The Inventivity Pod

Unmanned aerial vehicles started out as a military technology, but now have applications in fields like agriculture, surveying, search and rescue, pipeline monitoring, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief. Trevor Perrott, CEO and co-founder of Censys Technologies, explains what it’s like to start and run an aerospace startup company, and its market niche in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drones.

Unmanned aerial vehicles started out as a military technology, but now have applications in fields like agriculture, surveying, search and rescue, pipeline monitoring, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief. Trevor Perrott, CEO and co-founder of Censys Technologies, explains what it’s like to start and run an aerospace startup company, and its market niche in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drones.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Unmanned aerial vehicles started out as a military technology, but are now used in agriculture, surveying, search and rescue, pipeline, monitoring, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief. Welcome to Radio Cade . I’m your host Richard Miles. Today, my guest is Trevor Perrott, CEO, and co-founder of a UFA company called Censys Technologies in Daytona Beach, Florida. Welcome to Radio Cade, Trevor.

Trevor Perrott: 1:02

Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity and the platform.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So, I was getting a little bit of research on UAVs and I’m going to let you correct me to see how much, if it’s I , I get right or wrong, but UAV’s or drones is a lot of people refer to them now. And this dictatology has surprisingly been around a while in one form another, going back to the mid 19th century, 1849, when the Austrians used balloons loaded up with explosives to attack Venice. And then the concept was further developed also during war time, world war one, world war two, but it wasn’t really until the 1990s and two thousands that UAV’s started taking off so to speak. So now, we’re at the point where Amazon can make drone deliveries of small packages, consumers, and I’m guessing one day my pizza and beer will arrive the same way in the backyard, should be great. But my point is that this has grown to be an incredibly competitive market. So tell us where Censys is positioned in the market. What are your current line of products and how do you plan to grow and succeed and what has got to be a huge and rapidly growing market?

Trevor Perrott: 2:02

Well, the only thing I’m going to correct you on is that Amazon still can’t deliver packages. At least not at mass market. They’ve got some limited approvals to do some trial runs, but there’s still quite the problem still exists. And proving, we call resilient communications, resilient, UAS operations. A lot of those mass market opportunities hinge on something that we call it, BVLOS, which is actually an acronym that stands for Beyond Visual Line of Sight. So BVLOS, kind of slurring it a little bit then to BVLOS, that’s kind of where Censys position. We’re in a very small segment of companies that has onboard detect and avoid technology, which what that does is our drones are able to look across the sky and identify potential collisions and then avoid those collisions before they encroach what’s called a near miss. So, what was that to about a 4,000 feet or so is generally what we call a near miss. I think a lot of people kind of struggle with that spatial understanding that 4,000 feet is not a lot when objects are moving at hundreds of miles an hour. So it sounds big, but I promise that’s actually really close and the three dimensions, so where we’re at is aggregating all those technological pieces together. So mass market package delivery isn’t going to happen until communications are reliable and collisions are extremely unlikely, mitigated, almost in full . So that’s where we’re at.

Richard Miles: 3:40

So Trevor, just so I understand this correctly, it sounds like your line of UAVs are built and designed for much longer journeys than say some of the UAVs that people are used to seeing now that like say a construction company will use to fly around a building or even a farmer will use to survey of field and then critical to that is obviously the communications the entire time. Who are some of your clients? I don’t need company names, sort of like sectors or types of companies. What are the end users look like for your line of UAVs ?

Trevor Perrott: 4:09

So far, we’ve been selling a lot into the energy industry vertical, which includes the enterprise energy companies, as well as you can imagine, those enterprises have dozens of industrial service providers. So there are two main clientele in that market segment. We also very similarly, when you look at other verticals, construction or engineering firms, corporate agriculture is another big vertical. I think one of the things that I answered in the questionnaire is that the biggest thing that impresses me every day is that just application after application, after application keeps coming around , we just sold the drone it’s going to be used for low atmospheric weather research, which is something we had not done before. We’re selling several to validate different types of communications equipment. So it’s not necessarily performing a data acquisition mission, as you would think of it like taking pictures or video, it’s more proving that you can actually communicate in a reliable fashion.

Richard Miles: 5:13

Got it. So this year 2020, which we’re recording this episodes have been a tough year for a lot of companies, but for you all, it appears that it’s been pretty good in the sense that you’ve hit a couple of big milestones. I saw you got a grant from the Florida Israel innovation partnership, and then also significant investment later in the year from the venture fund. Tell us, what does the grant that you got for the Florida Israel partnership? It was to develop a communications platform, right? Something like that. Give us a few details about that.

Trevor Perrott: 5:41

Sure. So the grant was a little bit about the program. It’s an into stimulate economic activity between Florida and Israel. And we had an existing supplier that made a piece of communications hardware that we were using in the UAV. But some weaknesses with the current state-of-the-art are different frequencies will get blocked out by different things. For example, some frequencies get highly absorbed by vegetation because vegetation contains a lot of water. Other frequencies do not do well with terrain. They cannot bounce over Hills and mountains. So what we’re doing with mobile ACOM is developing a resilient communication system. That’s closer to frequency agnostic. And what that means is if you have frequency, A, B, a nd C, the same information is being shot down all three, but on the receiving end if you got a third of the message on frequency, a, a third on B and a third on C , we can actually rejoin all of those pieces and still get the information on the other side. So it’s just a way of reducing data loss over long range communications. Which are going to be key to making UAV’s stay for i n commercially viable.

Richard Miles: 7:04

Tell me what the partnership looks like. Do members of your team, are they in Israel or vice versa or the Israelis over in , Daytona Beach? Is this real time limited? Is this an agreement that you’ll work together for a certain amount of time, or is this indefinite where you’re working on a product development or software development that will eventually result in some sort of end use?

Trevor Perrott: 7:23

The end goal here is that our teams in Daytona Beach and Mobili Comms team is near Tel Aviv and Israel. And we’re kind of, co-developing what will eventually be a communications product. So this is not just R and D for fun. And it’s R and D to commercial lots .

Richard Miles: 7:42

Trevor, if you could just, for the benefit of our listeners, what are some applications that either you’re doing now or you think are possible say in the next couple years that are intuitively obvious to people in terms of applications of UAVs or drones.

Trevor Perrott: 7:56

There’s really starting to be a huge opening and environmental applications. So a lot of people don’t realize this, but the petroleum industry has tremendous problems with leaks in the pipelines. And it’s not just fluids, it’s gases . So how can you cost effectively patrol millions of miles of infrastructure and get an idea for where our methane leaks coming from? How much is it leaking? What’s going to be the cost to fix it. The current workflow is drive a truck down the right away and look for defects. That doesn’t sound that expensive, but when you carry that over, as I said, millions of miles, that’s one that I think is really interesting to see. So there are certain payloads, we call them sniffer payloads. They literally have air pass through them looking for different compounds. And from empirical data, you can kind of draw a line between, okay, if I saw this many parts per million at this distance, from the pipeline, then the leak is approximately X pounds of methane an hour.

Richard Miles: 9:06

Wow. That’s fascinating. Does this sort of capability, even in theory, could you do it over an underwater pipeline as well as a way to detect leakage? Or is that a little bit beyond the horizon at this point?

Trevor Perrott: 9:16

So underwater applications, there’s a lot of challenges. First of all, underwater communications is just a pain. You typically get stuck using extremely low frequency communications. And as you can get information from A to B, but you can’t get very much. So the higher, the frequency, typically the higher, the data rate, the lower, the frequency, the further away you can speak, but the less you can send at a time think morse code versus a phone call to kind of give you an analogy. So gas leaks, underwater, the gases do not disperse the water on the same way they do in the air, different fluid rules if you will.

Richard Miles: 9:55

Trevor, let’s talk a little bit about the company, your development of it. I noticed in August, you got a pretty significant investment from a venture fund in Florida. What part of your day, what part of your week is spent now talking to investors and as opposed to your engineers, is that a big part of your job now is finding that capital as your company starts expanding?

Trevor Perrott: 10:14

Well, I believe I’m probably in the minority of CEOs where as part of the transaction that you’re referring to, we got a couple of new directors that are just absolute all-stars and have really lightened my load in the pursuit of other sources of capital. So that freed me up, the name of the game for me is racking the revenue number as high as I can. And one of the things about this kind of a business where it does take investment capital to get it going is that capital gets capital is the name of it. So if you can get the investor capital, then you can get the revenue. If you get the revenue the nation, you have more investor capital. And then the, so goes the engine, but kind of like a pull start on a lawnmower if you never get the first spark. And it’s kind of hard to, because of the turnover.

Richard Miles: 11:03

Well , you are in an enviable position because the common complaint from a lot of startup CEOs is that here you are spending 90% of your time in design development, doing that first prototype, and then boom, you make it big. And all of a sudden that CEO has got to be on the road, hustling to get the resources, to develop the company and keep going. And it’s a little bit of shock because it’s a different world entirely. So the fact that you have some board members that can help you do that is fantastic because otherwise you would hit a sort of design and production bottom up pretty quickly. If one person is trying to do it all. I’d really like to explore a bit about your development as an entrepreneur, because clearly it sounds like you know what you’re doing and learned quite a bit. You’re a relatively young guy. Of course, the older I get, everyone looks a little bit younger to me. So you’re probably not as young as I think you are, but you started and founded and running a mid-sized company now. Tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur. I know you grew up in a small town in Illinois in the middle of a cornfield as he put it, and your dad was a carpenter. Your mom was a teacher and you learned how to mill metal from your grandfather. So tell us about that experience growing up, how you think it shaped you in terms of who you are now growing up in that hands-on environment. And bonus question is, were you a good student in school? So I know it’s a big question, but lets start there.

Trevor Perrott: 12:12

Let me hit the bonus question first, if you measure by my grades alone, I was an excellent student, but if I’m being honest, I would say, no, I wasn’t. And what I’m getting at with that is I would feel that generally speaking, I was blessed with a pretty sharp mind and I never had to study, never had do this, just did not have to put in nearly as much effort to yield the same result as some of my classmates. And I’m not saying that to boast. I’m saying that as when I got to college, it kind of kicked my butt because I went straight from high school into engineering school and it was night and day. So coming back to the other points that you asked about the hands-on environment, I think was very essential to who I am. It may terrify some people, but I’m going to say it anyway. You would be amazed at how many people will not just get into engineering school, but graduated, still having never changed the oil on the car. And what I’ve learned is that that basic skillset of having to fix things, having to build things, whatever is not something that’s natural. So in the business context, I’ve had to be extremely selective about the people that they come into the organization. And a lot of it has been focused on. Have you ever built something before? Have you ever had to do the colloquial square peg in the round hole problem and were you successful? So, the nice thing about being in a cornfield I guess, is that you get to experiment with a bunch of things that you wouldn’t be able to do in the city environment. I’m a piro at heart. I love to blow things up. And I think doing that in the country is a blessing you can’t pick up in the study environment.

Richard Miles: 14:03

Are your grandfather and father still living?

Trevor Perrott: 14:06

My father is, my grandfather passed a few years ago.

Richard Miles: 14:09

Had you already you started the company before your grandfather passed away?

Trevor Perrott: 14:13

About a year before he died. Yes.

Richard Miles: 14:15

Alright. I’m sure he must’ve been very proud to see that sort of hands-on training come to fruition. Number of years later.

Trevor Perrott: 14:21

You got to hear about several failures and that first year, how much prompting was there? I’m not sure.

Richard Miles: 14:27

Well, grandparents are usually good at hiding their worries. So maybe he was worried, but in the end you certainly proved them right in starting and running your own company, Trevor, what have been your biggest surprises? What were your expectations when you founded the company and then what would have been those big surprises ? Is there anything you’ve looked back on and said, man, I was totally wrong about that. And then if you’d like to share any big failures early on, and what did you learn from them?

Trevor Perrott: 14:50

So cards on the table, this is the first venture back company that I have been involved with. And I would say the biggest weakness that I walked in with that I think I’ve turned into a strength is I was actually really weak in finance. I did not have a lot of understanding about how to control and articulate financial mechanisms to get a particular objective accomplished. I kind of have taken myself to school a little bit on corporate finance, a lot of reading, a lot of textbook greeting on corporate finance and one of the most important lessons, curve balls, that I’d say hit me definitely the first year and a half of the company is you have to be extremely judicious on who you allow to advise you. Because one of the things that I’ve learned is that I was actually getting fed a lot of what makes perfect sense, but it’s still not true about how to start this kind of a company . The best example I have for that is that the first business plan I ever read from this company said, I’m going to need about two and a half million dollars of capital. I’m going to need three years and it is impractical and hazardous to try and do it a different way. And what I found myself getting into was we raised capital $25,000 at a time. And we were in this perpetual cycle of a little bit of revenue, a little bit of investor capital and the peace meal, very, very nearly killed us. So I think that the big lesson for me is you really got a stick to your guns about there is a minimum amount of capital you need to get going and don’t put your customers on the hook if you can’t get a hold of it. So that’s something that was definitely a learning experience for me .

Richard Miles: 16:46

So one thing that founders of companies get asked to do, and certainly a successful companies is to speak to students and you probably already have had that experience. But if you haven’t, you will soon, whether it’s a bunch of bright high school students or engineering or business students in college, what would be some pearls of wisdom that you would dispense if you have somebody similar, like it’s say a first-year engineering student at some university is saying, wow, I really admire what you’ve done. I want to do something like that. What would be your advice from that angle? Say a bright 12th grader or a freshman or sophomore at an engineering or a business program at a university?

Trevor Perrott: 17:20

Well, believe it or not, I don’t have a whole lot of great things to say, because to do the kind of company that I did, it was very capital intensive. The things we sell are expensive, which is good, except you also need a lot of capital to build it in the first place. So what that really means is I think I commented to you in the questionnaire that you got to do things like take a second mortgage on your house and max out your card. And I do not come from a bunch of money, but I’m the son of the teacher and a carpenter. Now I know there are people in this world that are far worse off than I am. Well , let’s just say we weren’t sitting on 2 million in cash to put into a business endeavor . So you have to walk into this and you have to really, really ask yourself, will I literally bet the farm to do this? And if the answer is no, then don’t start, don’t waste anybody else’s time, including your own, because you can always make more money, but time when it’s gone, it’s gone. So some of the risks that I took or so large and still continued to be pretty big actually, then I’m just not so sure that it’s for everybody. And I think our culture, we like to glorify entrepreneurship a lot, like universities have entire centers of entrepreneurship established. And I think that we really have to be more honest culturally with entrepreneurs. Like one of the comments that I also made is that founding CEOs are not overpaid. If they take all of those risks and then they end up absolutely killing it, extremely high risk, extremely high reward. I just think we have to be more honest culturally with entrepreneurs. And what really goes into that because a lot of times entrepreneurs are so busy that they never sit down to tell you exactly how high the stakes were.

