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Can you imagine hiking through a volcanic landscape that were being surrounded by the
gleaming white sand dunes of white sands National Park, seeing the sand grains up close, seeing
the lava flow textures up close, and then blasting off a hundred kilometers into the
sky looking out and seeing it look this big, but also realizing, wow, I hiked that.
I actually understand how that lava flow is in place or I actually understand about how
13,000 years ago this dry lake dried up and that's where we get the gypsum white sands
for white sands.
I just want to help people expand their experience or their encounter with what people sometimes
call the overview effect that Frank White is famous for, coining after interviewing lots
of astronauts on how seeing Earth from space literally changes their psyche.
Kirby Runyon is a Space Camp alumni and planetary geologist at the Planetary Science Institute.
He has flown 16 parabolic flights accumulating over an hour of time spent in weightlessness.
He owns a technical and space tourism consulting company, guiding clients through parabolic
flights and teaching future Virgin Atlantic astronauts about the geology they will see
from space.
I'm Ryan Ferris-Elli.
Join me as I learn what makes this extraordinary individual, dare to explore.
I'm gonna space ship that I'm waiting for.
I'm flying up to the stars.
I'm gonna dare to explore this time.
I'll let you know what I find.
I grew up in South Central Michigan in the mid to late 80s and into the 90s of course.
I grew up in rural Michigan and didn't have a lot of connections to the space program.
That being said, the closest city, Jackson, Michigan, had at least one astronaut from
their Al Warden from Apollo 15.
He orbited the moon on Apollo 15.
There was a small space connection but there wasn't a lot going on space wise.
There's a now closed facility called Michigan Space and Science Center right there in Jackson,
Michigan and they had the Apollo 9 capsule.
It didn't go to the moon.
It was just in Earth orbit with the Apollo 9 astronauts.
They had one of the parachutes from Apollo 15 because I guess that parachute had been
around the moon.
It was a small little fun little science and space museum but it's since closed.
I was as a very young child but just fascinated with space.
The Challenger accident happened just a few months after I was born so I don't remember
it but around the time that NASA returned the space shuttle flight to fleet beginning
with a space shuttle I think Discovery in 1988 with Mission STS-26, the space shuttle
would have been on the news a lot and maybe my parents had the news on a lot.
Maybe I picked up some space shuttle CNN soundbites from that but I don't know.
I did go to the Michigan Space and Science Center and there's pictures of me as a little
kid there.
Maybe that's where I got the space bug but I've just always loved space.
Growing up in Southern rural Michigan there weren't a lot of other space kids to talk
about so I was kept my people knew I was interested in space but there wasn't really anyone I
could talk about it with.
That was sort of my beginning as a space cadet.
Did you want to be an astronaut early on?
Was that kind of the goal?
I did want to be an astronaut early on and I still do.
Was your first step towards that?
Was that when you attended Space Camp when you were a kid?
Yeah, Space Camp was definitely a huge step toward that love of all things space.
I went to Space Camp when I was 16 in the summer of 2002 and I went to Advanced Space
Academy and I'm still friends with at least two of the people who I met there and we
just saw each other the other last week in Washington DC.
When I told people that I was going to Space Camp but they were like, oh my goodness, of
course you are Kirby that just makes sense for you.
Up until that point it was the most incredible, intense, fun educational but educational
of fun sense not in the boring sense of the word time I had ever had.
I remember the fact that I got to put on a scuba tank and mask and go down in the underwater
astronaut train to the UAT and pretend to assemble a space station trust segment while
floating sideways next to my buddy.
I can't believe I got to do that as a teenager.
That was just incredible.
I was the commander for our simulated space shuttle mission.
That was a lot of fun.
I think I was also the flight director when we did a rotation and I was in mission control
for part of that.
I remember doing orbit reboots on the International Space Station and at the end of the week I
actually got to win the right stuff award which I still have that medal and that was
quite an honor.
I just soaked up information like a sponge.
I know that they had some of the speakers they had there talked about hypergolic fuels,
the fuels that ignite spontaneously when they mix nitrogen to trioxide and dimethyl hydrazine
being those two propellants and talking about home and transfer orbits and different abort
modes on the space shuttle like RTLS abort, return to launch site abort to orbit AOA's
abort once around and then the different landing sites there are ghosts, white sands.
I just was a sponge for that information just sucked it up.
We also got one of the original formerly German rocket engineers.
His last name was I think it was Von Teasonhausen and he actually worked with Dr. Verne von Braun
on the Apollo lunar rover.
