 Hi, everyone. Welcome. We're going to get started in just a couple minutes because we want to have people have time that when just another minute and we'll get started once the shuffling settles down. Nothing like killing the discussion. So quiet down. But while we're waiting, happy Pi Day to everyone. Yeah. Happy Pi Day yet. It's an exciting day at MIT. Our admissions go out to students on Pi Day. Of course, that's how we do it at MIT. Our undergraduate admissions all go out on March 14. OK, I got a thumbs up. Hello, everyone, now it's taking me. My name is David Newman. I'm the Apollo program professor of Astronautics here at MIT. And I'm delighted to be with you and welcome you all to this session. We have an unbelievable session. We're going to talk about the future of exploration. 10 to maybe 50 years out and inventing, painting that picture of the future. So I'll do a quick introduction of our panelists. And they'll be followed by their own couple minute introductions. And then we're going to launch into some questions. My immediate, right? Dr. Leon Alkalai is at JPL, is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and currently manages the JPL Office of Strategy. So I've had the great pleasure to work with Leon and take a look at the strategic plan for JPL, really looking out at decades. So I think we might hear some about that as well. Then Professor Sarah Seager, who's a colleague in our Earth Atmospheric Planetary Sciences Department. She's a class of 41 professor. And well, the guru of everything exoplanets, really the expert on exoplanets. She'll talk about tests. We can ask her questions about what it's like way beyond the solar system, way past my comfort zone. Sarah can take us out to all the extraordinary planetary finding missions and looking for that Earth. Are we going to find another Earth? Dr. Erica Wagner from Blue Origin is the payload sales director for Blue Origin and developer of vehicles and technologies to enable human space transportation. And I think we might want to ask her, who's going to launch this year? A whole bunch of payloads are already launching, but it's really ramping up to launch from suborbital to orbital. And I know I want to hear about Blue Moon and beyond. We paint that picture of millions of people in low Earth orbit and beyond. And we're very also fortunate to be joined by Yonatan Weintraub. Hopefully I didn't massacre that, Yonatan. I've been practicing. And the co-founder of SpaceIL, who doesn't know about SpaceIL, oh, you guys are so well informed. Anyhow, we have to hear about this amazing startup getting on route today in orbit, getting to the moon. So space really is democratized. It really is for everyone. SpaceIL today is $100 million investment. A few years ago, people would have said that science fiction. And now everyone's in. So we have the opportunity also to talk about the really interesting and opportunities for international collaboration, spaces for everyone. With that, I'm going to ask the colleagues to introduce themselves a little bit in more detail to tell us what's on there, maybe what's the most exciting thing that they're thinking about for the future of exploration in the coming decade. Leon, you want to start? So I'm Leon Alkalai. I've been at JPL for 30 years now. And I've had the unique experience at JPL to work with people like Maria Zuber here at MIT on the GRAIL mission, where we started with ideas, just the whiteboard sketching concepts on the whiteboard and then working to win the NASA competition and then taking my family to the launch of the GRAIL mission and then seeing it complete the gravity recovery at the moon. After that, I had also the good fortune to work on and lead the competition for insight. And again, see the landing on Mars just last year successfully. So those were just to share a little bit of my experience. And right now, I plan the future outlook for JPL in terms of strategy, working closely with NASA headquarters. And JPL, as you may have heard from Larry James earlier, we're really focused on enabling science, enabling science of Earth, of the solar system, of the universe, and understanding how we originated as a solar system that bears life, a planet that bears life, and so on. And looking at some of these early conditions that originated in life, so informing life. So my biggest sort of exciting thing for the future that I'm looking forward to in understanding better is understanding how life originated on Earth. So astrobiology, conditions on Earth, the beginning of how life formed on Earth, how life formed in the solar system and those early conditions, how life may exist outside our solar system. So exoplanets, imaging exoplanets. And just all of these themes, whether it's Earth, solar system, galaxy, and the universe, all have life connecting them, or our quest to understand life, and improve life and conditions for life on Earth. So I look forward to, at least in my lifetime, understanding a little bit better those dots and how to connect them between how life originated on Earth, how life may exist elsewhere in the solar system and in the universe, and how we can improve life on