Richard Miles: 19:17

Those are great observations, Trevor, and got me thinking you’re right. There is a way in which popular culture and university programs and so on have kind of made entrepreneurship seem safer than it is, or like less risky than it is. And they hype the exciting part of it, right? But not the potential downsides. And it also strikes me too, that there’s this continuum between risk tolerance, where you’re willing to try new things, but also kind of gut confidence. Right? I imagine you wouldn’t do something like take out a second mortgage unless you had high confidence in the product, and the idea you’re developing was really solid. You didn’t just take a flyer and like, eh , maybe this work may be a wall and I’m guessing you told yourself, I know this is going to work. I just got to find the path there.

Trevor Perrott: 19:57

Yeah. The thing that has driven me to really keep my foot on the gas is every now and again, I’ll see a video clip of a guy hanging out of a helicopter, working on a power line. And I know the stats about how risky his job is. And I just shake my head and say, there has got to be a better way. There has to be. And there’s 8% of every seat we put in the ground is lost to something preventable, poor irrigation, some disease that we didn’t know about that ended up eating the whole field. If the world’s food consumption is going to double between now and 2050, how the hell are you going to solve that problem? If 8% of what you plant now is lost . So there’s a lot of very, very global, very, very real problems that what we’re working on will solve. And sometimes I have to set my own team down and say things like we are going to have a lot of problems this week, but we are paid to solve them. We are paid problem solvers . So the way I tried to describe it as my job is ultimately leading people into a love affair with problem solving. Because if you do not have this passion to just go from one problem to the next to the next to the next, it will overwhelm you.

Richard Miles: 21:18

That’s a great quote, I love it. Leaving people in the love affair with problem solving . I remember talking to another CEO once of a startup company. And he said that he had to strike the right balance in sharing updates on the company, how it was doing with the employees, but not too much because what he found was if he, every day sort of gave an update, like here’s our cashflow , here’s our burn rate. They were getting totally stressed out and they couldn’t concentrate on the work anymore. So he decided I need to dial back on the transparency for their sake. So you’re honest with them. You tell them where you are, but you don’t necessarily have to share every single up and down every single day, because you don’t want the people under you to have unrealistic picture, but you also need to give them that room to focus. I imagine that happens with you as well, right? You don’t want them to be too distracted by everything that comes across your desk .

Trevor Perrott: 21:58

Absolutely. I have two co-founders and one of the growing pains of 2020 has been listen, guys, I’m not trying to hide anything from you, but for you to be effective and do the role that the company needs you to do, I can not bog you down with every single issue that comes across my desk, nor do I want you to bog me down with every single thing that comes across your desk. Ask yourself, do I need him? And if the answer is, yes, I need him. Then you’d call every time. But if you don’t then handle it yourself, that’s been something that in our core team, we’ve really had the work on this year, especially with all the moving parts. You talk about that I’m in an enviable position in a lot of ways. That’s very true, except we are still expected to perform. Our customers still expect us to be there. The product still has to work right. The revenue has got to be where it needs to be. There are very real things where the buck stops somewhere. And I guess that’s what me.

Richard Miles: 23:05

Trevor, one final question, you certainly have gotten off to a great start. Where do you see the company where to see Censys Technologies? Let’s say in five years?

Trevor Perrott: 23:13

Well, in five years, I want to be one of the companies that was responsible for mass market adoption of commercial drones. I want to be in that large middle ground between not really quiet household like Amazon yet, but people see our logo. It’s not novel. We’re trying to build a multi-billion dollar company here and that’s no small feat is going to take more investor capital. It’s going to take a lot of wins on the commercial front to get there, but I truly believe we can get there that there is a well , that is deep enough for that condition to be true. I always ask myself, okay, this thing that we’re about to go do, if we got 1% of 1% of the total market share, is it still a big number? And so long as that answer is yes, then we go forward. I just think that I can lead an effort where we control a few percentage points of the market. And if we do that and you’re talking in billions, how many people are happily employed because of that? How many people aren’t on the unemployment line because of that? How many people then die in a helicopter this year? Because of that, there’s some very real metrics that I think we can put a dent in.

Richard Miles: 24:27

Well, I’m certainly off, like I said to a very good start. And I think it strikes me that you benefit highly from being in a highly competitive market. Because as you said, you can’t rest. I mean, the market demands certain things and your company needs to have that revenue and so on. And it’s a market accountability. That’s I think going to make you grow. That’s where I take back what I said earlier. Maybe you shouldn’t spend any time doing motivational speaking at all because that’s usually the one sign , right? When a CEO has gone wrong and they become a celebrity CEO and they quit running their companies, you probably shouldn’t do that yet. But Trevor, thanks for being on the show today. Really appreciate your insights and wish you the best of luck.

Trevor Perrott: 25:01

Well, I really appreciate the invitation again, man . Thank you so much. And let me know when the podcast goes, live.

Richard Miles: 25:08

Will do.

Outro: 25:11

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Just 20 years ago the dream of starting a space company could not have become a reality unless you had significant capital and access to government programs. Mark Sirangelo, one of the founders of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, along with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, joins us to discuss how the space industry is becoming far more accessible and how you can start your very own space company.

Just 20 years ago the dream of starting a space company could not have become a reality unless you had significant capital and access to government programs. Mark Sirangelo, one of the founders of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, along with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, joins us to discuss how the space industry is becoming far more accessible and how you can start your very own space company.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Welcome to a special edition of Radio Cade. I’m your host, James Di Virgilio. And today we’re going to explore what sort of space company we might want to start, which kind of venture would you get into? What would be the wise thing to do? And how complicated is this? My guest today is Mark Sirangelo. He is one of the pioneers of commercial space flight, the commercial space industry, and someone who has a wealth of knowledge and depth of expertise, not only in space, but a wide variety of entrepreneurial ventures and projects. Mark, thanks for being with us today.

Mark Sirangelo: 1:10

Well, thank you, James. I’m excited to talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics here and talk a little bit about the future and how people who might be looking at space might look at it.

James Di Virgilio: 1:20

Now let’s revisit the past here you were in fact, one of the pioneers of commercial space flight . So non-government oriented space flight , private space flight. What was the genesis for that? And what did that look like in those days?

Mark Sirangelo: 1:33

I’d be happy to go back a bit. And it’s funny because in going retrospective, you sometimes think it’s decades, but it really wasn’t. Most of what is now known as the commercial space flight industry largely started in the early 2000s. And in my case, 2004, when I took over a small little company called SpaceDev, that was based in San Diego. But about that time, it was interesting for me and a number of others who sort of created the foundation of this industry. We all seem to a number of us and I’m speaking of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Paul Allen, and a number of other people all from different directions started to look at the space industry and say that as an industry, it had not been disrupted in any really significant way for quite a long time. Really the only bellwether entrepreneurial company was a company called Orbital Sciences that was started by Dave Thompson. Who spun out of graduate school with an idea and a project that turned into a very significant company. But beyond that and a few others there , it was really not a sector in space for the most part was dominated by legacy companies, very large companies. And I think there was a convergence of people who had experience in disrupting other industries or who involved in the tech growth industry of the nineties and the early two thousands who looked at space and said, this seemed to be in an area which has a fascination to it. And that’s not a small part of why people get engaged, but had not been really refreshed for many, many years and decades, even. And from different perspectives. All within a couple of years, we approach various problems in space and said, how could we do this differently with a couple of benefits and one might see detriments, but the benefits being that none of us myself included had grown up in the space industry. We all had experience from other areas, but in doing that, we all had a pretty clean mind about how we might do it. And one of the challenges I think the industry had faced is because there’d been so much money invested into infrastructure and machine and equipment and processes that was very hard for them to step away and look at things differently. And I know in my own case, as I got together and a number of us met in the early days and sort of talked about how we might do this and how the industry might move forward. Most of the people and the names that I mentioned all gravitated to the rocket or the launch business, and the idea of finding a much less expensive way to bring things to space. And I think Elon puts it pretty well in that at the time, the rockets, which were one use rockets cost about the same as a seven 47, would you fly a seven 47 once and then throw it away. And that was his early comment in looking at this. And I think others felt the same way and still are in all those people are absent . Paul passed away recently were involved in getting up the space industry, mostly in the area of propulsion. I took similar view of disruption, but in my direction, in my company’s direction, surrounded by a tremendous group of very energetic people, numbering just about a couple of dozen people. In the early days, we decided to look at what was being brought to space, what goes on top of these rockets. And that would be the satellite industry. That would be the sensor industry. That would be the rock , the motors that move things around this space, not launched them. And we took a hard look at that and decided that the satellite industry really could benefit from the knowledge that came from other industries, other industries, meaning the computer laptop business or the medical device industry, many of which were able to build pretty exquisite stuff in a way that was not being done in space. Most satellites were being built by hand even into the early 2000s. So my path took me down the direction of wildlife associates out in the industry. We’re all looking to figure out how to launch things better, cheaper, and faster. I went to what would we launch on these things? And that seemed to be a fortuitous path to take, because it was at least in the early days, a lot less competition in that area, but it was a very difficult thing to do space. The reason why it hadn’t had new entries is that it’s a very capital intensive business. The primary customers being governments or large companies don’t really want to risk their business on new entries. It requires precision that requires a lot of quality control, a lot of gut checking on what you’re trying to accomplish. And that is very difficult to stand up. But nonetheless, we were able to take credit for launching one of the very first small satellites into orbit satellite with something small satellite, which has become fairly common these days at the time was not. I could control that satellite from my laptop, which was a pretty big breakthrough. And we produced it in the terms of months instead of years, and for tens of millions of dollars instead of hundreds of millions of dollars. But to do that, my motivation was not in and our groups motivation was not look to the space industry. We actually went out to look at other places, for example, Dell computer, which at the time was riding high building, essentially custom computers from a standardized system of choices and delivering fairly quickly a custom computer to your home. And we said, well, why can’t we apply some of these other techniques to space? And it worked quite well. We were part of a team that got us on the map. We won something called the X prize. We were part of the team that won the first X prize and at that time, and it seems crazy in some ways now, but the prize was to take a human on a spaceship to space and be able to do that three times in a month without any government money and working together with scaled composites and Paul Allen who financed it. We were able to do that and something called SpaceShipOne, which now hangs in the Smithsonian, and our company’s contribution to that was the rocket motor that enabled that trip to take place. And it was done out in the Mojave desert and felt very much like the wild West in many ways. It was quite an interesting environment. And still to this day, many entrepreneurial space companies gravitate to the high deserts out in California to collaborate and work together.

James Di Virgilio: 7:33

So let’s visit for a second, Mark, something you mentioned. So you have private companies entering in, you have this disruption as you’re mentioning, and you touched on large companies, the risk reward benefit, how they may not want to invest so heavily. And as you mentioned, new ideas, new ventures, more risky ideas. Why is it in your opinion that governments in general are obviously not going to be looking at the same things that you did that Elon did that others did? Like you just mentioned what the Dell computer, why is it that there is sort of that blinder effect that they don’t approach the problem the same way?

Mark Sirangelo: 8:07

You know, it’s interesting. And I like to think of myself as a bit of a historian. And when you actually look at cycles, and one of the things that propelled us in the early days was that, although what we were doing was new to the space industry, what we were doing in terms of disruption was certainly not new. If you went back into the seventies and eighties and looked at the birth of the computer, most people look at these computers in the personal computer industry and said, what could you possibly want to do at home? What could you do with a computer that has no computing power and has no battery power and so on and so forth. And most of the mainframe companies at that time just looked at that industry and said, it just doesn’t make any sense to us to go do this. And, and famously, they looked at software and they said, this software is not where the money is. It’s in hardware . And as many people know, that’s what launched Microsoft. IBM at the time did not think software is important. Then they seeded that largely to Bill Gates and Microsoft, as it turns out far clips to the hardware industry. And I bring that up only to say that those kinds of thinking processes in my view were exhibited in the space industry as well, that people looked at these small satellites and realized our first few satellites, we couldn’t do very much. It was like Sputnik was in the 1950s. Basically we can send it up and make some noise with it, take a few pictures maybe. And that was about it. And no one saw it as a serious tool for being used in government or being used in business. And the mistake was made that is, that had been made in the past that people just discounted it and this then credited it off to something else. If you look at Kodak who owned the photography and camera market for 50 years and had its 70 or 80% market share, they decided that digital photography would never work. And they are now relegated to historical footnote, if you will. And I think that philosophy is what drove us in that said it’s a very big market, which is very important when you’re starting something it’s tens of billions of dollars a year in acquisition. If you could break into that marketplace, even in a small way, it’s a fair amount of revenue. And I think Elon and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and others looked at the launch market and said, well, there’s 20 to 40 launches a year. And in each one costs a couple of hundred million dollars. If we can bring a product to market at half that price, aren’t we going to have a really good chance of getting a significant share in the market. And that’s in fact what happened.

James Di Virgilio: 10:27

So then let’s look at what happens. Like you mentioned, they are successful with that as we’ve all witnessed in a watch. And now that marketplace, as you mentioned, very competitive, the rocket, they get to space, if you will marketplace. And now we’re seeing space businesses obviously grow in range of diversity because we can get there with rockets because we can get there more efficiently. We can now begin to say, well, Hey, maybe more people have access to doing things and helping things which brings us to our topic for today. As you look around the landscape, as you’re seeing what’s needed, as you’re seeing maybe the next wave of disruption, what are some ideas or what are some endeavors that people can begin to work on further disrupting. And this, as you mentioned, large market large industry.