So the cars that are still on the moon from Apollo's 15, 16 and 17 were something that
he worked on and it was just absolutely, I was just mesmerized.
Having an actual living legend share his stories from the Apollo program with us.
Were your parents scientists?
No, my parents aren't scientists.
They're both in the humanities.
My dads are a retired English professor, my mom's a musician and a religion scholar.
My grandfather though is an engineer, my mom's dad and he had a whole career working in radio
consulting putting up radio stations all across the United States and being an expert witness
for FCC hearings.
I got some of the technical exposure with my maternal grandfather and so he was one of
the only people growing up that I could have at least technical conversations with.
My brothers and I have two brothers and all three of us have an interest at least in technical
areas and so we could talk about that and we would all watch Star Trek and Star Wars
together.
So at least within my family had a little bit of a space and technical connection with
my brothers and my grandpa.
So when I graduated high school I met to go to a local university for my dad taught
and my plan was it was from the beginning to transfer out of there and I wanted a major
to get a bachelor's degree in astronomy or astrophysics because I thought I wanted to
pursue a PhD in astrophysics.
That plan started out and I did transfer but I transferred to another school that offered
a degree in physics and not astronomy.
Astronomers I talked to said if you want to actually do observational astronomy you should
actually get your bachelor's degree in physics because there's a lot of physics there.
It turns out I'm terrible at math.
I worked my tail off for my physics degree and like I said I'm terrible at math.
I got all C's in physics despite working really hard at those C's and I opted not to
go to graduate school for astronomy or astrophysics because I just I wouldn't make it.
But I learned at that time that the scientists working on like the Mars rovers which were
really big at the time that I was in college spirit and opportunity and then Mars 2020
rover was on the horizon and you know the Cassini orbiter orbiting Saturn flying by
all those icy moons that was going on a lot too.
And I found out a lot of the scientists that worked on the Cassini mission and the Mars
rovers weren't astronomers they were geologists and I found you know they're slanted to made
out of rock right and geology is the science that studies rock so okay so there's such
a thing called planetary geology.
And so after my physics degree I took a couple classes in undergraduate just to get some
more geology classes and then I did a master's degree in planetary geology at Temple University
in Philadelphia and later on I did a PhD in planetary geology at Johns Hopkins University
and then I've been working as a NASA funded planetary geologist ever since and also just
recently started a space consulting business.
So can you tell us a little bit about what a planetary geologist does since you're not
actually traveling to those planets how are you studying the geology's there?
In terms of my personal research that I do I rely heavily on images taken by cameras on
mostly robotic spacecraft around the solar system.
A little bit from human spacecraft when you know astronauts have been to the moon and
so there's a little bit of overlap between human space flight and planetary geology in
terms of the Apollo astronauts and the upcoming Artemis astronauts but like right now I'm
actually doing geologic mapping on the moon using images and other data that have mostly
come from a spacecraft called lunar reconnaissance orbiter that's a NASA spacecraft that's been
at the moon since 2009.
I did a lot of my PhD focused on Mars and so I was using a camera on Mars reconnaissance
orbiter called high rise which stands for high resolution imaging science experiment
and that's basically a spy satellite over Mars and it can just like you can just like
zoom in endlessly on the geologic landforms on the surface of Mars and I was studying sand
dunes and I have sand dunes on Mars below in the wind and you can actually see the sand
dunes move from year to year across the surface of Mars and so I was using the sand dunes
as sort of like a natural weather station to see what the wind is doing.
