ISU Space Studies Program + ACS - Week 7 & 8

Week 7 and 8 are combined because I did the very unsmart thing and traveled back to the US for a conference during week 8. While I highly do not recommend such travel during SSP to any future participants (especially so close to the end!), it was an amazing experience and I'll share more below.

Week 7: Start of Team Project Phase

While we've touched on team project things over the last 6 weeks, week 7 marked the transition to 100% time working on our team projects. We also officially transferred from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica - ITA campus to the INPE campus and had a full parade of bikes with a military escort from one campus to the other. Just imagine - about 50 men running and chanting while 100+ crazy space nerds follow on bright yellow bikes! It was quite the scene and I'd share pictures or videos but unfortunately (or fortunately), they were all shirtless running and I don't feel as though I should share this on this platform. ??

Once at INPE, the hard work began. In the team project phase, you are assigned a general topic and as a group, you have to figure out how you will approach that topic within the realm of the space industry. Within this phase, we have 2 main deliverables - a 120-page report to stakeholders and a 1-hour presentation. To me, it was basically a group PhD dissertation that is researched, written, and defended in the course of 14-business days! ?? Luckily, we are led by some of the best in the industry - our TP was chaired by Francois Spiero and Lincoln Alves .

Anyways, throughout our lectures in the earlier stages of SSP, we were taught about the current water security situation in Brazil. Because of this, in our TP, we decided to take a Brazil-centric approach and focus on issues relevant in this country. And due to recent natural disasters that greatly impacted water resources in the southeast regions of Brazil in particular, we decided to focus on floods and droughts and their subsequent impact on water availability and quality. I'll talk in more detail about our report and outcomes in my week 9 post! But I will say, the best thing our group did to bond and stay calm throughout these last 3 weeks was appoint happiness managers. Tobias van Bemmel and Linda Martina Maier kept us fed, laughing, massaged, etc. throughout all three weeks and it was the best!

Fun time in SJC

Beyond our TP work, we were able to have some fun during these two weeks as well. Firstly, thanks to Claudia Medeiros , we were all able to go see the Barbie movie together and be able to watch it in English!

I was also able to give a fun, 10-minute talk to all of SSP about failure analysis, which was really cool since we didn't really touch on this topic at all throughout the SSP core lecture or workshop phases. So it was fun to get to teach a very brief background to what FA is and why it is important to so many who have never had any interaction with that topic before. (It was also great prep for my conference that I'll talk about shortly!)

American Chemical Society - Fall 2023 Meeting, San Francisco, California

So this year, I was invited by Chemical Marketing & Economics (CME) to speak at their annual CME/NASA Symposium at the American Chemical Society fall meeting. So yes, I traveled almost 24 hours from S?o José dos Campos to San Francisco to give a 30 minute talk and 2 panels (on my birthday no less!!) ?? Before returning to SJC to finish up the last week of the program! The amount of sleep I need to make up at the end of all of this is outrageous.

It's been quite a few years since I've attended an ACS conference since I've focused the majority of my time on going to space conferences (because, well....it's SPACE!) But it was nice to reunite with people I haven't seen since pre-COVID times (including #SSP11 alumni Luke Roberson, Ph.D. ) and be immersed in chemistry talk (although, I felt like much the imposter since I don't really do "hard-core chemistry".) But it sure was encouraging to listen to polymer lectures and realize I retained more of minute details than I thought I had from my polymer chemistry courses back at Case Western Reserve University from Stuart Rowan , even though I diverted to more ceramics during the rest of grad school. (Which was also cool to hear the recent work that some old colleagues from CWRU are doing these days.)

Anyways, I was invited to talk at this symposium as an alum of the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF, now NSTGRO) that I had during my PhD at the University of Central Florida and how NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration supports early-career/early-stage research in academia and industry. So for 30-minutes, I was able to combine my experiences as a NASA Pathways intern and a NASA employee working in the area of failure analysis with that of my past as a NASA research fellow in the area of energy storage materials to speak on "Utilizing Lessons Learned to Create a Safer, More Sustainable Future in Space".

So what did that talk sound like? Well, at NASA and in the space industry, learning from our past is critical. We cannot attempt to land humans on the Martian surface if we do not grow from our past mistakes. But what we oftentimes forget to do is to look to our past to drive highly innovative, revolutionary development - this becomes even more exacerbated as generations pass and the lessons learned stopped being passed down from the older to younger generations. But that does not mean they are any less important! Looking into these failures, as small or as big as they may be, should inspire researchers to think outside of the box. During my presentation, I highlighted a few examples at NASA that really demonstrated this push in technological development as a result of a failure.

The obvious failure is that of Space Shuttle Columbia , who was lost along with her crew as a result of a structural breach on the leading edge of her left hand wing. This shed light onto a gap in the program through lack of detailed knowledge of our launch vehicles health throughout all parts of a mission. But now, our space program is better in this aspect due to the development of the structural health monitoring systems that have been deployed since Columbia. And with the real-time data transmission, those on Mission Control have a chance at interfering and providing alternate cues to get crew safely back home when the structural integrity of a vehicle isn't sufficient.

Another highlight in my lecture before I talked the technical details of my PhD work in polymer-derived ceramics was that of hydrogen sensing tape that was also developed during the Space Shuttle days. Leaks in the hydrogen lines of the launch pads caused more than one delay over the years and was synonymous with a lot of lost time due to trying to isolate the leaks. With a hydrogen leak being invisible, this was always problematic. Researchers at KSC (including #ssp11 alum Luke mentioned above), as well as UCF, developed a chemochromic sensing tape that changed color when in the presence of hydrogen gas thus leading to visible identification of the exact source of the gas leak!

There's just so many things out there that we can solve and create a game-changing product for the space industry in particular.

After I got to blabber on about failures and polymer derived ceramics for 30 minutes, I was able to speak on a panel with 3 other brilliant minds, Jenn Gustetic of NASA STMD, Paul Anastas of Yale, and Karen McDonald of UC Davis about the future of innovation and sustainability in space. As only my second-ever panel, I would say everything went well and there were some truly great interactions between the three of us. Paul in particular challenged us to think of the terms "efficiency" versus "effectiveness" in research. We had a great discussion on the question of "should we always be working to making things more 'efficient'?" I encourage you to think on this as well, because once you dive into the meaning of the words, your thought process might surprise you.

Finally, I had a great small discussion between myself, Jana Stoudemire of Axiom, and George Rodriguez of CME. We were able to talk again on sustainability in the space industry but from a more materials development perspective. But I think the most memorable moments for me were these: (1) being asked how we at NASA can engage and support global sustainability needs and (2) how can we engage the younger generations to continue pursuing STEM-related degrees. In both of these, I realized, I responded as a result of the things I learned this summer at the International Space University .

For the first question, I was really able to respond as a result of our core lectures and department phase work, drawing on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and being able to highlight some conversations I had. For the second one, I never thought I would be able to respond to a question like that to be honest. But, thanks to a whole new world opening in front of me due to Niamh Shaw, PhD teachings this summer, I was able to pass the word of humanities and how to engage on a multitude of level to a larger audience that we had during SSP. I think my responses to these two questions were the first time I started to notice the change in myself and my thinking as a direct result of SSP.

The 3-day symposium ended with a reception on the pier at La Mar (I also went to La Mar in Lima, Peru last year so I was excited to go to this restaurant for seafood and ceviche!) At this reception, I met another secondary connection to ISU which just goes to show how far reaching our crazy network of space people really goes! But after a few days in San Francisco, I returned to SJC (after another ~24 hours of travel) to finish THE LAST WEEK of ISU's Space Studies Program....which will be next weeks topic! ??