further deeper into looking at the senior level employees, which we kind of defined as the GSA 14,15 and senior executive service level.

Eric White Gotcha. Ok. And so let’s get into the meat of this. What is some of the major highlights of the results that you all found? I don’t mean for you to have to go line by line or anything like that, but what was the overall sense that you all took away from this report?

Tekla Colon Sure. So the report does outline two major findings. The first is really related to the little progress the agency has made in increasing its representation. And then the second finding was focused on the lack of timely and reliable data. So let me get into the first a little bit here. Our audit found that NASA has made little progress in increasing representation of both women and minority groups in its civilian workforce and its leadership ranks. So we found this to be true at both the agency level, where demographics have remained consistent with only minor increases, sometimes by just 1 to 2% for certain groups. We also found this to be true at the center level, where only two centers have increased black or African-American representation. Other centers have small increases in Hispanic and Asian American and female representation. So demographics for minority groups at the senior level also remain consistently low when compared to their white employee counterparts. And when considering gender representation had remained consistently male. So lastly, in terms of veterans, we found the proportion of veterans hired at NASA’s workforce has declined dramatically from 20% in 2015 to just 13% in 2021.

Tekla Colon So in our first finding, we also attribute this lack of progress in increasing representation to multiple factors. Really, first and foremost, the agency’s siloed approach. So responsible offices have been focused on meeting federal workforce requirements, instead of taking a more proactive approach to gathering the necessary data and identifying barriers to employment and promotion. And prior to 2021, NASA really wasn’t holding its leaders or supervisors accountable for advancing DEIA efforts. And the agency experienced some gaps in its professional development and training opportunities, including programs designed to prepare employees for more senior roles. And then lastly, we found that the agency really didn’t have reliable applicant data to help inform its decision making. Because the hiring process was primarily carried out at each NASA’s center, there was really no standardization on how this hiring and demographic data was collected or analyzed. So that’s really kind of the meat of it for our first finding.

Eric White Yeah, it was interesting reading the reports. NASA has, there are so many stories about barriers being broken because of NASA’s work. And I’m thinking of the desegregation efforts in Huntsville, Alabama, and things like that. But on the surface, it all look good. But from what you’re saying, that the data didn’t really back up, that there is much of an effort or hasn’t been much of an effort until recently in the DEIA fields.

Tekla Colon So I think over the past decade, the agency has taken efforts, but I think more recently it’s been a more focused approach, and they’re really committed to their efforts. They’ve agreed to the recommendations that we made in our report, and are looking to make planned actions kind of into the future.

Eric White Yeah, and that’s a perfect segue way in my next question, which is once you relayed this information to them, are there any sort of improvements that are coming down the pipeline? Or is things moving in the direction that the leadership wants to have it move when it comes to diversifying their workforce?

Tekla Colon So, yeah, great question. And I think the agency, like I said, is really committed to this effort and has made improvements. Our report identified seven recommendations and those recommendations were really focused on improving things like training for supervisors and hiring managers, establishing an agency wide mentoring program for the agency to really start conducting barrier analysis to identify those obstacles that prevent women and minority groups from reaching those senior leadership roles and really taking a more data driven approach to decision making. And again, the agency has agreed with our recommendation and has planned actions that they’re working to implement.

Eric White Did they mention anything in interviews that you had with senior officials? NASA’s work is so unique, the trough is already small enough with the people that they can recruit to come work for their agency. Did they mention anything about how difficult it is in the STEM field to diversify companies? And multiple agencies are having trouble in that field in making sure that they have a diverse workforce. Was there any mention of that in your interviews with senior officials?

Tekla Colon So that did come up, Eric. Historically, we know that the federal and scientific workforce has really struggled with diversity, understanding that NASA really relies on that workforce to perform its functions. We did get into that a little bit. But again, the agency has really made a commitment to moving the needle, as we say, and increasing diversity. And so they have a lot of actions in place that they’re working towards. In addition to that, as kind of a follow on to this audit. We are doing an additional audit now looking at NASA’s STEM engagement efforts. So we’re going to dive a little bit further into STEM and the STEM workforce there.

Eric White Understood, we’ll certainly have to check back with you on that one. And looking at diversity as a whole, as an issue within the scientific community and having workers from multiple backgrounds can help get different ideas in there. That’s well known. But what was the sense that you got in speaking with senior leaders about how important they value DEIA for ensuring NASA is successful in their missions?

Tekla Colon So here’s here’s kind of our take away, and I think we lay this out in our report. Even NASA, the agency that has been named the best place to work in the federal government for over 11 years and counting, really continues to struggle with increasing the representation of women and minorities in its workforce. Now, we know that the agency success relies on attracting and retaining that highly skilled and diverse workforce. It’s important for NASA and the entire federal workforce to reflect the best of us, as well of all of us. So the findings and recommendations that we made in our report are there to help NASA turn its longstanding commitment to diversity really into meaningful progress. And we understand that the agency is very committed to its efforts.

Eric White And what is its long-term goal? I imagine that they’re not going to be just looking at percentages every year trying to make sure that they have equal parts from everywhere. Or maybe they are, But what is it that they are trying to achieve? Is it just a numbers game to them or are they just trying to ensure that it’s more of a sense that employees feel that they have representation there, both in their counterpart work fields and in senior leadership?

Tekla Colon So I think it’s the latter. I think it’s more of the sense that the agency employees do feel that they’re included and that there is a diverse workforce kind of across across the agency. The agency has taken steps in its initiative to really focus on this area and to make improvements. The report kind of outlines the updates the agency has made in its DEIA strategic plan. They developed a governance structure, which elevated responsibility for DEIA efforts to the highest levels of leadership. They made updates to their strategic plan, really focusing on the data and having availability of the data, and increasing the transparency of the data to their hiring managers and to their supervisors. And then I think the last important thing to point out that the agency is doing, and maybe this may be one of the more important things, is really starting to conduct those in-depth barrier analysis reviews that look at workforce demographic data at all stages of the hiring process. From recruitment to selection to promotion to retention, to really identify those barriers to equal employment opportunity to move that needle, so to speak.

 

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