The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and NASA are collaborating with eight American universities for the second year of the Mission Concept Program. The program provides universities with assistance in helping students gain skills focused on early satellite mission design, through mentorship and guidance from space professionals. The Space Hour host Eric White had the chance to speak with two folks who are a part of the program, Seth Sisneros is a systems engineer with AFRL’s space vehicle directorate, and Emi Colman is deputy program manager for the lab’s University Nanosatellite Program.

Interview Transcript: 

Emi Colman  So, the mission concept program is something one of the efforts within the University Nanosatellite program. So just to give some more context there, University Nanosatellite program or UMP has existed since 1999. So, we’re in our 25th year, super exciting. We’re a STEM education focused program that is here to support universities and their labs to build satellites. So, the Mission Concept program really birthed a couple years ago. It’s a joint program with NASA Kennedy Space Center, and CSLI or CubeSat Launch Initiative, specifically. So, what we’re really trying to target here is new universities just trying to get into this space. It’s our entry level summer program to teach schools with mission design and concepting of their satellite. We ran it for the first-time last year, we’re doing it again this year, we’re super excited. And we really want to increase opportunities to schools that want to dip their toes into this small satellite industry. So that is what UMP is doing within the Air Force Research Lab. We are providing the curriculum and the funding. We’re also giving internships to these 24 students this year through Space Dynamics Laboratory, which is another contractor. Within this and my role, specifically, I’m the deputy program manager of University Nanosatellite program or UMP. So, my responsibility is to, you know, coordinate the logistics and make sure that, you know, everyone has equal say, between AFRL and NASA, you know, refining the curriculum. From the last time we did it last year, and just making sure that the ship is moving, so to say.

Eric White  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll get back to you on the on those changes and curriculum that you all made from the first year. Seth, why don’t you talk a little bit about things on the engineering side? And where do you fit in? And all this?

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, so as a systems engineer, what we do here within AFRL is really the entire the entire satellite build. On the engineering side, we’re teaching students the entire satellite build from cradle to grave, I mean, the entire concept, the engineering concept, seeing engineer development, and then the post development of these missions. So, we teach students, how do they go through designing their mission statement, designing their objectives, designing the requirements, understanding their customer, their stakeholder? And what is it they truly want out of a mission, and then they translate through systems engineering knowledge and practice that we give them in this curriculum. What really matters and how technically feasible is that? That’s really what we’re evaluating here. And what we’re teaching students is the systems engineering knowledge or practice to have feasible, successful missions within small satellites. It’s difficult, right? It’s not exactly rocket, or rocket science. But you know, it’s up there, it’s hard to do. A lot of people will underestimate or say, hey, it’s just small satellites, because that’s the world that we’re working in right now, Eric, just for background there. But you know, small satellites are still satellites. It’s still hard work. And so, it goes through these students go through a rigorous program through multiple reviews that we would see a flight missions from the Air Force and from the Space Force actually go through. So that’s through a slew of multiple reviews of the system concept review of system requirements review, and then eventually to critical design review or preliminary design review. So, it’s rigorous and stuff, but it’s meant to be that way so that the students really understand really get a good foundation for understanding the concept of mission design.

Eric White  Yeah, let’s stay here because you know, the UMP has been around since 1999. But you really only have started to see the actual mean just from a person who covers it. standpoint, I’m sure you’ll disagree with me, but you really have only starting to see a lot of heavy use in the idea and concept of nanosatellites, and cube sats and things like that. Only recently. I mean, can you just kind of give us what you think of the standpoint of where things are currently and where this program could fit into that and building a workforce of the future.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, totally. It’s 25 Year program. And so, for myself, it’s almost a little bit limited point of view here with my experience within UNP, but just for the workforce side of things, because it’s 25 years, we’ve met a lot of people ourselves. So, between myself and Emi, and just other people, we know who UNP alumni are, there are a lot of UNP alumni who’ve graduated from multiple universities working in all areas of aerospace. So, whether they’re working for federal agencies, such as NASA, or for other DoD agencies, such as SSC, the Space Systems Command, or even AFRL, we’ve hired over 50 UNP alumni within our space vehicle structure alone, which is a lot it’s a lot of people. We’re estimating is anywhere between, and Emi, feel free to check me on this, 7000 to 8000 people who have graduated have gone out into industry. And so, we’ve met a lot of those alumni through other industry partners or contractors, so through Northrop Grumman, or through Boeing, Ball Aerospace, you know, just for a few examples there. So, we’ve seen these students really change the landscape of small satellites and of pushing forward and systems engineering practices that we’re teaching them. Right. Yeah. I mean, do you have anything to add on to that?

Emi Colman  Yeah, I think 8000 is the estimate that’s currently in my head. And with this mission concept program, UNP has formally reached and formally mean, meaning that, you know, there was a formal proposal process and all of that stuff. We’ve reached 53, universities, US universities. So, we’re really encouraged by that number. And to kind of hit a piece of your question, Eric, although I don’t remember the specific question. Yeah, UNP exist as a workforce development STEM program for, you know, the small satellite industry, the government, you know, kind of like our whole nation, in a sense, we’re not one of our focus areas is technology development. Although that’s not our first and foremost focus. Our main focus is education. And really educating the students on like Seth said, the systems engineering principles and practices when they’re a freshman in college, so that they have this real-world experience from the cradle to grave. They’ve done some, you know, actual satellite design. And then, you know, once they get to the workforce, they’re, they’re that much further ahead. And it’s super impactful to them as a person as well.