Earth. Fantastic. Thank you. We should be able to cover all that in the next half hour. Sarah, please. Thank you. Well, it turns out that every star is the sun, and it appears that, like our sun has planets, it seems that each of the stars out there have planets as well. And astronomers have found thousands of planets. There are millions, billions, trillions in our galaxy alone. But what we really want to do is get down to the level where we can find a true Earth, a planet like our own, around a very nearby star. And that's incredibly challenging. So we're doing the easy thing first. And even though it's easy, the TET NASA mission that's conceived of, built, and run here out of MIT, it still costs $300 million. So we do find planets literally on a daily basis. This afternoon, I have to rush back where the team is working on getting the next batch out of planet candidates out. So there's a lot going on. But TESS had no, nothing was new about it, actually. It was very well done, very special, four identical kind of glorified telephoto lenses. They're all custom, a thermal, no vignetting. TESS had one deployable, actually, just the solar panels. So that's kind of where we're at. We can turn things out like that. But to move to the next step is much harder. And there are kind of two different ways to do this problem. But our own Earth, the way that we want to find just a true Earth twin, is in reflected light. But our Earth is so faint, it is 10 billion times fainter than our Sun. So we have to be able to block out a nearby star to a level of one part in 10 billion. And I'll put the question out to all of you and you. Do you do anything in your job where you have to work to 10 decimal places? Well, actually, sometimes people say yes, believe it or not. People who work on LIGO, they do that. Some people in particle accelerators have to have to do that, but that's where our challenge lies. And I can answer more specific questions about the technology if needed. But I will say that even this new technology we in JPL and others are working to build and implement, that will let us study the nearest 100 or maybe few hundred Sun-like stars. But our galaxy has billions of stars. So to get to the next level after that, that would be more like 50 years out. And we'll need brand new paradigms there, space-based fabrication, space-assembly, and new things we haven't thought of yet. Thanks, Sarah. And every star we're seeing in this beautiful image, right? That's a planetary system, you tell me, right? Yes, I would see nearly all of them. I wouldn't say every single one, but pretty much all of them. Yeah. That's a mind-blowing. Amazing, amazing, yeah. Erica, please. Yeah, so I think that that's an interesting transition from this sort of vastness that is the entire cosmos and everything that could be to what we're doing at Blue Origin, which is sort of the heavy lift work of, how do we take this very next step? And we are looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. And that's not a job of one career or even one lifetime, but it's a job of generations. And how do we get from here to there one step at a time? We talk about being step by step ferociously. Great Atom Ferrociter is our motto. So my role as one of our payload sales directors is to help figure out how we open up space to more audiences, a lot like that democratization panel that we just heard from. Space doesn't grow if we are continually taking the same pie and just slicing it smaller and smaller. We need to figure out, on pie day of all things, how do we bring more pies to the table? How do we open up space to tourism, which is an industry that is very cost-elastic and risk-elastic unlike satellite launches? How do we open up space to art and humanities and all the other things that make us human so that we can start to see more of the lenses through which we view our own universe? And how do we open up space to being not just a place where we see as a location where we can bounce bits back and forth, but a place where we're creating new value, creating new things in space manufacturing and all the other kinds of value that are coming back? So I get the fun of being at that very bleeding edge of that next step and looking forward to raising my hand and going myself someday and hope to take all of you along with me. When? When are you going? When am I going? I don't know. Literally, I keep raising my hand. OK, I haven't figured that one out yet. I've only given you five years. All right, I'll take those off. I'll be up in five years. How about that? Yonatan, please. So hi, my name is Yonatan. I have a quite a diverse background from aerospace and I'm doing cancer imaging as well. But in this context, about eight and a half years ago, I sat down in a bar with two friends. And as the alcohol level in our blood rose, we became more and more determined to join a competition that was organized by Google called Google and our expires to send the first private interplanetary robotic mission. And we were joined by a lot of really talented engineers and supporters in the industry. And about a month ago, less than a month ago, we actually launched it. And it's