← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus Overview- The Texas approach to space.
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Welcome to the T-Minus Overview Radio Show featuring conversations with experts from the space industry.
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You're listening to the N2K space network. Happy holidays from all of us here at N2K Networks. We're taking some time off to spend with our families and we'll be sharing some of our radio programs and repeat episodes during this time for you to enjoy. We will resume our daily briefing on January 2nd. Happy New Year.
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Hi, I'm Maria Varmazes, host of the T Minus Space Daily Podcast and you're listening to t minus overview t 20 seconds. And this program will feature some of the conversations from our daily podcast with the people who are forging the path in the new space era. From industry leaders, technology experts and pioneers to educators, policymakers, researchers and more. Today we're talking about Texas, the Lone Star state where everything is bigger and where the space industry is booming. It's home to NASA's Mission Control center, multiple commercial spaceports, and will soon be the base of all SpaceX operations. So what do we know about Texas and their approach to providing the best ecosystem for a thriving space economy? To tell us more, our first guest is Eric McManus, president of the U.S. space Force association in Texas. Although the Space Force doesn't have a permanent presence in the state, Eric and his team are doing everything they can to prepare the industry for the future of space.
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My name is Eric McManus. I spent 10 years in the Navy working the Aegis Weapons System. I specialized in that weapon system and over four deployments out of Pearl harbor and then went to White Sands Missile Range and did weapon systems development for the Aegis weapons system. I was able to shoot 12 standard missiles, which was pretty fun. And then from there I went to Lockheed Martin and did more Aegis work with the Navy. Realized that I wanted to do entrepreneurship and wanted to get back to Texas. So I moved to Texas to move to Austin and started developing the space products, specifically micro integrated circuits and then realized I had a kind of a knack for helping entrepreneurs and helping communities to scale into industries and capture revenue, win more work. Basically I met the Vice president of the central region of the U.S. space Force Association, Joe Guzman, and he was really interested in starting the Texas chapter for the Space Force Association. It was kind of an interesting prospect because there is no Space Force in the state of Texas. However, there is a lot of space action in the state of Texas. And you compile the opportunities that the Space Force provides to provide national security innovations. With the timing of the Texas economy, you really see that we have an opportunity here to reduce barriers for industry to get into the space industry, while also accelerating those national security innovation needs. The state of Texas is the 8th largest economy in the world. This is a matter of economies working together and industries working together so that we can achieve dominance in space with our allied countries. Through that dominance and the sustainment of that dominance, we'll be able to accelerate into the space exploration, research and further technologies for generations to come. And that's what's really most important to me. I have three sons. They're nine, six and four years old. I don't know what the workforce is going to look like in 20 years or 15 years whenever they graduate from college. But I surely want to do the most I can to make sure that they're prepared. And this is part of that. And so education is a major part of Space Force Association. We provide that education through professional research. Most specifically, I look at economies and want to understand what they're doing on a local level to get involved with the space industry. So one of the communities I work with is Midland, Texas. Midland, Texas boasts the highest GDP per capita in the country. For every one person that lives in Midland, that city generates $334,000 in capital. This is unlike any other city in the country. However, their economy is not very diverse. They're big oil and gas and energy community. So going into that community asking what can we do to get involved with space? And then finding out, well, they have a spaceport, they have licensing for horizontal launch, they have agreements on a federal level to allow experiments to occur in a lot of facets of space. And then it's starting to ask the question, well, how do we connect this? What does your education look like? What does your workforce training look like? So one of the things we're working on there is building internship programs from the university level to go into these space communities or space jobs in the community. So that while they're getting their education, they're also getting experience. Over 30% of the population is under the age of six, which is a massive opportunity actually, to kind of shotgun informal and formal space STEM education. If you've got a space STEM program, it should be tried out in Midland. There are tons of kids there. And so that opportunity to provide that Education is going to exist for the next 10, 15 years while those children are becoming adults. And hopefully we will have a sustainable space market that they can enter, and that should be achieved. At the same time, we're achieving all of this for the next generation.
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All right, so speaking of a sustainable space market, how do we make that happen?