Eric White  I promised I wouldn’t, I’m going to stick to it here. You know, this is the second year of the Mission Concept program, if you could just lay out a couple of the changes that you saw in the curriculum from year to year and tell us a little bit about those universities participating this year? And how do you all measure success when it comes to the Missions Concepts program?

Emi Colman  So, I’ll start in Seth, feel free to jump in changes to the curriculum, we wanted a bit more hands on. aspect. So, within UNP sits within the small satellite portfolio at Air Force Research Labs are AFRL. So, we have a satellite a CubeSat in space right now. So, you know, we were throwing around the idea in the office of Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we had the students actually operate this satellite? So, Seth is actually focusing on doing a satellite operations week with these students. And it’s kind of a surprise, we haven’t told them yet. But we’re we will take them through, you know, a lecture series on, you know, the ground considerations, and how do you operate a satellite, and then we’ll actually get, let them operate the satellite. So we wanted to show kind of like the end cycle of the satellite design process to then help inform how to mission concept because once you have an actual, I guess, data point where you’re actually doing it, it kind of helps with this more abstract mission design mission concepting, more of the beginning side of the satellite design. Another thing that we’re doing is, we’re working with Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, NASA, JPL, and their F prime software framework. So, some NASA folks are coming out here and giving a workshop on their software, which we’re super excited about JPL have run this a couple times. Once at like the small satellite conference. They do this with a bunch of different universities. So, we’re excited to expose our students to more technical software considerations.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, and just to add on to there. Emi is spot on. She hit a few of the, like, specific examples of that we’ve changed to this curriculum, but like to more encompassing, I guess, our broader scope Eric on in terms of changes to the curriculum, and what we’re trying to do Is pack as much of the entirety of a satellite’s life and give all that knowledge. But really, it’s a fire hose that we’re giving to the students in a span of two to three months. So, we’re trying to show Hey, this is how long this is the in depth, give them a preview a peek into the years and the time and expertise that takes into building a satellite. But we’re giving them a peek into that now within two to three months in this crash course of a program. And so, these students really get the valuable opportunity. As you know, earlier, I alluded to like cradle to grave operations. Because that takes so many years, these students, you know, within this time span, obviously, can’t take part of that. But what we’re doing is we’ve been adding a curriculum, we’ve been adding experts’ expertise, specific topics from that we’ve learned within our branch, about satellite operations and commanding. We added in these topics to these students say, Hey, you’re not going to be you know, years off for making a satellite. But keep in mind, you need to work on new ground, your ground station, keep in mind that you need to work on your flight software, keep in mind that this is what satellite operations is actually looking like for a satellite in orbit today. So not only we’re giving them the chance to fly satellite, giving them the chance to work with hardware the we’ve developed, but also to, you know, by time they get into industry in their own or while they’re in college working on their own satellite mission, they can have that in mind the entire time looking towards the future. That’s the part of the, you know, overall scope and change in curriculum that I would say we’ve made this, so far this year.

Emi Colman  Another big piece of the Mission Concept program that we hadn’t mentioned was the reason why we’re targeting people that are just wanting to step into the small satellite industry is because we have a lot of opportunities for university, you know, NASA CSLI, us, NSF has stuff, there’s a lot of different STEM opportunities, but they’re competitive with their proposal process. So, one of the outcomes of that we’re hoping to do is to make their proposals a bit more on par with the competition. So although we’re not directly doing like a proposal writing workshop, we are having a principal investigator, the professors in the PI’s, a focus lecture series, where we take in professors that have been doing this for the past 20 years, or the past 15 years, or just started and kind of let them network let them have, you know, an intimate conversation on, you know, how do you start your lab? How do you get students excited? How do you retain lab knowledge across years? How do you actually close a satellite? So, we’re actively having these conversations this summer. And that’s been a huge change that we did in the curriculum, with the hope that these PI’s and professors and the labs and the universities can kind of have, you know, some sort of foundation to start, as well.

Eric White  Let me set the table here. And Seth, maybe give you the last word on where you think this could all be going and how this will kind of evolve over time as the industry itself evolves? Pretty quickly. I would have to say, I don’t know if you agree with that. But I’ll get your insight here.

