AIAA’s Breaking Barriers.

Summary

Podcast Summary: T-Minus Space Daily – "AIAA’s Breaking Barriers"

Episode Information

• Title: AIAA’s Breaking Barriers
• Host/Author: N2K Networks
• Release Date: June 14, 2025

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Introduction to AIAA and New Leadership

The episode, hosted by Alice Carruth, delves into the recent developments within the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a prestigious professional society in the Aerospace Engineering sector. AIAA boasts over 30,000 members across 91 countries and includes 95 corporate members. Established in 1963 through the merger of the American Rocket Society and the Institute of Aerospace Sciences, AIAA has recently undergone a significant brand refresh alongside new leadership.

Alice Carruth introduces Clay Mowry, the newly appointed Executive Director of AIAA as of late 2024. Alice sets the stage by highlighting Clay's swift initiatives to revitalize the organization and steer its growth trajectory.

Interview with Clay Mowry: Vision and Leadership

Timestamp: [02:33] - [24:16]

Clay Mowry shares his background, describing himself as a lifelong member and a fellow of AIAA. Despite his extensive 25-year experience in the commercial aerospace industry, Clay chose to lead AIAA out of passion and a desire to give back to a community integral to his professional journey.

Early Initiatives and Engagement

• First Six Months: Clay reflects on his initial months, emphasizing his return to the aerospace roots, engaging with student branches, regional chapters, and participating in events like the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) and the Design Build Fly competition in Tucson.

  "It's super exciting for me to give back and to be engaged across the whole industry. So it's exciting times."
  — Clay Mowry [02:46]

• Volunteer Army: With a membership base primarily composed of aerospace engineers, AIAA also welcomes professionals from diverse backgrounds, including Clay himself, who humorously notes, "I'm not an engineer, don't tell anybody, by the way." He underscores the importance of local engagement and volunteer participation.

• Student Focus: Clay highlights the enthusiasm and innovative spirit students bring to competitions, viewing them as the future of aerospace. He expresses admiration for their intelligence and engagement.

  "They're so smart, they're so engaged. It's just a lot of fun."
  — Clay Mowry [04:55]

STEM and Student Engagement

Clay emphasizes AIAA’s strong focus on STEM and student events, articulating the critical role these play in fostering the next generation of aerospace professionals.

"What we're trying to do is connect with the next generation of aerospace professionals."
— Clay Mowry [05:04]

He elaborates on the technological advancements in aerospace, such as reusable rockets, hypersonic flight, and orbital transfer vehicles, which were once considered science fiction but are now becoming reality. This progress fuels his motivation to engage and inspire students.

Partnership with IREC

A significant highlight of the interview is AIAA's partnership with the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC). Clay elaborates on the collaboration, praising IREC’s growth over 15 years to become the world's largest and most international rocket competition.

"It's a perfect symbiotic partnership between the two organizations. One plus one is going to equal five, six, seven here."
— Clay Mowry [07:00]

Key points about the partnership:

• Inclusion of Non-AIAA Teams: Currently, about half of the 143 teams at IREC are affiliated with AIAA, with the remaining teams poised for future engagement.
• Growth Aspirations: Aiming to double the number of student branches from the current 263 to 500 within five years, tapping into the extensive network of the NASA Space Grant Consortium.

Rebranding AIAA: "Breaking Barriers"

One of Clay’s notable initiatives is the comprehensive rebranding of AIAA, symbolized by the new tagline "Breaking Barriers." This rebranding aims to capture the organization's evolving spirit and appeal to both traditional members and the newer generation.

"The informal kind of tagline now is breaking barriers. We came up with kind of this. It's an homage to Chuck Yeager, it's homage to the Apollo program in a certain way of departing from planet Earth."
— Clay Mowry [16:02]

Key Elements of the Rebrand:

• Logo Design: Incorporates elements representing both aeronautics (a plane breaking the sound barrier) and astronautics (a rocket launching from Earth), reflecting AIAA’s dual heritage.
• Process: Involved collaboration with external design firms and internal teams, culminating in a logo that serves as a Rorschach test—different members perceive different aspects aligned with their expertise.
• Reception: Positive feedback from both senior members, who appreciate the historical connections, and younger professionals who find the new logo clean and energizing.

