 Good afternoon folks, live here again at the Think Tech Studios downtown Honolulu, Ted Ralston with our show, Where the Drone Leads, have an incredible cast on today. We've got Dr. Peter Quigley. Peter, thanks for coming on board. First time around on this show, and that means you get to come back. That's the rules, okay? And on the telephone from far, far away in Kailua, right over the Koalaos, we have Jim Crisifuli of D-Bed. Hi, Jim. Aloha. Oh, well, how about that? Okay, we got a tropical response out of Jim. That's good, Jim. Good seeing you there. Well, you wanted Italian or what? Italian would be fine, sure. Right. When's autumn though? Okay, so now we're all squared away. So we bring to the public on this show topics of current and topical interest on UAS or drones, as they're sometimes called. And this is an incredible week coming up because we do have the Aerospace Summit that D-Bed is putting on, Jim Crisifuli is running it, along with Jeff Wong, down at the capital. He'll be running basically displays up starting on Saturday, running through the week and then the heavy part is a Tuesday and then Wednesday when we have the various panel discussions and outbreak sessions to develop aerospace plan for Hawaii for the next five years. That's right. And Peter, you're running that. You can be the emcee anyway. Well, actually, I do have the privilege to introduce the governor and then I moderate the first panel, which is basically the overview of the summit. And so we've got some heavy hitters there in that first panel. Mike Bruno is the Vice Chancellor of Research at UH Manila. Of course, we have a lot of activity at Manila around the Hawaii Space Flight Lab. He'll speak to that and give us a little bit of an overview of that. And Mike Jones is the senior advisor from Paycom. He's going to be on my panel, Hank Rogers, of course, of Blue Planet fame and other enterprises. He's also the chair of the Pisces Project, and he'll be there as well as Captain Vance Johnson, who's commanding officer at PMFR. So it's quite a lineup to start the venue. And again, it's sort of the umbrella conversation that then, you know, allows the other panels. Yours is coming up to two after that, topic two, but it's going to kind of set the stage for what people are thinking about, what the various users have from a needs perspective that Hawaii can help fulfill, and that UH can fulfill, I presume. UH, you've got to be a big part of this. Well, certainly UH would like to be and has been with Luke Flynn's work at the Hawaii Space Flight Lab, as well as the drone work that's been going on in the College of Engineering already with some of the research. And of course, we have drone activities at UH Hilo. We've got some Arthur Cunningham is out there, and he's been running some programs and some non-credit training. And so there's been plenty going on at UH. But the whole point to this, like so much in Hawaii, is making the connections across sectors and across agencies because nobody can do it alone. That's pretty cool. And Jim, great credit to you for putting this on. Jim, tell us what your expectations are when Thursday is over. And the day has ended. What do you want to have as a take-home, take-away, and new information for people to have? Sure. Well, what we're looking at is trying to depict what's the aerospace industry in Hawaii. Why it is such a strategic growth sector for the state and basically identify some of the low-hanging fruit for development moving forward, say, over the next five years. So we've identified a number of areas, including commercial space launch, developing of a UAS test range system in Hawaii, focusing on a whole new range of tech development capabilities under the rubric of planetary sustainability. How can we test, validate, and implement technologies in Hawaii that can improve the state of our planet and those same technologies of renewable energy, broadband telecommunications, additive manufacturing, those all can be applied to help advance our reach through the solar system, exploring the moon, trips to Mars and beyond in a very exciting way. And Hawaii can play a big role here because of our moon, Mars-like terrain where you can test and validate these new technologies. And in fact, we're going to be signing a new Space Act agreement with NASA that will basically form an alliance between the agency and Hawaii. And in particular, NASA aims research center in California and the Big Island because there are many of these high-tech firms that work in Silicon Valley and based at the NASA Research Park in Palo Alto that are very interested in developing new technologies for future robotic and human missions to space. And what better place to test them than in Hawaii on our moon, Mars-like terrain, especially with our international connectivity because our motto is really, or I say our approach, is to focus on international collaboration, build public rather than compete, collaborate with our various international partners so we can share complementary resources to help develop new cost-effective ways to sustainably get beyond low-Earth orbit and then build public-private partnerships between Hawaii and various organizations around the United States and internationally that are interested in corporate development of space. So public-private partnerships are a big part of this. And you mentioned a key word along your dialogue, and that was additive manufacturing. Hawaii is not seen as a state where we manufacture a lot of things. We have the shipping issue, we have the natural resources issues, and we have the lack of a sort of what you might call an airplane assembly-trained workforce here, and so, or space system-trained workforce. So in terms of the Hawaii contribution to this, I can see the additive manufacturing concept is really interesting, Jim, because that doesn't require necessarily the large industrial footprint and base that we think of for airplane assembly and truck assembly. So sub-assemblies and miniaturized components could well be made here, as well as could be the engineering and the research and the testing that is going along the way to make those happen. So Hawaii has an interesting and kind of a non-traditional potential future here in the entire world of the evolving aeronics. Yeah, can I just support what Jim was saying? He used a word that's key to my heart and that's collaborate. He used it in the international framework, but if you look at the folks that are coming to the summit from industry, from academics, from the military, this is once again a great opportunity for Hawaii to pull its energies and its policies together around an economic area that has great potential for the state. As you're pointing out, there's lots of abilities to go in engineering directions, advanced manufacturing directions. We've already shown in the flight program with Luke Flynn out of UH Manoa that we've connected almost all the campuses that have been involved in that space launch effort that he's been involved in and launching a small satellite into space in partnership with PMFR. But that collaborate issue is crucial because we're not gonna get, we're not gonna continue to get a lot of chances. I mean, I continue to think about that word with San Diego, they saw 30 years ago, they had tourism real estate and a naval base and they knew they had to have more. And