Seth Sisneros  Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the landscape is has been changing dramatically. I mean, even just, you know, talking about like launch vehicles alone. We’ve seen the landscape of launch vehicles and flights that are happening regularly changed dramatically. It’s increased dramatically. We’re having reasonable rockets, right. We’re having flights with highest success rates; with less harm or damage we’ve seen ever before right revving two to three launches. We, you know, we just kicked off the program, Kennedy Space Center, and one of our partners in this, Jose Nunez from NASA, he was mentioning how you know, launches are happening every you know, it’s every week for two to three times a week, which is unprecedented. It’s huge. So yeah, we’re expecting the, from this. The Mission Concept program is going to play into that by maturing universities and maturing the students themselves and their satellite hardware and software understanding and in their systems engineering practices, but also the university PIs themselves. So, the professors, the professors who are getting new into the world of satellite technology, the university labs, so the laboratories, enabling them to work on this technology at a faster pace, and with more hardware experience, more software experience in mind. So yeah, we definitely plan to see a change in there in these universities, university lab students and the laboratories. And from there, it’s only going to exponentially grow, at least from what I’m anticipating personally, because these students will then go into the workforce and, you know, continue to push this technology forward. Yeah, so we’re expecting a huge change for us, in particular with UNP. We’re planning to release another RFP later this year for our Nanosat 12 or Nanosat cycle, yeah. So, we’re actually anticipating a lot of these universities have participated with us last year for summer 2023. And for this summer of 2024, we’re actually anticipating a lot of them to use the ideas that we taught them last summer and this summer through the Mission Concept program and assessing the technical feasibility of the proposals that they get to us. So yes, we’re very positive. We’re looking forward to seeing a high growth rate from our next Nanosat cycle with these university students who are involved in this who’ve never had a chance to before.

Eric White  That’s Cisneros, a system engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory. You also heard from me Colman, who is deputy program manager for the labs University Nanosatellite program. You can find this interview along with all of our interviews and previous episodes at Federal News network.com Search the space hour. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts.

The post A sneak peek at the newest class of engineers from an Air Force and NASA collaboration first appeared on Federal News Network.

There are a lot of regulatory boxes you need to check to get your space project underway. This can be hard for companies with smaller budgets and legal resources. To help, the firm Aegis Space Law has created a regulatory calculator tool to help commercial space companies understand which regulations apply to them. To learn more, The Space Hour host Eric White got the chance to talk to Bailey Reicheldt who is a partner at Aegis.

Interview Transcript: 

Bailey Reicheldt   We’ve developed with what we’re calling the space regulatory calculator. It’s a free tool posted on our website, a bunch of regulatory attorneys at Aegis Space law. We built it because we wanted to come up with a tool that could just give our clients an idea of what the regulatory timelines and costs even look like before they even engage with an attorney or start going down the route of talking to regulators. So, Aegis Space law, we’re in a niche, boutique law firm. We work with a lot of space startup clients. And over our last four years of working with those startups, we realized more and more that there’s kind of a regulatory valley of death that they run into, because they’re very focused on the technology and getting investment. And they leave regulations as the last leg of that, when they get to the regulations, they suddenly realize, oh, some of these timelines are two years long, you know, and they’re already signing commercial contracts. And they’re trying to get launch agreements in place commercially. And the spectral allocation they might need from the FCC could take them a really long time. So, they don’t quite realize how long those timelines are, or that they can be very expensive. So, export licensing under the State Department costs money, licenses with the SEC cost money. And that’s just the regulatory fees and application fees, getting people to help you build this stuff can also be equally expensive. So, we created this tool. And it’s really simple logic it’s a decision tree. And it answers three primary questions for a US based Space company, starting their regulatory journey. It tells you which of the primary agencies you’re going to need to talk to, the federal agencies, how long the timeline is, from application to submission to possibly getting your license. Now, it doesn’t take into account how long it takes you to even build the application, but from submission to getting it back. And about how much it’s going to cost you it gives you the regulatory fees. So, we think that just putting that out there on the internet, and it at least gives people some idea of the journey they’re about to go on, hopefully allows them to prepare a little better. So that we see fewer space startups hitting that regulatory valley of death.

Eric White   Yeah, is it you know, you use the word startup. So that generally means that it’s folks who may have some experience in the business, but are just getting their feet wet at this moment? Have you noticed in working with a lot of your clients that they’re just not aware of the regulatory burden that is required for this kind of work? Or how shocked I guess, is my real question of, you know, when something when you give someone a timeline, and they go what?

Bailey Reicheldt  Well, it’s pretty common that they’re absolutely shocked, especially if they’ve worked for a bigger company, and they’ve had a department that’s been handling this for them. And then they went out and started their own business, they just they have no concept, they were siloed from this information, or say they came from a foreign country and started a company here, which is quite a bit of our commercial space sectors, we have foreign persons coming here to bring their innovations to the US. And it’s not like when you go through immigration, they inform you of US export control law, that just doesn’t happen. So, unless you’re encountering it somewhere in industry in the US, no one’s telling you about it. So, it’s a pretty unreasonable expectation that most people even know how many regulations they’re going to deal with. And even if you go and talk to the agencies, they don’t necessarily understand how onerous the other agencies in this process’s regulations are like, State Department and Department of Commerce worked together quite a bit like on the export front. But the FAA often has no idea about the export licensing piece or SEC has no reason to know about the other regulators. They don’t understand how all their licensing requirements stack up and the timelines and how they run in parallel. So hopefully, it even allows regulators to kind of see how hard it can be for a commercial space company to navigate this process.

Eric White  Yeah, a little bit of look what you made me do, right? Do you have to deal with all of this? So, you know, with all those variables that you just described, I mean, just multiple regulated regulatory agencies having a hand in just launching a new piece of technology. I know that this you’re probably going to tell me that it’s not meant to be super accurate, but how can you guarantee the accuracy of this new tool With all those variables that you have to consider, just, you know, even some paperwork getting lost in the shuffle or anything like that?