on its way to the moon right now. This is a good shout out. All launches are good launches. Yeah, successful. So hopefully, Nakonwood is going to be on the moon in April 11th. That's a scheduled landing. We actually have a picture, if later, we can show it, of the first picture I was taking from the lander, first selfie for the lander. You can see actually Earth there. And I'll be happy to talk about that. There we go. There you go. Great. Excellent. So I'm going to push a little bit more. Let's get right to kind of big dreams, a little bit of beer, people socialize this. But let's talk a little bit more about the international cooperation and how you're using the deep space network and kind of how these all come together. So as you can see, we started a program in Israel. So that's a country which is way, way smaller than the United States or any of the other Soviet Union, China. These are the countries that the land is so far on the moon, soft land is on the moon. And this is a very small country. And this is a private endeavor. So that's not even sponsored by the government. And one of the key aspects of that mission is education. So today's kids, as you all probably know, they don't want to be scientists and they don't want to be engineers. They'd rather be on celebrities. And rock stars. And I got to admit, I watched The Real Housewives and I enjoy it. But we also need engineers and scientists. And it's so very important. And one of the key parts of SpaceIL is outreach. And we do outreach and reach over a million kids worldwide with our messaging with those programs. So this is one type of collaboration, which I think is very important because outreach and inspiration is something that is important worldwide as people shift their attention from sciences to other things. But also we have collaborations. For example, as you mentioned with NASA, we're taking a retroreflector, a laser retroreflector, with us to the moon. And they are helping us communicate with the spacecraft by using the Deep Space Network. So there's no country that can do this alone today, I think. And the fact that we can have those collaborations is quite amazing to make this first private mission to the moon. Great. And Leon, I'm going to flip to you, keeping maybe the international partnership theme and then with your new strategic plan out, how does that go together? NASA perspective, but international perspective as well. Both for NASA and for JPL, international partnerships are essential. It is a huge part of what we do. In fact, I personally see this as an amazing way to spread goodwill across the world. I see this personally when I travel all over the world, how I'm received and people from NASA and JPL we basically carry a certain, I don't know, universal element of doing tough things, landing on Mars, it's not just for the United States, it's for the world. And I feel that we're kind of looked at as citizens of the world, at least that's what I feel when I travel. And I think that spirit is, to me, very important that we do more to enable robotic space exploration and human space exploration. And so for me, this is essential. I also am a naturalized US citizen. I was born in East Europe and came here as a young kid and so on. So I know what it is to be from a small country and come to the United States. And there are many, many other out there countries, people all over the world who dream of building a CubeSat or going into space themselves. So there's a huge opportunity to spread goodwill through space, science, engineering, exploration and I think we should all do that. Let's talk some details. Insight, we have three incredible instruments on, are we gonna, how is this gonna further our search for the evidence, past evidence of life? We're looking down, we're finally looking down into the structure of Mars. Insight is an amazing example. We often called it like a little United Nations, which wasn't really intended as a compliment, but it was, but we had French, German, UK, Spain, lots of countries involved and it was really a challenge to work with all the different cultures, work on a tight schedule. As you know, Insight actually slipped two years. I had a bit of fortune to be at NASA headquarters. This is NASA deputy administrator. That was one of those tough calls. Post bonnet for two years, 2016 we couldn't make it. So 2018, thank goodness we got it right. That's right. You all got it right. I thought it was interesting to mention at that turning point, JPL really, really, and NASA stepped up to help the French space agency and post landing. It was recognized that this was, we didn't pull out. Things were tough and we talked about this and it was very important at that time that both NASA and JPL step up and help a friendly agency like CNES and work together when they need help. We can help them and vice versa. So use it as an opportunity to build a partnership rather than pull back and kill a partnership. And I think that was a very smart decision. Great work. Sarah, we have to know more details. Tell us about these exoplanets. I just can't get my head around 3000 exoplanets and the Earth-like ones. So how's