Digital Transformation and Communication Strategies

Clay underscores the necessity of digital transformation to engage effectively with today’s digital-native students and young professionals. He identifies platforms like Instagram and Slack as critical tools for modern communication.

"We need to be all over social media, and we need to figure out how to launch a Slack channel."
— Clay Mowry [12:07]

Strategies Implemented:

• Freemium Model: Introducing low-barrier entry points for non-members to access content, akin to platforms like YouTube and Spotify. This approach aims to expand AIAA’s reach and subsequently convert engaged individuals into members.
• Content-Centric Approach: Transitioning AIAA into a digital content company, prioritizing the dissemination of valuable information to attract and retain members.
• AI Integration: Enhancing AIAA’s extensive digital library, ARK, with AI search capabilities to optimize content accessibility and utility for members.

International Expansion and Membership Retention

Looking forward, Clay outlines a three-pronged strategy to ensure sustainable growth and relevance of AIAA:

1. International Expansion:

   • Current Status: 6,000 international members with significant interest from regions like Eurasia and Australia.
   • Goals: Establish a stronger presence internationally by hiring regional representatives and increasing participation in global competitions like IREC.

2. Membership Retention Beyond Graduation:

   • Challenge: Currently, AIAA struggles to retain members post-graduation.
   • Solution: Offer continuous value through ongoing education, mentorship programs, professional development opportunities, and active engagement in committees and events.

   "Why would you want to stay with the organization? That's a huge part of what I'm trying to solve for is keeping people in the fold."
   — Clay Mowry [20:14]

3. Enhancing Content and Learning Opportunities:

   • ARK Library: Maintaining and expanding the vast repository of peer-reviewed technical journals, with plans to integrate AI for enhanced searchability.
   • Learning Organization: Positioning AIAA as a perpetual learning hub where members can continuously gain knowledge and stay abreast of industry advancements.

   "We are really a learning organization. You come to our events, you're gonna get smarter, you're gonna do better in your job."
   — Clay Mowry [20:14]

Conclusion

Clay Mowry’s leadership is steering AIAA towards a future where it not only maintains its prestigious legacy but also adapts dynamically to the evolving aerospace landscape. By focusing on digital transformation, international growth, and strengthening member engagement, AIAA aims to break new barriers and remain a pivotal organization in aerospace engineering.

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Notable Quotes

1. "It's super exciting for me to give back and to be engaged across the whole industry. So it's exciting times."
   — Clay Mowry [02:46]

2. "They're so smart, they're so engaged. It's just a lot of fun."
   — Clay Mowry [04:55]

3. "What we're trying to do is connect with the next generation of aerospace professionals."
   — Clay Mowry [05:04]

4. "It's a perfect symbiotic partnership between the two organizations. One plus one is going to equal five, six, seven here."
   — Clay Mowry [07:00]

5. "The informal kind of tagline now is breaking barriers."
   — Clay Mowry [16:02]

6. "We need to be all over social media, and we need to figure out how to launch a Slack channel."
   — Clay Mowry [12:07]

7. "Why would you want to stay with the organization? That's a huge part of what I'm trying to solve for is keeping people in the fold."
   — Clay Mowry [20:14]

8. "We are really a learning organization. You come to our events, you're gonna get smarter, you're gonna do better in your job."
   — Clay Mowry [20:14]

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and future directions outlined in the "AIAA’s Breaking Barriers" episode of T-Minus Space Daily. For listeners seeking an in-depth understanding of AIAA’s current initiatives and strategic vision under Clay Mowry's leadership, this episode serves as an informative and engaging resource.

Transcript

[Clay Mowry]

You're listening to the N2K space network.

[Dave]

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[Alice Carruth]

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, better known as aiaa, is a professional society for the field of Aerospace Engineering. AIAA has over 30,000 members from 91 countries and 95 corporate members. It was created in 1963 by the merger of the American Rocket Society and the Institute of Aerospace Sciences. And it's recently rolled out a brand refresh to go along with its brand new leadership. Welcome to T minus deep space from N2K Networks. I'm Alice Carruth. Clay Mowry was appointed as AIAA executive director in late 2024 and has hit the ground running to update the organization and figure out ways to make it grow. I caught up with Clay at the International Rocket Engineering Competition, better known as the irec.