Bailey Reicheldt   Oh, absolutely, we can’t guarantee anything, especially when it comes to the regulatory timelines, because some of them are more fixed than others. Regulators can often stop the timelines. For instance, when they go back to an applicant, and they ask for additional information, those timelines will toll until you respond, or the application might get returned to you. And you have to start all over. There’s lots and lots of variables. This is just to get people started asking the right questions and getting an idea, we anticipate there might be a second version of the calculator that comes out with a lot more sophisticated knowledge, or a sophisticated assessment. But that’s going to take us a lot more time to build because that’s actually going to require more than just yes, no questions and branching logic. So that’s, that’s in the works. But yeah, we can’t guarantee those timelines, there’s too many variables. But you should have an idea of whether it’s going to be one month or two years. And that’s still going to be helpful.

Eric White   Yeah, so just doing its part to set expectations, right, you know, with all the talk these days about AI taking over jobs. Or is this a new tool that may actually lighten your workload a little bit.

Bailey Reicheldt   You know, if I can figure out a way for AI to better inform industry, I think we’ll pursue that. I’m not terribly concerned right now. Because there are so many variables, and there’s so much of a human element on this, when you start talking to regulators, there’s a lot of discretion on the regulatory side. Again, for instance, AI is not deciding, oh, I need to go ask them more questions, or let’s apply a different definition of this word like AI is not necessarily making decisions like that. That would cause this timeline extension. So, I’m about terribly concerned.

Eric White   So when we last spoke, you know, this was you had mentioned how niche your law firm actually is, and helping folks in this realm of, you know, the commercial space sector and all the regulations, can you give me a bit of a sense of how have the regulatory agencies behaved, you know, even over the past few years, this is all new for everybody. And they’re also trying to make the adjustments so that there is a successful commercial space entity that they’re not hindering too much of progress. Is that the case? Are they starting to hold hands a little bit better for these folks that are just starting out?

Bailey Reicheldt   That’s an interesting question. I don’t think that regulators are necessarily thinking how can we cater to the burgeoning commercial space industry? So much as they’re thinking about streamlining regulations overall? And how can we keep the American economy competitive in leading technological innovation worldwide? And how can we also protect national security and make it easier for industry to work with us and for us all to be on the same team? And that’s one of the issues I think, with this space industry, when it gets super niche sometimes is we tend to think so at such a granular level, but really, regulators are thinking about many, many things beyond just the tiny space industry. So that’s part of I think, how we have to shift our mindset, for instance, export controls, we are seeing reform, where many things are coming off the ITAR, hopefully many more things off the ITAR going over the EAR, because they’re technology that’s no longer controlled for military application, or it’s become kind of ubiquitous and use around the world. So, it doesn’t have the same need for the national security protections to keep it under the State Department on the United States Munitions List. You know, we’re seeing we’re seeing the government asking industry more for input on what they should control less or put less restrictions around. But I don’t know that the motivators specifically driven on making things easier for commercial space so much as the economy overall.

Eric White   Gotcha. And, you know, you had mentioned how you were kind of hoping that regulators may even use this tool just to show what the regulatory burden looks like for a startup company, could this be something that, you know, they may contact you for, you know, and utilize this tool for themselves, and maybe even work with you to make it a little more accurate?

Bailey Reicheldt   So, we actually just released it on Tuesday, this past Tuesday, June 5, I don’t know what day it is anymore, but we just released it. And we’ve actually already had some regulators contact us and ask about the second iteration. So, I think you might see that happen. And I do want to clarify, so Department of Commerce Office of Space commerce, they actually are pretty interested in streamlining the regs, they have a mission to streamline the regs for commercial space. So that stands out among the regulators in my mind and how they might do that. We don’t quite know yet. This tool might be part of it. I do want to make sure people know about the tool. We’re putting a whole suite of tools out there Aegis is, over the course of the rest of this year. We’re going to be putting more medicals out, just trying to lower that regulatory barrier, making sure people have resources aggregated in one place that, you know, if you want to go start a space company that the barriers shouldn’t be the regulations and the law, the barriers should be the technological innovation. So, we’re trying our best to put out tools that lower that barrier, making things accessible to companies that you know, they don’t have positive cash flow, yet. We’re very aware that the markets can contract it. And investment into commercial space is contracted right now. So, we’re doing what we can, we’re going to have a lot of tools come out if people want to go use the regulatory calculator, and they have ways they think it could be improved, or they have feedback. I welcome that feedback. And our contact information is, of course, on our website.

Eric White   And I am curious about, have you ever worked with clients who have said, you know, they’ve gotten that timeline that they had no idea about? And said, okay, you know what, this is just too much, we’re going to have to move on to something else. Has that been the case with maybe not even a client? But you’ve heard stories?

Bailey Reicheldt   Yeah, so a really obvious one for me is on the export control side. That’s where I spend a lot of my time. If someone tells me, hey, we want to hire this foreign person to come work with us on this program, and I tell them, Okay, we can get permission for them to have access to that controlled information, but it’s going to take about six months, a lot of times that that changes the equation of who they might hire, when they figure out that oh, this person would sit in pending regulatory approval to receive certain technology for six months before they could even start work. But, you know, we’ve actually we’ve pursued some more aggressive licenses, especially on the telecommunication side, and we’ve been able to turn things around much more quickly than we ever thought we would honestly so if we can find a way to turn licensing and talk to regulators fast if we can. If we think we have a shot. We’ll take the shot, but we’ve tried to be realistic with people too.