Mark Sirangelo: 11:07

Just to put it in perspective from the time where I launched into this industry, which is 17 years ago now, 16, 17 years ago, the company that I held was privileged to lead , or the several companies that we may end up doing acquisitions and mergers had completed over 300 space missions. And something we built has gone to seven of the nine planets has gone to the sun. It’s gone to our moon in my wildest dreams. Would I have thought that I would have visited seven planets in my space career? It was not something we were thinking about. We have done that and survived , but in part, I think every entrepreneur has to look at their business. And one of the hardest things to do is to be completely honest about it. Not only honest about the technology, but the timeframes, how long might it take. And in my case, when I looked at it, it was clearer to me that we could build the technologies. It was less clear to me that we would be accepted. And it was even less clear that even if we weren’t accepted many of these things take years to come to fruition. We were on the new horizons mission to Pluto, which took 10 years to get to Pluto, but it took six years to build. And so from start to finish, it was almost a 15 or 16 year journey. And when you’re starting a small company, how do you survive with those kinds of timeframes? So you have to look at it. And in my case, I made a pretty fateful decision. And that was while I was pursuing these big dreams of rocket motors and satellites. And eventually the craziest part of that was that we thought we could build a replacement for the space shuttle when we were less than 50 people on the space shuttle at the time was still flying in at 18,000 people working on it. But that was disruption at its maximum concept, if you will. And it has come to fruition that we did wind up building the spaceship. It is now built and tested, and it’s going to be flying here within the next year. So it was a long journey, but well, over 10 years we went from a crazy concept to something that could be one of the basis for US space flight for a long time to come. But in the midst of all those dreams you have to survive. One has to, I use the analogy. I may want to become a movie star, but I’m waiting tables for a while until I do. And in our case, what we decided to do is to go into the manufacturer of components and the pieces of other people’s spacecraft. It was not the most glamorous part of it. It wasn’t the most exciting dream part of it, but we got to be good at it. And we found out that everybody would buy our parts and our components and it paid the light bills and still does in any way. It’s a good business. If you get into it, it’s not the glamorous part of the business, but it is a good business. And I think in every entrepreneurial mindset, you have to look at what it is that you ultimately are going to do. But then you have to look at how do you get there? Part of it’s raising money. Part of it is having enough business to keep yourself afloat. Part of it is to build a reputation and we made a pretty fateful choice and somewhat laughed at at the time to diverge a part of our resources to go into this business and bought a company that was doing that and added them to the mix. So we had this idea of two or three big dream projects supported by a lot of sort of blocking and tackling simple stuff. And as I look at today, one of the things I think I talk about when I lecture at the University of Colorado and privileged to be able to do that, but a lot of people want to talk about the hardware, particularly since I’ve built so much of it and my teams have built so much of it. And it’s exciting, it’s sure is it’s exciting to build a new shuttle . It’s exciting to build a satellite, or we were on five missions to Mars that landed on Mars and sitting on the mountain here in Colorado and looking up at Mars, you’d say, you know, something I’ve built in touched is on that little star up there. It’s pretty mind-blowing. But what I do that today, and the answer is probably not as alluring and sexy is the rockets. And the hardware is a lot of people have entered that space. And particularly on the satellite side, it has become more and more ubiquitous in the sense of people trying to build small satellites. But what isn’t and where I would go is I think a little bit different. And again, history shows an analogy, but in the past 50 or so years, we have normally somewhere in the 3 to 5,000, depending on how you count them, satellites have launched. And that’s from the beginning of the space industry in the 1950s, that number of satellites will be launched in the next five years. And when you think of that, what’s the outcome of that while we’ve got all this hardware that’s up there. Now, the question is, what do we do with it? And my analogy here is imagine that you S had broadband to every house in America, but didn’t have anything on broadband. What has happened in the last 10 years, you’ve seen this massive movement to apps, this massive movement to content providers, and everyone can turn on their TV and get 900 channels. Now it’s not so much about the hardware anymore in maybe with an exception of 5g and a few things. Most of it is about what you deliver. And I think that analogy is where I would go in space. There’s going to be a significant amount of space, data, and access to other data. And the question is, what do you do with it? And I talk about the space app industry. What are the apps from space using this amount of information 10 years ago? If you talk to someone about the fact that we would get all our airline and travel done on our phones, and we would not need maps and everything would be done electronically, we do all our banking from our living room. People would have questioned that maybe thought you were a little nuts, but that’s in fact what’s happened. And it is happened because the hardware was built to accommodate it. But mostly because we now have a way to get that information. I have a friend who was involved with the Apple music business and they said, well, we had the Apple, the iPods and other music devices. We knew we could build them and we had them, but we had to wait until broadband hit to about 30% of the US market before we could really launch the business because no, one’s going to wait two hours to download a song. And that’s what’s happening in space. We were at the precipice of having huge amount of data and infrastructure. Some of it is going to be used for traditional methods. Others are though , it’s going to be open for creativity. How can one use this information? What new businesses can you derive? Some of it we’re seeing right now, we’re all going through the COVID response in our own way, in our own personal lives. But one of the things that’s come out of it is this idea of telemedicine using phones, using computers, to visit with doctors, to get a lot of our medical information moved and taken care of. That’s a new business that was driven forward faster because of the pandemic. But nonetheless, it’s a use of what I would call the app side of life, as opposed to the hardware side of life. And we’re seeing that in space. And I think that would be a big area that I would look at. How does one create new businesses? Businesses are , or applications. People may not even know they need or want right now. And that to me is where that opening is in the future.

James Di Virgilio: 17:56

Lets take what tends to be the sexiest story of entrepreneurship, which is somebody in their garage, tinkering with an idea, somebody nowadays writing code somewhere by themselves, somebody just off and their little nook, thinking about a problem and solving it. Are there any problems like that, that people are able to work on? Let’s call it the garage entrepreneur in space, or is it still too capital intensive as you mentioned earlier?

Mark Sirangelo: 18:20

Well, I think the point here is that someone else is building the infrastructure. You can tap into it, those people in the garages that do what they’re doing. They’re not building broadband networks, but they’re accessing it. We all are from our homes. So you don’t have to look very far to look at how much the access to broadband has changed our everyday lives. I mean, I probably have a hundred apps on my phone doing everything I ever wanted to do. So I think to look at this and say, you have to have hundreds of millions of dollars to raise a ticket in some space. That is the case now, or has been the case. It was the case in my run up. But I think once this infrastructure is up there, it’s going to be for sale. So let’s take, for example, several companies are doing imaging from space, commercially that used to be the privilege of the governments of the world. You can pretty much now get imaging of any location, any time that you want. The question is how good is the image and how fast is it updated, which is going to change very rapidly. So for example, the real estate industry where you will not buy or sell house in most of America without seeing images of that house from space, most, every realtor uses that somehow to show you the neighborhood, to show you the house, to show you what the property looks like to show you where you sit relative to those shopping malls that didn’t exist a few years ago. And that’s all using space imagery that imagery for the most part is weeks or months old. And what’s happening now is that imaging might be days old or hours old. What new industries can come out of that one for example, is that cities are managing their locations from space, a lot more actively using cameras, remote cameras, and imaging, big cities out here in the West, where I live. You can figure out where to go pile their streets by looking at the snow drifts and the snow falls and vectoring the piling to a place that’s needed more. We’re seeing how their huge forest fires out in the West. Many of those images from space are now telling us where to send the firefighters. And that helps us put the fires out, save lives, save a lot of money, but also helps us save the forest that we’re in those kinds of trends, which are already here are only going to accelerate very rapidly in the future. And the people who have the idea. If I were looking at this, I would say, how do I use that infrastructure to solve a problem that either hasn’t been solved in a good way, or maybe people don’t even know they want solved yet to me, that’s the wave of change here. Yes. They’re going to be people who still want to build small satellites or want to put the camera up in space, but that marketplace has dozens of companies already in it. I would say, if I were doing this, I’d go to the soft side of this, the software side, and figure out assuming that all this happens in the next few years, how do I use it for the betterment of society, for the people I need for the businesses that might need it? We used our satellites, for example, to track there’s a company out there as a public company called Orbcomm that I worked with in the past and their business was not space. We built the satellites for them. Their business was to track things for other people. So Walmart wanted to know where all their trucks were and FedEx wanted to know where all their packages, where they could track using space, tracking all those assets so that somebody sitting in Bentonville, Arkansas, who runs all the assets for Walmart , knows exactly where every one of their mobile assets is at any point in time. And not only knows where it is, but also knows how it is. What speed is, is it parked ? Is it moving? Is it, if it’s a refrigerated truck is a refrigerated compartment at the right temperature, all that’s using a commercial privately built space asset to do. And the reason you can get on your phone and find out where your Amazon packages immediately is because of this infrastructure.

James Di Virgilio: 21:55

Now we can look at this. You mentioned Dell earlier, just like the computer industry, right? Once upon a time, not that many years ago, computer was a huge, massive capital intensive fixed cost item. And now of course, your cell phone right, is a supercomputer and everyone has access. As you mentioned to app stores to code writing, to open source platforms, to all the things that allow you to go on and do the things you do without thinking about it. You know, once upon a time nobody would have had access. I think there’s this demystification of space. That is your saying seems to be right on the horizon of happening where right now, if you think, if you talk to most people, space feels so pioneering so far away, solving problems seems almost so other worldly. So complicated yet on this Radio Cade series, we find out that every person we talk to, they get into it much like somebody gets on any business here on earth, they get introduced to it and they see a problem and they think, well, I’ve got some expertise that might be able to solve that problem in the landscape. Your painting is that these problems are going to becoming more available, essentially becoming more available for someone to solve versus before, where as you mentioned, you know, you had to be a government or you had to be one of the engineers or thought leaders on the project, but pretty soon that’s not going to be the case. And then there’s going to be a wide array of options in space. It almost seems too, sci fi oriented to think that that’s so close, but here that is. And what I want to talk about now is your background. I get this question a lot. Yeah. But I don’t have the right background for that. Or I didn’t go to school for that specific thing. Or I just would have no way of getting into that. But your background is fascinating. You were a photographer, you were involved with Broadway, and now here you are. And if you just listened to the majority of this podcasts , I’m sure it’s quite surprising for the listener to find out what you have done, how Mark do those things possibly coincide. How do you get to where you are today?

Mark Sirangelo: 23:41

Thank you, but I think one of the things I like to talk about is the idea that they , these worlds that people think are so disparate actually coincide quite a lot. In my case, I have lived an active artistic path while I was building businesses. As space was my third entrepreneurial business that I was able to build and be successful in, but I never really left what I’ll call the artistic side, left brain, right brain. And the reason I say that is because most of what I do or most of what happens, even in something as technical as the space industry is art in a different way to bring an example of that, going to land a Rover on Mars. Very few people would think is art. But before that ever happened, somebody had to sit there and come up with the creative idea of how would we do this? What would the vehicle look like? What does Mars look like? How do you imagine the elements and something that you will never see personally, that we only have skin images on. And many of the people in my organization, which grew to be thousands of people, I would say are the creative mind. There’s a creative mind. There’s the people who come up with the creative idea and turn it into a prototype. And then people who take the prototype and figure out how to make it and make it successfully. If I can say in a broad scope, in any successful entrepreneurial company. And then there’s the fourth element of that, which is all the people who keep the company and all the activities of the company working and those four elements of any successful entrepreneur company and the three that I’ve built, you have that balance and that tension between those pieces. But you need all those pieces. You can’t come up with an idea. Even the conversation we’re having today is what do you do in the future? People think of that as somehow business orientated or technical orientated, and certainly is. But a lot of that is in the creative side. And many of the people that I employed, even directly artists, frankly, in this space, because we storyboarded out, like you would storyboard a movie, we storyboarded out. What would it be like to build this vehicle? And there’s an awful lot of overlap between the two. And I like to point that out for people. The other two things I would add is that space is somewhat of a paradox. And the paradox is that most people who aren’t in it believe it to be so advanced. They can’t conceive it. But the truth of it, most things that happen in space are actually behind the technology that exists on earth. It takes somewhere. If you’re building a big satellite or a program to go to another planet or even a spaceship, it can take 10 to 15 years from concept to flight in that period of time, somewhere around, let’s say, if it’s a ten-year program, somewhere around year three, you’re locking down the design, which means the computers, the sensors, everything that’s on there is what exists in year three. It may not launch until year seven. It may not get to where it’s going to year 10. So by the time it gets there in year 10, it’s using seven year old technology. And that is the case for virtually all the things that happen in space. And when you think of it in those terms, in some ways, the paradox is that it is less mystifying because in fact, it’s a bunch of computers and a bunch of sensors and cameras and wiring and composites and metals all put together to do something. And yes , it’s a very difficult thing to do, but the elements are not that difficult. And the other piece that I think is important as , as you do this, is that not everybody needs to be a specialist. The joke that a lot of people talk about saying it’s not rocket science. Well in my world, it was rocket science. And I was fortunate to have well over a thousand PhDs and rocket scientists. And I’d like to say, if I am successful, if I walk into a room and I’m the least smart person in the room, that wasn’t my job, my job wasn’t to be the specific person who knew physics, about how something lands on Mars. There are people who know that you spend your whole life on those kinds of things. My job was to round up all these very smart people, all of whom were smarter than me and get them to move in the right direction and make the right calls about where to move them and to get them to believe in what I was doing enough to follow me down that path. And I think people confuse the two that yes, I’ve become one of the leaders of the space industry. And I’ve had this fabulous career, but the idea is mostly behind. I am fortunate enough to have so many talented, good people. All of whom were specialists, that we were able to point in the right directions and win most times.

James Di Virgilio: 27:58

And that’s such a true picture of here on earth or here in space, as you mentioned, needing each other, needing creative diversity, needing different skillsets , what motivates us and utilizing the people skills, the different desires we have to come together and truly achieve something fascinating. When you described standing on top of a mountain in Colorado and seeing something you touched reach Mars, right, reach a planet that is such a great depiction of what an incredible creative process that took. And oftentimes we think of sciences, anti creative, which couldn’t be further from the truth is you just mentioned to look up in the sky and say, I want to get there. And I’m going to figure out how to get there is absolutely peak creativity. And as you mentioned, there are going to be more and more questions, more and more things that we can do to explore, to take things that we learned from space and improve the very lives that we live here on earth, as well as going into space. And all of those things are going to occur. As you mentioned, in , in what is a frontier market, that’s becoming much more accessible as a closing thought here, Mark, as you look out into the future, as you see where we are, I’d be remissed. If I didn’t ask you, there’s so many projections, when are we going to wind up being on the moon? When are we going to be on Mars? How realistic do you think some of these projections are about humans, truly having any kind of actual stable setup on any planet? Is this really as close as people make it out to be? Is that something that’s going to happen or is that too much of a moonshot right now?

