In this episode, USU President Elizabeth Cantwell talks to Dr. Jed Hancock, President of the Space Dynamics Laboratory about advancing research and education in the field of space exploration.
Jed Hancock oversees a portfolio of sensor systems and small satellite projects for government, academic, and commercial customers. He has a successful record of leading research, including the development of IR, visible, and UV systems such as NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex Camera Suite detector assemblies and cameras for the NASA Ionospheric Connection Explorer mission.
Hancock received an undergraduate degree and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Utah State University. He earned a PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona. Hancock is an adjunct faculty member at USU and serves on graduate committees at both USU and the University of Arizona. He earned a distinguished alumni award from USU, individual/group achievement awards from NASA, and is a Fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics.
Hancock is the director of the Space Dynamics Laboratory’s Civil Space Division at Utah State University. He oversees a portfolio of sensor systems and small satellite projects for government, academic, and commercial customers. He has a successful record of leading research, including the development of IR, visible, and UV systems such as NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex Camera Suite detector assemblies and cameras for the NASA Ionospheric Connection Explorer mission.
full transcript
Elizabeth Cantwell: Hello and welcome to Future Casting with Utah State. I'm Elizabeth Cantwell, president of Utah State University, and I'm the host of this podcast. Today, I'm really delighted to be talking to Dr Jed Hancock, who's the president of the Space Dynamics Laboratory. We'll get him to talk a little bit to us about what that is. The civil space division of the Space Dynamics Laboratory is one that frequently collaborates with Utah State University on NASA programs and space missions, and we're going to spend some time talking about that.
Jed is a selected fellow for the Society for International Optics and Photonics. So we're very happy for you. For those of you out there who don't know what fellows are, they're members of SPIE that make significant contributions in their specific fields. So we have a bona fide scientist here, and we're going to take advantage of that with Dr Hancock's expertise in his field, he's been able to assist in a number of successful nasan programs, and with his leadership in developing space based tracking systems, there's been an enhancement in the work that the Space Dynamics Laboratory is able to do. So we're going to dive more into these topics.
I'm going to start though Jed with I think would be really useful for our listeners to understand the history of the Space Dynamics Lab, but how it got to be really a part of USU and just a hallmark institution in Logan, Utah.
Jed Hancock: Utah State University has a long heritage of just absolute expertise in Applied Engineering and Science. In 1959 a gentleman named Doran Baker, as he left the Air Force, he was working at the Air Force geophysics Laboratory. He chose to make Logan Utah his home and to be a professor in what was then the College of Engineering at Utah State University. And he and his colleagues and those early students, they were launching rockets, sounding rockets, that would just, you know, go up maybe 50 kilometers, 60 kilometers, not too high, actually, but they would take data about what was happening on this boundary layer between Earth and space, what we call the ionosphere, and project after project. And remember, this was a time of Cold War nuclear weapons and other kinds of research that was really interactive with space, and so his research continued to grow. His brother and their team from the University of Utah then joined forces at Utah State University, and in the late 80s, all of these research teams came together and actually formalized the name Space Dynamics Laboratory. And so what started as professors and student led projects has now blossomed into a workforce of just under 1400 people.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Just amazing and test I mean, 1400 people doing leading edge work, which is really, really cool.
Jed Hancock: Absolutely, from those early days of space research, we're now into way more than rockets, satellites, sensors, ground systems, cybersecurity, and on and on.
Elizabeth Cantwell: You know, one of the things Jed, you and I talk about a lot is how Utah State University and the Space Dynamics Lab now can be partners in building more. I'll call it civil space. You know, NASA type of missions, deep space missions. I know you and I have a an overlap in the OSIRIS REx mission that I worked on when I was in my previous institution and and we've talked a little bit about where we think we can go, which is incredibly cool stuff. But so, so let's riff for just a minute on what we think we ought to be doing going forward, to bring our students into the kinds of leading edge technologies that serve the SDL mission, but also serve the future of space missions, some of the most interesting stuff out there that's going to go a long, long way away and bring back. And if you could, in that context, talk about the camera that SDL created for the OSIRIS REx mission, because it was a mission to an asteroid A long way away. It landed on that asteroid, but before it did that, it did a complete, sort of 3d map of the surface of this object a very long way away.
