Renee Wynn, former NASA CIO, brings a wealth of knowledge to the discussion of space industry’s multifaceted nature.

She navigates through the critical roles that data science, IT, and cybersecurity play in the expanse beyond our atmosphere.

Wynn’s experience offers a deep dive into the integration of technology in space operations, emphasizing the importance of cybersecurity and debris management to ensure the sustainability of space endeavors.

In this episode, Renee shares her insights on the vast opportunities space offers to diverse professions and the necessity for collaborative efforts to foster peaceful and profitable use of this frontier.

As someone who has transitioned from environmental policy to the realm of IT at NASA, her journey epitomizes the cross-disciplinary nature of space industry roles, highlighting the scope for contribution from virtually any professional background.

In this episode you'll discover:

• The expansive opportunities for a diverse range of professions in the space industry, from data scientists to lawyers.

• Insights into global government collaboration for sustainable space business, emphasizing peaceful operations and risk mitigation.

• The essential role of cybersecurity and space debris management in the growing space economy.

• How NASA embraces arts and design, including how Origami-inspired technology, is essential to space innovation.

• Renee’s personal narrative on transitioning careers and the value of inviting unexpected talent into the space sector.

• A strategic approach for entrepreneurs and businesses considering the space industry, focusing on problem-solving and innovative partnerships.

Quote:

“You're operating with everyone else up there, including what space throws at you. Operate accordingly, deal with your risks, and then I'd ask everybody to invite somebody to the game that you would least expect.”

- Renee Wynn

Episode Links

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NASA

Listen to The Heart of a Public Servant with Renee Wynn

on ‘Kathy Sullivan Explores…’ Now part of the Inter Astra Podcast Network

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Join the #1 community creating equitable access to the business of space.

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NASA made me feel welcome in a place where I was clearly an alien. And it's important, I think, when you're in a business and somebody is new to that business or new to your organization, do what you can to make them feel welcome so that they will bring their talents to how amazing things happen and possibly things you as an individual never even thought possible. And frankly, that's what space is all about.

Hi. I'm Renee Winn, the former chief information officer of NASA where I did global and off the globe IT operations and cybersecurity. I retired just a few years ago, and now, I take what I learned over a 30 year career in the United States government, and especially the time that I had at NASA to turn what I've learned into advice so that others can be successful.

Renee Wynn, welcome. Thanks for chatting to me.

Well, it's good to see you again, Tobin. I hope you're doing great.

Doing well. Thanks. Renee, you left the Environmental Protection Agency and joined NASA in 2015 as chief information officer. I'd love to know what are your memories of being welcomed into the space business?

It's showing one correction because people always get my job failure, and that is I went to NASA in 20 15 to be the deputy CIO, and I failed at that. And a few weeks in, they asked me to be the CIO. It turns out when they were recruiting for the deputy position, they were actually looking for the next CIO at the time, and I was about the only person that wasn't clued in on that focus, for NASA. So it was a big surprise when all of that happened. And and, you know, kinda related to the business space, I always like to add this into the story of failing as the deputy CIO, which is really just to get people's attention and encourage them to listen, is that, I thought hard about whether I could shift from being the deputy to the CIO when I'd really I'd been at the agency only 2 weeks. You know, I was still focused on where's the printer, where's the restroom, what floor is that conference room on, when we were in person. And when I I spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, and it's because I didn't think I could do the job. And then I thought, well, gosh.

If they're asking me, then maybe nobody else either wants the job or that it's, you know, just one of those jobs that nobody wants, and I was kind of stuck having it. And so kind of moving through that spectrum of thinking, I said, well, here's where I land. I'll give it a shot. And then if it doesn't go very well, I've proven to myself that I know how to find a job in the federal government because I wanted to retire from the United States federal government, which I eventually did. And so I felt like I was at least mentally prepared. If all things go poorly, I had a backup plan, which is always a really good idea in anything that you do. It might not be what you do is use your extra your backup plan, but you should really have an exit strategy so that if it really gets bad, either for you or for the business, you, can exercise that plan. So then how was I welcomed to NASA? You know, NASA is an is an interesting place, and I was welcomed absolutely.