But you can also do laboratory experiments to do geological laboratory experiments so
one of the things that I study is the formation of impact craters on any planetary body whether
it's the moon or Mars or even asteroids and so I actually use this catapult it's like
a human sized mouse trap and it flings these sheets of gravel or sand or whatever we want
to use we recently used crushed up chalk to simulate the emplacement of what's called
an ejecta curtain and the ejecta curtain is all the busted up rock and gravel that gets
scooped out of a crater as it's forming right after a meteoroid or an asteroid hit a planetary
surface and so it gets flung out of a crater and then it lands on the ground and it's
if you are on the ground by the crater that just formed it would be like this avalanche
from the sky this wall of busted up rock and debris flying at you really really fast
at hundreds of miles per hour and it would slam into the ground and continue sliding
outward like I said like this horizontal avalanche until it came to a rest and that is one of
the most common geologic processes across the solar system because every solid body from
small asteroids all the way up to the largest rocky planet earth all have craters on their
surfaces and so this is one of the most common ways that the surfaces of planets, moons and
asteroids get affected as with impact cratering and the emplacement of this ejecta this avalanche
from the sky and that's kind of a long way of answering your question Ryan about how we
do geology on other planets since we can't go there with minor exception you know one of my
colleagues in planetary geology is actually an astronaut Dr. Jack Schmidt he's the only
PhD geologist who have walked on the moon he was one of the astronauts on Apollo 17 he was the 12th
of 12 men to have walked on the moon wow and and he's still I mean the gentleman is in his 80s and
he's still active going to science conferences and active on email and still publishing papers he's
he's quite a guy and so you know he's he's the one exception of having to use robots to do
planetary geology because he's actually the only human lunar field geologist so it's quite an honor
to still get to be associated with him I love how excited you are about rocks
well thanks you know rocks are actually an acquired taste for me because for me to be really
interested in something it kind of takes a connection to space for me to be interested and
for you know growing up it never even occurred to me to connect rocks with space really
you know I thought I wanted to study galaxies and supernovas but it turns out you know we'll never
get to send spacecraft to another galaxy or a nebula even and within our lifetimes we'll never
send a spacecraft even to the nearest star Proxima Centauri it's but within our own solar system even
though the distances are so vast from hundreds of thousands to billions of miles we can we can
still send at least robotic spacecraft on in they can get places in only a few years instead of a
few centuries one thing I want to add about geology is that it's also a forensic science
something natural happened to affect the way the landscape happened the landscape doesn't look
like it does just cause something happened something build those mountains something dug that valley
something made that river bed something blew that sand and geology is looking at clues left in the
rock record and trying to reconstruct natural history just like an investigator might forensically
investigate a crime scene and piece together what happened based on the clues that are present in
front of them so geology is pretty rare among the natural sciences in that it is also a forensic
science and that sort of forensic thinking really appeals to me like I said I'm naturally very bad
at math but I seem to be naturally pretty decent at that kind of thinking so for my PhD I did my
research so I was a student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore but I did the research
for my PhD at a university affiliated laboratory called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab or
APL it's not quite fair to say this but the easy way to describe them is they're sort of like an
east coast of JPL they fly a lot of planetary spacecraft for NASA there's a lot of planetary
scientists employed there and they're down the road from Baltimore in Laurel Maryland in between
Washington DC and Baltimore and so I did all my research for my PhD there at APL but graduated
from Johns Hopkins University and actually worked at APL for five years after finishing my PhD
so work there as a NASA funded research scientist up until October of 2022 and since then I've
switched affiliations to the Planetary Science Institute and they're headquartered in Tucson but I work
remotely but the way this works is that scientists can write grant proposals to NASA saying hey this
is some science I want to do here's how I think it contributes to the overall body of knowledge
and here's how much it wants to cost NASA if you want to you know pay me and my institution to do
that research and so if NASA decides to fund a proposal they'll send you and your institution
the money and that actually pays your salary for the several years it takes to do that research and
publish it in peer-reviewed journals and hopefully do some public outreach like podcasts wait so
you're getting paid for this maybe
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Well New Horizons as many of your listeners will know that was the first and only spacecraft to ever
go by a planet Pluto and dwarf planets are planets too the planets right there in the name
and so that flew by in July of 2015 and I was still a graduate student at the time
but if you rewind the clock a little bit to around 2010 or so I was a master's degree student at
Temple University and I remember telling my master's thesis advisor Dr. Alexandra Devazzas I said I
don't care what it takes I'm going to be in the room wherever that is when New Horizons flies by Pluto
and to make the story a little bit shorter that's what ended up happening but because I was able
to volunteer to help with you know helping with office duties with for the for the fly-by team
and that actually got me into what was called the geology and geophysics or GGI room at APL
during the fly-by which is where the pictures came when they came right down from the spacecraft
so one of my humble brags is that as far as I can tell I was the first person or at least one of
the first people to discover mountains on Pluto when we got our first really high resolution