your science team? And tell us more about the results. What's really interesting about these planets is we have not found a solar system copy yet. So here we're talking about Mars and someone mentioned Venus and we have in our solar system the interterrestrial planets and we have the giant outer planets, not like that. It's maybe a tiny bit selection effect but on the whole, no. We see a giant planet for example where Mercury should be or where Earth should be. There are very small planets about the size of Earth that are so close to their star the surfaces would be melted like liquid lava rock. And close to the star by Kepler's third law means they orbit very rapidly. So there's a bunch of planets whose orbits their year is less than a day. And I could like go on, I could spend the whole time just mentioning all these crazy types of planets that are so different from one. Do we have any that slow down time? I need a longer year to get all the work done. Do we have any slow ones? Yeah, we do. There's also a growing list of slow ones. They're harder to find because most of the ways we find them rely on seeing the planet orbit more than one time. There's planets that are so slow, their orbits would be, I don't know, let's say tens of thousands or 100,000 years even. There's planets really far from the star that are big planets. They shine from their own luminosity from leftover energy from their formation. So pretty much anything you can conceive of, it's probably out there. And we may have even found it already. Exactly. We're going to try to get to the star shades better. No, I do want to say one more thing about it. The thing is right now we can find planets. We've got that down pretty much. We can in some cases measure their size and other cases measure their mass. Sometimes for very few of them we can measure the atmosphere, just a little tiny bit about what's in it. But on the whole, we're very limited. So we know there's lots of planets. We have lots of them. But the details aren't there yet because we need new telescopes, better technology. Better eyes. So if you're the technology, rip off of what kind of technology investments do we need to make? Well, we need to. There's an instrumentation, the precision of our instruments. It is the precision's really key. Let's see. Well, there's lots of things happening. There's the James Webb Space Telescope. We've all been waiting for that to launch. And that will be great for us. There's a new e-submission called Ariel that will study atmospheres of planets that go in front of their star, transit their star. And so I think we have things online. People have been working to get things ready. And then we can come back later if we have time to the starshade and other things. And a really important point, right? It's everything, right? It was Kepler first. And now Tess, when combining all of these amazing assets we have waiting for James Webb. We're not here to talk about ground-based astronomy, but there's armies of people and telescopes that started the whole field and continue to support it. OK, Erica, over to you. On exciting stuff, we have to cross, we want to cross the science, art, and engineering theme. But tell us more, when we do have something cued up for you as well. So I think it's an interesting question. Is where does science and commercial intersect? And it's something that I find personally very important, that as we're creating this future that is allowing us to grow what we can do in space by using these economic engines to drive an even bigger and bigger picture, that we use that as a sort of momentum wheel to carry science forward with us. We're doing a lot of that right now at Blue Origin with our payload flights on New Shepard. We're carrying microgravity experiments inside the capsule to study things like how you would measure the amount of fuel and the fluid in a fuel tank on a space mission or understand the collisions between dust particles and the rings of Saturn are all things we can do in these short microgravity missions. Yeah, we have a bit of a disconnect. We need to come back here in a few hundred years. Because if the dream comes true, that millions of people are going to be living in space, our very nearest star, although it's very far away, our nearest star appears to have an earth mass planet. And so sometime in the future, we may intersect. Absolutely. And so things like New Glenn that's coming down the pipeline, looking at a first launch in 2021, seven meter faring. For those who don't know the satellite world, five meters is the biggest thing you can get on the market today. So seven meters in diameter is twice the volume. It's one and a half times the size of the Shuttle payload bay, massive amount of space. So how do we use that for exploration, for bigger aerobraking systems at Mars, for larger apertures on space telescopes, for bigger constellations that we want to launch to do incredible scientific discovery. And then Blue Moon, we've got coming down the pipeline. I want to hear about Blue Moon. We are going to the moon, and commercial folks are helping us accelerate. We have exciting news signed MIT, Memorandum of