And I say it's an interesting place because when I left EPA, at EPA, everyone was about the environment, you you know, various aspects, clean air, clean water, safe chemicals, land that can be used for the purpose it's intended, which is, you know, residential being different than maybe an industrial spent centers, the more welcoming it got, the more cool it got. It seemed so foreign and so intimidating, which nobody intended to make it intimidating. There's this whole language of space exploration, which I didn't know anything about. Science, I could follow along with, not space science, but science in general has a similar cadence to it. So overall, NASA was very welcoming, but it was a very steep learning curve for me to be there and learn about the mission and learn about the very complex IT, which, you know, is both off the globe as well as across the globe.

Was there a stated mission at that point that's different to the mission today? Or

Not really. You know, it's got new language, but it's not it isn't different. It's science and technology and, you know, arts and design play a huge role at NASA. James Webb Space Telescope, the sunshields were inspired by origami in order for those to fit into the rocket as payload and then deploy and deploy as intended and for its intended use. So and robots, Japan put a robot on space station. Well, the interaction of robots and humans has to be safe. So design really matters a lot when you're looking at robotics, physical robotics versus the workflow robotics that I'm much more accustomed to in the IT world. And, you know, space science for the benefit of humanity, you can say it lots of different ways, but it's still the same, space exploration and then aeronautics.

We always forget that first a, and the first a is aeronautics. And NASA focuses not only on the on science and new technology for aeronautics, including hypersonics, but also greater safety, greater efficiencies. You the wings on airplanes now tip upward. They're not flat, and that's based on research for lower fuel use, in terms of running your your airplanes and SAFER. NASA did a lot of work with the aerospace industry, and the the lanes that airplanes fly in all across the globe, are much smaller or much closer to each other, because of research done. And now, you know, you have safe and closer, so it allows, I guess, you know, more airplanes to fly safely. A lot of cargo is moved that way as well as as humans and and that. So those pieces are the same, even if you give them a different label.

So you tell me if this is or isn't an appropriate question just based on where you are and what we might say that might be useful. This question I have is, what were your first impressions of the relationship between government and industry?

I got to feel that one firsthand. In general, and this is sort of my generalization of working across industry. When I was at EPA, worked with the industry. I've worked with Congress on legislators, including having 4 congressional hearings when I was at NASA. So all of those represent sort of different relationships, different mindsets, different focus, what do you wanna get out of what's going on, and different intentions. The first one is when I got exposed to NASA with sort of the commercial crew. And at first, I because I didn't understand how historically it came to be, I was wondering what NASA was trying to do with its commercial partners. And now, especially now, it makes all the sense in the world.

So there were some really brilliant minds thinking of the future and laying the groundwork for the future with something like Commercial Crew. Commercial Crew is simply that the United States government, in this instance, NASA, was getting out of the business of running routes effectively to the International Space Station to bring payload and crew. Lots of science goes up on International Space Station on an amazing cadence. It really is amazing to know what goes on back and forth between space station and and here on Earth and the benefits that it has. So then it makes sense because then NASA could focus on getting back to the moon, doing research for potentially someday landing humans on Mars, And what do we need to learn about Mars before we attempt to put humans there besides what we're already learning because of the rovers were already up there, including the new one, Perseverance, and the helicopter. And so it made sense as time grew in my mind as I sat at the table, the the governance table, right, sort of always looking at the cybersecurity, the IT angles with it, but I learned a lot sitting there. And it comes down to this, and I think this is just true in relationship. It depends on the industry partners.

Some have a mindset of partnership. I can learn from you. I can talk to you openly. I can offer corrections. I mean, relationships aren't all just compliment and everything's hunky dory. There's always a conflict that comes up, and how you approach and how you handle it is really the strength of a relationship. And then others are more arrogant when they're involved. And I I ran into some of that, you know, especially when it came to running IT, which I never claimed I was an expert at running IT.