The post A new tool to help startups navigate through the many, many, many space regulations first appeared on Federal News Network.

Voyager Space has entered into an agreement with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help develop an airlock for the Mars Transit Vehicle, also referred to as Deep Space Transport. It’s a 12-month study that will look at the applying the concept of Voyager’s Bishop Airlock design, currently being utilized on the International Space Station, towards a future mission to Mars. To learn more, the Space Hour host Eric White spoke with Marshall Smith, Chief Technology Officer for Voyager Space.

Interview Transcript: 

Marshall Smith  So, basically, when I was working in NASA, and NASA has always been on the plan to go to Mars. Or, you know, if you go look back at the legislation back in 2010, you know that the end goal is to go to Mars, we are going to the moon, but all in process of going to Mars. So one of the things that that’s really important and going to Mars is you need to be able to keep the mass as low as possible, the amount of things that you push out to Mars and back, we have developed an airlock that we actually self-funded and put on the ISS International Space Station. One of the tasks that it does is ejects garbage, it gets garbage away, and we can point it wherever we want to and, and get garbage out of the ISS, which is a really big deal. And so, if you’re going to be traveling to Mars, and back for, you know, many, many months along the way, mass is really important. So, when we look at how do you get rid of the garbage, this is one of the ways you can do that. So, we’ve been talking with NASA, NASA has been talking to us Marshall Space Flight Center about the ability to take the Bishop Airlock and develop a smaller version of that that can be used on the Mars transit vehicle. That’s the vehicle that’s going to go take crew and cargo from here, from the Earth to Mars and back.

Eric White  So, was it that feature of the Bishop Airlock design the ability to dispose of trash? That is, you know, in a controlled manner? Was that the main reason why you think that they are interested in it for this long journey where you know, the humans they’re going to generate some waste while they’re while they’re taking that trip?

Marshall Smith  Yeah, actually, that is their primary reason. You know, obviously, the bishop airlock, we can talk about that in a minute, if you want about all the things it can do it can do payloads and launch payloads into space and those types of things. But when you’re on a trip between Earth and Mars, you’re probably more functional. I’m going to use it as a trash injection system. There are some other things that can be done with it as well. And we can we’re going to look at some of those opportunities as well. But I think that’s their primary interest.

Eric White  Yes. And you did have that correct. I would like to get a little bit more into the actual Bishop Airlock design itself. What else can it do? And are there other things that I can do that would be utilized on a mission to Mars?

Marshall Smith  Yeah, so let’s talk about Bishop a second, a second. First of all, as I said, Before, it was a self-funded program, you know, we looked at the ability to launch payloads and to do pilot and you know, a modified payload, do things with them and put them out and expose them to vacuum. And, you know, Voyager came up with this idea of building an airlock. And this is a very large airlock, actually, it’s about five times larger than the current size airlock, that is that is on the vehicle. On the ISS. It’s a four cubic meter bell shaped canister, if you will, that attaches the tranquility module on the ISS. It uses the ISS arm that came with the arm to go down and grab the canister, if you will, the Bishop Airlock, and we’ll pull it away. And they can actually move it around and point in any direction that that you want to maybe point at, particularly if you have payloads that want to look a certain direction, or you want to launch payloads in a certain direction, or if you wanted to launch trash so that it burns up appropriately, and then doesn’t get you know, in the way of hitting anything on the ISS or even being close to anything on the ISS or any operations that are going on. And use as a berthing port, which is different than a docking port. It’s actually much larger, it’s pretty large, I think it’s about six feet seven inches, or Americans are about two meters, or for Europeans of others. And the size itself is kind of a common berthing mechanism that CBM which allows it to be very large, you know, an astronaut can actually get in the, the actual and put his, his or her arms out. And, you know, stretch around and move. And one of the cool things about it is there’s a lot of volume in there. So we can actually put a lot of payloads inside this, we can work in a shirtsleeve environment, because when it’s actually on the ISS, there’s a hatch and the hatches opened up and so the crew can go in and work and assemble payloads and check things out and make sure everything’s good to go and close the hatch and then you can depress it, and the arm will then move it away and point it wherever it needs to be pointed. And the other thing that it has is the ability to actually have external payloads mounted to the side of it as well. for a longer duration type of activities that you want to do.

Eric White  We’re speaking with Marshall Smith. He’s the chief technology officer for Voyager space. And so is this the I imagine this isn’t the sort of thing that was on the ISS when the ISS was first put up. I mean, the ISS is a giant Lego project anyway, it was this something that was put in after the ISS was already in orbit.

Marshall Smith  Yeah, actually, it’s only been up for about four years or so three or four years, we launched this, this was an idea that we had, we went to NASA and said, hey, we would like to do this. So, this is actually self-funded, commercially owned and operated by border space, it’s one of the only commercial properties, they may be the only commercial property on the International Space Station that is owned by another company, not a government. So, we came in assets. And we believe this is a really good concept that can offer opportunities to do payloads and get more commercial activities going. And it’s done just that. And like I said, it’s been a very efficient way to use and expose systems to space and vacuum and to deploy payloads, etc. Those types of things.