[Clay Mowry]

My name is Clay Mori. I'm the Chief Executive Officer for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

[Interviewer]

So you're relatively new to this role. You only started about eight months ago. Tell me about what it's been like coming into aiaa, which is such a great and established brand.

[Clay Mowry]

Well, you know, it's interesting because I've been a lifetime member of aiaa. I'm an AIAA fellow. It's been an organization I've been part of for the bulk of my professional career. So when the opportunity came up to take the leadership role here, it was super exciting for me. A lot of people ask me, why are you doing that? You've been in the commercial industry for more than 25 years. Why would you Want to go run this institute. And I said, because I love it. It's just like the volunteers of the organization. It really is a great opportunity for me to give back and to be engaged across the whole industry. So it's exciting times.

[Interviewer]

It is. And you've now done, like I say, that first six months on the job. What have you covered in that time?

[Clay Mowry]

Oh, gosh, Incredible scope. So the other great part of it is now I get to go back to my roots in the aero side. So I've been a space guy for most of my career, but I started in the Office of aerospace at the U.S. department of Commerce. So it's great to be going back to air shows, to going to competitions, being engaged with students. It's been a whirlwind, to be honest with you, from the start of about seven months ago, working with our student branches, our regional chapters and sections and really traversing the whole country. I've been up to Boston, I've been out to the west coast, to la, I've been to Colorado, to Arizona, and now I'm here in Texas. I've been a couple trips to Texas and engaging with the local because we're really about our volunteer Army. We have 33,000 members of the organization, mostly aerospace engineers. But we're much bigger than that. We have folks like myself. I'm not an engineer, don't tell anybody, by the way. I'm running a 30,000 member society that I'm not an engineer, but it's all engineers. But it's great to be connecting on a local level because that's really where the action is. That's where our volunteers are engaging. And I would say the students are probably the most fun part of that. Right? They bring the energy, they bring the new ideas and it's spectacular to go to these kinds of competitions. We're here at IREC in Texas. I was at the Design Build Fly competition out in Tucson two months ago. And the energy that they bring and the excitement, I mean, this is the future of aerospace right in front of me. And they're so smart, they're so engaged. It's just a lot of fun.

[Interviewer]

So it's obviously a focus I'm seeing for AIAA to support a lot of these STEM events. Tell me why AIAA is so focused on STEM and student events like this.

[Clay Mowry]

Well, so let me just back up for a second, which is to say that I've been doing space and Aerospace for 32 years and there's no more exciting time than what we're doing. Right now, this is the future. It's now. The technology has finally kind of caught up and the software has finally caught up to what our desires were 30, 40 years ago in terms of access to space, in terms of vertical flight, in terms of hypersonics and supersonic flight. The design elements now have changed so rapidly that we're really at this exciting time where everything we imagined would be happening from hypersonic, supersonic, transferred and vertical flight. Planes that can take off and the props turn and then all of a sudden and automation and automated flight, reusable rockets going back to the moon, going to Mars, refueling in orbit space tugs, you know, orbital transfer vehicles. All of these TYP technologies are now, right now right in front of us. They're either operational or they're about to become operational, or on the aero side, they're getting certified. So these things are going to fundamentally transform how we transport things, how we as a society move forward, how we're going to understand the solar system and planet Earth, how we're going to continue to explore and utilize resources. And these things are what was science fiction, right? This is what we were thinking about in the 50s, 60s and 70s that we thought the aerospace industry was gonna look like. So it's just super exciting to be a part of that. Like, I never thought or even dreamed that like at this point in my career it would be happening. So I think that's great. I tell the students I meet all the time, this is really this. I wish I was your age. I wish I could actually start over because right now it's all opening up.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's a very exciting time and it's a really exciting time to see you guys involved in the irec, which is the world's largest rocket engineering competition that MOU you guys sign. What are you agreeing with Ezra to do moving forward?

