Meet Elizabeth Kennick, President of Teachers In Space, a transformative initiative integrating real space science into classrooms across the United States and beyond.

Elizabeth’s journey from diverse careers in fashion and finance to pioneering space education exemplifies her dedication to making space accessible to educators and students alike.

Growing up near NASA centers, Elizabeth was inspired by the Apollo missions and envisioned herself among the stars. Her early career path took unexpected turns through fashion retail and Wall Street, where she honed her project management skills before a serendipitous encounter led her back to her first passion—space.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How Elizabeth’s childhood dreams evolved into leading Teachers In Space.
• The challenges and breakthroughs of integrating real space missions into classroom curriculums.
• The strategic approach to expanding Teachers In Space’s impact, offering unique educational payloads and flight experiment opportunities.
• Space education's profound influence on developing students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Future projects and aspirations to further democratize space education globally.

Quote:

“We’re not just teaching the future, we’re doing it now.”

- Elizabeth Kennick

Episode Links:

• Teachers In Space Website
• Follow Teachers In Space on Facebook
• Connect with Elizabeth Kennick on LinkedIn

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Join our journey into the world of education and space: https://interastra.space

Elizabeth Kennick:

Would you never go out of your house until you had done all your laundry and all your dishes and cleaned every single thing and automated everything and achieved financial independence? No.

You go out and explore because it's in our nature and it's what keeps us alive. It's what makes us creative. It's what enables us to come back and improve the world in which we live.

I'm Elizabeth Kennick, and you are listening to 'Your Business In Space'.

I'm president of Teachers In Space, and that means I'm responsible for bringing space education opportunities, flight experiment opportunities, ways to bring space physically into the classroom to teachers, especially across the US. Well, as a kid, I really lived a vibrant fantasy life. I was either an astronaut or building robots.

I just expected that space would be available to me. In school, I went to a college prep school and so we studied math, lots and lots of math, calculus, trigonometry while we were still in high school, lots and lots of English. And our English teacher in 11th grade had us read science fiction, and he wanted us to read the science fiction and learn about the science it was based on. So I loved that. That that was something that my dad had introduced me to. My parents would take us to the library every weekend to check out as many books as we were allowed to. And by the time I was about 11, I was done with the kids lit, and my dad showed me where the science fiction was. We used to watch Star Trek.

When star wars came out, I was 16. I saw it three times that summer. So this is what I wanted to do, but it's not what I did. I was finishing high school in 78, getting ready to go to college, starting to work, and I worked as a lifeguard. And I worked very briefly at McDonald's. And then I started to work in stores, and I had a love of fashion. And I became an assistant store manager and then a manager and then an assistant buyer. And it wasn't until the mid eighties that I realized I wasn't making money, I wasn't happy, and I wasn't working in space.

And I actually ran away to Los Angeles where a cab driver said Hughes Aircraft is hiring, and I got a temp job in the engineering department at Hughes, and that's what finally enabled me to get started on my path. So I had just turned 25. And in fact, at this point, I was already having a midlife crisis. I had rushed through high school, skipped senior year, gone to college, got my BA in English with an AA in education at 19, then I got married at 20 and had my daughter at at 22. And then working in retail and not making a lot of money, and my husband was then a rock band, and this was the time when clubs were starting to play MTV and have DJs and not hire live rock bands anymore. And things were really, really hard for us, and our marriage fell apart, and I just got as far away as I could. And what I discovered while I was there in LA was that I could work as a Cali girl, as a temp. I was literate.

I could type. I had all these skills and they put me in the engineering department and I learned about engineering. I was not an engineer, but I was filing. I was working with the engineers.

And I realized after a few months that there was no reason that I couldn't go home to Baltimore, get a master's degree, and get a real job in something that interested me. So I went back. I went home. I went back to my husband.

I went back to our life, and I began working in temping in the insurance industry and going to graduate school at night. And, eventually, I achieved a master's in operations analysis and information systems from University of Maryland. And in my final semester there, I was recruited by Morgan Stanley to move to New York. I took my daughter with me. My marriage had failed again by this point. So my daughter, who is now 11, and I moved to New York to and I worked on Wall Street for 11 years as because I ran to LA and got that job at Hughes. That's really what started it. While I was at Morgan Stanley, I really loved that work.

It was I remember calling my mom and saying, this is the first place I've ever worked where instead of me saying, come on, you guys, I was like, wait. Wait for me. Like, I had to run every hour of every day to keep up with those people, and it was exhilarating and exhausting and rewarding. So it was 95 when I started working for them, and I moved around. My job was to bring project management in, and I had earned my professional manage project management certification. I was also a network engineer. So, you know, I was the one to run out and get certifications and things. So because I had a team of project managers and we were managing various business information systems projects, When it turned out that we were going to have to convert all of our systems because Europe was converging on a single monetary unit.

