I was lucky enough this past week to be a part of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin TX. For the uninitiated SXSW is a film and music festival plus a conference about internet business and culture. It's a mecca for all things cool and new on the web. There is so much that goes on there that it's impossible to attend any more than a small fraction of the planned events. This year included some panel talks that directly involved space and science. In my opinion the best one was Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration.
To the Moon
The panel was made up of 5 people representing the diversity of ways that both NASA and private space companies have used social media to reach out to the public and generate interest in space travel. They also talked about the future of space travel — both manned and unmanned — and their thoughts about private space ventures taking the lead in innovation while allowing more people than ever to be involved directly in, and getting to, space.
There were two people on the panel who represented NASA and how they have embraced services like twitter and facebook to try and rekindle the public's love of space travel. Veronica McGregor works for NASA JPL and got the ball rolling in 2008 by creating a twitter account for the mars lander Pheonix. She gave the lander a personality by tweeting about the science it was doing in an engaging and often humorous fashion. It was so successful in getting the public's attention that NASA started creating similar accounts for all it's robotic interplanetary missions. We also heard from Nick Skytland — a project manager in Houston who works with the manned spaceflight missions. He showed how the Astronauts have been able to use twitter to directly connect with people and not just while they are on the ground training, but in space too thanks to a real time internet downlink added to the ISS in January of this year.
Astro_Mike tweets about readjusting to gravity
NASA isn't the only player in space anymore. We now have several private space companies developing both manned and unmanned missions. One such group is Masten Space Systems based in Mojave California. The company is headed up by David Masten who was also on the panel. He talked about his company's involvement in one of the many challenge prizes that have popped up recently in an attempt to kick-start the private space industry. Masten won the million dollar level two lunar lander challenge this past year.
Speaking of challenge prizes another panelist was Amanda Stiles who works for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $20 million dollar prize for the first team who can land a robot on the Moon that can move at least 500 meters and send back at least 1 Gigabyte of HD image data. This is just one prize in a long history of prizes that have spurred on innovation and even created entirely new markets. There are currently at least 20 teams competing for the prize.
The final speaker Cariann Higginbotham is co-owner and co-host of spacevidcast.com, a popular podcast that covers all things space. She and her husband formed spacevidcast and share videos of shuttle launches and other important events live on the web. She talked about how NASA and the major media outlets have made space commonplace, but not in a good way. She has worked hard to remind us that launching something into space is an amazing achievement even if it happens fairly often. And people have been listening, the web has proven a great place for like-minded people to get together and talk about a subject they are excited about.
To Infinity and Beyond
It used to be [that we thought in the future] that an astronaut wouldn't be a job, but a certification to do some other, normal job.
David Maston - SXSW 2010
The one thing all the panelists have in common is the belief that space will play a big part of the future and that it will be more collaborative, more international, and more participatory. Dave Masten pointed out that during the Apollo years we thought we could do anything, and that everyone who wanted to could live space, even if all they did a normal job. There would be a place for the accountants and the janitors in space too. But during Apollo our investment in NASA was about 5% of the national budget, while now it's less than 1% percent. Somewhere in between we won the space race, but lost interest. Now we are entering a new era of private space and renewed public interest.
Technology has now come far enough that smart, dedicated people can start building advanced rockets in their garages. In fact that's what I do. We no longer have to rely on large institutionalized space programs to get to space. It's a very exciting time to be a rocket scientist.