[Clay Mowry]

First of all, extraordinary partnership. These guys have built in 15 years the world's largest, most international rocket competition. It's amazing to be here, to feel the energy, to see the teams. What Ezra's done is outstanding. And when I first connected with them, I said, look, I have no interest in hosting something like this, but how do I become a part of it? How do we do what we're good at? AIAA as an institute, as a technically led organization, and help you build this event and make it even bigger and better over time. And so I think it's really a perfect symbiotic partnership between the two organizations. And by the way, there's a volunteer army here. And thanks to all those Folks, that this thing has taken place, that we can create something together that's going to be much bigger. One plus one is going to equal five, six, seven here. At the end of the day, we have 263 student branches in the US around the world. There's 143 teams here this year. About half of the teams that are here, a little bit more than half, are actually affiliated with aiaa. They are part of our student branch network, but there's another 62 teams here that are not. So I want to engage in those guys. I want to bring them into our family and what we do on the technical side, papers, presentations, conferences, events, technical publications, journals, and bring them into our family and help these students get access to that network and that capability. And hopefully they'll get jobs and stay with us and continue to be lifelong members of the organization. What we can bring here is a huge network that we already have established. We can bring those student branches and chapters that have not affiliated with this competition to this competition. And we're, by the way, on a track. I think we're going to try to double the number of our student branches over the next five years. That's our goal, is to get to 500. And there's over 1,000 students, excuse me, 1,000 colleges and universities that are part of the NASA Space Grant Consortium that's here in the US so like 500 getting half of those. Like right now I'm at a quarter. And that's not even talking about the internationals. So I think there's plenty of headroom here. There's plenty of room to grow and hopefully we can keep accommodating and building this. Right. There's a lot of space here in Texas. Right? Texas does nothing small.

[Interviewer]

No, it's big.

[Clay Mowry]

It's all big. So I think this is a great place if I was going to figure out a place to launch a student rocket competition. And so really excited, by the way, 100,000 foot ceiling here. The Rice University team's talking about trying to hit 75 plus thousand feet. So it's super cool to be part of this. I can't wait to see what comes out of this one this year.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Is this all part of the future of what you're hoping to bring to the AIAA role now you're as this lead for them?

[Clay Mowry]

Yeah, you know, they brought me in to try to grow the organization. It's been a wonderful organization, as I say, to be part of for over the years, and we made it through Covid. Thank that goodness, we're on the other side of that. And now we're trying to figure out, how do we grow? How do we connect with the next generation of aerospace professionals? And that sounds like an easy thing, like, okay, okay, but really, how do you actually do that? So I describe this a lot to people. I said, look, I'm not a digital native. My kids are all digital natives. They grew up with digital technology at their fingertips. Touchscreens and phones and Instagram and all the ways that they connect and communicate with each other. I grew up in an analog world with typewriters, and, you know, it was a very different place. And so networking was different. When I grew up, you had to actually show up at the event and shake hands with somebody, get a business card and put it in your Rolodex. Those are all terms that nobody knows anymore. What does that mean? And now we're communicating in a much different way. So part of what I was brought in to do was figure out how do we. We had started this digital transformation before I got there. I don't want. Dan Dunpocker did an amazing job, but we now have to complete the digital transformation. We have to figure out how do we communicate with students and young professionals in a different way? How do we engage with them? So whenever I go to a student branch, I say, well, how do you guys communicate? Where do you get your news from? How do you communicate with each other? And two things always come up, Instagram and Slack. And so I came back to my team and I say, we need to be all over social media, and we. Which sounds kind of funny for a technical society of a bunch of rocket scientists and aerospace engineers, we need to be there, and we need to figure out how to launch a Slack channel. We need to get back into the university section. When you think about it, I'm a sales and marketing guy, sold rocket launches for years. I was head of global sales teams. And the whole idea is the top of that funnel. How do you fill the top of that funnel so you can actually then get to your real customers? At the end of the day, you want to have as big of a universe of what we call the tam, the total addressable market that you can have. And so my big goal right now is to grow that addressable market of students and aerospace professionals. Show them what we got. You got to have a value proposition. There's got to be meaning behind this at the end. But trying to fill that funnel at the top with digital capability, we have to communicate digitally. We have to engage Digitally and then do stuff. And yeah, we still do the face to face stuff. We still do the stuff where we have to actually meet as people and engage, but we also have to have a touch point with everybody. I talk a lot about the freemium model. I don't know. Do you know freemium?

[Alice Carruth]

No.

