Alice Cruz (7:46)

Alice Maria we have three additional links in today's selected Reading section of our show, Notes for our listeners to read up on. The first is on the news that Satex 5 shareholders have approved the agreement and plan of merger with MTA Space limited Then we've included a CGTN article on Chinese and South African astronomers collaborations and the final link will take you to the announcement that AECOM has been awarded an environmental remediation contract at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Maria Varmazes (8:12)

And of course, we are watching SpaceX's planned Starship test flight for this evening. We'll bring you more on that tomorrow if it stays on schedule, of course. Alice in the meantime, where can our listeners find those links?

Alice Cruz (8:25)

All good podcast platforms include show notes. The links are added to the selected Reading section along with further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show. They're also included in the episode page on our website space.n2k.com hey t minus crew.

Maria Varmazes (8:39)

If you're just joining us, be sure to follow T Minus Space daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T Minus Crew. So if you find T Minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T Minus.

Dave (9:30)

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Maria Varmazes (10:11)

Our guest today is Jim Way, Executive Director of the American Astronautical Society. Jim started off by telling me about the history of aas.

Jim Way (10:23)

AAS is a nonprofit technical Society. We were formally established in 1954, but 1952, it all kind of started with a meeting of these folks in Staten Island, New York. The Staten Island Interplanetary Society.

Maria Varmazes (10:42)

Yeah, that is a great name.

Jim Way (10:43)

Yeah, isn't it great? And they wanted to get together and I'm gonna quote here to discuss problems of rocket propulsion, navigation and physiology in planet hopping. So that was their original mission, Right, of course.

Maria Varmazes (10:58)

Gotta set your sights high, right?

Jim Way (11:00)

That's right. And so in 54, in 1954, the society was officially established to publicly disseminate and support as many of the credible proposals for the conquest of space as in short, we haven't wavered from that in all those years. And what we do is we bring people together to address the current challenges and opportunities in space exploration and science, figure out where we are now, where we want to go and how we're going to do it. And that's our role, is to bring them together both in public forums like symposiums, but also presentation of research papers at conferences, things like that. We publish a journal. We're just very proud, part of the community.

Maria Varmazes (11:44)

The events list that you have, that is not a small amount of work that goes into that many events. And it is a lot of events. I don't often get to say, tell me about your symposia, but please tell me about them because you have multiple.

Jim Way (12:02)

Yeah, yeah, we do. You know, it's a small staff organization, it's only four of us, but we have a lot of volunteers on our. Yeah, wow.

Maria Varmazes (12:13)

My goodness.

Jim Way (12:14)

Yeah. But we're a big board and lots of committees. So that's how we, we get it all done. So I'm very fortunate to, you know, again, serve for a lot of those people. And so, yeah, we do three symposia every year kind of focused on some of the NASA centers. So we do our Goddard Symposium in the spring focused on space science. We do a Glenn Symposium in conjunction with NASA Glenn out in Ohio. That one's focused on space technology. And then we do the Von Braun Space Exploration Symposium down in Huntsville every fall. So we do those three. In addition to that, we do technical conferences, Astrodynamics Specialist Conference, Guidance Navigation and Control, Spaceflight Mechanics. And we also participate in a couple of other conferences. The ISS R&D conference, we do all the technical sessions for that one. And then the AMOS conference in Hawaii. Uh, we do a lot of the technical sessions for that one as well.

Maria Varmazes (13:13)

Wow. I, I, so I was at the Boston ISS RDC last year. Um, I, I, I did not know that you guys did the technical sessions. Yeah, you all are everywhere. It's quite amazing. I know that you have a lot of things upcoming that I definitely want to hear about, but I, I, I'm champing at the bit, a little bit to ask you about an event that just happened where you all honored the one and only Gene Krantz. Please tell me about that. I, I'm just dying to hear more about this.