Eric White  And to throw a curiosity question in there, you had mentioned some of the reasoning why you would want to be able to aim where you’re actually shooting off any trash into space, you know, for obvious reasons, you don’t want to hit anything, but it was that you know, something that NASA was actually looking for. I know you said you approached them. But was that something that they were like, oh, wow, that would be a big help.

Marshall Smith  Actually, that kind of developed, you know, we were coming at it from the standpoint of payloads and being able to deploy payloads and launch payloads in space. But the whole concept of getting rid of trash. Trash management is a really big activity on the International Space Station, because obviously, humans create a lot of trash. And we do the best we can to keep that down as much as possible. But the only time you can really get rid of trash is when you have a cargo ship come up, it brings on more cargo, and then you can pack the trash into the cargo ship, and then it can be deployed and burned up and in the atmosphere. Well, if there’s a way to get it out quicker and easier, then that’s better. So, we developed a squirt like if you will, a trash bag that we can actually put on the inside of the Bishop Airlock, and then turn around and deploy it and get rid of that. And that became very interesting to NASA, because it helped really helps dramatically with the trash management system.

Eric White  It’s Venus’s problem now, right?

Marshall Smith  It burns up. But if we’re on the way to Mars, then then obviously we’ll want to point it in a way that maybe gets incinerating the sun eventually, or something along those lines.

Eric White  Gotcha. Okay. And so yeah, let’s talk about the future in that trip to Mars, the design for the new airlock would be categorized as the Red Knight. And allow me to oversimplify again, you said you want to know they want to a smaller version of the Bishop design is it just going to be a matter of just shrinking down every element to fit whatever vehicle is going to be used? Or are other things going to be factored in?

Marshall Smith  Pretty much, you know, we’re looking to maintain the belt jar shape, and we have the form factor itself, the seals and mechanisms probably can be reused. We’re also going to look at some lessons learned from the ISS and dealing with you know, disposing wet garbage and those types of things. You know, when we, when we started doing it, we learned a few things, oh, we got to make a little modification here or there. So, we’re going to make some opportunity, the opportunity to put some upgrades in there and make sure that the system can operate as best it can in that environment. It like said it will be designed to be smaller, because, you know, on your way to Mars, you’re really just looking to probably eject trash maybe on a weekly basis. You know, because every grand you carry unnecessarily is a required skill to be the push that system along. So, we want to we want to get rid of the trashes relatively soon as possible.

Eric White  And not so much worried about any payloads. Right? I imagine that nobody they’re not going to make a pit stop or anything along the way, are they?

Marshall Smith  It’s kind of hard to make pit stops. Once you do what’s called a trans Mars Mars injection burner, TMI, you’re not really stopping because then you have to turn around and do a burn to slow yourself down. So that requires a lot of fuel, so there’s really no points to stop along the way.

Eric White  Marshall Smith is Chief Technology Officer for Voyager space.

The post Applying tech being used on the ISS toward a future mission to Mars first appeared on Federal News Network.

George Mason University will be the site of the recently approved Landolt NASA Space Mission. The mission will kick off in 2029 by launching a light into the sky that will help scientists determine the brightness of stars so they can more accurately study how fast the universe is growing. Leading the mission is GMU associate professor Peter Plavchan, who joined me earlier to discuss.

Interview Transcript: 

Eric White  So why don’t we just start with an overview of how this all came together? And what exactly you all are trying to accomplish with this mission?  

Peter Plavchan  Well,if you want to go way back, you could call it a lightbulb moment. Right? So we had, I was thinking about the challenges we have in astrophysics, and how with certain missions, like the NASA Kepler mission and the NASA test mission, I can point at any star in the sky and measure if it changes in brightness by as little as 0.001%, right? 10 parts per million. But if I point to that same star in the sky, and ask how many actual photons per second are coming from that star, I have to do a little bit of … I might get that number accurate to a few percent. And that’s a big gap of our knowledge. And so I started thinking I had a light bulb moment, what can we do to bridge that gap?  

Eric White  So the gist of it is to send something up into the sky that you know the exact photons that it is letting off so that that way you can then compare and contrast to the stars that you’re seeing. I know I’m oversimplifying it, but is that the basic idea?   

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, absolutely. So I had this idea back in 2017. And there’s plenty of history we can get into. But I was looking at how we measure the brightness of things in the sky. And it dawned on me unintended, that we haven’t changed how we do this. For half a century, we have been using the same four stars in the sky as our anchors, and how we map what our sensors see or digital cameras or going back even further in time, our photomultiplier tubes are equivalent to film these photographic plates, we look at these four stars, and we say okay, here’s a model of how we think the stars work. So that makes a prediction of how bright it should be. And that’s how we map from what we measure on our sensors, to what the actual physical brightnesses are being emitted by the stars in the sky. So those four stars are Vega, which everyone hopefully knows about. You can see it in northern sky most of the year. And three white dwarf stars, which came in vogue a little bit later, that had been anchoring the calibration for the Hubble Space Telescope. What has changed in the last half century, of course, is our sensors or digital cameras, the technology behind those, as well as the models that we have for the atmospheres and radiation coming from those stars. They’ve gotten more sophisticated over the decades, but the way we approach it hasn’t changed. So like, do we believe these models? Do we trust these models? Are they are they doing what we think they do. And in fact, just a couple of years ago. Right when we were getting ready to propose this mission, a new model came out for these three white dwarf stars and the old model and new model disagreed by more than a percent in their predictions of how bright that white dwarf star should be. So if the models are disagreeing with each other, the natural question is, how close are they to the ground truth? So how could we measure the ground truth and that’s when we decided to launch something by working in partnership with NIST, which is like ground zero for how we measure the brightness of things, they set the standard for the country, and then put that in space and look at it with our telescopes. So we know without a doubt, how much light is putting out?  