This was called EMU. It was European Monetary Union, and it started with 12 countries. The UK was not one whose currency would merge, but the Bank of London was a big driver of understanding what it would mean. And so our project was headquartered in London, and it was determined that the project would be so big that it would take the entire London IT staff. So rather than do that, they brought people from New York. And those of us who were working in project management, those who of us who had cross business experience were the ones that were brought to do it. And so I spent 2 years actually devising workshops for people in business and technology and operations all across the firm to sit together and role play the impact of placing trades prior to conversion and settling them after and what this would mean if you were in Europe, if you were in Asia, if you were in the US. And I discovered that I really enjoyed teaching adults.

So I began to do that. I began to do a lot of managing systems and then working with the training department to make sure that the users of the systems understood how to use them. Eventually, I became a vice president. And what happens when that's the first level of officer of the company, so each year when the new group makes it to vice president, there were things they have to do. One of the things we had to do was pick a charity to support. And I still wanted to go to space, so I decided to look for a space charity, and I found the Space Frontier Foundation. They had people like Buzz Aldrin on their board of advisors, and they were having conferences and they looked real. So I signed up to donate some of my pay to them.

And after a year, they called me up and said, why did you do that? And I said, I wanna go to space. And they said, well, come to our conference. So I did. It was 2,005. I met people who said we should do this. You should do that. You should join the Space Tourism Society. We should join Yuri's night.

So now it's 95. And what they wanna do is put teachers on the coming suborbital flights, which seems to be maybe 2 years away, safer, more affordable, more frequent. Right? Let's make this happen.

And so there were handshake agreements with the heads of some suborbital space companies, and teachers were selected and a NASA grant was awarded to start creating professional development workshops for teachers that would help them understand the new coming commercial space industry and get them involved in it. After the first set of workshops were delivered, Bob Worb, who was on the board and one of the founders of the foundation, came to me.

So that was it. Right? There was COVID. We weren't doing anything. And that fall, I do believe it was that fall, could have been the next year, but during that shutdown, I think it was that fall that Erica called me up and said, hey. You know, how can we help? And I said, I really need to get some funding to take teachers to the Space Symposium. Right? Because we were hearing Space Symposium, things might be open. We might be traveling again in 21. And she teased me.

She pretended that, oh, you know, I don't know. That's what they'd ask. And then she turned around and said, would a $1,000,000 help? And it turned out that we were one of 19 educational nonprofits selected that year to be funded by club for the future. And so we were able to prepare that when the shutdown lifted in 21, we were ready. We began to do workshops again for teachers and then we began to fly things. And we got some great clients. We began to work with the Space Grant Consortia in New Mexico, Maine, and we're still working with them today. Right now, today, I'm in New Mexico because we have 15 teachers arriving, Mexico because we have 15 teachers arriving tonight for meet and greet.

And by tomorrow, there will be 30 here, and we will run our 4 day workshop. We will teach them Arduino programming, circuitry, stuttering, a day of glider lessons, and a balloon flight for the experiments that we're building, a day of analysis of the data we've collected and working with orbital satellites, a tour inside Spaceport America, and then we'll do another 4 days and the same thing for another 30 teachers. When these teachers are not just from New Mexico, they're from across the US and a few are even international. After that, we give them an ear of support working in their classrooms with their students. We have an online course they can refer to, and we have regular flights now, balloon flights, working with the, pearling ladder again, working with their stratospheric tow plane, BGRET, which also does science missions, putting up the suborbital payloads with Blue Origin. We've done 2 more of those and have another one coming. We have begun taking teams of teachers doing coordinated work with related experiments on 0 g. We've done that twice now on our own and several times working with others.

And we are working on a program now that we should begin this fall that will enable us to keep doing that regularly, and we are just beginning. I can't talk about it in any detail. We're under NDA, but we are talking to flight providers and sponsors, and we are well on our way to beginning the suborbital flights for teachers. When it comes to the business of space, the big misconception is that it's a waste. We have too many problems to solve here on earth. And my answer to that is, would you never go out of your house until you had done all your laundry and all your dishes and cleaned every single thing and automated everything and achieved financial independence? No. You go out and explore because it's in our nature, and it's what keeps us alive. It's what makes us creative.

It's what enables us to come back and improve the world in which we live. To be successful in space, I believe that the biggest challenge is learning how to work with others, and that doesn't just mean getting along with them. It means understanding the ways in which we depend on each other, the criticalities, and the need to be honest with each other. One of the hardest things moving toward this commercial off the shelf model of, oh, you can just get components and stick them together and anybody can do it. Not really, not yet. Often these days, I still see projects fail because of low quality off the shelf components or they're the wrong components, engineering is still crucial. And I'm concerned that with all of the focus, talk, and funding for STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math, the curriculum in almost every school in the US is still just science and math. There is not yet, in most schools, technology or engineering curriculum.

And so that's what we're focusing on, and we are helping the teachers, according to their responsibilities, be able to do this. So elementary school teachers in the US typically responsible for an entire room, we help them bring engineering concepts into school. Elementary school kids get this. They like rules. They like following a program. They like testing things. They like breaking things, and they like communicating with each other and solving problems. Middle schools, in many cases, are starting to bring in specific STEM teachers who focus on the STEM curriculum for the whole middle school.

