Discovery Space: Next Generation

Barcelona: Home of ISU Space Camp 2008 and Dangerous Curves

Michael Laine -- president of the LiftPort Group -- recently set aside his space elevator-building duties to attend International Space University (ISU). Part two of his adventures in Barcelona, Spain are chronicled here.

Advice to anyone traveling to another country, especially if the trip involves a stay of almost 3 months... learn the freakin' language. Learn something, anything.

I got lost the moment I left the airport. I'd like to blame the taxi driver for getting me lost and driving in completely the opposite direction, but that blame isn't fair. I have no doubt the cabbie was trying his best to be helpful.

So $70, 12 hours, one hotel and a different taxi cab later, I arrive at my correct destination.

Space Camp for Big Kids

Michael Laine -- president of the LiftPort Group -- recently set aside his space elevator-building duties to attend International Space University (ISU). The first installment of his adventures in Barcelona, Spain is chronicled here.

I've never had so much fun, learned as much or played as hard as I did this summer at a "space camp" -- and I'm 41 years old.

The International Space University (aka ISU) was founded 21 summers ago by Todd Hawley, Rob Richards (Odyssey Moon) and Peter Diamandis (X PRIZE Foundation, Zero Gravity Corp, SEDS, Space Adventures, Rocket Racing League). My experience there was a blur of nonstop activity, but that frenzy had a purpose: to learn about space as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.

If the university's following credo sounds ambitious, that's because it is:

"...founded on the vision of peaceful, prosperous and boundless future through the study, exploration and development of Space for the benefit of all humanity... dedicated to international cooperation... where students and scholars seek to understand the mysteries of the Cosmos and apply their knowledge to the betterment of the human condition."

The spectacular thing is that I think it fulfills this vision, and then some.

I had been working on LiftPort, the Elevator to Space Companies, for several years. In April 2007 we hit a financial roadblock that looked to end our role in building a space elevator. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to work around the problems. It was a blow to me, my team and the worldwide space elevator research community. I was stuck.

Closing the company and giving up the cause absolutely crossed my mind. (Some of you reading this would probably encourage that!) I asked myself, "Do I really care enough to work this hard on something that most people think is impossible?" In short, I was having a crisis of faith in what I believed in -- and its potential to make a positive impact on the people of Earth.

I needed a personal reality check, so I took some time off to see if it was simply a case of being tired or a complete burn-out. That's when I went to "space camp."

Disclaimer: the school's administrators dislike it when you call the ISU "space camp" because it's a serious university with a difficult program. I suppose they think my calling it "space camp" is demeaning. To me, however, it's a term of endearment and I'll continue to use it. This is the same reasoning that I use when calling (ex) girlfriends by nicknames. It might get on their nerves, but it's a way of telling whether I care or not. That being said, Boston University didn't get a nickname from me.

Back to space camp: I went to learn something about myself, but also knew that the worldwide space community wasn't that big -- and if my goal of an elevator into the sky was ever going to happen, then ISU was the place to start.

This year the university's Space Studies Program was held in Barcelona Spain. Last year it was in Beijing, the year before that in Vancouver and next year it will be at NASA Ames near San Francisco. By floating around, it lives up to the expectation of being an international program.

My classmates from Barcelona (friends now!) numbered about 120, plus 50 or so instructors and other staff. In short, we were a tight-knit community from 26 nations with a variety of talents. Some were more surprising than others: belly dancing, solving a Rubik's cube in 4 minutes, and singing/using musical instruments (as well as other skills I won't mention here). Our ages ranged from 20 to 52. I think I was the fourth oldest in the program. And no -- I can't solve the Rubik's cube anymore.

More than half of the students had educational or work experience in engineering. There was also a sprinkling of life sciences, physical sciences, information technology, humanities, policy and law, and of course -- my area -- business and management.

I learned some things about the space elevator that I really, really wish I had known six years ago. Suffice to say, there were moments this summer that made me say "ah ha!" and others where all that came to mind was "oh sh*t!"

Did I mention that I'm the sort of guy who actually believes he can build an elevator to space? Imagine the stubbornness and strength of will that a guy like that must have...

Thankfully, ISU professors were there to provide moments of clarity and insight into problems that had hindered me for years. Professors were there to guide, and ask useful questions. Staff who had understanding and patience. Staff with grace in the midst of chaos. Most importantly, there were students who started out as strangers and became friends – friends I know I can count on. Students that turned out to be teachers. Students who broadened their horizons and by so doing, they broadened my own.