Understanding with Blue Origin. You're going to succeed, right? We're pushing hard. Blue Moon's exciting. It's a limb-sized cargo lander. So we're talking about Apollo-class, multiple metric tons of usable payload to the lunar surface. And the reason we're doing this is because it's the infrastructure that you need to do anything else. And Blue Origin isn't about a particular destination or a way of traveling, but it's about laying down that base layer. You'll hear Jeff Bezos talk about doing the innovation of Amazon, that he couldn't have done it without interstate trucking and airplanes and the internet and credit cards, all these base layers that an entrepreneur could come and build on top of. So at Blue Origin, we're trying to lay that base layer that lets all the rest of you that have even bigger dreams than we do to achieve those. So I think that how we use the engines of commerce to underpin the growth of science to underpin the growth of exploration is probably the most important work we're doing. Excellent. Okay, we're gonna give you guys all a chance to ask some questions as well, because we just take advantage of this amazing panel that we have up here. The little mic is probably around somewhere. Hopefully, get that cued up, yes, no? Yep, there it is, thank you in the back. Okay, so be thinking about your questions. But I wanna, again, just chime in here to ask Mike a final question in terms of, it's the superpower technology you need. So it's the one word answer, I know it's a hard question. The next decade, what's your superpower technology that you need, Leon? An instrument for life detection. Sarah. I mean, in some ways, we don't really, we don't necessarily need a superpower technology. Continuing to reduce launch costs is very helpful for us. I'll just leave it at that. I think the superpower we need is imagination and the power of all the young people who are coming out. We are growing like crazy at Blue Origin. We're almost 2,000 employees now, which is a 10-fold growth since I started a few years ago. And we're looking for people who can come and help us envision that future. I'll join on the imagination part. We live in an area that technologies that were close to impossible a decade ago becoming something of a reality. So it's basically, technology would catch up to your dreams. And this is one of the messages that we're giving to the kids, is that you need to dare, you need to dare to dream, you need to dare to fail. And if you're doing this just right, you might reach the moon. We did see that selfie, right? We saw that selfie of Space IO looking at Earth. It's kind of the New Yorker's view of the world, right? The spacecraft looks really big. It's a little teeny spacecraft. And Earth looks kind of small, right? And I think we have another special treat. Erica, you want to talk about tell, inspiration and art? Yeah, absolutely. What you're doing up below? We've been working for a while now with the band OK Go, who's known for their really creative rock videos. You may have seen them jumping around on treadmills or doing giant Rube Goldberg devices. They did a video a couple of years ago where they were on a parabolic flight and smoring the power of microgravity. So we just recently, just this last week, launched a contest to inspire the youth of the world to join us in making art in space. So all artists, shout out, I think we have that cuter. Yeah, absolutely. If we've got folks who know 11 to 18-year-olds anywhere in the world, we're inviting them to come join us by creating their own art. It's not something NASA usually recommended. Flying paint around. So I think we've lost the audio here. Yeah, but that's OK. Look at hashtag art in space. Reach out to the 11 to 18-year-olds in your world. Encourage them to come and play. Students will get to make an art project that really goes into space. Thanks to our friends at Cognizant, Blue Origin is letting us send two real art projects into space. The winners will work with our friends at the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to get their projects ready. Then your project will be sent up as a payload on the new Shepard launch vehicle. So get your friends together, get your teachers together, come up with your best ideas, because we want to send your art project to space. It's open now, of course that's good music, but thank you. So it's open now, so we just had to do a shout out to really spread the word, please. Get the art submissions in from students. That would be awesome. And audience, we have plenty of time for questions from you. So let's start throwing that ball right up here in the front and in the middle, I see. Just maybe three rows ahead. Raise your hand again in the middle. I see your hand. There you go. Thank you. Tell us who you are and then ask a question to whoever you want. Hi, I'm Erin. I am a designer trying to launch a space tech company right now. I'm over at Harvard. And I wanted to know, I heard a lot about STEAM and STEM. And I think that sometimes design can actually bridge the gap between industry and scientists think very cross-disciplinary. How do you think designers can start playing