And often they have great leeway in how they teach that. And so some of our most successful teachers to come through our program are the ones that write back to us and say, hey. Guess what? Now in 6th grade, we're starting with the programming and the circuitry, and we're doing some little robots and things. And then in 7th grade, we're starting to work with the data collection and analyzing the data. And in 8th grade, we're doing CubeSats or flight experiments, which is just a wonderful progression and sets those 8th graders up for the high school teachers that are looking at the 8th graders to see how they can help those kids be ready for the most science and technology and engineering that's available to them in high school. A lot of times, those high school teachers are still having to do it at the club level after school weekends, but at least they're doing. And, we're excited to be working in some states now with groups that are actually trying to change the curriculum and bring technology and engineering into the classroom. We've tied what we teach to the next generation science standards, and so it it's a slow and rigorous process, but I see it happen.

The best bit of advice I've been given that I can give about the business of space is what my daughter said, and she took it from Jesus Christ Superstar because we had been to that musical, and she loved the line about you'd have managed better if you'd had a plan. And that's what it is. Right? You have to plan it and manage what you're doing to that plan. The opportunities I see I'm most excited about, Oh, yes. Number 1. Number 1, the coming of the commercial space stations. I'm so excited about this because when we have people doing work, doing research in space, that's when teachers and their students will actually have a hand in it. It's exciting now to go to a challenger center, a museum, any public event where you might get to see a presentation live by astronauts on our International Space Station and ask some questions.

That's amazing. But think about there are already opportunities like the student space flight experiment program that is run by Jeff Goldstein in Maryland, and we participated in this where students can have their experiments set to space station with instructions for the astronauts. The astronauts perform the experiment, students perform the same steps on their ground truth version, and then they get the data back and see what they can learn. These are great opportunities, but imagine when we have multiple space stations and people can easily upload or even take their own experiments and perform them there. And so that's what we're working on, understanding what that will be and how can we analog it now and be ready to participate. So it's how do we do something similar to that? How do we perform it in our environment? An analog media analogist too. So a good example, one that just is in the news because it just ended is NASA astronauts who went off to a Mars analog for a year. And if you're curious about this, go look for it and find the news because things you might wanna know are, well, how analogous was it? What do you mean Mars analog? What was the gravity like? What was the atmosphere like? What did they eat? How did they sleep? What was the point of having these people who are astronauts be in this situation for a year? What did we learn from it? And what will we do next? It's safer and way cheaper and way more accessible.

We can't yet send those people to Mars, much less keep them there for a year, but how will we get there? And that's what the analog environments help us do. Today, I'm focused on the workshops that we're running this week and next. That's the number one thing I'm focused on. But additionally, the other two things I'm super focused on right now are our Serenity satellite. We've been launching Serenity. It's a 3u, CubeSat with Firefly Aerospace ever since their first launch of their Alpha Rocket Alpha 1. They ran something called Dream and invited educational payloads to get a ride on the test flight of their rocket, so we went. It was exciting to see that launch.

And then, unfortunately, there was an issue with one of the engines and the rocket had to be destroyed at the range, so we lost our satellite. But Firefly said, rebuild it. Will we fly it? So we did. And on their second launch, we got to an orbit, but it was not quite the right orbit. This was still a test flight. There was still learning going on about how exactly that rocket gets satellites to a proper orbit. So we were up, we got signal back, but our orbit was too low and we'd only stayed up 11 days. So then we got into NASA's CubeSat Launch initiative and built the 3rd serenity.

And since that time, mass, Firefly have had 2 commercial launches that were successful and now they're back to doing the NASA launch.

We just went with them on their 5th launch, and our satellite is up, and we're trying to communicate with it. So there's a whole lot that we are learning about orbital satellites and that our whole team, everybody we're working with, all our partners, even the people who know way more than we do, we're all learning from this. So that's the second thing that I'm very involved in right now. And the third is funding. We have a number of funding opportunities underway and moving, and I will be really excited to talk to you again in, say, 6 months about where we are with those. But, a big one is probably gonna provide about 5 years of funding for our educational efforts, and the other one is for flights.

I'm Elizabeth Kennick of Teachers In Space, and you have been listening to Your Business In Space.

Best ways to connect with me, you can find me, Elizabeth Kennick, and you can find teachers in space on Facebook and on LinkedIn and on Twitter. We're most active on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also find our website, TIS for Teachers In Space, tis.org.

And on our website, you will find out about the Serenity satellite, our educational orbital satellite that's up in space right now, and the workshops that we offer, all the things that we offer, including an online course that is available now that you can go ahead and register for. And also, this is where we will publicize the next opportunities to join our workshops and other programs. Right now, the, workshops this summer are completely sold out, but the online course is available and there will be more workshops coming.

So to discover more, head over to interastra.space.

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