Jim Way (13:39)

It was, it was truly exceptional. Again, honored and humbled to, to be in that company. But yeah, AAS has a, the lifetime Achievement award that we present only every 10 years. So this is only the seventh time we've ever presented it. And in the past it's gone to folks like Norm Augustine, Ed Stone, and, you know, way early on, Wernher von Braun. So, yeah, a nice list of people. But this time around, we were very honored to present this to White Flight himself, Gene Krantz. And it was an incredible experience. We had a lot of help and collaboration with the folks at NASA Johnson Space center, as well as the team at Space Center Houston. So Space Center Houston was our host for this event. Beautiful theater, beautiful place. And then we also got to spend some time in historic mission control over at NASA Johnson. So that was incredible that Gene had a part. Yes.

Maria Varmazes (14:42)

Oh, my God.

Jim Way (14:44)

I got to step over the rope that said, don't go here. An alarm will sound. And I was behind that. And we were really honored to have some special people there with us. Fred Hayes from Apollo 13 was there. Jack Schmidt from Apollo 17 was there. And to sit next to them and them talking to each other about stories and things, and it was just incredible. And Gene Krantz, all 91 years old, talked for 40 minutes at the podium, you know, and everybody was riveted. It was, it was a beautiful thing. Yeah.

Maria Varmazes (15:17)

I was dying to ask, and I am dying to ask, so can 1 summarize 40 minutes of what he said? Geez, what did he say? I mean, I'm so curious.

Jim Way (15:27)

It was remarkable. It was a history. I mean, he went from, you know, riding hitching rides on freight trains to go to college, all the way from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle. Everything, everything he'd done, he went through it all, and it was amazing. And all along, you know, incredibly valuable insights and lessons, lessons learned along the way. So, yeah, that's the best way I can summarize it. But I will say we'll have the whole recording actually posted to our site so people can take that in soon. So that should be up there in very Short order, just@autautical.org just look for the awards page and it'll be there.

Maria Varmazes (16:11)

I cannot wait to watch that. I was just gonna ask you, does he have any thoughts on how iconic he is? He must know how iconic he is.

Jim Way (16:19)

Maybe, but it didn't come across right. I mean, he's, you know, humble. Absolutely, Absolutely humble. And that really came across it. And. And you know, what he kept talking about was being a leader of teams, and it was all about the teams. It wasn't about him. It was about all the people around him to make all of this stuff happen. And so I think that was really his focus and that really came across.

Maria Varmazes (16:45)

I bet that's part of what makes him so iconic. He definitely deserves a lifetime achievement award. If anyone does, it's him. That's what a treat. And this is not to take away from also the incredible work on things that you are working on that are upcoming.

Jim Way (16:58)

So in addition to kind of the symposia, we were talking about, one cool thing that we have coming up in the next couple weeks. Here is our student can SAT competition. It's a pretty unique competition for university students. It is a payload, design, build and fly competition. So AAS supplies the rockets, the motors, that kind of thing. And students are charged with a really complex mission to put into this small satellite or payload. Doesn't go to orbit, goes to three, 4,000ft kind of thing. But they have to accomplish a whole set of tasks. Deploy an aerobrake or something like that, land an egg. You know, we've had them deploy a drone, deploy something that glides down on its own. And bonus points for a stabilized video, things like that, and all the telemetry. And the nice thing is, so this is run by a gentleman that works at the NRL who builds satellites for a living. He runs the technical portion of it and so he knows the experience. And so these students are doing pre flight testing, pdr, CDR flight. And then even after they fly, they have to present to a set of judges on what they learned. You know, did they get their data, how did it all work, all that stuff and everything is scored. We have a couple hundred teams apply for the competition, and then we invite 40 or so down to the actual flight portion of it. And they come from all over the world. So we have teams from Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Canada, Turkey, India, and a bunch of teams from the US and they all come and fly and have a lot of fun together, which is great. And it's just an inspiring, inspiring competition. And every year I see this challenge, I think there's no way any one of these teams is going to accomplish it. And yet most of them do. They are so amazingly capable students. And it kind of gives you hope for the future of the industry, for sure. Yeah.