Eric White  And what do folks like yourself and other NASA astrophysicist use the brightness of stars to determine obviously, there’s an interest in knowing what the universe is doing? Because you know, that’s kind of the bread and butter of space. But do they use that for mapping other routes for other missions? What sorts of tools are at their disposal? If they know that information is super accurate?   

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, you had me worried for a second because we got way into the technical details right away, which is okay, I’m glad we had an audience that’s interested in that. But there’s some amazing science that we’re going to do with this mission, and it’s potentially transformative. And when we thought this mission, I’m an exoplanet astronomer, so I study fancy terms. I’m a discoverer of worlds, the fate of entire planets hangs in the balance of the statistical analysis that I do, right. So kind of imagine a planet vanishing if the statistics show is not real. So we’ve found over 5000 planets around other stars, and it’s been an incredible time over the past quarter century kind of a Golden Age of Discovery of these worlds. So when I was thinking about this problem, I was interested in addressing, how big are these planets? How big are their host stars? How hot are the planets? Like, are they actually in the habitable zone? Are they too hot, too cold. And for the past 25 years, we’ve mostly just kind of wave our hands a little bit and said, it’s roughly the right temperature, give or take. But we wanted to get those numbers more accurately known. And it turns out that until about 2016, about eight years ago, we only knew very precise measurements of the distances to stars from the prior to the Gaia mission, we only knew about 250,000 stellar distances. The Gaia mission when it launched in 26, to 2015 or so gave us the distances to over a billion stars to suddenly, we knew very accurate distances to a lot of these stars that hosts the exoplanet systems we are discovering, and that was no longer question. There’s been this long standing question is the star this size, is it this size, we don’t really know. But we could make some good educated guesses. Well, now we know the distance to the stars really well. And it turns out what limits our understanding now of the habitability conditions, the sizes of these other worlds, is that calibration, how we map what we see with our telescopes, to the physical amount of radiation coming from those stars, hitting those planets and reaching our telescopes here on the ground. So that was what drove me to kind of think about this problem in particular, but then I met some other people, other scientists in my community, and it turns out, they have the same problem. So in cosmology, right, we’re looking at an expanding universe. We’ve known that for almost 100 years now. 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from us. And Nobel Prize was awarded a decade ago, when we not only do we discover that the universe is expanding, but how fast that expansion is happening is accelerating. And the way in which we measure that is by comparing the explosions of certain types of nearby supernovas, to very distant supernovas. And it turns out their ability to calibrate the brightnesses of those distant supernova explosions that happened billions of years ago, billions of light years away to these nearby supernovas also depends on our ability to map how bright something is in the sky that we see with our sensor to real physical amounts of radiation. So two different fields in astrophysics very far separated, right, nearby exoplanets and distant supernova explosions, same problem. That’s how this mission got born, is going to answer some great questions. And to add one more bit to that NASA right now is investing in building the Roman Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. And the National Science Foundation is investing in the Vera C. Rubin observatory down in high Atacama Desert of Chile. All three of these, the case of Rubin a $400 million ish telescope, the Roman observatory, a $3 billion plus mission, the web observatory performing beautifully over $10 billion of US taxpayer money invested, all of them are doing amazing science. But it turns out, we can make that science so much better if we could improve that mapping of brightness to physical units and what we measure with our telescopes. So all three of these facilities, which are coming online, are already online, in the case of the Webb telescope, are going to benefit from this mission when it launches in a few years. We’re speaking with Professor Peter Plavchan, he is with George Mason University. So I’ll get into the actual device itself in a second. But I’m just kind of surprised. And I want to know if that was your reaction that this wasn’t thought of before. I mean, it’s kind of a basic tenet of science that you need a control right to measure something. Why wasn’t this already an idea that NASA was working on?  So that’s a great question. And we have to get a little bit into the history of this. And, you know, there’s an old saying, like, every idea out there has already been thought of there’s nothing under the sun that someone hasn’t already come up with or under the night sky in this case. And when I came up with the idea in 2017, I was like, Oh, look how creative I am. But no, no, I wasn’t the first one to think of this. And people have been thinking about this and working on it for decades. So you go back to the 1970s they would launch sounding rockets into the upper atmosphere to look at Vega and these white dwarf stars. Some early infrared observatories would actually like spit out these little spheres that would radiate heat, and since they knew how big those spheres were, and temperatures of the spheres, they can kind of calibrate their telescopes that way, but it was a much cruder level. And so I wasn’t the only one that started thinking about this recently. And I ended up meeting as we started getting further and developing this concept. About five years ago, we started bringing together a team of people that were interested in doing this. And since the news about our selection came out, other people been coming out of the woodwork, I’d say, Yeah, you know, we’ve been wanting to do this for years. So right time, right idea, and right science.  