in the space industry right now? We all start with it. Super the panel. So I call it STEAMed. I'm all about bringing in the arts, right? The artists or the visionaries tell our stories. They're 100% part of all my teams. D is the designers. They're the 3D makers. We have a generation of 3D makers there. So we're all in. We need to recruit everyone. Can't filter anyone out. New space is all about recruiting everyone in. And surely, we'll raise up STEM if we do that. But if we're inclusive, and count everyone. So I think we need a new message, frankly. And I call it changing the conversation to make sure we're talking it everywhere. There's a place for everyone. And all good ideas as an engineer. I need to be whacked on the side of the head. Did you think about it this way? What about this? Great. So I need to think about it differently, not just how I was trained. I was just trying, man. You guys are all passionate about it as well. Yeah. At Blue Origin, we have industrial designers. We have designers that we work with for developing the inside of our cabin, our spacesuits, all those kinds of things. But we also see the importance of design thinking more broadly and how that plays in to the way that we envision whole systems and systems architectures. So, yes, spot on. That's part of the reason we're engaging in this art and space is to bring that design and art into the conversation more broadly. We have artists. We have a studio at JPL. I was waiting to jump in. Go ahead. We're going to do rapid fire, because I want to. But tell us about the artist at JPL. About a decade ago, we realized that we can't just be engineers. We have to be human, too. So we hired Dan Goods, an artist and resident at JPL as a group of about 10 people or so. So we have in-house at JPL a group of designers, artists. We found that a lot of what we do requires both a human, emotional, and a communication element. So we do have a resident group. We work with designers outside. We also found that a lot of engineering can be improved through innovative, non-traditional engineering approaches to design. So we work with Autodesk and many other companies to improve the way we build the systems by innovative, non-traditional systems engineering approaches to our mission. So it's a very exciting time. Next question. I think there's a hand right here. Up in the front, yeah. Hi, I'm Charles Slotkin. And I've founded the Wonder Mission to find ways to substantially raise the bar in immersive high technology visualization experiences that excites young and old in terms of science and space exploration. So I'd like to ask the panel if you could briefly just tell us about a spark or a particular aha moment that ignited your interest in science and space. Good. Yeah, Sarah, please. Mine was simple, and it was not technology-based at all. It was just the beautiful night sky. And it's kind of the opposite of technology, because when do we, especially kids today, put your phone down, turn the TV off, just get away from stuff. And away from the city lights, if we can bring children and people out there to reconnect with nature and see the sky, I think it's very motivating. You understand? How about you? I think, for me, the moment is you can actually do that kind of moment, because I was a student, and a science teacher kind of blew up something, or they did one of those experiments that does a lot of smoke. And to me, the idea is that can you actually do that as a human being? Is it accessible to you? And I think once you realize that yes, then why not other things? So I can definitely credit reading Isaac Asimov's book, Science Fiction, in early teen years. I was reading and buying everything that he wrote. I even, I won't say what I did, I went to libraries and I read the books, didn't take them. You tore out the pages. And so Isaac Asimov, when I was very, very early in my teens, was key to forming my future. We need those storytellers. We need those. Not just the science fiction books, but the science books. The popular science books inside the atom and so on were key. Erika, how about you? Yeah, I was so young when I started to love space, I don't know where it came from. We say it chose me. I didn't choose it. But I certainly give a lot of credit to teachers early on that were willing to let me run with that. Space Camp was another one for those who grew up in that generation to go and put yourself in those shoes. There is Space Camp for adults, for those who haven't ever thought about making the trip down to Huntsville and still have that childhood dream. I think that being there and really vividly imagining yourself in that world, whether it's virtually or personally, is a big part. Yeah, for me, it's Apollo. But we've talked about it yesterday and all throughout the week, Space Week at MIT. It's just Apollo taught us that we can pick the hardest, most audacious goal ever, and then achieve it. So for me, a young girl growing up in Montana in the night sky, looking at me and saying, wow. No, that's where we are. We're on the moon. That's pretty inspirational. We just need to get back soon. Back into the back? Yeah. Oh. Oh, OK. Hi. Hello. I'm