Mark Sirangelo: 29:25

No, I think it is when you say close, close in space terms, I think is entirely feasible that we will have some type of presence on the moon within the next 10 years. And I don’t just mean sending someone there to walk around and take pictures and bring home rocks. I think what we’re moving towards and it’s pretty rapidly moving towards this is to have something. The easiest example is what we have in Antarctica and Antarctica research station that exists on the moon. And there’s a lot more similarities in those connections than most people realize. And Antarctica is the station we’ve been having for 50 years. It’s visited by countries all over the world. It’s not owned by any one country. And the research goes on there every year and people come in and out of the research station and do their work. They don’t stay there forever. And sometimes only there for a few months at a time. And it’s an enormously harsh environment that takes two or three days to get to some times . That’s what I think we’re going to wind up having on the moon. And there’s a lot of good reasons for it. Some of those are scientific. Some of those are resource driven. There’s potentially huge amounts of resources on the moon. We have found that there is significant what appears to be water ice for much of the Southern hemisphere and the moon, and perhaps even elsewhere. And we also want to think about, we have a space station that’s been flying around for the last 20 years this week as its 20th anniversary of the space station, being a human, going to the space station for the first time. But that’s base stations in the latter years of its life and is not going to continue. And there isn’t any plans and you made your plans to build a new one. I think that idea is shifting to saying rather than having something that’s mechanical, that’s flying around and tends to fall apart. Why not move that concept and put it permanently on the moon? We have everything that we need to do that some things have to be developed. We have to develop the right landing systems and the rovers and the computers and all those things. But there isn’t anything major there that has to be created in my view, the living part of it has to be figured out, how do we actually live there for long-term we’ve been living in space. Our astronaut’s been there for six to 12 months at a time they come home. There’s no harm to it. So I think that is well within the realistic possibilities and those things that need to be developed are largely onto the development path. And then the question is, could we go to Mars? Well, certainly we could go to Mars. We’ve already sent things there and they’re working and they’re working as we speak right now. And there’s a new Mars Rover that it’s on its way there. It’s about halfway to Mars. It’s going to land in another four months or so. So we have proven we can get there. And the question is, do we need to go there with humans? And what will it take to send a human there? And it’s really not about the time as much humans have survived in isolation kinds of situations for more than a 9 or 12 months, it takes to get to Mars. But right now the human going to Mars wouldn’t survive the trip because of radiation and other issues. And the question is, is that necessary? And that’s become an esoteric question I think is as society, both in the United States and around the world, do we want to continue that exploration it’s expensive. It takes a lot of commitment, probably a global kind of cooperation to get to Mars because no one country has those resources. Do we want to do it? And do we want to do it as humans? Do we want to continue the pattern of exploration that goes back now, thousands of years, when the first people got on their first sailboats and started moving, why did the Polynesians leave their homes to go to Hawaii? I mean, they left islands that were pretty good, but then went to look for something else. And I happen to like Hawaii. So I’m glad they did, but that question is not a new question. And it’s a question that I think is part science, part technical, but a large part, the human spirit. And maybe on that point, I’ll end by saying, I think a large part of why space is important, why it’s still important. Why we still talk about the moon program from Apollo is because it drove people to want to do more than what they’re doing now. And I don’t just mean in space. I mean, in computers, many of the early founders of computers were inspired by the space program. I mean, in medicine and list goes on and on. People saw that activity that pushing the envelope that we did in the sixties and seventies and they took it and they moved in into so many different areas. And I would argue, that’s probably one of the biggest benefits to society. Now as an inactive space program is what we learned , what we bring home, the things that are better, the medicine, the medical devices, and other things, we move into society, but we also create people who want to do something more and it’s still unknown how that will play out. But we can look back at history in the last 50 years and see what did all those people like myself, who were inspired by the early space program and aviation pioneers to go do something else. And I think that’s the hope of society.

James Di Virgilio: 34:00

It’s rather remarkable. As you mentioned for all of human history, we could say, I want to go over here because I don’t know what’s on the other side of the ocean, or even today, if you’ve traveled the world right now, you can’t stand outside and see across the world. You can’t see Antarctica. You can’t see China or Australia. You can’t even see the neighboring County, but you can look up in the sky at night and you can see the moon. And for much of the year, you can see a variety of planets. And to think that, like you mentioned, we’ve been there. We’re going to get there. Things are going to happen there. I think, is this other worldly feeling yet? It’s connected to the first humans who thought I’m going to go into the next set of woods . I’m going to go over the horizon. So absolutely fascinating stuff, Mark. Thanks for joining us. Everyone should know that you are a Hall of Famer, always great to announce a Hall of Famer at NASA and Space Foundation’s Technology Hall of Fame amongst so many other things. Wonderful discussion today. I know it enlightened me and I’m sure it enlightened to all of our Radio Cade listeners.

Mark Sirangelo: 34:52

Well, thank you very much, James and I am privileged to be able to talk a little bit to you and all the listeners take care now.

James Di Virgilio: 34:58

For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 35:00

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville. This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews. Podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinists , Jacob Lawson .

For 20 years the International Space Station has served as a microgravity lab in the sky. Every day there are dozens of experiments being run that are designed to improve humankind. Dr. Siobhan Malany, Founder and President of Micro-grx, is using the test lab to study how to reduce muscle atrophy here on earth. Join us as we discuss what it takes to run such an experiment and why space makes for such a great testing environment.

For 20 years the International Space Station has served as a microgravity lab in the sky. Every day there are dozens of experiments being run that are designed to improve humankind. Dr. Siobhan Malany, Founder and President of Micro-grx, is using the test lab to study how to reduce muscle atrophy here on earth. Join us as we discuss what it takes to run such an experiment and why space makes for such a great testing environment.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio : 0:38

Welcome to another edition of Radio Cade’s space podcast series today’s guest is studying human tissues, specifically how they respond and microgravity and how that may help us improve the human condition here on earth. My guest today is Dr. Siobhan Malany, the founder, and president of Micro GRX and associate professor at the University of Florida. So many other things we could add to your title, Dr. Malany, we’re excited to have you today. We’re excited to talk about what you’re working on, a welcome to the program.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 1:07

Thank you. I’m excited to talk about it. It’s a fun, exciting, and challenging field.

James Di Virgilio : 1:11

So I’ve read a lot about your backstory and for those listeners, obviously that have not in general, you find yourself in 2011, a background in pharmacology, and you’re going to watch a space shuttle launch, and this is going to change really the next decade of your life. Right? And so tell me about what got you interested in space. I think as we’ve done this space podcast space seems like this huge, enormous sci fi endeavor, but in your case, I think reading through your story, it’s actually a really great example of how it’s really not as far away from maybe many of our own individual lives or things we’ve already learned as we may think it’s just a different environment, but talk to us about how those dots connected for you and how you went from something that seems far away from space, in fact, to working primarily in space.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 1:54

Yeah, it’s a fun story because my family and I had just recently moved from San Diego where I was working in the biotechnology industry and 2010 and its the recession. And we’re really starting over in some sense, and coming to Florida and I was working at the Sanford Burnham Institute in Orlando. So you come to Florida and one of the things to do in Florida is go see a launch. And so I had the opportunity to go to the Endeavor launch in 2011 and it’s in the middle of the night trying to keep yourself awake and started to talk to actually a teacher that was sending experiments up to look at crystallography and how crystal’s, form and thats really been a big advancement in space because without gravity, you have this perfect formation of crystals . So that has always been one of the things that’s been studied in space. And that makes sense. He said, they’re really looking for researchers to send experiments to space. And it’s like, well, that’s very fun pharmacologist. What would I do in space? I mean, I do screening of compounds and biological assays, and we’re looking at drug discovery and how would I use space to do that? Um, but then he invited me to a workshop where there were students that were studying types of experiments on suborbital flights . And it’s just a little workshop at the Kennedy Space Center. I went and just took some lunchtime from Orlando, went over there and really started to think about what could you do in space? And there was some technology folks that said, you know, we’re putting a plate reader on a space station and they read or something we use in the pharmaceutical industry all the time. It’s a way to read a light signal from cells to give you an indication of whether you have a positive or negative response. It’s kind of a workhorse instrument. I , well , that’s really interesting. Then you could actually do some types of experiments that make sense in the drug discovery world. And that really sparked my interest. So I started to talk a lot more with folks at Kennedy Space Center and the Center for Advancement in Science and Space was starting to formulate. And they were in charge through a contract with NASA to engage researchers on a space station and start to really utilize the International Space Station as a research laboratory. And so they started to have white papers and I became involved in a competition, which said, if you could put something in a 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter box, what would you do in a of proposal? It could be accepted and you could send this to space. And so I did that and was accepted for the small competition to just send these microtiter plates to the space station, to calibrate this plate reader. Something I thought was simple enough, cheap enough to do. Wasn’t really sure what the impact was, but we did this and we needed a logo and it’s , I came up with Micro GRX logo. And then when there were funding opportunities, that logo became actually the company. So we founded Micro GRX in 2015 and then we’ve gone into other experiments from there.

James Di Virgilio : 4:32

And your funding source primarily, how are you able to run the variety of research studies that you’re running? How are you funded?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 4:40

So the , from that competition, which was with Space Florida, so Space Florida was really the initiator for me. And you’ve talked with Tony Gannon , you had him on your show recently, and he’s very energetic and they’ve been Space Florida for the last five years have really been trying to develop partnerships with other countries. And Israel has been one of those. They had a collaboration that was called the Florida Israel Innovation Program, and they have every year, some funding opportunities. And so Tony had actually reached out and said, you know, you’ve done this competition for , you should think about these other opportunities, which involved a for-profit company and well I’m in a nonprofit company, but you know, you just won the for-profit and it did that and proposed to look at this more lab on a chip type of experimentation to go from something that was more of a fire chemical type of experiment to something that is using human cells and can use micro gravity to understand changes in doing so that might indicate a disease process or a degenerative process. And so we combined efforts with an Israel company called Space Pharma. And so that was the first seed funding for Micro GRX. And we needed to raise additional matching funds, which we got through the Center for Advancement of Science and Space, which then got us to the International Space Station to send experiment in 2018 to the ISS.

James Di Virgilio : 6:00

And that 2018 experiment is one that is close to my heart. I love fitness. I like lifting weights. I like the idea of muscle building and everything that comes with that. And of course, to anyone who likes to try to strengthen their body, one of the big things you’re concerned with is muscle atrophy. You obviously fear losing your muscle. As we age, we know we tend to lose muscle mass in space is vastly accelerated. So the study that you did on muscle atrophy, as you’re using this test kitchen of microgravity, this lab on a chip, right, this small little area to gain data, what are some insights you learned and how does that set you up and encourage you for the future of using this? Let’s call it a space lab to basically improve our lives.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 6:40

Yeah. This has been a key question. So what astronauts go through, why they’re in space? There’s a number of challenges they do face, lucky for them that when they come back to earth, this is a reversible process, but there are effects on the cardiovascular system. We lose immune suppression . There’s a lot of things that happen to the body in microgravity . When you take away that pull on our organs and on our tissues, you have osteoarthritis, it’s a lot of musculoskeletal issues. You get bone loss and muscle atrophy, and they occur in this accelerated timeframe. And that process at a tissue level is somewhat like how we age and as we age, you know , things decline. And so muscle wasting due to age is really a health burden on earth. And so the idea of how do we exploit this microgravity effects on cells and tissues, to understand how to fight diseases, understanding how to perhaps find new drug targets and testing therapeutics. So that’s kind of the idea. And in 2018, we were really looking at more just muscle 2D cultures to see, do we just keep cells alive? You’re looking at a small shoe box that has really a laboratory inside it. I mean, it’s got a refrigerator, it’s got an ability to heat things. It has fluid mechanics and it’s a feed nutrients itself have a camera system. You know, it’s all on a shoe box and it has to operate and store data and download data. This is a big challenge. You’re almost creating the technology has you’re studying the biology and you’re doing it completely automated and putting it on a rocket. So, you know, it’s exciting, but it’s like really terrifying because many things can shut the whole system off and you don’t get data. And that’s the hard part of this is the rocket business. It’s just, there are so many variables you just can’t control, but in our first launch, and we did have some issues with that in terms of communication and of the payload, but we learned how to make a sterile environment, send this to space and look at culturing . So we didn’t really get the data back we wanted on this first flight, but we’ve built enough expertise on how to do this, that we’re now two years later launching another one. That’s now looking at three-dimensional muscle bundles. So these tissue chips mimic the function of human tissue . Interestingly, in this one is we actually put electrodes into these tissue bundles and as we know muscles contract, and so we can stimulate the muscles and they are 3D and they can do some contraction . So we can look at this now functional response in real time. So that’s the excitement of this payload. And then after a certain amount of time, a couple of weeks we’ll actually preserve these cells. They come back to us and we’ll look at the gene changes that occur from the tissue. And we’ll also be collecting their waste media to look at anything they might secrete like inflammatory type of markers. They might be secreted. And so trying to get a lot of data out of this one experiment and the idea then it’s to not only advance the technology, but really develop some disease age model in these human tissues that can be used to look at new target drug targets can also be used to test therapeutics in future flights. And that’s the real idea behind the whole concept of the tissue chip in space.

James Di Virgilio : 9:42

Now let’s talk about this tissue chip, give us a visualization of what this is my imagining like a micro chip with some fuzz on it. If you will, some material that is functioning as a tissue chip, I have no idea if I have the right mental picture or not. What does this look like if I’m to be seeing it visually.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 9:59

It’s micro-scale so think of a thumb drive size units , and it has inlets and outlets so that there’s fluid flowing through because our cells and tissues constantly need nutrients. They’re in a kind of a silicon type of containment so that there is ability to exchange air and gas, so need to be buffered. And so there’s carbon dioxide in the box and that allows a buffering system and there’s fluid exchange. And so, but they are really quite small. And so our little muscle bundle that we inject, and these are from muscle biopsy cells, from volunteers who advent health. So we collect the muscle biopsies when collaborating with them, isolate those cells, put them in kind of a gel scaffold. And they really form these tight bundles around some goal posts that we have and then tissue chip, and they’re able to contract. And then the silicon chip is viewable. So we have a camera system that can align on top of the chip and actually take pictures and videos and get a contraction rate. That’s the idea, but they’re micro scale . So the bundle is maybe seven millimeters long. It’s very small. So we’ll have 16 of these tissue chips in our payload. And actually half of them come from volunteers that are of older age, over 60 and of younger age, which are under 40. So we’ll be able to look at the function of both of those types of cell types.