I always, always knew what my whole team was much smarter, much more experienced in running large complex IT, you know, my job was to bring the people together and work as a team. If I was touching the boxes, NASA was gonna be in the the, servers. NASA was in a real low to hurt if that was gonna be me doing that work. So it was easy to stay out of that because there was no way I could interfere with it. But we had some partners, even in my part of the business at NASA, we're very arrogant. And it was very hard to get stuff done, and we would have to weigh if that arrogance was getting in the way of of delivery in support of the mission or in in mission delivery. And you could have a number of tough conversations and challenging conversations or tough conversations didn't result in a change. You you had to do some hard thinking about where you were gonna really go and if you were really partnered with the right people.

So I think it just gets down to people, mindset, and arrogance, and in terms of industry partnerships, public private partnerships. You you wanna work, you wanna learn, you wanna get better. It's a great place to be, regardless of whether you're paid by taxpayers as a direct salary or paid by the taxpayers through a contract.

So let's talk about the changes in space industry. What what do you see as the most concrete changes that signal the space industry growth and and potential for business today?

I've seen, and I see this continuing. 1 is the number of launches into space, and partly because there are businesses doing this launch. If I'm from a, smaller nation or I'm in academia or I'm a wealthy person who can build a satellite and send a satellite up with sensors to bring back data to tell me something about space atmosphere, Earth, other planets, the sun, you know, whatever it is, it's now cheaper to get in space. It's not super cheap as in you're gonna go run and buy a dozen satellites and put them up in space, but the price of that has gone down considerably and in part because it's much easier to get a ride in space because it's easier and less expensive to get a ride in space. There are backlogs at our lawn at launch facilities all across the globe, which we sort of imagined 20 years ago, the folks that that thought about commercial crew and, the development of areas for greater number of launches, right, sort of redeveloping equipment and things like that. I don't know that they imagined a backlog. They might have wanted a backlog from a business perspective. The second piece, and this gets back to it's cheaper to be in space, you see the Internet being used in space.

In the United States, in particular, space is part of our everyday life. So we have a codependency on space, in part, really scares me because some people don't know they have that dependency. And if something really bad should happen, then as a business strategy, if you don't know you have that risk, are you prepared to iterate and, you know, pivot when something goes wrong in space or you're whatever you're depending upon in space so that a lot of times, most places rely on GPS, trucking companies, dating apps, delivery of your food, and things like that rely upon GPS. And so if you don't realize that as a business manager, you probably haven't planned for the potential loss of space in in order to deliver your business. So in the United States, this is where I live, you have this strong dependence beyond state space practically in your everyday life. I listen to satellite radio, so I do that. So even your just enjoyment also comes from space. News is broadcast from space a lot of times in order to bring you to remote locations, reporting on amazing events or events that are very tragic.

And then now we have the Internet in space. So you have this larger dependency upon space, certainly in the United States, and you're starting to see that that growing in a lot of other countries as well. And you see the business opportunity of what data can be retrieved from space for the benefit of humanity in ways we haven't even thought of, and so people are now thinking differently about space. The Internet in space is one of those. Precise weather, seeing a lot more businesses dive into the weather business, and you say to yourself, really? You know, we've been doing weather data for a very long time from satellites. Well, getting to greater granularity, to help with farming or better predictive models in terms of significant weather events that could be damaging to humans as well as to economic areas, as well as to nature itself. And so having more information, more granular information helps you be better prepared for catastrophic events created by weather. So those are some areas that I've seen it, and we're starting to see manufacturing in space as well on International Space Station, and that goes on quite a bit.

I just have only a little bit of insight into that. So lots of business is being formed and, new ideas are happening, and the benefits have been great across the board.

Tell me about the myths that need dispelling about barriers to entry. You know, you've essentially just described so many different areas of business that people can get into because of space. You talked a little bit about the dangers as well. But there's a lot of noise around space just because of the massive amount of fiction and and and things that have been built up, over the years as as we've looked up from Earth. What isn't real? What what needs to be dispelled? And are there any specific bits of misinformation that you can think of that people should be ignoring?

I think one of them is who can be in space and who can be involved in space. If you self select out, then you can't. Right? So you can and can't. Both can be true. And so if you decide, if you decide if you're a small a young kid now and you look about and you don't see someone like you in space work that's advertised on the media and that, then you might say, oh, I can't be that. So now that child, that young young kid has self selected out. And I would think that that is in fact fiction. And I say that because having worked at NASA, I've seen some amazing people that, a, didn't look like me, in a variety of ways.

