Space Exploration Opening Up

On Monday I was the featured guest in a Technocamps online GiST (Girls in Science and Technology) seminar. A few hundred youngsters attended, many of them watching in classrooms. My prerecorded introductory video took about fifteen minutes. Their questions took about 45. That’s as it should be.

One of them asked whether there are more ways to get into a space program now than working for NASA. There certainly are! First I explained that most people in the American government’s space program work for a company under NASA supervision, not directly for NASA. That helps know-how spread into other things here on Earth more easily than it would from inside a government agency.

But NASA and the Russians haven’t been the only space explorers for many years now. We are at a critical juncture in the maturation of space exploration. We understand it well enough now, globally, for smaller nations and even some private companies to be doing it.

A few years ago India set a worldwide record for the lowest cost per kilogram to sent a scientific satellite into orbit.

Yesterday, the day after the Technocamps event, China landed a spacecraft on the moon. As I write this, the probe is midway through two days of planned collection of soil, rocks and borehole samples from the moon’s surface before it will blast off with its payload to return to Earth. This is the first time any country has attempted to collect samples from the moon since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s.

My audience can become space people all over the world and may even work for a private space company such as Virgin Galactic.

They have more options than I did. Let’s see where they will take us.