I went to Barcelona -- to space camp -- as a "test of faith." I returned committed, healed and ready to wrestle tigers.

This post might sound like a sales-pitch, but it's not. Quite simply, the program had a profound impact on me.

Obviously this is just the beginning of my story. Discovery Space agreed to give me the keys to Next Generation for awhile, so be sure to check back often for new posts!

Michael Laine

Michael Laine is the president of LiftPort Group, the Elevator to Space Companies. You can follow him on Twitter and Lifestreaming, and check out his company's YouTube page here.

Photos, top to bottom: Courtesy Michael Laine; Spaceward Foundation; courtesy Michael Laine

Helping NASA Get a Raise

This May I went to Congress to help NASA get a raise. Perhaps surprisingly, I don't work for the space agency -- and I'm a student.

I've always supported NASA, but had never really made a good list of reasons why. That's when I joined the Citizens for Space Exploration -- a group of small and large businesses, teachers, students, local government employees, and others who believe investing is space exploration is a great idea.

Over the course of four days, 146 people from 29 states visited hundreds of congressional offices to make the case for NASA (my group met with North Carolina and Maryland representatives). When I first heard about their trip to speak with members of Congress, I expected everyone to be part of the space industry. I was wrong. No one in my group of five "citizen taxpayers" had ever worked for NASA.

Our meetings with representatives lasted anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, during which time we explained the importance of NASA in the future of America and asked for a boost in the space agency's funding. How much, and by when? From 0.6 percent to 1 percent of the national budget by 2013. To get some perspective, look at NASA's funding during the Apollo era -- it received 4 percent of the national budget (almost seven times larger than today's funding situation).

I went on the trip because I've come to understand that NASA validates our role as explorers, has far-reaching educational benefits and creates new technology that ultimately brings us so many things we take for granted. By the end of my congressional visits, I felt like I could convince a total stranger why they should care about NASA.

We are an exploring species. Every elementary school student can tell you about Christopher Columbus' voyage, but few can tell you how the Norsemen found America in 1000 AD -- Columbus simply opened the floodgates to settling the Americas.

Like pre-Columbian explorers, we have visited the moon and now plan to settle it. NASA needs the proper funding to work towards permanent lunar colonies, but is a bit strapped. Imagine if Europeans had decided that it was too expensive to travel across the oceans and settle unknown lands. Now compare that to what future the other planets might hold for us.

To return to and colonize the moon, we need to develop new technologies. For example, moon settlers need to be able to generate their own food supplies and air to breathe on the moon. In the process of researching how to do such things, we push the technological barrier.

For example, the imaging technology used in some telescopes is now used to help detect cancer. My father is an orthodontist and uses brace wires derived from morphing materials researched by NASA. My mother is a physical therapist and uses a machine developed through research conducted on astronauts after they returned to Earth.

Maybe more important than technology spin-offs are the "people spin-offs." Teachers try to inspire students because they know it will help drive them to learn and succeed. A child who wants to be an astronaut knows they have to stay in school, stay out of trouble, attend college, etc. Although he or she may not become an astronaut, they're like to be inspired to go to college and stake out a career in science, technology, engineering, or math.

As a member of this new generation of explorers, I'm thrilled to help NASA return to the moon and colonize it, then head to Mars -- and beyond.

Laura Meyer is a University of Maryland senior in aerospace engineering at the James A. Clark School of Engineering.

NASA-JPL is a Hotbed of Student Activity

About 300 students at all levels, from high school through graduate school, have been working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California over the summer. And the 25 different programs that the lab offers for students are not just summer work -- about half of them are academic-year positions.

And they span the gamut, from engineering to data analysis to planetary science.

These are amazing opportunities for anyone interested in working in space science of any kind. Here's just a few examples of the work students have been doing at what is certainly the world's premier center for designing and operating planetary exploration missions. (No offense to Ames, which is NASA's other principal planetary research center, but which doesn't actually build and operate as many robotic missions).

-- Yuri Carillo, 18, is a sophomore in electrical engineering Cal Poly who has been working there this summer. She actually put in her first stint working at JPL while she was still in high school. She's worked on a gadget to help a Mars robot change drill bits, and on batteries for a future rover. "Before I came I thought it was going to be very serious and uptight, and then I realized it's more like a college campus," she says.