Jed Hancock: Outstanding. Well, let me start with our students. They're the lifeblood of the organization, obviously, Utah State University and the Space Dynamics Laboratory. We have about 200 students in our workforce. It's about 12, 13% of our workforce. They assist in everything from business functions to the very engineering and science research. So every project we do has students working alongside, you know, tenured engineering professor, professors and professionals. When it comes to OSIRIS REx, that was really kind of a just a special and career making time for so many of us. So Space Dynamics Lab. A lot of expertise in electronics and in imaging systems, focal plane arrays, detectors. The University of Arizona needed help. There's three cameras on that spacecraft. One camera is called poly cam, and it would acquire this out that asteroid, which is about the size of a football stadium, from millions of miles away, and help navigate the satellite to the asteroid, but once we got close, there was a camera called Map cam that took colored photographs in several different colors of the whole surface. It mapped it for more than a year, got to know everything about that asteroid, and the important part there was to pick the landing site where we would actually touch down. We couldn't call land, but touch down on this asteroid and collect this sample. And that was a camera called Sam Cam, because it was the sample camera it would collect. It would actually document how the sample of the asteroid was collected. And so all three camera systems that had those very sensitive electronics and detectors we designed, we developed, we built them, we tested them, integrated them, and off they went to outer space for seven years to collect the sample and help it get back to Earth safely. And you and I were there. We were there when it came back.
Elizabeth Cantwell: It wasn't really astounding to see that land in the Utah desert. Actually, what was really astounding about that mission was to see the arm, because you could see it come down to the nominal surface and realize it was just kept going because it was just kind of a dust layer rather than an actual surface. There were a lot of very cool things about that. So this is probably a good time to talk about the cool things that we could do together. One of the things you and I have talked about is that Utah State University is moving very rapidly into this place. We're creating multi disciplinary capacity to understand and utilize artificial intelligence so both on the teaching and learning and because it has a huge role in in the academic enterprise, but on the research side, we really believe that multidisciplinarity is going to be enable us to bring artificial intelligence to use cases, to actual applications, and there's a ton of them in space missions, absolutely.
Jed Hancock: Let me give you a couple of thoughts to that. So the Air Force and Space Force is our they're our largest customer, our largest partner. So you know, you think about that. This last year, we did just over $300 million of research and development, and more than half of that was Air Force and Space Force related. The Space Force has publicly stated that their number one priority is dynamic space operations, or autonomous space operations. So that's satellites working with other satellites working with ground systems and not having humans in the loop to make important decisions about how to execute missions that keep our country safe, bring our soldiers home safe, keep free lines of communication open between nations, and all of this in a space layer and ground layer with AI with autonomy.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So in my mind, I imagine, because we've also on the USU campus, talked a lot about terrestrial applications that have a lot of things that are similar, like agriculture and mining, where humans in the loop actually slow things down andor don't necessarily make the best decisions. So I expect there'll be some really interesting options. There some really, really interesting opportunities to work together. You and I have talked a little bit, but I want to pick your brain publicly here on our podcast about the kinds of missions we should be going after together.