I know you can't see that on a podcast, but I'm a female. I'm Native American, not by culture, but by bloodlines. Most people would think I'm of European descent because but if you look at me against the rest of my tribe or my great grandmother in that, you're like, oh, yeah. I guess I guess you are part of that tribe. We're from Northern America into Canada. So different in terms of how we look, but not every American Indian looks the same either. So that happens. And there aren't barriers, to Native Americans being involved in space, unless you decide that you aren't.

And I think that's the biggest myth that needs to be dispelled. I think a long, long, long, long second from that is the risks. Because there are launches, it feels like every day, to space, we get familiar with it, and we might forget that it's still really risky to have thousands of pounds of thrust and power driving a tube, a rocket up through the Earth's atmosphere, getting up past Earth's atmosphere, and then bringing and deploying payload however that payload is being distributed in space or up to International Space Station. That's still really risky, and we forget that, I think, because it's commonplace if you follow space in particular. So I think, by far, the biggest issue is who can, and then the second, a very long way aways second, miles away is is the risk, because we we have a tendency, I think, because we get so familiar with it that it's that we forget the risks associated with launching into space.

So that also is a bit of an unknown, isn't it? Like, there's a risk element. What should business people interested in doing business in space then navigate and be mindful of? Because this isn't guaranteed. Like, nothing's guaranteed. So what kind of due diligence should people be making, before they decide to enter this industry and and and be part of it?

The first piece, sort of the entry into this business is expense, and, you know, just paying for a launch if you're doing that. So to me then is if you've got an idea is find your partners so you can sort of distribute the cost amongst many. I think, and this is really from my perspective and what I got to do at NASA, is the failure to recognize that cybersecurity is an absolute risk in space, as is the growing amount of debris in space. So we if you've come up with an idea that is a business proposition, so I'm gonna put off take off my 30 years of government hat. And if I'm looking at a business and I can find partners and I'm gonna be able to get to a launch, that's great. They get so focused, and I've talked to so this is my talking to a few smaller start ups. They so focused on getting into space, driving down those costs because coming by cash is very hard, especially in these large sums. These are 1,000,000.

I worked with a company that was in a capital raise of a $100,000,000 and one that was $50,000,000. For me, that's a big sum of money. For some, that's not a big sum of money. Then but that is a lot of money and that's you've gotta manage risks associated with that because people want success. They wanna make some money back on what they've invested in the business. But they're so focused on getting their business into space and whatever the revenue generation data, let's call it data coming down from space in order to create revenue, they forget or they make a risk based decision that they're not gonna worry about debris, or maybe they don't know about it, but I find that unusual if you're in the space business. And they certainly put off the cybersecurity piece. And because of the the perceived expense, and it is an expense, but in some instances, I think it's a perceived expense that they haven't necessarily gone through a full risk review process and really tried to figure out how they can mitigate those risks associated with that.

I mean, worked at NASA and, got the distinct pleasure of leading the agency's effort to overhaul its cybersecurity posture from our older assets that were launched when I was a small child, Voyager series, Voyager 1 and 2, which is still in the news now because they're having troubles communicating with it, and they're trying to figure that out. 2 or more recent launches is on our older stuff, figuring out what you can do because you're not gonna do an operating system update on what we call patch Tuesday in the in the business because it's a millions of miles away, And the operating system for that flying asset, as I call them, might not have been designed to be able to do an update in it. I mean, there is does have to be the design. So to me, the the newer stuff we really pushed at NASA building in cybersecurity protections or understanding what might go on with a satellite if we see anomalous behavior, how can we react to dealing with that risk? Figuring out what the anomalous behavior is, is it man made through a cyber attack or is there's your satellite kinda freaking out or something like that? So I that's the so there's 2 areas that I see that, well, I'd like people to pay more attention to because the 2 can go hand in hand. You know, you could have a cyber incident that could create a debris incident, and vice versa. And then certainly based on the reporting that we're beginning to see in the news right now is putting what I would call satellites or the capability to blow up satellites and the use of nuclear in space is gives everybody pause, and I think it's gotta be examined very carefully because peaceful operations in space, it it's really hard. It's really hard because sometimes things are intentional and sometimes things aren't intentional. And it takes a long time to figure out the difference between the 2.