-- Brandon Jones, at 28, is a bit farther along -- he's a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working on satellite navigation systems, tracking the positions of the GPS satellites that are used to track everything else. He spent a previous summer working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, so he's really racking up his mileage at NASA.

-- It's not just hard-core technology types who can find a niche at JPL. Take Erin Edkins: She's a 28-year old student who spent time as a personal fitness trainer and a restaurant manager before deciding to go back to school in planetary science at  UC Santa Barbara. Now a senior there, she's putting in her second summer at JPL. She works on planetary atmospheres and is analyzing the swirling storm systems on Jupiter.

As part of that job, she enjoys being often the first person to see new planetary images that arrive from a distant planet. Her advice to other students is to just go ahead and apply for a JPL internship, as she did.

"Go for it," she says. "Definitely the worst thing that could happen is you could contact someone to work with at JPL and they say no. Then you're in the same position you started in."

You can read up on JPL's student opportunities on their web site. There's something for just about anybody who's interested in doing space-related work. Go ahead, give it a try!

photos: top, Yuri Carillo. bottom, Erin Edkins. photos courtesy of NASA/JPL.

Celestial Roundup

Today, we'll have a little grab-bag of items. Fill up your plate, it's an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord!

Telescopes without mountains

You don't have to be on a high mountaintop in Arizona, Hawaii or Chile to do astronomy. Although more and more colleges and universities are now equipped to run distant observatories from computer consoles on campus, there's nothing quite like the experience of actually working at the telescope itself, and plenty of campuses have or are getting telescopes nearby, wherever they may be, to offer hands-on experiences to their students -- and the capability of doing real research. It's a big sky out there, and among the billions and billions of celestial objects to observe, there are plenty of worthwhile observing programs that can be conducted from less-than-optimal sites.
So, here's one new example: Purdue University Calumet, in Indiana, just announced last week that they are proceeding, with the help of a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to get a 20-inch advanced Ritchy-Chretien telescope, which will be set up in an observatory in a nearby state park. It will be equipped for robotic observations from campus, but also can be used by students from the university, as well as special field trips by local high schools, to get that firsthand experience.
“Purdue Calumet students will soon have the ability to learn the science of astronomy through discovery from authentic data that they themselves obtain with the robotic telescope," says Shawn Slavin, a professor of astronomy at the university.

Portal to the Universe

It sounds like a device from a science-fiction story, sort of like the "stargate" in 2001. But no, this is a project, organized as part of the International Year of Astronomy (next year), to provide a comprehensive guide to the astronomy related websites, news, clubs, observatories, image sources, and so on. At their website, they are inviting people to contribute links and information on any sources that fit this bill.
They plan to launch the site at the end of the year. It looks like it will be a useful resource for all of us, if it works out. Good luck to them, and I envite everyone to help out by contributing information on sites, groups and facilities that you are involved in or know about.

Fly your Thesis

The European Space Agency has just announced a new program, similar to NASA's longstanding Microgravity University, which I described here in an earlier post (and gave a specific example of in another post).
ESA's program is smaller in scope -- far fewer students will get to participate, and they'll have to wait much longer to do so. But it's also structured to foster more ambitious use of the opportunity. As with NASA's program, students are invited to propose experiments that can be flown aboard an airplane that provides brief periods of weightlessness by flying on a roller-coaster-like trajectory of parabolic hills and valleys.
The NASA program is aimed at undergraduates, and students generally propose experiments that may be part of a class project, or may just be an ad-hoc idea that a group of students come up with. ESA, on the other hand, is looking for graduate students who want to do work that will actually be part of their thesis research.
I'm delighted to see that European students will now have an opportunity to share in the kinds of experiences that American students have been able to take part in for more than a decade. And although fewer will get to take part, it's an admirable idea to use these opportunities to foster advanced level serious research. I look forward to seeing what kinds of projects will result.

Students in the Dark

Finally, a footnote to the coverage by my fellow bloggers Dave Mosher and Alan Dyer about the August 1 total solar eclipse.
I was very envious reading their accounts of their adventures watching the eclipse from two different airplanes. I've see four total eclipses in my life, and they are definitely one of the two number-one all time greatest categories of skywatching experiences (see Alan Dyer's posting on his rating system of the top celestial sights) I've ever had the pleasure of seeing (the other category that equals it being an all-sky auroral display, which I saw in spring of 1988). But it's been a long time since the last one I saw -- which was awesome and spectacular, on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 1991, surrounded by the world's leading telescopes.
Anyway, I just read an item about a couple of lucky undegraduates, Katie Dupre and Marcus Freeman, who got a chance to see this latest eclipse in the company of the world's leading eclipse researcher, Jay Pasachoff of Williams College. For Jay, this was his 47th eclipse! The lucky dog. They watched it near Novosibirsk, Siberia, and took part in research on the sun's inner corona, which can only be observed during total eclipses.