Jed Hancock: Oh, marvelous. Okay, well, let me tell you about the one we just did together that has been a huge success, and this kind of sets the framework so Dr Mike Taylor joined Space Dynamics Lab and Utah State University all these years ago. He's a professor in the Department of Physics. Amazing career, he's been using a camera system to look up, look up at the atmosphere, the ionosphere, up into up into space. And he was collecting data about energy and momentum and what's going on in the ionosphere because of these Earth applications, tornadoes, storms, and how is it affecting the space layer, and how we communicate between Earth and space? And so we got together Dr Taylor and the other professors, Dr shurlis students and the engineering teams, and we put together a proposal for NASA in 2017 that was to take his ground based instruments, and put it on a space based platform, which we proposed and were awarded. So this was a $55 million mission that Space Dynamics Lab built the instrument. But Utah State University is the leader in the science, the leader for the really the world, not just the nation or not just the community. But this this piece. So this instrument has been launched. It was robotically installed underneath the International Space Station. It's taking data right now. This will produce the very first global map of what we call atmospheric gravity waves. This Global Map will go right into models that scientists will use to predict how GPS. Communications and other things are affected by tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, any kind of a weather event on the earth that could disrupt this global pattern of communication. So that's a perfect partnership that we're all involved in this. We have a mission operations center at Space Dynamics Lab. We have the science operations center at Utah State University, and that science data will be made available to the whole world. When I look at USU and the amazing research that happens, I mean, our potential is, you know, it's out of this world, from agriculture, earth science, climate science, you already mentioned autonomy, artificial intelligence, water and the list goes on. It does all of those have applications with national security and the furtherment of our scientific understanding of how we got here, how the Earth was formed, what's happening in the solar system, the universe.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So I'm thrilled to think of our future together, and we anticipate that if we really work this thoughtfully and together, and we'll be able to get a lot more students having touched this kind of work before they graduate, whatever they go out and, do I know, you know, from the OSIRIS REx mission, there were a lot of students who were brought into that mission who were humanities majors, and they were working on communications, they were working on, you know, a whole bunch of aspects of a mission that aren't just designing the instrument, I am really excited about being able to deliver business students into these big missions. Would absolutely need all of those skills, because when they go out and do whatever it is they're going to do, they're going to be incredibly well suited to the complex world that we have for our listeners. Some of you may not know that I'm actually also I'm a Space Systems Engineer. So Jed is the kind of scientist who comes up with amazing ideas, ways of looking at things, and I'm the kind of engineer that often says, yeah, that's never gonna work, but, but if it is, how do we how do we actually build so we can get it launched safely, and sending data back and and all of that? So we do geek out together a little bit on a number of things. Where are we going to go and, like, if we sped up 10 years from now and we were, I mean, in the ideal world for me, we'd be jointly managing a couple of really large missions different types. So we've got students from engineering and students from business school and social sciences and the hard sciences, but also kind of leading the way, maybe in in looking at everything from the security of the planet with regard to things from space or that interface, as you know, you talked about the interface between the Earth and outer space. But how do we think about what's out there in terms of whether it's a friendly or not friendly, and how are we dealing with stuff that's neither? Because it's just garbage that's accumulated in orbit. It no longer works. It's just making trouble. There's a lot it's the space climate problem.
Jed Hancock: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so that's where you know, the skills of our organizations really come to play here is the first job is to find, to find this, these threats, if you will, or these things that are in close vicinity to the earth. And so finding obviously takes sensing, and that's what we're all experts at here at USU and SDL. The other piece is to characterize and track and understand what the possible implications are. We have a mission right now with NASA that's called the Neo surveyor. So these are natural, potentially hazardous asteroids that are in an orbit around the sun. That is like the Earth's scientists say there's about 300,000 we have found about 25% or less of them, those are all predicted by models. We don't really know what they are, but we're building a large space based observatory right now called Neo surveyor. This is a telescope system that looks in the infrared. It's about the size of a small school bus. It'll be launched into outer space in 2028 it'll go out to a place called Lagrange, one that is in between the Earth and the Sun, where their gravity is kind of equal to each other. So it stays in a nice orbit there, and it will be viewing all of these different kinds of objects that could be possibly coming towards the Earth. A super exciting mission, very excited about what that's going to give to us about our future knowledge of our of our planet and our solar system.