[Clay Mowry]

So freemium is like YouTube or Spotify is a great example of freemium. Right. If you want to come in with ad supported content, you can come up and sign up and listen to music or whatever, podcast. But if you want to have no ads, or if you want to have another level of experience, access to a bigger library, then you have to pay to be a premium member. So you kind of move up this value chain as you go along. And I said to my team, okay, how many people are we communicating with on a daily basis? And they said, well, we have 30,000 people on our distribution list for my daily launch. And I said, well, why is it so small? And they said, well, that's our number one member benefit. And I said, no, no, no, this is our number one way to communicate and attract people into the organization. You got to stop thinking about it as a fence to a walled garden, right? Like where you had, there's a paywall that you're going to hit. So I want to be able to communicate with all as many people as we meet, connect. You're going to get our daily feed, then I'm going to attract you to come to our events. And if you want to come to our events and you want a discount to attend, you're going to join. If you want access to our library of information, you're going to join and then you're going to get access to that library. And so let's create an easy entry point, really low barriers to entry, Frictionless, as we say. And think of ourselves more as a digital content company. Content first, digital first. And put that out and make sure that the ability to come in, that's very easy and frictionless. You can kind of join our community, our large community, and then we'll attract you in as a member because you're going to see the benefits, you're going to see the value proposition and come in the door. So what I'm trying to bring is some of my business acumen and skills from broader into a society and try to think about it a little bit differently. You know, we tend to be very kind of focused on what we're doing and the technical aspects, but not thinking how to build the bigger picture about how are we communicating with the larger community. So that's a big part of what I'm trying to do.

[Alice Carruth]

We'll be right back.

[Dave]

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[Interviewer]

I noticed you also did went through a big rebrand since you joined as well. Can you talk us a little bit about that and why you decided to make a whole new rebrand of the way people approach?

[Clay Mowry]

Yes. So I mean, I've been part of a lot of different corporations that had huge brands. You know, Blue Origin or, or Aryan Space, you know, is an iconic brand in Europe. And you have to be very careful when you, when you mess with a brand right now. But I also say that every organization I've been in, they tend to do brand refreshes every five to 10 years. You think about, all right, we're going to tweak the logo, we're going to tweak the tagline. We might change the colors a little bit or we might make it a little more modern. You know, even fonts, the fonts that you use evolve over time. And so when I got to aiaa, I was kind of looking at the logo and I said, you know, as far as I can remember, this is the same logo that's been around. And we went back and did the history and it, it was really 1963.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Clay Mowry]

That they had put it in place, which is older than me, shockingly enough. And the font had changed a little bit. We had lines running through the A's at one point and then that Came out and the slant to it a little bit different, cant to it, but more or less it was the same color. And this is from the merger of the American Rocket Society and the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, I think. So these two organizations, the predecessor organizations that had been around from the 1930s and 1950s that joined to form AIAA. So we looked at it, we looked at the logo. I said, I think we could do a refresh on this or rebrand in a way that would capture more of the spirit of the organization, that would capture a little bit the next generation of folks. And so we started playing around with it. We hired two outside firms, ran a little competition. We have an internal team design team. So we had three design teams working on it. We tossed around different ideas and we came back with what you see now. And it's a bit of a Rorschach test, if you want to put it that way, which is if you look at the logo, if you're an aero guy or member, you see a plane breaking the sound barrier, you see shock waves coming off of the nose of an aircraft, which is inspired by the people who did the design by the Bell X1 and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. If you're a rocket person, you see a rocket taking off from the planet Earth. And so it actually works on both levels between the two organizations or two sides of the organization, Arrow and Astro. And the informal kind of tagline now is breaking barriers. We came up with kind of this. It's an homage to Chuck Yeager, it's homage to the Apollo program in a certain way of departing from planet Earth. But so. And by the way, if you look at it, see the positive or negative space of how you look at the logo. So we rolled it out. I first rolled it out to the board and then to the council, the AIAA council, the AIAA board. Then we took it to all of our senior members. We did a town hall. Because change is hard. And changing a logo that's been around for almost 62 years is a hard thing for people to take on. So people got warm to it. We kind of told the story of the creation of the American Rocket Society. What those guys did. And those guys, I say those guys, the founders of that society, did some of the first test flights of liquid fueled vehicles, basically following in the footsteps of Robert Goddard. And then they formed the American Rocket Society. And then an offshoot of that was a company called Reaction Motors. And that was the motor that powered the Bell X1. So when you tell that Story. All of my. The older members like, ah, that's lovely. We love the connection back to the kind of the roots of the organization that started there. And by the way, it's a rocket powered plane. So it's got both the arrow and the rocketry right. Mixed into the bell x1 and what Chuck Yeager did. So it was really lovely to see them embrace that to do this relaunch. And the reaction I've had from the students and young professionals has been extraordinary. They love the new logo. I think it's clean and slick and so it gives a little bit of energy to what we're trying to do. It's kind of a classic trick of any new executive. You're going to come in there, I'm going to re energize this organization. And so one of the ways you can do that is visually. So we think that that's a fun thing. And we're doing water bottles here and stickers and we got a big sticker game going now. So it's fun.