Josh Weinberg with National Geographic. Thanks for this great panel and day. I'm wondering what you think about encouraging more folks like yourself and a lot of other people who are speaking to go into that dirty word politics. Because I don't know, maybe this is my personal feeling. But when we see Senator John Glenn, obviously, we have Mark Kelly who's running. What do you think about the idea of transferring all the things you guys are thinking about and trying to apply it into the policy realm in terms of inspiring people? So it's almost like the overview effect for problems down here. Or do you think that is a waste of time? I think you should answer that. Yeah. I'm going to stay away from politics, but I'd love to talk to you about policy. As an aerospace engineer at MIT, I ran our technology and policy program for a decade. And that's exactly it. Scientists and engineers, we need to do more. You have to be willing to step up. We can't live in our labs. If we want to truly have impact, if we want to inform, Sarah can probably say this, but we're just on fake science. We don't have fake science. You get kicked out of the academy for that. It just doesn't exist. And we have science. We have truth. But if we're not helping to shape the policy and if we're not willing to step up, so it's a call to everyone. Just even can be like a year in DC or in world governments. Because as a technical person and trained as an artist, whatever your background is, you can make a difference. But I actually think you do have to. We have to call on everyone to say, no, sorry. It's not just the lawyers or economists. No offense lawyers. But it has to be multidisciplinary. So maybe just back to that. So if everyone needs to step up and be willing to maybe get into that decision-making policy realm, I think we'd all be better off. I'll put in a plug for the AAAS Fellowship Program. For those of you who are doing PhD work, consider spending a year in DC and being a voice, a trained understanding voice in an office. That's made a difference for me as I've been up on the hill to be able to talk with someone on the other side of the table that understands that language and the process. Policy. Go ahead, please. Policy in Israel is a little different than here in the US. But we're very proud that we actually were able to join teams with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science in Israel. And a lot of the programming that we're doing for kids and sciences are joined. So these are ones that are distributed by the Ministry of Education or Ministry of Science. And you can see that effect throughout the board, all the way to teachers that sends us questions from their exams, like in statistics. I got that question from a teacher in statistic. What are the chances of one engine failing in a lot of five or something like this? And this is really exciting because you can see it across the board. And Sarah, I'm going to ask you to share what its policy, its impact decision-making, you're speaking all over the world on behalf of colleagues in the academy. I mean, Axel Planets is a little removed from policy and politics. It's sort of seen as a somewhat frivolous, but exciting endeavor. So I think it's really not part of the bigger scheme. But you're out there speaking. You're not just standing in your lab. You're out there speaking as a scientist who just kind of speak for the investments, right? Why is it so important to get the budgets and investments and back to even dreaming and then the data we get back? It's changed the world. Well, we do try to encourage people to go into STEM rather than I think we had a comment over here. We see a lot of the top students here at least want to go into video game programming or lucrative jobs and not necessarily stay in STEM fields. So part of the whole public speaking and going around, it's not necessarily to set policy, but really to motivate things from a more grassroots level. Yeah. Thanks for your work. Alina, your work at JPL is a lot about policy, right? It is. It's a lot about policy. My answer to this is that we at JPL entertain and host a lot of policy makers every day. And they're international and domestic. US ambassadors abroad would come to JPL. We host them, show them. And they all get so excited about space in general and then the communication power of the achievements in space. It really transcends borders. It transcends cultures and stimulates young people to go into science all over the world. And that's good for everybody. Exactly. So I'd say we all have a role to play, hopefully. Another question? We have time for a few more questions. Good. In the back, there's some hands. Hi. I'm Kayla Frank. So I guess my question is, what's next? After you build up space tourism, after you get to the moon, after you build the infrastructure to get millions of people living and working in space, what do you do then? We've been waiting 50 years to get back to the moon. What's next? OK, what's after millions of people? While everyone's thinking of their answer up here, I say, I usually get a question like that. I turn it back to you and all the younger people, who that will be for you. Because we're so fixated on just getting the thing done. We sometimes don't really think beyond. 