James Di Virgilio : 11:16

And so when you talk about a contraction, I’m imagining that these muscle cells in space are mimicking like what you would do right now, if you’re listening and you’ve flexed a bicep, well , you’re tense to your forearm, right? That’s the contraction you’re looking at. And you’re able to stimulate these cells to make them either contract or relax or whatever it is you want them to do while they’re in space.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 11:33

Right, yeah. And the camera system can just basically look at that pixel displacement, if you’re just looking at a chain, something shortens or goes longer, you’re taking a picture of that. And so you can then map out what that rate is of where to go short and long, and that contraction ,

James Di Virgilio : 11:47

This is done from earth. You’re able to sit into a lab here on earth and press buttons or manipulate things, or is there an operator?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 11:53

We work with implementation partner, which put together the payload. So we’re really a biologist here. So my projects have been developing the actual chip device, which in itself is a product that can be used for different cell types. And then University of Florida, we’re doing the muscle biology. And we work with Space Tango, which is a implementation partner. So they have a hosting platform on the ISS. They’re able to tap into the vehicle. It’s almost like a locker system that you can slide these shoe-box units into. And they’re providing the electronics and the environment cooling and heating capabilities of this payload and the camera system. And so we work very closely with them in order to develop the entire system to work together, to communicate. And so from earth then, we have really a set protocol that we’ll use. So you kind of hit the go button when we hand over the payload and it has a process it’ll go through for two weeks, but there’s ability to communicate with it, maybe change a valve or initiate a process earlier or later, you also can get down linked images. But again, all these processes are really been developed as we’re doing all of this. So we get smarter and smarter. We learn a lot. So it’s very much a technology advancement as well as it’s about getting biological data, which is the real thing that we need is, is that data is really valuable in order to show that you can use the space station for what could be very commercialized opportunities.

James Di Virgilio : 13:15

Yeah. That’s a great description. Now, does any of this require a human in the space station to move something, grab something, do something, or is all of this entirely automated?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 13:24

So the box is entirely automated, the only thing and this is more of the photo op if the astronaut takes it at the end of the experiment, about 15 days in orbit, and we actually add this preservation, so it preserves the cells so that we can extract RNA when we get it back. And then it put from 37 degree environment into a freezer that’s minus 30. And all the astronauts doing then is just taking it from that one locker system into the freezer. And then it’s brought whenever there’s an opportunity to bring it back down to earth, it’s b rought back. And that’s really the only intervention that we a sked for o n the astronaut, which i s g reat. C ause there’s hundreds of experiments going out, I mean real estate on these rockets, it’s getting very competitive. So i f a n a stronaut h ad t o d o all of these experiments it would never work. So really respect t hat, that want everything to be automated. That gives us the opportunity to do more sampling, have larger payloads and incense, be able to do a lot more of these types of experiments without needing to have a stronauts d o a ny kind of work.

James Di Virgilio : 14:27

This is such a great description of what an international space station, right? What it’s actually doing. I think to the general public, to many people, it’s sort of this mystery, like what happens here? We’re sending astronauts there. I’ve heard of these experiments that are being done there, but as you’ve described it, I think you’ve given a really tangible picture of what happens. And you’re also describing really well, this new frontier and of course space is called the last frontier, the new frontier, whatever you want to call it, right? It is a frontier. And it’s great to hear you also describe the challenges that anyone faces when they’re pioneering. Something is it’s not just, well, let’s run this experiment. It’s as you mentioned, you have to wind up solving all of these other variables, just to get the experiment to work. And every single time you’re learning more and more, it’s making you more efficient. It’s allowing you to study more. So given where you are now, all these factors, all these things you’ve learned, you’re progressing along. I’m sure your excitement level is really, really high. But as you get back this data from this experiment, you’re hoping to get enough information to then I’m imagining running another experiment. That’s going to then begin to look at what you may do to be able to solve some of these issues with muscle atrophy and other things like that. Right? That’s kind of the goal is to get yourself to the point to where you can begin to test some ideas and some thesises on how to improve the condition.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 15:38

Right. The biggest risk of all this is that you don’t get data. And there’s talking about a piece of fluff in the system blocks about, or you have corrosion or you have a wire that comes off and you can’t communicate. I mean, these are really pretty simple things that can happen, that don’t allow you to get that data. And you have rocket launches that you have to work around or rocket delays that affect your timing on all of those teams . We have to have backup tissue chips ready to go. And it’s really a complicated thing that even if you look at experiment in the laboratory and you try it and like, Oh, you know something didn’t quite go, right. I have to try it again. Well, you don’t get to try it again. This is the one time. So it’s a lot of risks, but I do hope to get data from that. So that in order to say, look, we do see these contraction changes. This kind of decline in an accelerated timeframe that could write. Give us an indication of why the age related. And so weakness, something that occurs over many, many years. We might see these processes happen faster and we can see where we might want to do therapeutic intervention to solve muscle atrophy. And so this is setting the stage on this flight to just be able to go through themselves, get the contraction rate, look at team changes. And then the next flight, which will be two years from now, we’re actually going to be delivering actual clinical candidate drugs and see what the response is on the cells . So that is the whole idea. If you have a disease model and that’s predicting a human response or a human toxicity, the next is can you actually apply potential therapeutics and see the right response and the right effect ? And that’s the goal for future flights. Dr. Malany, how many other companies are doing what you’re doing? Are there a bunch of them? Is it just you, what does that landscape look like? The landscape has changed dramatically since 2011 and 2014 competition. And thinking about lab on a chip, I think I’ve felt sort of like a rogue scientist. Like what are you doing? And what does it mean? But now it is really the last four years or so, just exponentially grown in terms of the number of small companies, academic institutions that are jumping on this to say, Hey, we have model systems. We have tissue chips . And we’re looking at kidney stones, we’ll astronauts, kidney stones, much more prevalently. We’re looking at arthritis. We’ve got rodent studies working with muscle atrophy. And so pharma companies are sending animal studies up there. So there’s quite a bit of activity and experiments going up. The national institutes of health had two rounds of funding. They funded five different groups, looking at different human tissue chip . And in the second opportunity, they had four more awards. So there was nine institutes and space programs going on. But other than that, they’re also NASA funded and other for-profit academic institutions that are sending small micro experiments to test human function, tissue and organs.

James Di Virgilio : 18:26

So then a lot of these companies, as you mentioned, primarily, a research base, right? They’re probably many years away from potentially creating a profitable product. So is there a lot of competition to get your idea, essentially, Hey, I want to solve this problem or study in this arena. Is there a lot of competition to get those funded?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 18:44

There is a lot of competition it’s becoming more accessible to access space. It’s really about having the advanced technology being ready, ready to launch and having that, being able to package if you’re taking a laboratory and shoving it into a shoe box and being able to do that efficiently. And like I said, if we’re looking at SpaceX 21 is like, are we really ready? You know the camera systems, still need a little bit of work. We could prove a lot more things. We could run a lot more ground studies, but going off of this flight and maybe a year or so before we might get on another flight, because they’re really full of science payloads, which is exciting. But I do think that there’s a lot of communication with NIH and the ISS national lab to have investigators really think about what are our survival opportunities, where are the gaps and challenges so that in five or 10 years, we were really getting the right return on its investment. So there is a big push to get this data back, to show some proof of concept so that there is ability to refine. So we fly, maybe get more statistically larger sample sizes and do more different types of end points . This is very much a proving ground. Is this worth the investment? And what can we get out in the future? There are companies that are actually using it to do, for example, formulations and different manufacturing of different types of, for example, lenses, because the lack of gravity really has an advantage when you’re trying to create the perfect type of crystals or types of materials, bioprinting , you can do easier, being in a no gravity situation. So there’s a lot of commercial opportunities that people are investigating.

James Di Virgilio : 20:14

So the thought here then what comes to mind is I’m managing the International Space Station. And I have a limited amount of space on my station to run these experiments. And as you mentioned, a lot of people want space on my station. They want a slot. How am I assigning? Who gets those slots?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 20:29

Great question. That’s what I’m thinking about. I need to get on a flight. Who am I talking to you, but the implementation partners, their own hosting platform . So they have space on every rocket, a number of these small companies that have pretty much a locker system, but if you’re funded by NASA, of course, you also have the opportunity to fly. So it’s really, you need to collaborate with some NASA certified partner to have space on the rockets and they are filling up. And so people may shift and there’s rodent studies. Like I mentioned, they used to get quite a bit of precedent because those are very expensive studies. You know, I think there are more and more rockets that are being launched, which is helpful, but there’s a lot of delays as well. And so things can pile up, but we’ve been manifested on this road past year and a half. But again, if you slip off of a launch, it’s challenging to find space on other one.

James Di Virgilio : 21:15

Yeah. It’s really interesting. When you just think of the logistics of all of that, I could probably spend a whole podcast talking with you on how that works and is it a free market solution where we’re essentially going to say it’s a law of supply and demand and therefore the person that’s willing to pay the most for the space gets it. And then the end, you can make an argument that’s most efficient or is it going to be, what’s deemed to be most important for humanity. So many ways to go there that are interesting, but let’s connect all of the dots here to a really big picture idea. So obviously your company is called Micro GRX. You’ve talked about micro gravity being important, right? And micro G being important. Why is micro gravity a good laboratory? Why is it better than studying things here on earth? Like what makes it so special?

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 21:55

It’s a big variable. I mean, if you think about our tissues and organs are subject to gravity, you that’s , that’s how they form. That’s how they function. So when you take that away, what happens, and we know that astronauts go through these changes and they come back and they’ve got to sit in a wheelchair and they’re weaker and it happens really fast, quite fast. And so then when you take away the pull , it’s almost as if you’re might be in bed rest for a long time, you have an injury that causes you to not put load on something, or you’re already getting that in my microgravity. And so there’s enough experiments that have non aspects so that there is stress responses and changes in metabolites and things like this that can be exploited to look at disease processes and then find ways to inhibit those for the benefit of fighting illness and diseases on earth. The other idea, I think one of the exciting too , that pharmaceutical companies doing is it’s very challenging to concentrating antibodies. When you have a lack of gravity, you have better, more perfect formation of crystals. And this gets into nano delivery and nanotechnology, you don’t have to have cross-linking regions when you’re doing bioprinting because you don’t have this hole on one direction. So there’s a lot of advantages for even just manufacturing things in microgravity, as well as there’s obviously degenerative processes that occur that you can explain in terms of disease modeling .

James Di Virgilio : 23:15

It’s so interesting to think about being here on earth. If you’d like, you just did there connect all these dots and we , you just simplify it. And you imagine this area of space just being like you set an area with a different set of conditions, and you can imagine the game if you’re old enough, or if you’re young enough, I suppose, depending on how old you are, young yours, a listener, there was a game Oregon Trail that was very popular in the eighties and early nineties on PC. And you had to take your little eight bit character, and you’re trying to go out to the West and settle the West. And occasionally you’d run into trouble and you would get dysentery or your wagon to flip over in the water or whatever case may be in a new frontier market. But essentially if you live in an area that’s flat like Florida, and for the first time in your life, you go to a mountainous area in Colorado, right? The air is different, the environment is different. And of course that gives us a chance to learn, study and interact with same thing with a place like Antarctica. And obviously the same thing with space. And I think oftentimes space feels like, wow, that’s crazy. There’s the stars. There’s all of these things. But hearing you talk about it, hearing your background, hearing how your brother was into space and you weren’t so much, you know, we even talked about that really a lot today, but all these thoughts come together. Where in reality, you’re looking at space as a way to improve humanity here on earth. And that’s what so many explorers have done really since the beginning of people on this planet. And I’m sure in some way, do you feel that excitement, do you feel like you’re connected to all the pioneers that have lived before you that have done things with their search for new lands or attempt to find discoveries or curious for things? Or is it just a very granular, this is a task I’m doing it. This is what it takes to be able to accomplish the task.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 24:43

I think there’s a little bit of both. It’s certainly added some excitement. I mean, coming from the biotech industry and sort of the high throughput world where you’re screening chemical libraries, fishing for something compound that says, okay, this is doing what I want. And now I’m going to develop an into a drug. That’s fine. But this has really opened up a whole other avenue that I’ve really taken some ownership on because it’s just been my curiosity that got me there and building microbes fast and exciting for me in terms of finding a niche that I’ve been developing. And now it’s really about got to get some data and proof that what we’re thinking is feasible and working investment and things like that. Now it’s more like we’ve got to get this done. You know, I’m talking with the technology partners and it’s like, okay , we’ve got to make sure that we run through this and we don’t get corrosion here. We don’t , I mean , needs are important. Failure’s not an option. You , we gotta do this, but there is a big failure rate and we have to fail smart and learn from it and be successful in standardized things and share ideas going forward. So there is a sense of being a pioneer in terms of setting the stage. This is one of the first experiments where on a space station, we’ll be delivering a electrical signal to cells in having a functional contraction. And that really hasn’t been done. And so that’s exciting, but lots can go wrong. But again, this is challenging, but if it wasn’t challenging, maybe I wouldn’t be interested. So there is a feeling of being a pioneer , but also understanding that it’s an expensive endeavor and it needs to make sense in terms of future commercialization opportunities and return on investment. So in terms of a business opportunity, but also be excited about space exploration.

James Di Virgilio : 26:16

Yeah . We here at the Cade Museum, of course celebrate innovation. We like to celebrate the people behind innovation, which is what we’ve done here today with you, is that for every idea, for every invention, for everything you’re looking at, for everything you use, a person had ideas and thoughts just like you’ve had Dr. Malany and they attempted to fix it or improve it or do something with it. And oftentimes they didn’t grow up thinking, this is exactly what I was going to do or am going to do, but they had this idea and they thought this would be great. Maybe I can begin to do this. And they of course accepted the risk. A lot of times it’s for a desire to improve something rather than a desire to make money. But you need funding to get things done topic for another day. But what I love to end this show with would be some words of wisdom from you. So you’ve had a very background, you’ve done a lot of things. You work, of course, again, with your brother, which is a family and business type environment. There’s many things I’m sure you could give us words of wisdom on, but to give the listeners some of your thoughts from your life and your experience, what are some words of wisdom for somebody who was about to maybe embark on an entrepreneurial venture of some sort or, or someone who’s already there, what do you think is some high level and important advice.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 27:19

Mostly is to throw your hat in there and give it a shot. Cause you just don’t know how important or where something might go. And this was a case where it’s so unknown and not very accepted in the beginning for it’s not our priority . And so I think you have to balance that. And if there’s something you’re really passionate about, you got to give it a try. You gotta take a risk at some point like this from year to year, this really exploded and things can go very fast. So I would say take that risk and do what you’re passionate about doing and following the biggest device . The other one has learned a lot in the first round in 2018, we were working with an international group. So level of communication and getting on the phone or getting to talk to people and dealing with the details , making sure that everyone’s on page because there are so many things to overlook in this type of research in neurology and getting the right folks on board. That’s where my brother’s been really an amazing resource for me because he’s an engineer. So for me, talking with engineers, it’s tango and doing the biology, there was a gap in terms of where we overlapped and what we understood, what we didn’t know, we didn’t know. And so really finding the right people that can close the gaps . We , the biology with technology has been key. So that, that team environment, people that understand milestone driven research, because this is very much, you have to hit deadlines. So learning that early, getting things written down, getting documents , set up, that everybody understands. And that’s been the biggest learning curve for me as a researcher pushing forward. Those are some of my advice.