Elizabeth Cantwell: I would be remiss if I didn't do a little shout out to the PI of that mission at UCLA. It's Amy Mainzer, someone I've also worked with. There are amazing partners for us out there, Jed, I know if we don't bring this up in this podcast will get called out for it. So let's talk for a minute about how genuinely exciting it is for the smallsat conference to be able to expand many, many, many times where it is today by switching from 100% in Logan to 25% in Logan. And 75% of the Salt Lake City area. My own bias is that's been such an important attractor for the state of Utah that if we we would have been remiss not to allow that to grow at the rate that it wants to grow. Because all kudos to Space Dynamics Lab for really being in the small set business before it was cool, meaning small satellites, small launched objects to where it is. Now the heart of most, if not what many business models. It is commercially incredibly important. It's National Security important, scientifically important. And 15 years ago, I don't even remember when it actually started, but for me, it was 20 some odd years ago that that I came to small sat here in Logan, and it was a bunch of faculty and graduate students kind of talking about these, this weird idea for little, teeny weeny satellites who can actually do stuff, not just get in the way. So I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but I really think that's a way that USU and Space Dynamics Laboratory collaborate that benefits the entire State of Utah and all of our defense companies and all of our universities and all of our scientists in these areas.
Jed Hancock: Yeah, I'd love to share some thoughts. So if we were to put a list together of how Utah State University has changed the world, small satellites the capability that they bring to the science, to national security, to private business, connecting the world via the internet, Utah State University has helped change the world in a very big leadership role in small satellite missions. So the smallsat conference has been going for 38 years. The attendees, as you mentioned, went from 20 and 30 people to now close to 4000 it's the world's largest and best gathering of the small satellite community, scientists, engineers, capital, investors, business, professionals, you name it, not to mention students. So we've had such great success that this large community, it requires a lot of resources to gather, and so we had to make the decision to enable this conference to continue to grow, so that the best and brightest could come and could stay close to the conference, and we could really get the very best out of this, which is the technical progression, the evolution, the vision of what this conference provides the world. And so that that did make us have to look hard and make a decision to move the gathering place of the conference to the salt palace. So that'll be take place over three days. We're going to paint the town blue. It's going to be Utah State University here, guys, we're going to paint the town blue. It'll be Utah State Universities and Space Dynamics laboratories turf. Now with that, we still do hold what we call a technical workshop, which is, you know, for those that are centrally involved in national security to gather here, that piece of the conference will stay,
Elizabeth Cantwell: And that's still many hundreds of people.
Jed Hancock: Oh yeah, 600 or 700.
Elizabeth Cantwell: It's not a small component. The thing I know about Small Sat is it really draws all eyes to Utah, and it is an amazing event. And as it grows, all boats rise.
Jed Hancock: So we're working on some concepts that are going to allow our students to get down there and get back to be involved in this.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So details are coming up personal helicopters down there.
Jed Hancock: Yeah, I wish it was helicopters. We might have to be on the pavement, but we're gonna, we're gonna ensure that our student involvement and participation increases and does not decrease through this experience.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So, and I know our students have always just really, really valued. It is an incredible conference that has a lot of places for students to, you know, get hooked in and engage students across
Jed Hancock: the whole nation and really the world. I think we had 43 countries attend that conference this last year.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Just amazing and awesome, and it is awesome that it's going to be able to expand and really keep that, keep that all eyes on Utah, in this incredible area. So so let me segue for a minute. I'm going to segue, although I'm always happy to talk about space science. I mean, we could always go to when we don't have an orbiting platform that we own in the US, like the ISS, what are we going to do? And I think a lot of answers lie in assemblies of small objects, small and medium sized objects. But I was actually going to change the topic to one that's a little bit near and dear to my heart, which is how you make the choice to go from being a person who is building, creating and building, you know, being a scientist or being an engineer, to leading the people who ideate and do that and make you know, successfully meet milestones and successfully. Uh, attract talent, and all of those other aspects of a leadership role for an institution like Space Dynamics Lab, which is, as you said, Not small and has a really significant budgetary footprint. I know you do have some outposts around the country, but but your biggest outposts are here in Utah and and how you made that choice. I mean, I have my own stories to tell about that. Since I did that probably 1314, years ago. You're a little more recent than that. Well, how does, well, why does one do that, make that choice?