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So there are programs on a federal level. There's. The Small Business Administration provides Small Business Innovation and Research Fund. They typically deploy over $4 billion annually between nine agencies. So communities where they have higher GDPs but less cibber interactions. I get curious and say, well, what if there's a Cibber company that would do well in this economy? Can we move them here? What does that look like? How can we help with that? And so there are programs throughout the state of Texas that will allow companies, help companies to move from a community where they need facilities or they might need this economics support to come to a community like Midland and begin working almost immediately. There's one company in particular that builds rocket engines. These are startups. And this startup rocket engine company does make a very cool rocket engine. It's all inert fuels, so it's safe to transport and safe to manufacture. However, testing is very challenging right now. To get on a NASA or a military facility to test a rocket engine comes with a long wait list, and it's also very expensive. So one of the things that we could do, we have done is provide a blanket license agreements that this, this community has licenses to perform rocket testing. It's a matter of you need a facility, maybe some storage. And so with company, this, this startup that's making inert rocket fuel and rocket engines, they had a barrier to entry that was a long wait list to get to these facilities to perform tests. However, speaking with the local economic development community, they were able to begin testing within 90 days because land was available for that initiative and funding was available from the state of Texas to ensure that testing could be done within the state of Texas by this Texas company. And what I found in the state of Texas is that the industry is supported in a way that it's strategically united in this growth. What the state of Texas has done on a state level is they've started the Texas Space Commission through House Bill 3447, right?
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Yes. That was big news.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. That house, that bill provided $350 million to the state of Texas and a team of directors and a commission to the state of Texas to essentially provide a baseline understanding of the Texas space ecosystem and a Strategy for building a foundation for a future space ecosystem that matches the eighth largest economy in the world. And they're doing a wonderful job with that. One of the biggest things they've, they've chosen to do is build the Space Institute. And the Space Institute is a very large facility all in one, lunar and Martian. So Moon and Mars testing capabilities that that's once again a barrier to entry that's reduced. Getting a new test facility out there that's modern, that other companies can come in and perform their tests, gain viability and report back to their customer that they're ready to go to space, gets us there sooner and allows us to iterate faster. It really does. And those iterations is what means a lot in the space industry. Fail fast is what people say often. And we don't mean that we want to do a bad job. What we want to do is find out the limits of the capabilities in this technology and then push those limits to where we need them to be. And we've seen that year after year between SpaceX, what Blue Origin's doing, and intuitive machines. They went to the moon this year, they put a Texas flag on the moon. That's incredible. These things should be celebrated. And they did it because they pushed technology. They decided to iterate until it was done. And so it's that kind of attitude that's in the Texas space industry and it's throughout the state of Texas. A Texan thing.
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Okay, so tell me more about the Space Force aspect here. It's in the name Space Force Association. So, so how does what you do work with the Space Force?
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What I like to say is if the Space Force has a limitation, Texas has a capability. Let's get aligned on it and we can reduce your barriers to entry very fast. And so what Space Force Association Texas has focused on is providing that public research and education of that public research. We inform communities, we inform the state of Texas, and we inform academia as well as Space Force on these actions that are occurring across the state of Texas. And then we advocate for small businesses or large businesses to be supported and support the needs of the Space Force. When we started the Space Force Association Texas about two and a half years ago, I knew how big Texas was, but I didn't know no. From Orange county to El Paso county is about a 13 hour drive and I spend most of my time driving around Texas. I love stopping in the small towns, checking out the burger joints and seeing all the new downtowns they're building. It's really beautiful. The Texas chapter is Centralized around the state of Texas. However, we have committees that we're building. We just started one in Houston, a strong committee of nearly 12 people to build a body of knowledge for the Houston area and the College Station area to understand on a small business scale, an academic scale, as well as on an education scale, what's happening actively in that area for space and what can be done. For example, Klein High School has the largest concentration of Space Force Junior ROTC in the state of Texas. What can we do? So then we take that committee and we go to their local economic development Commission. We go to the Texas Space Commission. We say we want to take these kids because it's the largest concentration of children. We want to take them to a Space Power conference show, and we want to show them what the Space Force is and show them all the work and organization and the technologies that will be available to them. If I was in the Navy, I knew I was going to be on a ship, but I didn't really know much more than that. Right. And so if we were able to take these children at the high school age, show them what this organization looks like and how they can participate in it, I think they would be a lot more prepared, especially while they went through their education in the Space Force, to make the biggest difference. And these small actions can really create the leaders of the Space Force from this moment. That's just one of the examples of how Space Force association helps the state of Texas. We're a nonprofit, and we want the whole state to work together, not compete at all. It's Team Texas for Space.
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So it's just amazing, especially for entrepreneurs, because you mentioned that earlier, and that's. To me, what's so fascinating is how much business, space business just is thriving in Texas. And I'm wondering if I'm an entrepreneur who's got a company in the space industry, and I'm looking for that kind of support that you were talking about that the Space Force association can sort of help with. How do I interface with you all? How do we work together?