James Di Virgilio : 28:49

And for someone who now is actually sending right has sent things into space. That’s great here on earth and then Hey to the next frontier and beyond. And I’d be remissed. If I didn’t say this, hearing your story today and reading about it, that it seems like maybe some of the best advice to take away from your story is just solve one problem. At a time, you didn’t start in 2011 by saying, here’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to be ready to send something to space within a month, but it takes years to figure out the things that you figured it out, but you were committed to solving each problem at a time you’re committed to that process. Now you’re doing what the team of people and you’re doing it with this lens of exploration. And I think all of those things have led to where you are now. It’s obviously been a wonderful to discuss these things with you. We look forward to following up with you to see how the experiment goes and certainly wish you nothing but success as you prepare for this launch. Thank you, Dr. Malany, founder and president of Micro GRX and associate professor at the university of Florida. It’s been Wonderful visiting with you.

Dr. Siobhan Malany: 29:43

Thank you so much. It’s been really fun to talk about it and share the excitement and some of the challenges.

James Di Virgilio : 29:48

For Radio Cade. I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 29:52

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded and Hardwood, Soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson .

What do you do with human waste in space? Daniel Yeh, winner of the 2014 Cade Prize and a professor at the University of South Florida, invented a solar-powered system that converts human waste into nutrients, energy and water. Initially designed for small villages in the underdeveloped world, the all-in-one waste management system is being tested for use in the Artemis program for a return to the moon in 2024.

What do you do with human waste in space? Daniel Yeh, winner of the 2014 Cade Prize and a professor at the University of South Florida, invented a solar-powered system that converts human waste into nutrients, energy and water. Initially designed for small villages in the underdeveloped world, the all-in-one waste management system is being tested for use in the Artemis program for a return to the moon in 2024.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

Waste in space, specifically human waste. What do you do with it? And is it good for anything? Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles. And today we’ll be talking to Daniel Yeh, an engineering professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, as well as a winner of the 2014 Cade Prize. Welcome to Radio Cade Daniel.

Daniel Yeh: 0:56

Richard it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me here.

Richard Miles: 0:58

So Daniel, you’ve had an incredible ride over the last several years, six years ago, you won the Cade Prize. It was a great moment for you and your team. Now we’re going to talk all about that, the technology behind it and so on. But first I’d sort of like to focus on you a little bit. Tell us what the Daniel Yeh story. So you’re born to come home from the hospital, then what happens? And then how did you end up in Tampa?

Daniel Yeh: 1:19

So I grew up in Northern New Jersey, I think just typical suburban environment, nothing really exciting. And I was thinking, you might ask me this question. So I was thinking, you know, do I have something, some aha moment as an inventor, right? You people usually point to something when they’re living , right ? Somebody gave them some electronic tool kit and that sparks some creativity. No, I think I listened to a lot of music at the time. And that was obviously pre-internet. I just listened to a lot of radio and whenever I can get on the bus and lay down , I was able to drive over New York City, go watch concerts and clubs and whatnot. And that’s mostly what I did focus a lot on music.

Richard Miles: 1:55

Are you a musician yourself?

Daniel Yeh: 1:56

That’s on my bucket list and to pick up a guitar and play and probably should . Now that you’re asking me that. So after high school, I went to the University of Michigan. And for me, that was a world of difference from what I was used to coming from the New York, New Jersey area, being in the Midwest. And I think that experience going to the University of Michigan, being a Midwest really changed my life in many ways, got to see a different perspective of how people are in the Midwest. And of course, I met my wife there.

Richard Miles: 2:24

That helps it.

Daniel Yeh: 2:25

it was life changing for the better.

Richard Miles: 2:27

So we entered the University of Michigan. Did you know you wanted to study engineering or what was your undergraduate major?

Daniel Yeh: 2:31

I did not. So I thought about biology and I was really attracted to nature. That was one thing to have may explain where I am today. I was really attracted to nature. I started out in the school of natural resources and ended up with degrees in natural resources, as well as civil engineering. I even attended forestry camps. I thought I was going to be a forest ranger, but at some point at Michigan, that something clicked. I realized that engineers develop solutions. Engineering is how you get things done. And if I really want, I think, solve problems, I need to become an engineer. So that’s where I pivoted and double majored and pursued a degree in civil engineering, the realm of equations.

Richard Miles: 3:07

So you finished up at U M and then what came after that?

Daniel Yeh: 3:09

From there, I went to work, went back to New Jersey to work work for a consulting company, did a lot of computer modeling to study impacts of human development on water bodies. So specifically looking at this case where there’s a potential development in a watershed in Northern New Jersey and the pristine watershed and our job as the consultant was to project the impact from that development and how that might impact a water reservoir. So I think that was a good experience because they really got me to think about what constitutes a good computer model. When people say garbage in garbage out, I really understood what that meant. A motto is only as good as the assumptions state you put behind it. It is only as good as the data that you have to formulate a model from there. I decided to go back to Michigan to get my master’s degree. And then after I got my master’s degree, I worked at Ford Motor Company for a little while. So that was a good experience. Getting industrial engineering, industrial waste management experience. I was part of a research group that was in charge of troubleshooting issues at Ford, almost kind of like a strike force, looking at different issues related to environmental aspects, waste management at Ford. But that’s where I think I met my first life-changing mentor. His name is Hyung Kim and Dr. Kim really just loved to talk and give advice. And he said, young man, you need to go South to Georgia Tech because that’s where, before he came to Ford, he was teaching and I follow his advice and went to Georgia Tech to pursue my PhD in environmental engineering.

Richard Miles: 4:34

Wow. Yeah . And then you just kept going, he’s got a PhD and.

Daniel Yeh: 4:37

Kept going. Yeah, I think that didn’t have everything mapped out. A lot of that is just, well in each one of these jobs that I’ve always felt like, I didn’t know enough. I always felt like I could do my work, but I just didn’t know enough. Right . There was something that was kind of nagging me. Like I could apply the solution, but, but what constitutes that solution? Like how did people come up with that solution? And I felt like ultimately I really need to get a PhD so I can essentially construct something from zero. And I’m glad I did, because I think that whole PhD process rewires your brain. It does, either breaks you or makes you.

Richard Miles: 5:09

A lot of inventors have unique stories. And when you start out saying that you used to go to New York City, it’s funny, I’ve had two other inventors on the show and they started the exact same way, but the sentence always ends. Like I went to go see like planetariums and science museums. You’re the first as I went to music clubs .

Daniel Yeh: 5:24

I did, I went to the village.

Richard Miles: 5:26

And all sorts of ways that you can map out a career path, but that’s not a bad one. So Daniel , let’s talk about your inventions. And first of all, the work that you’ve been doing recently, at least since I’ve met you last six years, you’re dealing with most people by definition don’t ever want to hear about or talk about it’s human waste. And so forgive me, you’ve probably heard every single poop joke out there by now. You’ve probably gotten used to it.

Daniel Yeh: 5:47

I’ve heard most of them, but there’s still some good ones. Yeah.

Richard Miles: 5:50

So start out by explaining the technology that won the Cade Prize six years ago, the new generator, which if I remember it was solar, it converted human waste into nutrients, energy, and water, hence the name. And it was essentially like an all in one sanitation slash power slash water system for small villages. And is that essentially what it did.

Daniel Yeh: 6:10

And that’s essentially what it is. So the motivation behind this idea is the fact that we have close to 3 billion people on the planet that lacks something that we take for granted e very d ay, which is the ability to go to the bathroom and flush a nd f orget and go about our daily business. And the reason that we’re able to flush and forget is because in our society, t here’s infrastructure, starting with the toilet itself, then you have a whole series of underground pipes, the pipes in your house, the sewers i n the city, a massive underground network and leading to a wastewater treatment facility that handles that waste and turns it into clean water. Water that’s either clean enough to put back into the nature or water that you can recycle for other uses. This system is very expensive to build and probably even more expensive to maintain. So for many parts of the world that are in the emerging economies, they’re struggling with t he various infrastructure issues and this type of sanitation infrastructure that we use is really difficult for a lot of cities to build, not to mention t hat for many mega cities, they basically b uilt very organically. So now it’s very difficult to go back and basically dig up the entire underground and put all those pipes in.

Richard Miles: 7:18

For these systems that you develop . Can you give us a rough idea of size? I seem to remember they’re fairly compact and small.

Daniel Yeh: 7:24

Yeah. So normally you would have this entire factory, right? It looks like a whole factory facility that your domain would be one or multiple in , in a city, depending on the size of a city, like a whole plant. Right? Yeah. And so what we’re after is, is there a different way to provide this type of service so that you don’t have this build as massive sets of pipes under the ground? And normally the trade-off is that, well, it looks like the only thing that’s available is either a latrine, which is essentially a form of hole in the ground or a septic tank of some sort and in the 21st century. And it’s incredible information technology age. So there’s gotta be different ways to do that. Right. And so the idea is that if we can have essentially a hub of some sort near where people live, those that their waste can enter this hub and the pipe runs would be relatively short, could either be the one hub per house or per a cluster of houses or cluster of public toilets. But this hub would not only safely handled the waste that go a step beyond that. It will view the waste as a resource, not a liability, but extract what we can out of the resource. So that’s the water, the energy nutrients, and actually provide value back to the community and this hub, because many parts of the world is crowded. So it can not be very big. So it has to be relatively compact. And what we build are essentially fraction of the size of a 20 foot container.

Richard Miles: 8:40

Really? Yeah. And how are they powered?

Daniel Yeh: 8:42

To date we’ve built them all solar power. And the reason is in these communities that a re lacking sanitation, they’re probably lacking other things as well. And part of the sanitation equation is water, but electricity is another global problem. Many communities either don’t have electricity at all, or is severely unreliable. And that’s another part o f that cost equation for the US that these treatment plants, we have c onsume a lot of electricity. So we basically need to come up with a low energy system that can run on r enewable. S o it runs on solar, but along the way, we also extract energy out of it in t he form of bio gas that communities can use for heating, cooking, lighting, and so forth.

Richard Miles: 9:17

So something in the size you said that could fit easily into part of a cargo container, what size village could that handle? Both the waste and provide a reasonable amount of power for?

Daniel Yeh: 9:27

The first form we built what we called a new generator, a New Gen 100 serves nominally about a hundred person a day. And that’s about a third of the size of 20 foot container . So roughly a foot by six and a half foot wide. So that’s the size of that. And then right now we are testing a new generator, 1000, serving a thousand people for about double the size of that. So basically 10 times the capacity at double the size.

Richard Miles: 9:52

And you’re currently testing these, I think in India, right? And South Africa is that where you’ve done most of your testing.

Daniel Yeh: 9:57

We started our testing in India and then later on, because we’ve had good success, we moved to South Africa and these are all places where there is a significant needs. And we’re currently still developing the technology in South Africa. This is all through just the support of the Gates Foundation that had this vision to basically reinvent a toilets that can basically do all those things I described independent of sewer . So basically the next generation of toilets. So we were fortunate to be one of the teams funded by the Gates Foundation to develop these technologies.

Richard Miles: 10:26

How did you get on their radar screen? Was there an application process or did they reach out to you? Or how did that connect happen?

Daniel Yeh: 10:31

So , so after Georgia Tech, I later on move on to Stanford to do my postdoc . And then that’s when things start to click in terms of working with wastewater. And so I was working with this technology called an anaerobic membrane bioreactor with another good mentor there , Craig Credo. And this is sort of the latest and greatest technology for waste water treatment. But I always felt like there’s an application to apply this for sanitation context. But the thing is nobody would fund that it was difficult to get funding within the US because this is for a global need, right? And then if I go to talk to the NGOs, they tend to want to work with tried and true technologies. There really aren’t any resources available to develop transformative technologies. So this thing is we’re sort of caught in between, right ? Until the Gates Foundation came along with this program that they want to reinvent the toilet. So it all started in 2011 with a two-page application. They had a program called grand challenges explorations, anybody in the world can apply anybody. You just need to supply two pages. And the first time I applied, I didn’t get it. And then I retool made the application better and then apply it again. And then I got it.

Richard Miles: 11:35

And what year are we talking about Daniel?

Daniel Yeh: 11:36

Uh , that was 2011.

Richard Miles: 11:38

2011. Okay. All right . So one more question then before we move on to the space application of this and what you’re working on now, I’m imagining that by nature, this is not difficult to both install and fix. So if you put it in a village or any remote area and something goes wrong, do you need to, in an engineer from somewhere, or is there extensive training that’s required? Or how long would it take you to train person of average intelligence, how to fix one of these things?

Daniel Yeh: 12:01

So what you described this scenario is exactly the challenges that when we develop technologies for this type of context, often in remote areas. You have to think through. So first of all, the technology needs to be extremely reliable. And you need to think about all the things that may potentially fail. And every machine fails. At some point, if you have a car and you never change the oil, it will fail on you. At some point, you’ve never inflate your tire. It will fail on you since Henry Ford time. And before we have made so many cars in the world, that we have a good idea to predict reliability, automobiles, that we understand their failure modes and meantime to failure and end to preventative maintenance needed for those. So what we’re trying to do is get our technology to that point where we can predict failures, that you can have preventive, maintenance, change out parts before they go out. And then you essentially have a workforce, right? Because one of the issues in lobbies communities also is high unemployment. So you want to create value in the product you’re providing so that somebody will pay for this value, this product, this service, which is sanitation, and then employ people who will be trained technicians to serve as the units. And people are very smart and clever anywhere in the world, you go, right ? Somebody will figure out how to solve that need. And right now we’re working with some of the smartest people I’ve ever come across in South Africa. And the prototype engineer that we have working with our sister is just dynamite. So I totally believe that this approach will work, that you make a reliable technology, and then you train a technical workforce to go along with that. And then you create a business model that will sustain that operation .