pictures coming back from the spacecraft one thing that's lost on a lot of people is that Pluto is
one of about 130 similarly sized planets out beyond Neptune and that's anything 500 kilometers in
diameter and bigger they're all small little planets they're all round and Pluto is the largest known
member of that class of planets so there's not eight planets there's not nine planets in the solar
system there's like 150 and counting most of which which are really small around Pluto size and
that's the most common type of planet that formed in our solar system that's and small icy dwarf
planets are probably the most common type of planet that's formed around other stars exoplanets
and what's crazy Ryan is that a lot of these dwarf planets probably started off with liquid
water interiors in contact with like a hot rocky core because just the heat of a planet coming
together from basically tens of millions of comets and asteroids mutually colliding it's going to
be warm on the inside of that even though they're so far from the Sun or their host star so it's not
out of the question that in the first half billion to billion years after one of these small icy dwarf
planets formed that it could be habitable and that maybe life could have started in these things so
really it's these icy dwarf planets three to five billion miles away from our own Sun where
life could have gotten a foothold in the very earliest times of the solar system if there are
so many why is it always just Pluto yeah you know i don't know i think there's a huge opportunity
for educators to do a whole curriculum on the planets in our own solar system not exoplanets
the planets in our own solar system behind Neptune all of which are Pluto size and smaller
but many planetary scientists such as myself still consider them to be full-fledged planets
even though they're small um the the geology on Pluto is is far more active like we have flowing
glaciers on Pluto we have wind-blown snow drifts and sand dunes on Pluto Pluto is as active
geologically as Mars is and Mars up until this point we thought was a fairly active planet i mean
Earth is by far the most active but Mars is really active so is Venus but but Pluto and these small
icy planets are incredibly geologically rich and diverse they have everything you want in a planet
and so i really think it behooves educators and if anyone listening to this wants to partner on
k-12 curriculum i'd be happy to work with you on on coming up with a curriculum for dwarf
planets beyond Neptune Pluto just being the largest but there's others eris maki maki
quayoir ixion veruna vant they've got really cool names but they're the most diverse and most
populous type of planet in our solar system and i think they deserve a lot more love do you think
it's just because Pluto is the biggest of them Pluto being the largest small planet is part of that
but i also think it's because of people's misperception about the international
astronomical unions abuse of their power when they quote unquote demoted Pluto which by the way
that definition isn't even used by planetary scientists so really if planetary scientists aren't
even using the quote unquote official definition is it really official so so i think it's a perception
of how science gets done and i think there's like i said there's all kinds of educational
opportunity not just for learning about the most common type of planet in our solar system and
the galaxy but also just in terms of understanding the scientific method the scientific process
and how scientists communicate amongst themselves and having worked on new horizons sort of dovetails
and these other mission concepts that i've been involved with one of them was called a mission
concept called Neptune Odyssey this is not a real mission we did not actually build a spacecraft
but the national academies of sciences was doing a report for NASA to prioritize future
large robotic missions into the solar system these are missions that cost well over a billion
dollars one of those mission concepts that we did we wanted to look at what would it take what
would both what would it cost what would the spacecraft have to look like and be capable of and how
long would it take to get there if we send an orbiter to the planet Neptune now Neptune's only
been visited by a spacecraft once in August of 1989 and that was by the voyage of two spacecraft
that launched well before then in 1977 we've never gone into orbit around Neptune with anything
it's Neptune for all intents and purposes is the same distance from the sun that Pluto is
at least right now about three billion miles or about 30 astronomical units um the you know one
astronomical unit or one AU being the distance between earth and the sun and so we looked and our
website which maybe you can link to on the show page Neptune Odyssey dot j-a-t-u-a-p-l dot e-d-u
shows that you could put like a Cassini class spacecraft powered by plutonium powered radio
isotope generators it would take 17 years getting to to want to go from earth to Neptune and then
it would take about a year once you're at Neptune to get into a tight orbit around the planet and
then do repeated flybys of Neptune's moon Triton which is a kind of a older brother not older brother
but maybe say like larger sibling to Pluto uh Neptune used to be its own dwarf planet orbiting
the sun and then it got captured by by Neptune um and so we would do repeat flybys of of Triton
and use Triton's gravity to to change where the spacecraft could go in orbit around Neptune to
fly by smaller moons to fly by the rings of Neptune to image Neptune from like high latitudes up near
the north and south poles as well as around the equator and a very similar way to how the Cassini
spacecraft used the moon Titan's gravity to shape its orbital tour around Saturn and so I was uh
got to be the project scientist on on that mission so project scientists is someone who works with
with the scientists on one hand and the engineers on the other and you kind of have to translate
sciencees into engineeringes and translate engineeringes into sciences and get engineers and scientists
to talk to each other and so we wrote up that report and it's also been published as a peer-reviewed
paper people can read it if they want to it's linked to at neptuneautacy.jhuapl.edu
on the side you're doing space tourism consulting can you tell us a little bit how do you end up
in that my mission in life is to not just learn about space but to experience space and I think
that's one reason why space camp was so an amazing incredible activity when I was a teenager.