And then you have to think about if it's intentional, what are the repercussions, and how are you gonna enforce those repercussions? And that's another place that's very, very hard as well. But that's what I would say.

So, man, we'll be talking about diplomacy in space as well, on a different episode so we'll definitely touch on that. I want to talk Quick Fire style about opportunities for 5 different types of people. And the first type of person I wanna talk about is a young person in education, maybe even high school, then looking at different studies. You've mentioned art, you know, you mentioned origami earlier in this episode. So it seems like there's quite a wide range of things that you might study that would mean that you end up in in space. What would your recommendations be if people are looking at that?

Yeah. There's the standard ones, you know, the engineering, computer science, physics, space related sciences. And in this instance, I wanna sort of say space geology. And we've already proven both the United States and Japan have proven that they can land a robot on an asteroid, which is traveling up to 17,000 miles per hour, and they land on it. They grab a sample, and those samples come back to Earth. And so now that the geology of that asteroid has to be studied. So now you've got rock science for space folks as well. And I bring that up because NASA, has a lunar library, a lunar rock library, but it's got more now than just lunar rocks in it that lots of people come and study.

And sometimes what they study helps us better understand our earth, which is really cool. You don't realize this, but NASA has a lot of great storytellers in what we record. Like, This Week at NASA is recorded every week, and it uses all sorts of graphics. So graphic designers that put together to help you if NASA decides that they're going to land on the moon with a lunar lander. If somebody puts together, and I'm pretty sure it's NASA, puts together a video that's not really of a lunar lander, but it's, AI driven, I guess I have to say nowadays. But, you know, driven videos to help people see what could happen. And if you can see it, it's a lot easier to imagine. And so there's this whole video development, and we have I got to know, for very good reasons, we have photographers at NASA.

When I got to go to Moscow for a launch, I went to Moscow and Kazakhstan for 2 weeks, our photographer was taking photos all the time. And so when you go on the website for NASA, there's all these photographs, and some of them are here on terra firma on lovely mother Earth, and others are photographs from space, like, from James Webb Space Telescope. I cannot say that best. And those photos come down, and they have to be prepared to put out in public. There's science. There's data scientists. Personally, when I I talk to younger folks, I I sort of tell them, you know, data is everything. I ran IT, but it yes.

I had to run IT so that it would work. But all that was about data, data from space, data from the network, data that perhaps we had a nefarious actor on our network. And focusing on data and arts and design, rate can help make things that have only been in our imagination visible to other people and inspire them to get involved. So to participate in space, it's it runs the full gamut, and I talked about origami. So I always push folks for data. If you're a straight IT professional, then robotic processing workflows, getting learning about AI and how that you can bring humans to the loop there. NASA has HR people, and they have lawyers, lawyers from the silly things that people do, so that's not space stuff. And then there are space lawyers that go along that, contract lawyers, contract specialists, lots of acquisition people because everything goes through an acquisition.

So it's the full spectrum of it. So I just say to folks, you know, besides the data, if you're really looking for something, then I say think about data because that's part of everything that comes down from space, and they do data processing in space to bring down the science part and less, you know, less calculation on that. So it runs the full spectrum. If you need to, then I focus on data because it can use that in any business. Right? If you can't break into the space business, anybody could use a great data scientist. And that, the mathematics are always good fields because physics continually get tested. And that and then if you're me, I I have a bachelor of arts in economics, and so everything I come at, this is the business proposition of what we do. Is it cost effective? Is it optimized? Will it bring value to the mission or to the business and things like that? So there's even a big giant place for folks that are focused on business and good project management skills.

Wow. Truly everybody. Everybody.