Jed Hancock: You know, obviously, we all have our story, but I'll just share a couple of principles I think I've learned in my journey. First of all, I absolutely love the mission of Utah State University Space Dynamics Lab. So I started there as a researcher, as an engineer, and just all in our mission of national security, scientific discovery, it's just so compelling to be involved in that that you just love who you work with. We have an amazing workforce, talented men and women. So when you become part of a team, you start to just deeply care about this team that you're working with, and soon your joy can transition from your own personal accomplishments, maybe your own, your own personal ideas, to seeing the magic that happens when you can see the betterment of a really deeply engaged team. And so it doesn't all happen in a day, but you you transition your career from for managing your own work to seeking the success of a few others, and then that grows to maybe additional others. And so there's this mindset where you just, you just love seeing the people that you work with succeed, and having your team perform in an excellent manner. And and so it just becomes really exciting to be able to be in a position where you help others know what to do next. You help them progress in their personal careers, but also in the achievement of the organization. And so the tide just rises all the boats and and so that's kind of a leadership pipeline, a mindset, a change that one goes through. I certainly went through it. OSIRIS REx we've talked about, was maybe my first big project that I managed, and I was hooked, and that was because of the unbelievable men and women that I was working with.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Not everybody has that mindset, so kudos to you. I find that being affiliated with a university and also being able to experience the lives of really young people just setting out in the world and are going to make the difference in 20 or 30 years when I'm sitting in my rocking chair on my front porch watching really smart people do amazing things. So you know, having having walked that walk, it would be useful for people to hear why some of us transition into what I think of as it's an institutional mission, not just like a space mission well.
Jed Hancock: And leadership has its own skills and talents. You know that one learns and studies and it's absolutely exhilarating. It's exciting. And so I have just absolutely loved my journey at Utah State well, and you
Elizabeth Cantwell: You have a few stakeholders that the university itself doesn't. You have your you know, your federal partners and who are deeply invested in, not just that you meet your contractual milestones, but that the work that you do is successful for the national security of the nation. And I've met some of them, and kudos to Space Dynamics Lab everybody there, because it is viewed with such high regard as a partner. And certainly we at USU will make sure that we do everything to enable that kind of partnership. And that accolades that I've heard from, from our from our federal partners, as we think about, you know, all the vectors, how we would work together and what makes our institution successful. Let's see, are you? Do you teach?
Jed Hancock: I am. I'm teaching right now.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So talk about that for a minute, because it's like, such a Mind Blow. I don't get to teach very often. I mean, I would say every five years or so I get to actually teach. And it's so it's like, sets me up for the next five
Jed Hancock: years. I have a couple of courses that I teach. The one I'm teaching right now is radiometry and detectors. The other one is interferometry and diffraction. They get listed between physics and electrical and computer engineering. So they're kind of deeply in optical sciences. I guess I love to teach, because I love the students, yes, and I also love the field of optical sciences and what it can do. And so what that does for me is it reminds me of why we're all here, and builds those connections with those students that are just so hard working and so excellent. And I'm amazed at the talent and the tools that our students are graduating today that I didn't 25 years ago, yes,
Elizabeth Cantwell: and when they. Teach us. I always feel so much better when the academic year starts in August and students come back and all of a sudden, whatever grind I was going through in the summer, I feel just completely renewed. So
Jed Hancock: I teach about every other year, big day job, but I like to squeeze that in, yeah.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Well, thank you for doing that, and I know not only our students, but our university benefits from that. So we could talk for a minute. I mean, I see a future where we're doing more interchange of personnel, not just students having internships. That's sort of always going to be but where, for instance, if we hire engineering personnel to work more on personnel, as opposed to faculty working more on missions, they then begin to start working side by side with students in more complex laboratories and field type situations where we hire more joint personnel who, and that would be really kind of at the faculty level, but people who might work on a at Space Dynamics Lab, On a space mission, and then come back to USU and teach the heck out of things for five years, and then kind of really be able to have it all, but not all in the same year. That's an unusual model. There are a few places that do it in the US Johns Hopkins does that pretty well. Some of the national laboratories do that pretty well.