Richard Miles: 13:34

So let’s switch now from the underdeveloped world to space. At some point you attracted the attention of NASA. First question, when I heard that, is that, that , well, hasn’t NASA figured this out already. I mean, even astronauts got to go, you know, they they’ve clearly they’ve done some work on what you do with human waste in space. So tell us, did they contact you for it’s fall or you contacted get them? And what was their request? What were they looking for?

Daniel Yeh: 13:55

So the whole thing was serendipity. I happened to be giving a talk on the space coast at a workshop actually about what we were doing in India. And after my talk, a NASA scientist came over and started talking to me, his name is Luke Robertson. And he said, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we need to go to this next generation of water recycling in space, because right now on the international space station, we’re pretty good at recycling water on international space station. We can recycle even the water in urine. The issue is the amount of chemicals involved to make that whole process happen. And he’s worried that when we move beyond the ISS to the moon and then to Mars, this resupply of the chemicals will be either extremely difficult or expensive or just not possible. So NASA kind of needs to go onto this next generation of technologies that might be more biologically inclined that will use less chemicals. So that’s one and the other is the need is driven by food production. Well, we need to grow food on Mars, but our current approach doesn’t allow us to connect the dots. And I know there’s fertilizer and waste, but we need an enabling technology to make that happen. So we started talking and then putting our heads together and applying a lot of the ideas that we developed through the new generator towards what we’re currently doing with it NASA.

Richard Miles: 15:09

So I guess the big question, obviously, anything deal with this space is does this work, or can it work in zero gravity or low gravity? Have you done any testing so far? I imagine you have to establish a proof of concept before we go any further, or will you not know that until you get to step on the International Space Station?

Daniel Yeh: 15:26

The very first thing is that we need to have a technology that can show that, you know, if you have a certain type of input into the system, that you can get a certain output out. So meets the requirements of NASA that I can have water that basically looks like water containing toilet water, and out will come clean water, right? It meets their requirements within a certain space. So that’s the level that we’re at right now, but obviously we’re doing this technology on the earth where gravity is present. So while we designed a system with microgravity in mind, we won’t really know that until we actually build the next iteration, which hopefully then will be subjected to low gravity situations. So kind of have to climb the ladder. First, first, you need to show that, yeah, I can get it to work. And then the next iteration is okay, I’m going to actually build a version deck, stand up to all the requirements of micro gravity . And then the other is that, you know, micro gravity is not the only setting. If you’re looking at surface habitats, whether it’s the moon, one, six gravity of the earth or Mars about one third, there’s going to be gravity present. So you get to enjoy gravity a little bit in this system you built for this context, although it’s going to be a reduced gravity.

Richard Miles: 16:34

So let me make sure I understand this correctly. So in addition to cleaning up the wastewater and converting it to water without chemicals, which is the big advantage compared to what NASA does now, you’re also creating fertilizer for plants growing in space. What was NASA’s plan before that? Were they just going to truck a bunch of fertilizer up to the moon? Or how did they plan if at all, to grow things on a moon base.

Daniel Yeh: 16:56

Other ideas have often been considered. I think the technology is wasn’t there yet because of the focus on making what you currently have work. As you know, right now, NASA is given a budget by Congress and it needs to work within demand days of the budget of their current administrations. So priorities do shift over time. For example, since the Apollo era, we haven’t gone back to the moon because the priority has shifted to lower earth orbit. And you can watch all sorts of shows on TV, talking about how this future would have been if we had kept going and gone to Mars. So we would’ve been there maybe 30 years ago, but it’s the focus happened on lower earth orbit. So even though I think in the back of their head has always been the need to develop a different version of the technology, but the focus has been to get things to work on ISS and what they currently have works for the ISS very well. In fact, one of the reasons I got involved working in NASA, well, first of all, who doesn’t want to work with NASA, right ? Right. So, but the second is, as an engineer is incredibly challenging and you get to work with some really, really good people. And it also rewires your brain, I think a different way. But under these very difficult constraints, if you can get something to work, you can probably develop something that will work better on earth as well.

Richard Miles: 18:03

So dividends that pay off as you develop something for NASA, you could discover it , it works even better or other applications here.

Daniel Yeh: 18:10

We think so yeah. So for example, we know there’s a lot of technologies developed for a space that has since been sound translate to earth like GPS, the algorithms use for talking to the space station is now the algorithm used for laser surgery and the list goes on and on. So we’re basically miniaturizing the new generator into something, the size of a refrigerator. And we see that, well, the outcome of this might be something like an appliance household appliances, like refrigerator sized decadent, or just basically handle all the waste as his house generates. But now not only that will give you value back .

Richard Miles: 18:41

Right ? So sketch out for me, Daniel, I know you’re still in the testing phase of just making sure this works, but at a conceptual level, what is the idea? Let’s say if we have a moon base eventually that has several hundred people or even a thousand people, would it be like what you just described where you’d have these sort of mini units for each household, or is it envisioned that you’d build something like a water treatment plant using your technology just a lot bigger to service the entire base, how much thinking has gone on to, I guess, the scaling up of this type of technology to serve a relatively largish base. And then I’ll go ahead and ask my follow-up now is the plan that those would be constructed there on the moon, or would they be constructed here and then brought up there and assembled.

Daniel Yeh: 19:23

I think all of those things that you mentioned are all possible scenarios, right? So right now NASA has planned is 2024 through the Artemis project first woman on the moon next man on the moon that by 2024 and by 2028 to have a sustainable presence on the moon, as a proving ground for technology so that we can put it the first human on Mars by somewhere around 2033. So what’s neat is that we get to have the moon to test these technologies before we just build something, think that’ll work and then do on Mars. So part of this is also that there’s going to be a gateway station, sort of like an ISS that circles the moon. So in terms of building out the moon base, there’s a number of ways it could go. And I think you always have to think economy of scale. You obviously, if you have a whole community and you want to put a treatment system in, in every household, it might be better maybe to aggregate the waste and then to have one unit, right, in that case. However, you can also see that this is going to be colony. That will slowly grow. Basically when we go to a place I go to the moon. First thing we’re trying to do is not die. It’s survival. And just like the first thing that will happen when we land on the Mars is trying not to die because Mars will find all sorts of ways to kill you. So as you get really good at not dying, you transition from survivability to sustainability, how do you actually sustain your presence there ? Using the, these amount of resources, costs, energy, generated the least amount of waste, recycle everything. So whatever technology that’s putting , putting up is probably need to grow. You need to have something that maybe is there initially serving one phase of the operation and maybe a smaller scale, and then sort of like Lego blocks, it will grow and be able to serve something larger rather than just shipping something, a mega sized unit overnight. So I think a lot of thinking needs to go in there thinking about how do we put something in there that will not only serve the needs of initial missions, but you get to basically lean on your investment and allow that initial investment to just grow. So that 5, 10 years down the road say, you know, that technology is outdated and basically kind of scrapped it.

Richard Miles: 21:18

I’ve been talking to a number of folks on this podcast series and we’re all working diligently and feverishly on one aspect relating to space. How do we do X or how to do Y do you have an opportunity through NASA or through any other organizations to actually interact with other people in other disciplines, working on space technologies. In other words, do you get a chance to interact with doctors or chemists or biologists focus also maybe part of the Artemis program? Cause I would be fascinated to know, are there areas of overlap in which even though you’re in different disciplines, you’re actually may be trying to solve versions of the same problem.

Daniel Yeh: 21:49

That’s is really interesting. So we work in this realm called Eclss that’s environmental control and life support systems. And we work in a subset of Eclss, which is basically water and waste management, but obviously the rest of Eclss in terms of like air revitalization and radiation. I m ean, those are all important things. And I’m also very interested in basically human physiology and psychology because at the end of the day, it’s about life support and mission success and how do what we do contribute to that. But how d o w ork other people do affect what we do? I would say probably right now, we’re so focused on just trying to get this initial piece of technology to work that haven’t had chance to really branch out as much. But I think this w ould just happen as the project grows and maybe I’ll do this through my son. He’s currently studying biomedical engineering and his goal is to do space medicine. Wow. A nd you think about, this is actually not that long in the future. M aybe in a few years from now, he w ould be up and running during this stuff, I’ll be learning from him.

Richard Miles: 22:44

The biggest revolution seems to me in space, exploration has been the involvement of the private sector and specifically private space companies. And you’ve got this interesting dynamic going on. They obviously still depend on support for math then and oftentimes funding. But in many instances it looks a lot like a private sector initiative in which they’re kind of set their own priorities, set their own plans, get at least part of their own funding. So whether it’s SpaceX or Blue Origins or Sierra Nevada Space Corporation and others. And we were talking earlier before the show about licensing and so on. Has anyone expressed any interest in your technology from a private company that says, Hey, we want to develop some component of the space program. We really like what you’re doing, come work for us or develop this for us or license it to us. How much of role is that playing or is NASA still the major and kind of only driver in this event that we’re seeing?

Daniel Yeh: 23:31

So right now we are working with NASA or our goal really is to help them fulfill the mission of Artemis is very ambitious schedule. But what you said there, absolutely I think will happen in terms of licensing of our technology. That’s co-developed with NASA to the private sector. So I anticipate that we’ll be working with the private sector as well, very soon, because I think right now, most of what the private sector is doing is getting from A to B, having a better way to get from A, to B lower costs. You can’t really reuse a rocket from A to B and back, but the question is going to be like, what do you do when you get on B? How do you sustain life there? And if what we’re seeing with NASA is any indication, it’s more complicated than anybody on earth has ever worked on. And we’ve gotten good at sustaining life on ISS, but nobody’s ever been able to sustain life on the moon for a continuous basis, right . A long, long period. So that’s going to be, I think, a challenge for all of humanity to do that. And definitely the private sector will be part of that. So there are not already developed solutions, but at times what happens in the private sector you don’t care about because it’s a proprietary, but if they’re not already developing those solutions, they need to be doing that. And I think there’ll be working with NASA to develop those.

Richard Miles: 24:39

I got to ask before we close Daniel, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that in 2024 or sometime after that NASA calls you up and says, professor Yeh, we really need someone knows what they’re doing to install the first space toilet. Would you be willing to go to the moon and spend however long it takes to put one of your inventions on the moon?

Daniel Yeh: 24:55

Absolutely, but I do hate roller coasters . So I’m not sure how I’m going to survive liftoff.

Richard Miles: 25:01

So avoid the rollercoaster test for as long as you can and maybe NASA won’t notice. I got to say, it’s fantastic. What you’ve done. See progress that you’ve made since we first met you in 2014, I was glad to see that at least a couple of your members of your original team are still with you. I think right from new generator is fantastic and glad to see that and wish you all the best as you continue to research. And certainly as you continue this development for Artemis,

Daniel Yeh: 25:23

Thank you, Richard, you mentioned members of the team and I just have to say that this podcast right now, is it me? I’m the person that’s sitting behind the microphone, but this truly has been a team effort from the get go . And I think I’ve been just very lucky to have had really good people, really good students that I work with. And students usually there’s a passion that drives them. They bring their own skill set and perspective to the team and oftentime my role is to just kind of steer them in the right direction. And it’s sometimes I just get out of the way and let them do their thing. So I’ve been very lucky to have that good people. I mentioned people on the original team. One of them is Robert Baer and he’s just been the key person behind the scenes.

Richard Miles: 25:58

Well, that sounds perfect boss. Right? You inspire people and they need to step out of the way, right. And go have a sandwich or something. Right? Let your team, figured out the hard stuff.

Daniel Yeh: 26:05

I think a good leader knows when to step out of the way, because you’re not necessarily the smartest guy in the room. And if you do your job, you shouldn’t be the smartest guy in the room.

Richard Miles: 26:13

No , absolutely. I’ve heard that before. I’ve said it in the show as well. If you are the smartest guy in the room, something’s wrong, you know, you need to go find some other workers or organization, cause that’s probably not a good sign, but Daniel, thank you very much for joining us on Radio Cade and wish you the best of luck and hope to have you back on the show.

Daniel Yeh: 26:28

Thank you, Richard. It’s been a pleasure. Great talking to you.

Outro: 26:31

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinists, Jacob Lawson.

What is it like to be an astronaut? We talk to former astronaut and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, who became the second sitting member of Congress to fly into space in January 1986 on the Space Shuttle Colombia. Nelson describes his training, his fellow astronauts, the highlights of the mission, and his thoughts on the future of space exploration.    

What is it like to be an astronaut? We talk to former astronaut and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, who became the second sitting member of Congress to fly into space in January 1986 on the Space Shuttle Colombia. Nelson describes his training, his fellow astronauts, the highlights of the mission, and his thoughts on the future of space exploration.    

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:40

Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles. And today is part of space pod our series on the renaissance and space exploration. I’ll be talking to former astronaut, native Floridian, University of Florida graduate, and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, welcome to Radio Cade senator Nelson.

Bill Nelson: 0:56

Thanks. It’s great to be here and it’s great always to talk about one of my favorite subjects space flight!

Richard Miles: 1:04

Space flight right? And , um, we’re going to be talking mostly about space flight today, but I would be remiss in my duties as a host. If I didn’t mention to the audience, the rest of your very eventful life, which began in Florida and is mostly unfolded there. As I mentioned, you were of course , born in Florida, in Melbourne, you attended the University of Florida as an undergraduate. Then after that to Yale and the University of Virginia, you returned to Melbourne to start practicing law. You were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 and stayed there until 1991. Then you held several statewide offices in Florida. You ran for the U.S. Senate in 2000 and you served there until just last year, 2019. So that’s a huge expanse of time. The state of Florida has changed enormously in the last 50 plus years. So I thought maybe we’d start by what are some of the big, broad trends you’ve seen as a kid growing up, start with that up until now with regards to Florida.

Bill Nelson: 1:57

Well, my goodness , uh , Florida has remade itself basically because the country has moved to Florida. And so when you look at a political reflection, you see that Florida is so evenly split, just like the country. South Florida is a very international community. You move further North up the East coast, you got a lot of former New Yorkers. You move over to the Southwest coast, a lot of Midwesterners that have come to Florida. And then as you get up into North Florida, it’s more like the old deep South. And so it’s such a varied state reflecting pockets of the entire United States. Indeed the Hispanic folks in Florida are a reflection, not a one particular Spanish heritage, but multiples of all Latin and central and South America, indeed, we are as much of a cosmopolitan mix as any state in this union.