Eric White  So let’s talk about the actual device that’s going to be up there. What is it? Is it going to be just a rocket with a flashlight on it? What? What’s it going to be?  

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, so the simplest way to think about it is a light bulb in space. And definitely, this is what NASA considers a very small mission. When you’re operating on that small of a budget for NASA mission, there’s a principle you have to use, called the KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid, right. So we don’t want to have an overly complex payload. And what we’re looking at right now is a series of lasers or light sources that shine light, and that light goes into one of two places. One, it goes points down at the Earth, at a ground based telescope, which we can talk about in a second, or and the other half of the light would go to a sensor on board the spacecraft to monitor how much light the laser is putting out. So we want nice stable lasers that are putting out a steady amount of light. We don’t want a light bulb that’s rapidly changing in temperature and changing its distribution of power at different colors. So we focused in on just a few set of discrete wavelengths with a nice steady power supply to these lasers, so the amount of light coming out is nice and stable. In addition to that we’ve chosen orbits, we’re hoping to put the spacecraft into an orbit was called a geosynchronous orbit or close to geosynchronous orbit, where it orbits the Earth once every time the Earth turns. So from our perspective here on Earth, it’s always in the same part of the sky. And it doesn’t appear to move. It’s the same kind of technology we used to use and still use for satellite communications and our GPS satellites, so that that satellite is going to stay at nice fixed distance between the telescopes on the ground and it place in orbit. So that will also help with things because light spreads out, depending on how far away you are from the light source, we also have to put it far enough away from the telescopes that looks like a star. So we couldn’t say fly a drone above the telescope, that would be too close for these telescopes to get a proper amount of photometric calibration or even a high altitude balloon would be too close. So we had to put it out in space. So the simple part that goes into orbit, it’s actually quite simple. It’s just settled lasers that point to the ground and shine on them. One of the key technological advances we’re taking advantage of here are what are called radiation hearted, single mode fibers. So getting further into that helps stabilize the how much of the light is coming out of lasers. And a lot of the complexity actually happens at the telescopes on the ground, they’re doing this stuff is a lot cheaper than doing it in space. So we can have well characterized filters for the telescopes, and well characterized detectors, what we call flat Fielding. And so a lot of secret sauce is going to happen with those telescopes. When we do the data analysis.   

Eric White  You had slightly mentioned that some other folks have come out of the woodwork to ask you about this project. I’m curious, is this something that not just NASA can use but it’s going to be I imagine utilized by other space agencies in their work as well? Is that what you had in mind when thinking of this project?   

Peter Plavchan  Oh, absolutely. So our mission when it launches roughly targeting 2029 date to be determined. We have right now a one year primary mission scheduled, it’s a very quick development timescale, a very relatively short mission as far as NASA goes. And we’re planning to reserve a fraction of that time for what we call a guest observer program. And a citizen science program. It turns out that when these lasers shine down at these telescopes, it’s not like a little pencil beam, it spreads out. And it’ll spread out about 1000 kilometers or 600 miles or so. So anyone within range, this telescope could look at this artificial star in the sky. Now, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on who you ask, it’s not going to be bright enough for you to see with your eyes. So, it’s pretty faint, you will need a telescope to see it. But there’s gonna be plenty observatories that are gonna want to point their telescopes at this calibration star and calibrate their facilities. So, we have four ground stations as we’re calling them built into the mission, but we’re going to be looking to open up to other professional and citizen science telescopes, operations for them to look at this star in the sky as well.   

Eric White  Alright, so finishing up here, you got the approval, the champagne has been poured. What is the first step that you all are going to take to nail that 2029 timeline that you have set for yourself.  

Peter Plavchan  Yeah, so I’ll tell you actually, the first step was not popping champagne. The first step was actually two weeks of panic. Writing the proposal is one thing, winning it and now we have to execute is another. So, we’re past the panic phase. So, we did pop some champagne after that. We are now in what’s called phase A. So, this is the planning phase of the mission. It lasts a little bit under a year. And at the end of that we have to go to NASA and participate in what’s called a mission design review. And the system requirements review and once we get past that milestone where NASA takes a close look at our mission, they’ll make sure that everything looks like we were ready, we can prove to NASA that we’re ready to build this and fly this operate it. That’s when we so quote, unquote start cutting metal and that’s when we start buying the parts and buying products and putting spacecraft together.  Professor Peter Plavchan is with George Mason University. You can find this interview along with a link to more information at Federal News network.com Search the Space Hour. 

The post You may see one more star up in the night sky soon, only this one will be man-made first appeared on Federal News Network.

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

https://spacecoast.afceachapters.org/

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric White  No, I have not.

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

Charity Weeden Hi. How are you doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Temin Called gravity?

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

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

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

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

Charity Weeden Correct.

Tom Temin And then that renders them into debris.

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

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

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

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

Charity Weeden Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

Interview Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post ISS Laboratory looking to spark more in-space production with grant opportunity first appeared on Federal News Network.

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric White Yeah. Give him a break.

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

Eric White Geoff Mattson is CEO of Xage security.

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Transcript: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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