Yeah. In in 2020 during the pandemic even I got to go on my very first ever zero gravity flight
with the zero gravity corporation and I it was literally a dream come true and a prayer answered
for me to get to experience weightlessness like that right I had so much fun that I saved up some
more and I went again just a few months later and I brought a friend with work for me and there's
video of me floating around but they also do Mars gravity and lunar gravity parabolic arcs and so
you can hop around like the Apollo astronauts and like future Mars astronauts well in the lower
gravity of Mars and the moon and I also have NASA funded research that does experiments in
reduced gravity and you know that catapult I mentioned right simulates the placement of crater
ejector what we wanted to see how lower gravity affects that on on Mars and the moon and also
asteroids which have even less gravity and so we've actually done an experiment on board the
parabolic flight zero gravity airplane and we're doing another one next month hopefully
and and because of my involvement and the enthusiasm for it I've gotten to be a contractor for the
company zero g and as a zero gravity coach and now I'm working to actually have curated experiences
for people to go on what I'm calling the planetary gravity tour where they come to someplace really
special like the Kennedy Space Center they get a VIP tour we have a really nice dinner the night
before and I'm going to give a like a good half hour long presentation on the bleeding cutting edge
of planetary solar system exploration and how their parabolic flight their reduced gravity flight
the next day ties in with the environments on other planets and moons so tell us a little bit about
like being a person on board that plane like does it make some people sick what does it feel
like you know those the sensations the kind of things that any of us can connect with yeah that
human that human experience is something I'm really after so that's a really great question
thanks people I'd say 80 percent of people do just fine with regard to motion sickness okay and
and we always recommend that people take medications you can go to your doctor and ask for a prescription
for the scopelamine sea sickness patches that you wear on your neck those really work great
and even without them most people still do just fine sure if people do have some upset tummies there
are things that that we can do to help them with that once they're on the plane you know right off
the bat it does not feel anything like a roller coaster that feeling of your stomach dropping out
that you never feel that um you know we take off you're sitting in a you're sitting in the back of
the airplane and it's just like a normal airplane ride you're sitting in a regular airplane seat
you take off you have the whole seat belt uh spiel the whole oxygen mask spiel and then once we
get up to our cruising altitude the the guests are invited to unbuckle and come up to the front two
thirds of the airplane which is just open and padded there's there's no overhead bins there's
nothing it's just wall ceiling and padding and they take off their shoes and we have them all laid
down on their backs and the airplane starts to pull up in a steep climb and you're pressed onto
the floor with almost two times the force of gravity about two g's and it's not painful at all and
you call that being on the pole then you can start to feel the weight come off so the air the pilot
in the cockpit will start pitching the nose of the airplane down and you'll fall from 1.8 g's
you'll go down to 1 g and then it starts to feel really funny after that because the g's just
keep coming off after you go past 1 g and and you can litter and you can just feel the weight
melt off and and you don't know it needs to tell you you know something's different and you can
literally just tap on the floor with your fingers and your body will float up to the ceiling um the
very first time I experienced that I couldn't believe the sensation I tapped on the floor I
floated up to the ceiling I looked down and this person floated just underneath me and my initial
reaction was like oh no I'm gonna fall on her but of course I did it because we were both weightless
but just seeing someone fly between myself and the floor the only appropriate reaction is to laugh
and so people are laughing and smiling when they experience weightlessness and I'll also mention
this when you're in weightlessness you can perfectly relax every muscle in your body your body will
naturally float into sort of a fetal position with your arms floating out in front of you like Ryan
you're not aware right now of how much stress you're holding in your face in weight all of us are
all of us are in weightlessness you can completely relax and there's this relaxation that kind of
floods through all of your body including your face and there's this perfect relaxation that's
impossible to understand unless you've been weightless wow and it is this it's extreme physical
peacefulness and relaxation it's it's there's floating in water doesn't even come close to that
experience yeah and there's also this disorientation effect where you know you can flip upside down
and still feel right side up it's it's and then to look down the length of the aircraft and to see
people upside down to see that the chairs in the back of the airplane upside down to see like
like a foam rubber little like squishy ball just float pass and just pull it out of the air
it is a surreal surreal sensation and when the gravity eventually does come back on we get about
20 seconds of zero gravity every parabola and we do it 15 times and that that actually gives you