50 years, OK, but I'm going to make it 50 years, guys, panelists, where will we be? Where do you want us to be? Yeah, so getting to the moon is hard enough. Thinking what's next is also interesting. One of the things that we say to kids is that our mission to the moon is the one way. Means that the spaceship is going to stay there. And it's their job to bring it back. Good. Erica. We talk about a time when Earth is zone residential. So that this is a planet, this is the best planet we're ever going to have. And how do we make sure that we preserve this one while we explore and use the resources that are out there to help us do that? All right. Sarah, still 50 years. We're all for 50 years. I would hope that we will have launched something, whether it's these tiny little, not that, but I mean, that's kind of a low bar. No, no, it's not. Wait, just wait. I was going to say, we hope to have launched something that is directed towards another star system with planets. There we go. All right. Those are very far, four light years away. And there are a lot of different things in the works. And that's what we anticipate will happen. 50 years, Leon. So I expect within those 50 years to have a permanent science station on the moon, on perhaps the far side of the moon, just like we have in the Antarctic, a international science station that is permanent science telescopes looking deep into the universe. And just a vibrant lunar economy. 50? OK. I'm hoping that happens in the next decade. We've got to speed things up. That's why your question is so important about 50 years. Personally, I hope we're living much more in balance here on space ship Earth. In the 50 years, we're running out of time. It's urgent. So I hope we really muster the will and change human behavior and really take care of our home planet again. I love Moon Mars, but another hand. We have probably time for one more question. Hi, Jeff Nunn with the Museum of Flight in Seattle. So there's been a lot of discussion up there about kind of international cooperation. But what about the other side in competition? We talk about we need cooperation to get to space. But the reason Apollo got the budgets and succeeded was it was framed as a space race against the Russians. In the dialogue, there's a lot about how the US needs to maintain leadership in space. And that implies leading against someone else and talking about new space races with China and the like. So where's the balance in terms of motivating the public and the budgets between competition and cooperation? So I can address that. So Google and our expires started as a competition between private organizations. Anyone could register a company or an organization to compete in the Google and our expires and to attempt landing on the Moon. And this is how we started. So competition is very good at facilitating the start. But very early on, you understand that you're not competing against others. You're actually competing against physics, which is a lot harder. Exactly. Because landing on the Moon is really, really hard. And the deeper you go into this, you see how surprising and amazing it is that Apollo landers actually did it. And recently, the Chinese in the Soviet Union with robotic missions. So I think that the competition is a very good way to start it. But in the end, you're not competing against other people. You're competing against science. Well, build on that by saying that we're not seeing, perhaps, competitions between nations, even with China's recent landing on the far side of the Moon. But competitions between private companies. I know you said that's not what you were saying, but government-funded contracts competing commercial private spaceflight companies. So I think that's where we'll see competition. Competition's good, right? It raises everyone's up, the bar up. But I want to make a quick note on soft diplomacy. The US and NASA are international space station partners. This is really important. What's going well, as far as I can tell, from the US and Russia is our soft diplomacy for decades and decades to work together. I hope we can do that with China going out. Again, we're talking civilian space. There's plenty of budgets in the Department of Defense to worry about really important, really important national defense and strategic awareness, things like that. That's all going on, and that's very well-funded. Yes, so we are out of time. First, a big round to our panel. And final announcement there is the launch. We are launching to NASA's Russian cosmonaut to international space station at 314, 314 Pi Day. 314, that'd be great. So you have to stay till 314. We'll see the launch going up, and our astronauts are going to kind of take you through that scary launch and entry and getting us into space successfully. Very exciting. Thanks, Katie. Okay, good. Just if everyone didn't hear across the way. They'll be here all afternoon and still talking about the successful launch over cocktails as well. Thanks, everyone. Really happy lunch and appreciate your contributions.