Richard Miles: 3:12

That’s absolutely right. I tell friends who are not from Florida. I said, you know, Florida’s really a microcosm of the entire country for precisely the reasons you mentioned really does have this incredible mix of people from other countries, people from around the United States itself. And then it makes for very interesting election, for instance, right? Senator Nelson, let’s talk about your time in space. It’s fascinating, great career you’ve had, but I’ve got to imagine that time and space. It’s one of the highlights and what I’d really like to know and like our listeners to know is the details. So why don’t we start with you’re one of the first, if not the first sitting member of Congress to go to space. So start from the beginning. How did that opportunity arise? And at what point did you say, Hey, I want to go?

Bill Nelson: 3:54

Well, I was fortunate having been elected chairman of the space subcommittee and the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington at a time that NASA had just started flying the space shuttle and felt like that it was almost operational in the sense, instead of everything being experimental on each flight, that they decided to start flying members of the crew that were other than the full-time professional astronauts. For example, they started flying PhDs from the universities to conduct research. And so they got to the point that they decided to fly the chairman in the Senate and the house. And I was that chairman in the house, one, a Republican one, a Democrat to continue NASA’s bipartisan approach. And of course it was early in the space shuttle program. And the events that unfolded just 10 days after we landed on earth was the launch of Challenger. Challenger blew up 10 miles high in the Florida sky. And of course space flight with humans was then down for the next two and a half years tragedy was to strike again in 2003 with the destruction of the very orbiter that I flew on Columbia as it deorbited and started coming through the fiery heat of re-entry and burned up on the descent over Texas. So we’ve lost 14 souls just in the space shuttle program. And it’s an underscoring that spaceflight is risky business. You take a fantastic flying machine, like the space shuttle, but it is so complex. There were 1500 parts on the space shuttle call critical one parts, any one of which would fail. That was it. It was catastrophe. Needless to say, when we launched, I definitely knew I was in over my head and I were just hanging on for dear life.

Richard Miles: 6:10

So you’re pointing out that two tragedies underscores that space was and remains a risky endeavor. So I imagine once the decision was made that the two chairman to respect the committee is going to go up. It was a little bit more complicated than that, right? They didn’t say, okay, well, there’s your seat over there , congressmen , right? You probably had to go through a battery of physical and cognitive tests and training and so on. What was that like? When did that start? What sort of training was it? What do you remember from those early days where you knew you were going to space and you had to be prepared for it ?

Bill Nelson: 6:38

Every astronaut candidate has to pass extensive medical checks and psychological checks. As a matter of fact, I have only had one psychiatric examination in my life and it was as an astronaut candidate because they obviously have to make sure that you’re stable mentally. They can’t take a chance of somebody getting up in space and going nuts. For example, you’ve got to be tested for claustrophobia because you can’t have a crew member that gets claustrophobic because you’re tight, sealed up, no escape in a confined place for a long period of time. And the test for this is they see you up in a bag that has about three and a half feet of diameter. It has an air hose. So it’s inflated. They have you all wired up to see what your heart rate is, and they tell you, they’re going to seal you up in there for four hours and it’s dark and here you are. And so the only thing to do was just to curl up and start to go to sleep. And when I did that and they saw my heart rate was going down and after about 30 minutes, then they came in and got me because they saw that claustrophobia was not going to affect me. I’ve had some of the hot shot, military test pilots that are the astronauts pilots, usually the commanders and the next in command call the pilot. And I’ve had them tell me that they didn’t like that claustrophobia test one bit. And of course they’ve been in confined environments all their life in their military training, but fortunately it didn’t affect me. And so you go through all of that. Fortunately, in my case, I had only about six months to get ready. Normally a crew is together for a year. I had about six months. Fortunately I was already physically in fairly good shape. And so I joined in with the crew and it was just wonderful, I mean, today they are some of our best friends. We love each other. We stay in touch and they were going to be in a big event, down at the Nelson Initiative, down at the University of Florida last spring, but then COVID came. And so we delayed it until next spring. Let’s hope that COVID, doesn’t get in our way, but eventually I’ll have all of them into the University of Florida to discuss our various experiences.

Richard Miles: 9:26

And tell me Senator Nelson, where did this training take place? It wasn’t a Cape Canaveral, was it? Or was it in Houston or where, where did you do this training?

Bill Nelson: 9:32

It was primarily in Houston, but of course it included the Cape as well, especially when we did the practice countdown .

Richard Miles: 9:41

So let’s talk about that. Your actual launch date was January 18th, 1986. And I understand there were a couple of attempts before that, right?

Bill Nelson: 9:50

January 12 is when we launched, we landed on January 18 and 10 days later, January 28 , Challenger launched and blew up. And yes, we have the dubious record of the most delayed flight with the most scrubs of any American space flight . We started on December the 19th. It was scrubbed. We went all the way down to T minus 13. I had actually braced my body for the ignition of the main engines that T minus six. And then I heard the launch controls say on the microphone that we are recycling to T minus 31 minutes, and we never got off the ground that day. They gave everybody off for Christmas. We came back early January, the next one, lo and behold, we had a malfunction. Then the third one, another malfunction. The fourth one, we went to the launch pad in a driving Florida rain storm or strapped in ready to go. In case a hole appeared in the clouds. We were going to punch through, turned into a driving Florida lightning storm. And I could see the faces of my crew members with the flashes of lightning through the windows. And we’re sitting out there on top of all that liquid hydrogen, and they wanted to get out of there. Finally, they came and got us the fifth try a beautiful Sunday morning. The weather’s cooperating at the Cape and our two emergency abort sites over in Spain and inaudible in Africa. And , uh , we launch into an almost flawless six day mission only to return to earth and then Challenger launches and blows up. And that was a bad day. Needless to say,

Richard Miles: 11:44

I had not realized that you was only the fifth time that you launched. Psychologically that must’ve been tough because I imagine every single launch day, you’re up at some godforsaken hour to get all ready to go out. There you go out to the launch vehicle, and then you come back and the fifth trial , when did you switch to the onboard computer? It’s just like after 30 seconds and then, you know, you’re going right. What did you feel then?

Bill Nelson: 12:06

Well, it’s amazing. There are so many things that can go wrong. That what the astronauts do is you just steer yourself not to dwell on any of that. Otherwise you’d be distracted too much. And the first time went down to 13 seconds. We found out after the fact that had the sensor been correct, that it was a gambling problem. Fortunately, the sensor caught it. They scrubbed the mission, but nobody was paying any attention that that morning it was in the 40 degree range. Remember that’s what got Challenger was the cold temperature, 36 degrees at launch. And that 36 degrees was enough to stiffen the rubberized gaskets that went around the joints of the solid rocket booster. And the hot gas is flowed through that and burned into the big external fuel tank of hydrogen and oxygen. And that’s what destroyed it. We weren’t paying any attention to the weather on the first try. Second try, they go down to 31 seconds and alert supervisor had watched and saw that the locks line was too cold and took it upon himself to stop the count. And when they go back in and try to find out what happened, lo and behold, we had drained 18,000 pounds of liquid oxygen, and we wouldn’t have had enough fuel to get to orbit the third time we’re scrubbed for a different reason. I think it was the weather over in Spain and Africa. They go in, nobody’s paying any attention. They start taking all of the oxygen and the hydrogen out of the external fuel tank. They found out that a temperature probe in the ground equipment had flowed through the lock slide , into a pre valve at one of the three main engines and stuck it in the open position. Had we launched that day, it would not been a good day, not going up hill, but once we got to orbit, when the three main engines cut off simultaneously, one of the engines would not have cut off and it would blown the rear end of the space shuttle to bits. And so the fourth try, as I said, was this driving Florida rain storm that turned into lightning, needless to say that beautiful day on the fifth try, boy were we happy campers going up hill to orbit.

Richard Miles: 14:45

I’ll bet, tell us about those six days. I mean , what were the highs and lows of that experience or is it all a blurred? Did you just start working immediately? And what stood out to you from that six day period.

Bill Nelson: 14:55

Every minute on orbit is planned. So you don’t waste a second and they build in the time for you to get ready to go to sleep and to have enough time to sleep. And of course, you’re not sleeping at night because every 90 minutes you’re orbiting the earth and a half hour of that in the dark and the shadow of the earth. And about an hour of that, is in the sunlight. So you put on eye shades and all of that stuff, but every minute is planned and I had 12 medical experiments. So I was very focused on everything that I was supposed to do. I had a protein crystal growth experiment that was sponsored by the Medical School at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That was a cancer research experiment. I did the first American stress test in space. I actually ran for 40 minutes on a treadmill and that’s not particularly easy in zero G, but all of that was just so fascinating to me. It was just such a great privilege for me to participate and do these kinds of experiments. And so everybody had their own assignments and the crew is very, very busy.

Richard Miles: 16:15

Did you have any chance at all, Senator in that six days to just be reflective for a few minutes? I mean, just to enjoy the beauty of being out there or were you just go, go, go the entire time?

Bill Nelson: 16:25

Believe it or not, because you’re so busy, you don’t have time to get to the window. So what I would have to do is cheat on my sleep and everybody would be asleep and I’d be very quiet and float up to the flight deck and get in front of the overhead windows and just watch the earth go by. And so of course, those memories are seared into my mind’s eye. Uh , my daughter who has a beautiful voice had made a recording for me and I had a Sony Walkman and I had the earplugs so that I wouldn’t be disturbing anybody. And I’d float there in front of the window, watching the earth go by as we orbited every 90 minutes and I’d be listening to my daughter. And I thought I was in heaven. I mean, it was something. And of course, looking back at earth, it’s so beautiful. It’s so colorful. It’s so alive. It’s this creation in the middle of nothing. And space is nothing. Space is an airless vacuum that goes on and on for billions of light years. And there is our home, it’s the planet.

Richard Miles: 17:39

It’s a great story. Looking forward to where we are today. You noted that the two space shuttle explosion basically set the program back NASA back for quite a while, but then it returned. And we now have this new for the last 10 years, private companies getting involved SpaceX and Blue Origin and so on this public private partnership, where do you see the future of the space program going whether public or private, what is NASA’s role going to be? What should it be? And what do you think is possible in let’s say the next 10 years?

Bill Nelson: 18:09

Well, fortunately after having flown, and once I got to the Senate, I had a hand in charting that course a Republican Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchinson. And I alternated when she was in the majority she’d be chairman. And when the Democrats were in majority, I’d be chairman. And the two of us worked together. We didn’t work as R’s and D’s. We worked together for the nation’s space program and we charted the course in the NASA legislation of 2010, that set us on the dual course that we’re all on right now, which is to get out of low earth orbit and go explore the heavens . And that’s the Artemis Program that we’ll go back to the moon. But the goal is Mars in the decade of the 2030s as articulated by President Obama and that’s with humans to Mars, the dual track is to let and have commercial companies develop spacecraft and rockets to get us into and explore low earth orbit, manufacturing, the international space station, drug research, all of those things. And so that is what the legislation of 2010 did. And that’s the course that NASA is on right now. And it’s an exciting one. The new rocket, we even specified some of the considerations of utilizing the technology that would be applicable coming out of the space shuttle so that you saved money. And thus we have what is called the space launch system, which is the monster rocket, the largest, most powerful rocket ever with the human spacecraft on the top, which is called Orion. And that’s the one that we’ll launch in a couple of years. And in the meantime, we’re seeing commercial companies such as SpaceX and Boeing that are launching cargo and now crew to the International Space Station instead of NASA having to do those launches, although NASA obviously maintain strict control because of safety. So that’s where we’re going. We’re going to the moon use whatever properties there that we developed for the long venture to Mars. And then we’re going to Mars.

Richard Miles: 20:39

One final question Senator Nelson when important factors from the very beginning of the space program, it’s the support of the American public, because these are tremendously expensive programs that can be dangerous programs. As we know from the history of exploration. And one thing that I’ve picked up on in interviewing a number of people is if we just break it down to sort of the technical requirements and the financial pros and cons and so on, it doesn’t seem to be quite enough, but when we introduce or when the American public thinks about the sense of exploration and adventure and discovery , very soon, you get a lot of Americans going. This is really something we need to do as a country, as a nation to be on the forefront of this exploration. And I’m sure you’ve seen the various documentaries, the Apollo 11 documentary that you can’t help, but being moved by our entire history of manned space flight. How important do you think that is? That kind of sense of discovery apart from the economic or technical benefits we get and is NASA doing a good enough job in convincing the American public that we really need to still be out there in terms of leaders in space exploration ?

Bill Nelson: 21:39

Well, NASA can always improve its public relations, but let me tell you some of the things that NASA has done aside from the human space flight has been extraordinary. Look at the rovers, going all over Mars right now, look at the probes into the far reaches of the solar system. Look at the probes, going to and understanding the other planets and the moons of other planets. It’s just extraordinary, but you put your finger on something very important. The American people, they visualize the space program as human fly in space. So it was just phenomenal to me that once we had to shut down the space shuttle until we started flying humans just recently again on rockets, but the average person on the street in America thought, well, our space program’s over. When in fact we’re doing all of these gee whiz things with robotic spacecraft. So it comes down to a fundamental truth and that is no buck Rogers, no bucks. And what’s happening now that you have a bunch of buck Rogers going back up into space. It is going to rebut the American imagination into space flight again. And by the way, it’s American rockets that they want to see them going on because we’ve always, since we shut down the space shuttle, we’ve been sending Americans with international crews by means of the Russian space craft to and from the international space station ever since. But Americans want to see it launch from American soil, which we are now doing. And by the way, once you’re in space and you look back at earth and also is just emblazoned on my mind’s eye. I told you that it’s so beautiful, but as a political being, as a politician, as a public servant, as I orbited the earth, I look back, I didn’t see black and white divisions. I didn’t see racial divisions. I didn’t see religious divisions. I didn’t see all kinds of political divisions. What I saw was we are all in this together. As we orbited the earth, every 90 minutes, I saw that what we are citizens of the planet earth, and that ought to be very instructive to our politics in the future that we’ve got to overcome these divisions that be devils . Like we see our politics so divided. Like we see our racial situation so divided. We’ve got to come together. That was a lasting lesson for me, looking out the window of a spacecraft back at our home and our home is the planet.

Richard Miles: 24:46

Senator Nelson, thank you very much for joining us today on Radio Cade also thank you for your service to our country, whether it’s in the halls of Congress or in a space shuttle, thousands of miles above the earth, really appreciate you joining us today and wish you the best.

Bill Nelson: 24:58

Have a great day. And thanks for what you do with the Cade Museum.

Richard Miles: 25:03

Well, thank you. It’s been an adventure, maybe not quite as exciting as going to space, but on some days it feels like that, but really appreciate you joining us. We hope to have you back on show.

Bill Nelson: 25:13

Thanks.

Outro: 25:15

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist Jacob Lawson.