Yeah. So it kinda goes back to your first thing, which is, that's a quote from somewhere, right? Whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right. Like that's really exciting to know. Let's talk about entrepreneurs and start ups. These small business owners. They're thinking about it. They understand financial risk. You were brilliant to talk about identifying partners to get the to get the investment into a more realistic place.

What are the other initial steps that small business owners, entrepreneurs can can take to start testing the water to see if space is the right next move for their business?

Yeah. Couple of things on that one. One is, what's the problem you're trying to solve? There are so many good ideas, and I've talked to a number in search. So aside from space, but including space, what problem are you trying to solve by going to space or focusing on space? And have a very clear problem statement so that others can understand that there's a potential business opportunity and maybe help you refine that business opportunity. There's a business right now, the manufacturing I wanna call it wires because that I'm old school here, but it's not really wires. But they're manufacturing in space, and they're doing it now. It's a technology that was discovered about 30 years ago, but it was cost prohibitive. It has to be done in space in a zero gravity situation, which is expensive to do here on the planet, but maybe folks are working on that.

Right? To have more, zero gravity science done on space is really good. A great idea. I don't know the full business proposition, but, you know, you have a great idea. It does start to solve problems because there's a backlog of science going in on to the International Space Station to be in a zero gravity environment. Right? Because it's a limited capacity on the International Space Station. But this particular substance has to be done on the International Space Station in zero gravity environment. It's just now cost effective to be able to do that. It took 30 years to get to this point, and that manufacturing is going on right now up on International Space Station.

So maybe your idea might have been too soon, but what problem are you solving and why are the conditions of space important to that solution? And it gets to then the other idea of, do we need some zero gravity science places on this planet, and maybe we do have them, and I just don't know about it. But the study of liquids is really cool. In space, obviously, you've seen the astronauts on the International Space Station. If you haven't just everybody listening, just Google it. Water are these little globules floating about on inter International Space Station, and the study of those, the liquids in space is different. You can see that the properties if I have a glass of water, the glass of water looks like the glass. I have a drop of water in space. It's this globule of water floating around.

Imagine that difference. And that's the difference in terms of studying liquids in space and that. So the to start ups, entrepreneurs, what problem are you trying to solve? Does space have to be the proposition for it? Or maybe you create a JSON thing and say, I'll start the first lab of 0 gravity because there's enough business to go do that, and and then finding investors and partners along the way that can help make that idea come true and and have you test it? And this is where you also have to really put aside and be so humble because you really have to listen to the feedback. I know some amazing people that know space inside and out, and they would be the people I would call first. I'm not ever gonna do something like that, but these would be the people I'd call first. I'd call them my space board of advisors and get their feedback, and they would not none of the folks that I know that have operating in space, they never stomp on anyone's dream, but they will give you solid feedback on how to make your dream come true. And sometimes, you might just need to park that dream for a little while until you can focus on some other things, but you can get back to that dream when things become more financially viable.

One of the things that's really coming through when I'm speaking with you as well, particularly because of what you've done, is that it turns out you don't have to go to space to be in space. That seems to be a relatively common misconception as well. You know, I'm either working with astronauts or I am an astronaut or I am, you know, I'm building rockets and there's all of this other stuff that you're talking about. What I took from what you just said was, do you need zero gravity to do the thing or actually could you do it on Earth? Would it be better, cheaper, quicker to do the first iteration on Earth and then take it to commercial space or government wherever you may be.

Is that right? I think that's right, Toby. That's one, excellent listening skills on your part. And secondly, I think that's absolutely right. You could, set up your Pathfinder, borrowing from NASA language, here on Earth. And then your future phases, you know, is that the place you wanna go for space? But I think you're absolutely right. People think of space, they think of astronauts, and astronauts are pretty amazing people. I'm so fortunate to know a bunch of them. But then there's me.

Right? The the best I could offer NASA was, kinda working with multidiscipline teams to to get stuff done. Now I did that at EPA, writing legislation, coming up with principles, how the United States was gonna come address unexploded ordinance and all the closing bases, and that which, you know, had worked with explosive experts and legislative experts and negotiations and that. And so, yeah, every I guess every place of work, large domains like space and science and all that, they need other people to be part of it in order to get it done. There's always a business side of what you do. Project management is is in budget management and all of that. So, yeah, I think everything is open to people and find someone that can help you and focus on it. And sometimes you have to step left or right for a few years in order to make a forward advancement towards your dream career and getting feedback from people that have been in the business because maybe there's something about yourself marketable in the business of space.