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I would highly recommend going to a Space Force association event, as well as reaching out to your Small Business Development center in your local area. They are charged and funded to help small businesses capture federal grants for small business innovation and research. Over the life of the CBER program in the state of Texas, companies small business have received over $3 billion since the early 90s. And this has affected over 250,000 employees in the state of Texas. It's a wonderful program, but it's a challenging program to get involved with, and it's a little daunting and scary. And so we often link small businesses with large businesses. And this is a great strategy where this small business will then use a typical prime contractor, but then call them a sub in their contract and say, well, we are subbing our company to this large company to provide them this innate or novel technology. And it's in these strategies or in these meetings that we find there's a lot of unity for solving these national security innovation needs.
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So Eric covered a little about what he's doing to support space education in the state of Texas, but this feels like a good time to bring in a higher education perspective. Dr. David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute, spoke to our producer, Alice Carus, about what Rice University is doing to support the future space workforce. He started off by explaining the role of the Rice Space Institute.
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The Rice Space Institute is a lot of different things. Before even I came to Rice, I've been at rice for 21 years. There was a merger between what was the old Space Physics and Astronomy department and the Physics Department. And in that merger, our department became Physics and Astronomy. But the space physicists wanted to keep their long heritage going. And so a colleague of mine, Professor Patricia Reif, created the Reif Space Institute. And mostly what she was working on was outreach to do with magnetospheric physics, because that was her research area. She's won awards for it. She's been a very strong advocate for outreach and a very good purveyor of it. In 2011, I started an initiative called the Rice Space Initiative, where we were trying to form much stronger connections with NASA, which, of course is in NASA Johnson Space center in Houston. And I did a number of different things. And as a result of that, what we ended up doing was asking Pat to be the associate Director for Public outreach. And she is still to this day. And then I became the director of the Space Institute. So part of that was to create. We have a Space act agreement with Johnson Space center. So we do joint activities on education and outreach and so on. Ever since that time, Since, I think, January 2011, we've been running a public lecture roughly once a month, which is now sponsored by the Houston Spaceport. And so we have these monthly licenses with all sorts of people talking that from people who have walked on the moon to people who are studying what would happen if we found life on another planet, all these different things. And then what we do mostly is try and find opportunities for both our students and our faculty, particularly the institutes At Grice University, there's a few of them are fairly small mom and pop operations, but they're supposed to help foster multidisciplinary research across campus. So that's what we're trying to do. And on the education side, we have a professional science master's in space studies that we manage as well.
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It's very multifaceted, and I love that about it. And you've just mentioned something that I think is really important is that you've got this really great workforce initiative to work as a pipeline to places like Houston Spaceport. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship, how that developed and what it is you're hoping to achieve by working with Houston spaceport?
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I mean, we're very fortunate to of course, live in Houston, right? So there's a lot of space activity here. However you slice it, in the past, it's been primarily focused on NASA and of course, with the home of human spaceflight. Rice University's had a long connection with NASA on that front. But things started to change, as you know, in the space industry, where NASA's engagement with companies, with industry kind of changed a little bit. We had the commercial car cargo program, the commercial crew program. Now we've commercial lunar program. And part of that spurred this national push for commercial spaceports instead of the government spaceports. And Houston, being a big city, has three airports. Two of them are very heavily used for international travel. And the other one was Ellington Field. And it's called Ellington Field because that's where it was when it first got started. There's an airfield of 100, 100 odd years ago. And it was essentially an underutilized resource. And so the idea was to try and create what became the 10th commercially licensed spaceport in the United States. I joke that my good friend Arturo Machuca, he's the director of the spaceport, he came to talk to me. So my joke is I've been involved with the Houston SPACeport since day two, not quite day one. And we built up that relationship over that last maybe 10 or 11 years. So when I say we. Mayor appointed me on to the board of the Houston Spaceport Development Corporation to sort of look at the development of how we utilize the spaceport. But the key thing is there's not just the connection to industry and the growth and the creation of jobs, but we very much wanted to create an educational component. We have a thing called the ED center at the spaceport, and that is for training technicians. We spent about 18 months with industry trying to work out what the Curriculum ought to look like that's run by San Jacinto College. And so that's an excellent program where basically a lot of the students in that program get internships with companies like Intuitive Machines, which have been in the news a lot lately. The spaceport's now home to Intuitive Machines, Axiom Space, Collins Aerospace, NASA's there, the T38 Flyer. There's a lot of stuff happening in the spaceport. And what we've been doing is working to see if we can bring in more of the local universities. Again, we have, we have again, fortunate to be in a big city where Rice is essentially downtown, but there's University of Houston, Clear Lake, Texas Southern University, and then if you go a little bit further, we've got Texas A and M and they are kind of key partners in what we're trying to do in the state overall. So it's always been a part of the relationship to bring in the educational side. Ultimately, we'd like to create an aerospace institute located at the spaceport with participation from at least the local universities, if not more broadly, and then have that research, have that education kind of relate more strongly to the industry that's there too.