Jed Hancock: You know, my last count was 22 staff members at SDL, our teaching courses at USU, we have done, we have done, and will continue to enable our researchers to just work seamlessly with one another. Doesn't matter where the project originates, that we just do the right thing for our joint mission, and we're going to continue to do that, both for our students, our faculty and our staff. So absolutely, the missions of the future are complex. None of us will be able to succeed by just being siloed in an individual organization. It will require the best of business, the best of science, the best of technology. And I love that vision. President, that's what we're aiming for.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So can you imagine, I often think, when I think about collaborations at that scale, I think about, how do we have infrastructure that allows those collaborations to happen? And that leads me to think about, like, what I would call innovation spaces, where there's actual small scale experimentation happening, where students can kind of wander in and there's a year long project and not a 10 year long project, and it doesn't have a deadline, and maybe doesn't even have a sponsor who says, I've got to have this thing. I would love for us to be able to build that capacity. And I've only seen it a few places in the space world. The bits the are expensive. It's not like building an innovation lab where everybody's coding or putting games together or something. You actually have to build stuff and maybe even find somebody who would be happy enough and friendly enough to put it in a relevant environment for you and and and watch as it disintegrates on launch. Or, you know, all the way I think of all the ways that that missions can fail, but I would still love it to find a way to engage our community and our students and our staff and faculty and sponsors in this idea that as we collaborate between Space Dynamics Lab and Utah State University, we've created novel ways that Students, faculty and staff come together and rapidly, think about new ways of doing things. Some of it could be new technology, but new sensor technology, but it also could be new ways to make stuff. So we'll put a marker in the sand for that and see if we can. If we can, I know we've got really some great partners, Weber State partners with us, rather frequently on the engineering side, thinking through at that at that bachelor's degree workforce level for places like Hill Air Force Base, we partner a lot on that overlapping area where some of those students or those workplaces want more of a master's level skill set before They are ready for prime time. And we'd love to also just really think about how for the growing defense sector and national security sector and aviation sector in Utah, we're actually we're building too many students to serve our own jobs, but we send them out into the state, and they fulfill a lot of requirements. Do you have challenges we do at USU, which is why I ask attracting. There's just a lot of competition for really good talent right now. So it's not that people don't want to come to Logan, Utah. They get all we have to do is get them here, and they absolutely have no problem. But there's a lot of competitors out there. There's a lot of salary competition. There's just a lot of competition.
Jed Hancock: Oh yeah, absolute competition. It's a it's a global, but certainly a national workforce that that we're all pursuing in these spaces. Part of the reason people want to come is exactly what. You just described is that they want to be involved in an organization that's not going to do the same thing over and over again, but constantly be doing something new. And every time we've worked towards building that joint collaboration space, we've just seen great success, whether that's through our bid and proposal process our internal research and development. So we'll do a call for IRAD this next year that anyone in the USU family can propose against all faculty staff can propose against sdli, rad, we do things like hackathons, where we bring our coders together and they'll stay up all night, you know, working on something that furthers an idea or explores the state of the art. So, you know, we do have a very unique opportunity to be inspirational and innovative. That's a real key to winning that talent and getting them, you know, seated in our missions.