(Photos: Top, observatory sketch courtesy of Purdue University Calumet; Middle, zero-g plane courtesy of ESA; Bottom, solar eclipse photographed by Luc Viatour, licenced under the GNU free documentation license.)

Student Opportunities this Summer and Fall

There are a variety of conferences coming up over the next few months that should be of great interest to any of you who are students in astronomy or space sciences and engineering. There are also some remarkable opportunities to apply for positions to take part in field research that reproduces some of the conditions and circumstances you might face someday as astronauts or planetary pioneers. Like me, I'm sure many of you would like to become space travelers someday, but chances are we're all going to have to wait for quite a while. In the meantime, some of these chances could provide the next best thing. Hands-on research experience, and a taste of what may be to come.

Conferences

NewSpace 2008 Conference, Crystal City, Virginia, July 17-19

This annual gathering brings together the leaders of the "new space" movement, dedicated to creating a new generation of inexpensive, reliable space vehicles to open up the space frontier to a new boom era. This year's gathering in Crystal City (part of Alexandria, across the river from Washington, DC) includes a field trip to the NASA launch facility at Wallops Island. Regular registration is $445, but students (under 25, with college ID) get in for $145.

NLSI Lunar Science Conference, Moffett Field, Calif., July 20-24

This conference, held at NASA's Ames research center, covers all aspects of lunar science -- everything from the history of past lunar exploration, to research on the effects of the lunar environment on humans and machinery, to the kinds of scientific research that may be carried out on the moon starting late next decade. Registration closes on July 14.

The Mars Society Conference, Boulder, Colorado, Aug. 14-17

This is the 11th annual conference of the largest society devoted to promoting the human exploration of Mars. The meetings always present a great selection of top-level speakers as well as a host of original research papers, posters, and workshops. This year, among the speakers is Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, one of the leading "new space" companies aiming to develop a whole new generation of low-cost space vehicles; Pete Worden, the head of NASA's Ames Research Center; and Chris McKay, one of the world's leading researchers of regions on Earth that are possible analogs of Mars conditions. Regular convention ticket for non-members is $270, but students get a rate of $105 (or $70 for student members, and membership only costs $25).

Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) International Conference
Glasgow, Scotland, Sept. 27-28

SEDS is a collection of local chapters at colleges and universities around the world, and they have local, national and international meetings every year. This year's big international gathering will be in Scotland this September. Check out their main website to see if there's a local chapter on your campus. If there is, join up, and if there isn't, think about starting one!

Research Opportunities

Microgravity University

As I described in an earlier post, this is just a fabulous opportunity to experience weightlessness aboard a NASA training and research plane, while carrying out useful research that can be part of a class project, independent study, or just an extracurricular project on your own. Either way, it will be an unforgettable experience, and an impressive addition to your resume. Teams can consist of up to four full-time undergraduate student members who will actually get to fly on the "vomit comet," and any number of additional ground-crew members. Selection can be very competitive, so even though the deadline for final applications isn't until October (and for initial letters of intent is in September), you'll improve your chances by reading through past research topics now and starting to form a team and think about possible projects.

Mars Desert Research Station, Utah

Volunteers spend two-week rotations at this simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. You'll live in a simulated Mars habitat, conduct field research in geology or biology, or engineering research on proposed Mars equipment, vehicles, spacesuits and so on. The field research season at MDRS runs from December through May. Next season's formal application process has not yet opened, but it's not too soon to start thinking about your proposals for research there, and a good way to start is to read the field reports from the crews over this past season and from previous seasons.

I will provide updates as some of these deadlines draw closer, and I'll also periodically post information here about other conferences and research openings that may be of interest to students who have their eyes on the stars. And please, let me know, by posting comments below, if you know of any other meetings, symposia, conferences or research openings that might be of interest to your fellow students. I'd like to make this site the definitive go-to resource for anyone who may be looking for such chances to participate in cutting-edge research. Please help me out!
(Photos courtesy of NASA/JSC, and The Mars Society)