So let's move on. Let's move on to midlife. I'm calling, we're calling the midlife workforce. So here I am, space isn't for me, and suddenly I'm thinking maybe it could be for me and I'm 10, 20, maybe even 30 years into a career and I'm looking for a pivot and I'm interested in space. What might be identifiable, transferable skill sets that you could see that would be useful to the business of space? And I'm not talking about you can become an astronaut. I'm talking about getting into the business of space here on Earth.

First thing we do is find out if the skills you have are needed in space. And we've talked a lot about the probably answer is probably yes with that one. I'm gonna use food science. There's a whole food science lab at NASA. 1 because the astronauts need to be fed. And when you're in space, your taste, because your smell center changes. And from talking to some of the food scientists, you need spicier the astronauts want spicier food so they can taste it. Food is not satisfying when you can't taste it.

Yeah. You've had a cold and a really stuffed head and you kinda start eating, you're like, this is I'm not doing it. So let's use food science. So I'm a food scientist, and I'm working in a lab to come up with better nutrition or whatever the focus is in food science. Well, then do your research on how is food science relevant to space, and I'm you're gonna find a lot of information on Google search. Then the next thing is is who's doing it academically? What businesses are serving as a contractor to NASA? Why just NASA? Why not SpaceX? Why not the German Space Agency? If you have multiple languages under your belt, then that could be the other thing is you're gonna go work because you speak Japanese, then maybe you could try to go work with Jackson. Right? So just think of yourself and the thing that you do, then you say, oh, this touches space. Well, who is doing this in food science? And then see if you just can't sachet right into that business.

I I see people is I got into the government first as a contractor, and I fell in love with EPA's mission. Why would I go and this is me. Why would I go to work for money when I could go to work with my heart? And so I got into serving in the United States federal government. And next thing you knew, I was like, oh my gosh. I got 20 years in. And, yeah, I made a pivot around the 20 years, not intentional. I didn't say, oh, 20 years I've been doing this. It's just the opportunity came up, and I and I switched, into IT roughly at the 20 year mark.

And then I decided I wanna get better at IT, and an asset position came open, and and I was encouraged to apply because I self selected out. I was like, Oh, well, no, because that's gonna be a really technical job. And I don't do technical. I do software people. People aren't hardware. We call them software sometimes. And then they're like, no, no, no, no. They, as in my friends, said, you just need to try.

It's no right now because I wasn't doing anything about it. But if you drop your name in the hat, you got forced them to say no to you. And they didn't say no, which really scared me. But I came from environmental policy. I came from negotiation skills, conflict management skills, collaboration skills, and listening to customers. I did some, in the early days of user experience, like, you know, waste system store design and stuff like that. So where you are is where you are to start doing Google searches or whatever search engine you wanna use and see where that touches space and then figure out a pathway to it, and I bet you'll be surprised.

Let's go for 2 more. I'm going to swap them around. Renee, I'm going to ask you about global government collaboration. How might governments around the world And how how do you hope they're going to collaborate with each other so that we can start creating, safe and profitable, sustainable business in space. What what's your hope for that? What kind of behaviors do we need and actions?

I would like to see the ability for this planet, the one we all share, point of emphasis there, that we figure out how to have peaceful operations in space and enforce where appropriate. And I say that because you don't have to enforce every infraction in space to get good behavior, you have to enforce enough. And and and then that means enforcement means that there are consequences to your activities that were deemed unpeaceful. And that's the other part that's hard is what's the definition of peaceful and who's gonna decide that. Each of us probably have different definitions of peaceful. But in order for space to continue to operate and expand the risk of a nefarious activity against your space asset, we need to start enforcing and we need to start having consequences to that. Governments are cooperating all across this planet now. NASA's leading the whole Artemis Accords.