[Interviewer]

Always a good one. Everyone loves a good bit of merchandise.

[Clay Mowry]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So obviously you've been brought on to grow the organization. What can we expect from you in the next six months? 12 months and beyond with AIAA?

[Clay Mowry]

So a few things. So I've laid out a bunch of priorities which one is to re engage with students and young professionals. And so that's a huge part of what we're trying to do. And coming here to this competition is part. And the partnership we have with Ezra, the next piece of that is international. And so we really want to grow the organization internationally. And wherever I go around the world, I find engineers that say, oh my gosh, I'm a member. We by the way, have 6,000 international members already of the organization. So just hired someone in Europe to represent us in Europe. We're going to try to expand into the Eurasia region as well. We're going to be in Australia this fall. So we're looking to grow internationally. And when we say that. So we have tons of. I think there's 30 teams here that are international teams. We did our design build fly. We had 14 international teams. These folks want to come. This is kind of the biggest, not only the biggest market, but the most innovative market in the world. They want to come to the US to learn to fly, to compete. Talking to the students here, they love the fact that they're meeting their cohort. Right. They're meeting their people are here. They're like, I've never been in a room of this many international aerospace engineers. And I'm meeting people from Brazil and Malaysia and all these places. And so that's the second piece of what I'm trying to do is to grow it internationally. And then the final piece is to be relevant across the career arc. So we have a huge problem in the organization in that students come, they join, they do a competition where they present their first paper at one of our student conferences and then they leave us. And so we're not very sticky, as we say in the business. Right? We're not good at retaining, or I should say, we're not good at delivering a value proposition beyond graduation. Why would you want to be a member of ours? Why would you want to stay with the organization? And so that's a huge part of what I'm trying, a puzzle piece I'm trying to solve for is keeping people in the fold, give them a reason. So how do you do that? It's continuing education, it's joining one of our committees, it's getting mentorship, it's engaging in our regions and sections around the world, it's coming to our conferences and events and learning. We are really first and foremost, I say content, but we're really a learning organization. You come to our events, you're gonna get smarter, you're gonna do better in your job, you're gonna hear about some idea that some other engineers come up with and you're like, oh my God, what could I do with that technology or capability? So we wanna be a learning organization. And one of the speakers this morning talked about being a constant learner, about going to college basically every day his whole life. And that's exactly what we want to be as an organization, that people see us and view us as a place not only where they can network and they can get their start as a student, but they're going to continue to learn over the course of the career. So that's something I got to figure out. So we're going to start with Instagram and Slack. I know that sounds like kind of funny almost, but that's where we're going to bring everybody in. We're going to attract them to all these other products and services. Our online presence is huge. We have the biggest library in the world of peer reviewed technical journals on aerospace. So it's called Ark and it's digitally online and it's about 40% of what we are as an organization is these 200,000 books and journal articles that are. And every year we put another five or six thousand new articles into this that are peer reviewed, highly technical, state of the art. So if you want to learn, that's basically where people come to us. And who subscribes? Companies, space agencies, federally funded research development corporations, universities, they all subscribe to this library. And so it is. And now we gotta make that AI searchable, by the way, so that if you want to go in and do a query, you're going to get the best results. You're going to get the top four or five articles about what you want to do, whether it's designing a new wingtip for a plane or understanding thermal dynamics or thrust vector control. Whatever the technical piece is, you can zero in on what that is. Training a large language model to be able to look at that database and then extract the right. Not easy. So we're now trying to figure out how to do that. That's another piece of our digital transformation.

[Interviewer]

Well, it sounds like you've got a lot going on. Thank you so much for talking this.

[Clay Mowry]

It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure.

[Alice Carruth]

That's it for T Minus Deep Space, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email [e-mail] or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Peter Kilfey is our publisher. And I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening.

[Clay Mowry]

Sa.