Elizabeth Cantwell: First of all, who wants to be bored and second of all, rightly so. An awful lot of young people today know their jobs are going to change fairly frequently. No matter what sector they're in or their location is going to change fairly frequently. And, and they're, they're ready for that. They might be more ready for that than we as an at least my institution is, is ready for for that, but, but I would really like to be in a position to say, Bring it, you know, and we'll, we'll figure it out. There's, there's a whole bunch of, really, there's a goodness to be had for that. And I actually think there's a lot of goodness for Cache Valley to be had there. I know I've talked about a little bit, but I certainly have aspirations that we also feed not a gigantic but a but a really interesting little innovation ecosystem in Cache Valley, where we're we're taking ideas, probably largely from students, but maybe from, you know, joint faculty, SDL scientist teams that have a good opportunity to be commercialized, and we get them to small business or maybe mid sized business size, really novel stuff is coming out of, out of Cache Valley. I am one of these people, so I worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. And I hate derivative silicon this and silicon that, because there are so many novel ways to create innovation zones that don't look like what Silicon Valley did, because that's pretty Doggy Dog right now, I would rather create a place that people like to come to and then, and then like to have their kids here, and then like to Get Old here.
Jed Hancock: And yeah, we got a great track record in this, in this valley of innovative organizations we do. We don't have to look very far to see icon ASI Campbells. It's just and the list goes on. You know that really comes from the great people here, from Utah State University in the valley well,
Elizabeth Cantwell: and there is that there's an ethos in the valley. I mean, I have been here one year. You go back generations, but, but I think the culture was established very early of get to work, don't think about it too much. Get get good stuff done. Be serious, where you need to be serious, and have some joy, where you need to have some joy. But not a lot of folder all, a lot of fussing around at the edges. For those of you, I live in, you know, kind of farm country in the middle of Cache Valley, we don't fuss around a lot.
Jed Hancock: Yeah, it's fun, because at Space Dynamics Lab, we have four words hung on the wall in every conference room. We call it our, you know, our together poster, but it's SDL values, and that's respect, collaborate, empower and deliver. And that last word, deliver, yes, you know, we're an outpost. We are in a flyover state, but all of our customers, you know, are on the coasts, mostly Washington, DC. So we have to deliver. We have to actually do what we say we will do, and that's what you're talking about, work ethic, of of we're going to get it done. We're going to make our promises come to reality. And you're going to want to come back and do business with us, because it's been such a good experience. And you know, that's the gritty, agricultural applied, you know, area that we live in,
Elizabeth Cantwell: It is, and you know, you see that at USU, but you really see it throughout, throughout this valley. I see it a lot in Utah as well. I guess that's why we're called the Beehive State, but, but I really do see it here and and I'm glad that, just based on my past, you guys are able to deliver for really important customers, really important things, and I'm able to send amazing students and amazing ideas out into the Utah universe, and have them turn into something real somewhere out there. So let's spend maybe the last couple of minutes coming back from deep space to Leo to low Earth orbit, where there's a lot of small sets in low Earth orbit. And I think we could talk forever about, what's the, what's the economics of that? Why is that changing so fast? How did the things that were happening 38 years ago become entire economies? But that, but that is a fact. I mean, there's, there's so much interest, commercial interest, in stuff, in. Leo. Some of it's downward looking. Some of it's just communication. Some of it's talk about beaming energy. All these I won't go to space elevators, been talked about for a long time. But when we think about the applications for the work that we jointly do, which often have been not Leo a little further out, you know, or maybe even way further out, and we come down to this growing low Earth orbit economy, where look at what Elon Musk is doing with Starlink. But there's a whole bunch of stuff happening in fairly small objects with sort of critical roles. Communications is the big one right now, but I think that's expanding to to a whole host of applications that might utilize the kinds of things that Space Dynamics Lab did on OSIRIS REx, but to do what you talked about earlier, which is autonomous refueling of spacecraft, autonomous interaction of multiple spacecraft in the low Earth orbit context, so that they can continue to do their job for longer, or they can get augmented and do a different job without having to de orbit and relaunch or any of that stuff. To me, that's one of the most interesting changes in my lifetime. And to me, Space Dynamics Lab. While you have sponsors that are interested, that aren't there for the commercial use of Leo, that is an awful lot of what you do has applicability in low Earth orbit. You know, maybe we should start a another conference in Logan on,
Jed Hancock: you know, the word that is often used is P Leo proliferated low earth orbit, yes, which you know at one time, had 10s of satellites, then hundreds, now literally 1000s, moving to 10s of 1000s of satellites, everything from missile defense to communication aspects. It really is changing the world. I'll put a positive spin on it. Okay, think about humanity and what education has done for the world. If all school houses in every third world country had a small dish on top of them, where the students had access to the educational opportunities offered by the World Wide Web, what does that do for the economies of third world countries where people have access to learn and to know more about the world around them. I mean, it is changing many lives for the better, and it's changing our life. And I think that's sometimes just a very simple example that we can all think about and be very proud to be a part of this whole you know, economic development, if you will. SpaceX has changed the world. They've absolutely lowered the cost and the entry to be into space, everything from insurance to, you know, all the things we've talked about. There are so many business applications right here in low Earth orbit that will continue to drive those numbers. We'll see them, we'll see them grow. We'll see them be steady. It's a trillion dollar economy now it is
Elizabeth Cantwell: and getting larger very quickly, with all the concomitant nation competitions. And yeah, I think that's just beginning.