Maria Varmazes (19:01)

Oh, that's so fantastic. From what I know from these kinds of competitions, from my colleagues who've been and have taken part in their own way, everyone comes away with that feeling as well of the future looks really bright. And it's amazing also what students are accomplishing at such young ages, what they're able to do.

Jim Way (19:18)

I don't know about you, but when I was their age, I wasn't doing this kind of stuff, that's for sure.

Maria Varmazes (19:22)

I certainly was not either. I certainly was not. I could not have dreamt of what I mean, I talked to high school students, I should say, who were casually talking about, oh, they're cubesats. And I'm going, excuse me.

Jim Way (19:32)

Right, right.

Maria Varmazes (19:33)

I could never have dreamt of such a thing when I was in high school.

Jim Way (19:36)

Well, and related to that. So I just talked with a company who's going to be supporting the competition, who has students from one of the Turkish teams that have flown four cubesats with them to orbit. And they said that it all came out of Cansat because they learn the process, they learn how to go through it, all the missteps, things they could do better, differently, and it's all worked out for them. And they've flown actual satellites, so it's super cool to hear about that.

Maria Varmazes (20:03)

That is so cool. I want to make sure that if there's anything else that you wanted to share with our audience about what you all are doing at AES that we haven't covered or any kind of call to action that you want to share, the floor is yours.

Jim Way (20:16)

Well, that's great. Yeah, thank you so much. You know, it's interesting times we're in right now, right? You know, shrinking budgets, workforce issues, program cancellations, what have you. And you know, aas, what we're going to strive to do is to bring all, continue to bring all these people together to talk about all of this and figure out how to work with what we've got, who we've got to accomplish, the greatness that we all want to accomplish. It's definitely going to be challenging. We recognize that we're not just single legacies, purpose built systems anymore. This is an ecosystem and everybody's playing. And so the key to success will be to have everybody talking. And so that's what we're going to strive to do. We're going to keep doing it through our events, through the conversations that we'll have. And hopefully we can help facilitate those conversations and make this all work for everybody. Everybody, you know, everything under the stars.

Maria Varmazes (21:31)

We'll be right back.

Dave (21:35)

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Maria Varmazes (22:14)

Welcome back. The European Space agency is turning 50 years old on May 30th. Honestly, they don't look a day over 40 if you ask me. And to commemorate their half a century milestone, did you think ESA was just going to write a blog post about their birthday and call it a day? Of course not, no. They're throwing themselves a well deserved celebration and the entire universe is invited. Of course. Issa will be waltzing into their 50th year by broadcasting Strauss's the Blue Danube out into space this Saturday. In fact, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, who else for a waltz, really, will be performing the Blue Danube live. And you can watch it live@space.info by the way. And ESA's Deep Space Radio Telescope at Cerreiros, Spain, will then broadcast it out into deep space, pointing it directly towards Voyager 1, with the radio waves expected to overtake the aforementioned Voyager in less than 24 hours. And yeah, that's not just some random factoid for you. Overtaking Voyager 1 is very much a planned part of the story here. Issa is calling the Blue Danube, and these are their words, not mine, the anthem for space. Since the iconic piece's inclusion in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, of course. And ESA is definitely not at all the least a bit salty about the fact that the Blue Danube was not, I repeat, not included on the Voyager golden record. They may or may not have even made a short video about how it was not included on the Voyager records. And that that was a very obvious oversight. Okay, yeah, they have in fact made a movie about that and it's on that space.vienna.info website I mentioned. And the whole effort is being called Waltz Into Space. I should mention that this year is also the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss, who wrote the Blue Danube. So heck of a posthumous birthday present having your work beamed into space. That's it for T minus for May 27, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcast like T minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. 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 Ibins. Peter Kielpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Jim Way (25:24)

T minus.

Dave (25:38)

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