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I love that. And you did mention that you were appointed as part of the mayor, but you've been appointed to a few things in the state of Texas to really help develop this industry. One of which is the Texas Space Commission that just recently was announced and I believe as part of that is the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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C
Yeah, it's a mouthful. So Tasek, in fact, so one of the things that been very active in over a number of years is trying to get the state to step up a little bit more. Obviously we're a very energy focused state and so a lot of emphasis had been on the energy industry, but again, with the growth of commercial space, not just across the United States, but across the world, those competitors, Florida and Alabama, Colorado and so on, and so the state. And again, with great credit to the leadership of Chairman Greg Bonin, who's head of the Appropriations Committee, and the leaders up at Texas A and M University, with a little bit of help from Rice and others, but they really got this going. And so the state decided to invest $350 million into developing capabilities to raise the state's profile when it comes to particularly commercial space. Obviously we have NASA, so that's a big jewel in the crown. And so to do that little complication is that the Rice legislature meets every Two years. So it's a two year budget. But in addition to that support, that funding support, they wanted to create a couple of organizations to help spearhead that strategic thinking for the state. One of them, as you mentioned, is the Texas Space Commission. It's a nine body commission, which is, I mean, I'm really very happily. You always worry with some of these political appointments. There's always some political aspect to it, but really everybody's a space leader. Everybody on the Texas Space Commission is very highly regarded leader in the space community. Many of them from industry, in fact, most of them from industry. The other body is, I think, as you mentioned, the tarsec and there's a nine body executive committee. And that's where I'm representing Rice. On that committee, Texas A and M is represented and University of Texas System is represented specifically. Everyone else on that executive committee is from industry. And the idea is to combine the large scale direction for the state with the research component, the research and development component. And what can we, as a, as a subset, if you like, of this body, help provide that kind of flood of ideas into what the next budget cycle should look like. So, for example, specifically, I don't think this is emphasized enough. The nine of us are an executive committee, but the consortium that is in the name is essentially everybody in the state is any entity that has something to contribute. Obviously we're focusing a lot on the educational and research establishments, but it also includes industry partners too. So the hope is we're just getting going. But the hope is that that combination of people and ideas and the input from interested parties across the state will really galvanize what we do and really expand what we have to offer in the state of Texas.
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I feel like you kind of just answered my last question, but I'm going to throw it to you anyway. What is it you're hoping that all of this academic partnership that you're going to be doing with the industry builds for the state of Texas and for your students in particular?
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Well, I think it's, I think it's even bigger than that. I mean, it's always, it's always good to focus on your own university, your own students, your own state. But as you know and many of the things that you've done and people you've talked to, we need a lot of, a lot of people, we need a lot of ideas if we're going to do what we hope to do in space. And we just want to be part of that. And part of that is not just the state being a Big player in this. But the university and our students come. You know, our students come looking to get connected to space, you know, whether it be through NASA or some of these new. These new activities. So, yeah, I feel quite privileged to be part of it, and especially in now. I mean, there's a lot of other things we won't have time to touch on. But it's not just the spaceport and the Texas Space Commission, but also NASA. Johnson Space center has created this thing called exploration so that they can engage more broadly with the commercial industry. So that's all happening here. A lot of it in Houston, but happening here in Texas. And so really, if you're interested in space at all, it's a really exciting place to be at the moment. It's always been exciting, but it's particularly so now. And that's being reflected in the number of. We have a number of different international delegations come through here on a regular basis looking to either connect or emulate what we do. And that's an exciting. That provides all the opportunities for new ideas, to get engaged, to educate, and then to connect with other people, not just locally, but around the country and around the world. So it's kind of exciting to just be part in the mix of that a little bit. Now, of course, we have to do something meaningful with it, and that's what we're all hoping to do. And that's where. Not just what we do in the next few years, but how we prepare the pathway for those young people coming into the industry. We just hosted the International Space University's summer program here at Rice, you know, with I think 35 countries represented, 156 students, which I think is the biggest one they've ever had. And just the sheer thrill that they bring to the table and the sheer enjoyment and the passion that they bring, and thinking about what they can contribute to space going forward, it just makes it worth it. It's one of these trilogies of being at a university. So good stuff. There's challenges ahead. There's obviously issues with funding and all these other things. We want to be sustainable when we do this. Lots of different things, but as I always say, a big journey starts with the first step, and I think we're making some of those first steps here.
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And our sincere thanks to our guests, Eric McManus and Dr. David Alexander. If you're interested in hearing more about the space industry, join us every day for T Minus Space Daily, available on all major podcast platforms. Find out more@spare.n2k.com we'd love to know what you think of the show. You can email us@space2k.com because your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
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