Jed Hancock: And that's another big difference. There used to be only a handful of nations in space that had the capacity. Now there's many, many nations.
Elizabeth Cantwell: And you do, I mean, you have African nations, you have South American nations that may not have the capacity we have, but they are launching absolutely satellites and using them for local commerce. So think about your favorite satellite idea that could become a business friends out there. And we'll, we'll, we'll put it in our innovation space and and try and do a competition around,
Jed Hancock: I mean, I think that's a great a great thought is that business, even from personal business to large corporations, will be driving, and are driving innovations in space more so than governments.
Elizabeth Cantwell: One of my favorite types of discussions in the job I'm in is talking with farmers and ranchers in Utah about how they utilize space based information to do their to run their farms or run their operations. Some are far more innovative than you would think. I mean, they know what's available. They have access to data through data aggregators, but what they do with it is very unique and really, really interesting. And, you know, they've got 1000s of or, you know, very large land masses that they're either growing things on, or they're moving cattle or sheep around, and the ability of people to, when they get it, to think about, oh, what could I do with that if I had all if I had that information? Is it stuns me every day. It's cool. It's super cool. Yeah, it's
Jed Hancock: amazing to think that water probably the most valuable resource in the Western United States, and measuring the evapotranspiration, where the water's going, how it's getting there, that's done from space. So it is driving our economy. Even how we're feeding nations,
Elizabeth Cantwell: and the more we know, the more we're gonna struggle with who owns the water. Yeah, thank you. Do any Did I miss anything really important that you know? You and I have spoken a lot over the last year about different ways that we can, we can move things forward. I
Jed Hancock: mean, I guess the only thing I would add is that the future is so bright.
Elizabeth Cantwell: It is bright. It is enormously bright. And Space Dynamics Lab is just a rocket. I mean, it's amazing coming and talking to your folks and watching what you're doing is such a thrill. Yeah,
Jed Hancock: and so I just, I love the collaboration, the relationship we have with the university. And I just
Elizabeth Cantwell: thank you for just see it. Thank you for teaching, yeah, because I know you know a lot, and bringing that knowledge and sharing it is an incredible asset for for our kids. So thank you, Jed,
Jed Hancock: thank you for all you do for our university community, for our valley here, here,
Elizabeth Cantwell: a mutual admiration society here. So if you have questions for us, folks out there, you can always come and give us your satellite idea. We'll take a look at it. Thanks everyone.
Special thanks to Jed Hancock for joining us on Future Casting with Utah State. And thank you to the planners who made this week's episode possible.
Future Casting is a production of Utah Public Radio and Utah State University, sponsored by the Office of the President.
Our producer is Hannah Castro, with the help from Utah State's marketing and communications team, and the theme music was produced by Justin Warnick. You can listen to Future Casting at upr.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