more cumulative time in weightlessness than a suborbital space flight will wow okay so you get
about four minutes of weightlessness on the parabolic flight aircraft you get three to three and a half
minutes with virgins electric or blue origin although with us it's broken up into 15 seconds
and then the gravity comes back on and you'll hear someone with a megaphone shout feet down coming
out and and that's it gets your feet pointed down the pilots are going to pull out of the dive
and you'll get back up to one one g and then you then you feel the g's just pile back on up to
one point eight and at that point everyone is lying down on the floor again eyes fixed on the ceiling
after we do 15 parabolas it's like three lunar gravities and 12 zero gravities we give everyone
a snack because it makes you hungry makes you thirsty and then people get their shoes back on
and sit back down and from that on out it's like a normal airplane ride where you come back into
land except that you land at the same airport you took off from instead of going somewhere how much
elevation do you do you shift it's it's roughly it's about 10 000 feet difference in elevation
you you hit the top of your parabolic arc roughly between 32 to 35 000 feet and the pilot pulls out
of that and you hit the bottom of your pullout maneuver where you're probably when you're pulling
about the most g's you bottom out at about 23 24 000 feet wow but it's normal altitude that airplanes
right you're routinely all the time anyways yeah that's amazing almost literally any aircraft is
capable of performing this maneuver it's just that they don't so i also have gotten to do some work
with virgin galactic you know we're in this era now where people can pay a fair chunk of change
to go experience space flight for themselves for three to three and a half minutes going up to
80 to 105 kilometers or so above earth and they both they all both virgin galactic and blue
origin launch out of the american southwest a lot of southern new mexico is on display when you're
on those with suborbital space flights and to help these private astronauts who are paying their own
way to go to space to help them understand what they see out the window when they're in space
i've i've started taking groups of them on trips to new mexico using my geology phd my
enthusiasm for rocks as you say to show them up close and personal like literally in their face
the geologic landforms that they're going to get to see from space so in early 2022 and we took a
group of these virgin galactic future astronauts um and we went to quite sans national park which
is very visible from space uh when we went to a few other volcanic landscapes around southern
new mexico to help them understand what they see so what's next for you you're still at the
planetary science institute what's what's next uh yeah thanks so so what's next is i'm going to
keep doing the planetary geology research writing nasa grant proposals uh doing research on the moon
and venus and asteroids and then on the uh consulting side i'm hoping to do more geology you can see
from space tours in new mexico and by the way a lot of that geology new mexico is very similar to
geology on the moon and mars and other places so it's also what we call a planetary analog and it's
a way to explore the planets on earth so i'm hoping to do more of these tours i'm hoping to do um
more parabolic flights with the zero gravity corporation hoping to do more planetary gravity
tours and i can't say too much but i might be having a documentary tv show come out in the next
several years so uh edgy team
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no matter what it takes i at some point i don't even need the title astronaut i don't i don't need
that title i just want to go at least 50 miles up and and and i've experienced waitlessness on
airplanes but i i want that experience of and this sounds cheesy but communing with the cosmos
being separated from earth and getting that in sensation of what it must be like to be like a
citizen of the cosmos and not just planet earth i couldn't strap in fast enough yes
for students or i'll even say for grownups looking for a career change it's persistence
persistence persistence and if you know what you want and you want this thing more than you want
anything else don't let setbacks and full-out blockages stop you surround yourself with people
who are encouraging who can share your enthusiasm or at least encourage you in your enthusiasm
surround yourself with people smarter than yourself and don't be intimidated by that one thing that i
do on my nasa grand proposals is i bring people on who i know are smarter than me and i try not to
let that bother me because it takes teamwork so so don't be afraid of of collecting people around
in your circle of influence people who are smarter than you put yourself out there go network go to
events and conferences where you don't know anyone and just walk up to somebody and introduce yourself
it's scary but that works and people are flattered by it actually so i would say a lot of it comes down
to personal connections and persistence much more so than intelligence raw intelligence you don't have
to be super duper smart also one thing for the students and anyone looking for a career change
is that a master's degree or a phd in the sciences you don't have to pay for you actually get paid to
go to graduate school so that can help if you think it's too expensive to get a phd well it turns out
you can do it for your job hopefully that can be encouraging to some people hoping to you know
pursue the pursue space sciences
i've got a spaceship that i'm waiting for
i'm flying up to the stars i'm gonna dare to explore this time
i'll let you know what i find
you