That's one way to do it. Weather operations, weather satellites. There's all sorts of data exchanges, amongst government entities as well as with the private sector on weather data and the models that are needed to do better predictions for human safety as well as economic, buffering economic impacts of of significant climate events. But what we I haven't seen, and I took a look at this about 2 years ago, I haven't seen our ability to ensure peaceful operations by having someone own, have consequences for what many would've deemed as a nefarious activity.

Difficult, difficult job, I would imagine.

Yeah. Peace is hard. You just think of family dynamics. Right? How many times you bite your tongue, but then you don't bite your tongue to say something about someone's behaviors and the way you took them. You sieve. You get stressed. Mhmm. If you have that conversation, there's probably gonna be conflict, there would be in my family, and have a conflict, but you're gonna settle back into a better place.

But if you take the option of keep the peace because I'm gonna keep silent, you're tearing you're usually tearing yourself up, and you're you're gonna be indirectly impacting the relationship you might have with that person. So the hard road is to say something to clean up and make a relationship better, then you actually have peace, But you have to be willing to have that challenging conversation to have peace.

So let's finish on leaders of of big business. You know, people with a lot of money, many of whom have started already to make serious inroads in in in space. The the headliners, the Bezos and and Branson and and Musk type people, but there are others we know are going up all the time. What strategic moves do they need to make to continue to be responsible? You know, that they're going up there to grow business, to make money. How should they be behaving? What should they be considering?

Yeah. This goes back to peaceful operations in space. The thing first and foremost is you realize when you're in space, you're in shared space. Humans love boundaries. We have boundaries all over because I go to this country, I go to that country, and I cross a border in order to get that. Space doesn't really have boundaries created by humans, although we've come up with one, you know, the definition of cislunar, the definition of low Earth orbit. You know, we've come up with these in deep space. Right? How far out do you have to go for deep space? So we humans have added some boundaries to it, but those aren't owned by a particular country, a typical a particular culture.

So we've got to realize that when we are operating in space, we are operating in a really a boundaryless or no borders area and behave accordingly. You don't have that fight, that middle middle seat on the airplane. Don't have the fight over the armrest. Figure out how to share the armrest. Or if you're on an aisle seat or a window seat, do without that armrest. Right? You know, just figure out but I think you first, you have to come to realize you are operating with everyone else up there, including what space throws at you. Asteroids and bits and pieces of things have been thrown off from an explosion of a of a nature made product. Right? So by the way, and so I think first is is to just understand that.

And that gets into what I would go next is sort of risk mitigation is when you decide you wanna grow your business or establish a business in space, what are the risks? Let's just do the big old long list of them and then figure out which ones you have to prioritize and how you're gonna mitigate them. And they say all of this too is to say that part of this is because the opportunities in space are boundless. It's your imagination. And so you can have space tourism. You can advance science for the benefits of humanity or just advance science of understanding our own planet and our own solar system is really cool. We have a large amount of operational dependencies upon space, and that's just gonna grow and grow and grow. You look at communications. In the United States, we have a whole lot of wired telephones, landlines as we like to call them, and now it's mostly cell phones.

Well, some countries didn't bother with landlines because that's expensive to lay all of that, but they put the infrastructure in for huge mobile phone use. And look at the businesses that began to thrive when you had mobile phone access associated with where you could go with business, well, that mobile phone access is now reaching into space, which now could mean that the remote areas where you weren't gonna put a cell tower or some relay station, now you just ping off a space. And when we do that, those individuals that now have access to information that was very difficult for them to get information to because they don't live near necessarily a library and they they didn't have the Internet, Now you're just exploding in terms of what your business opportunities are. And it could be just an individual who decides that they've seen something that they can turn into a business, you know, all the way up to you're already operating in business. And at which point, you just need to really remember you're you're there with many other people in many other countries and operate accordingly, deal with your risks, and then I'd ask everybody to invite somebody to the game that you would least expect. And that goes back to your first question. NASA made me feel welcome in a place where I was clearly an alien. And it's important, I think, when you're in a business and somebody is new to that business or new to your organization, do what you can to make them feel welcome so that they will bring their talents to how amazing things happen and possibly things you, as an individual, never even thought possible.

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