they got together intentionally and strategically and moved from a $3 billion regional economy to a $178 billion regional economy in less than 30 years, but they did it intentionally. And so we can't, one of the urgencies around this summer, we just had a statewide conference this morning at the Colau Resort, educators, entrepreneurs, private sector folks, government folks around just STEM in general. So this is one piece of that STEM muscle that we've got to grow and tourism's great, we can add to tourism, we can add tech to tourism, come and see, be part of the anti-aging research and recreational area, come and be part of the science and technology advancements in Hawaii with new energy and new agriculture. But if we don't do that, then our economic future is questionable. So this is crucial not only for the opportunity about aerospace and aviation. I include aviation in this frequently because it's also low hanging fruit for us in a number of ways. But you're right to sort of put manufacturing and quotation marks, because we do the same thing with aviation, some other areas. We did it with drones when it first showed up. In 2010, FAA said, well, by 2020, there might be 15,000 drones. In 2016, they modified that projection and say, oh really, by 2020, there's gonna be 542,000 drones. And of course, the economic impact changed from $1.9 billion of an economic impact nationwide to $10 billion, of course. So we have to step up to some things that don't look quite possible. They look, well, we don't do that. We have to write them down first. If we don't have the vision and write them down and extrapolate our minds, we'll never get there. That's right. There's no opportunity to do that. And what goes through my mind, I've been working with Jim for a couple of months, putting ideas together to get to the point where we're gonna have the conference next week or the summit. And this gathering of people and the mental capital being spent putting it together and the discussions that'll occur, that really becomes a body of well-informed knowledge that the legislature can turn to, the business community can turn to, the venture capitalist people can turn to. If we could somehow keep that energy going and keep that group of people together in some virtual way, because people who write laws, people who make bills, people who generate development plans and investment plans need that body of people to turn to. So I wonder, maybe we can turn to Jim. I guess that's a d-bed function. Jim will slow it over the wall to you. How do we keep that body of people together and keep their connectivity going and make them responsive to our legislature and to the business community? Well, the bottom line is the magic wand, but realistically, if we can find a common denominator, what is gonna be maximally beneficial to the greatest number of people? And I'll give you one example with aerospace. Our big economic drivers in this state are the visitor industry and the military. Well, aerospace and the new opportunities that are being discussed here can certainly help expand and diversify our two big economic drivers. In the visitor industry, we're looking at developing a commercial spaceport at Kona International to allow space planes to launch and land at this airport and so bring basically space tourism to Hawaii, which I like to say it adds the orthogonal dimension to our visitor industry. And then in the military, we're working on developing a new test range for unmanned aerial systems. We're looking at possibilities for commercial launch into both polar and equatorial orbits all from the big island. And this is another way to expand military operations, but again, collaborating, bringing the private sector, the public sector, the military, the university into partnerships so that there's a bottom line of benefits. Okay, and that partnership that we're speaking of, Peter mentioned collaboration, you mentioned the partnerships and such getting it all together. That's what I see is a great value here. We're gonna assemble once. This grand bunch of people with a lot of information and visions and each one has their own networks that pull things together. And they're all more or less marching in the same direction. Somehow we have to create a, give them all a card, they belong to a party now. What if that party, I'm not quite sure, maybe it's the aerospace summit party. Let's talk about that, how we're gonna go forward, ask after we get back from a first break. Sure. Aloha everyone, I'm Maria Mera and I'm here to invite you to my bilingual show Viva Hawaii on Thintech Hawaii every other Monday at 3 p.m. We are here to talk about news, issues and events local and around the world. Join me, Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel and I'm the host of Research in Minoa, Mondays from 12 to 1 on thinktechhawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Minoa, you'll really enjoy it. So come around, we'll see you then. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, meeting people we may not have otherwise met and helping us understand and appreciate the good things about Hawaii. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Welcome back everyone, Ted Rawlson here and our guest, Dr. Peter Wrigley, UH Assistant Vice President of Community Colleges. Very close, very close. Okay, close enough. Oh, it'll do. And way over the other side of the co-allows, we have Jim Crisifulli from D-Bed standing by in our Kailua studio. Anyway, what we were talking about is this aerospace summit coming up next week, which happens too infrequently, quite frankly, Jim, message. We ought to do it once a year or maybe even more often than that. Anyway, it's a gathering of a lot of people in the government, in the state, in the legislature and in academia, and private citizens as well, private business, to come together and understand where the strong points are of going forward with an aerospace future in Hawaii. And we were talking just before the break about how to keep that activity going, how to keep that connectivity going, how to keep those ideas forming and flowing and nurturing them somewhere. So, Jim, we talked to you and we tried to have D-Bed pick that up and I think you may have skated past that a little bit, talked about the grand ideas of collaboration, but didn't say how you are gonna make this collaboration happen. Yeah, well, what we're looking at again is a common denominator where we find a residence with common visions and common objectives and goals and that common denominator, which is built through, again, public-private partnerships and looking at the multinational alliances. I think a third dimension to all of this is to get the public engaged from the get-go as major stakeholders. If the public understands what the benefits of space exploration are and the opportunities for them and their children, the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to engage, that will certainly get the momentum going. But we're looking for common denominators in terms of interest moving forward. And again, on these two planes in planetary sustainability to improve life on our home planet, but also extending our reach to the solar system and opening new worlds and opportunities, again, for our kids, grandkids, the future of humanity, and in a way that's collaborative. That's not like a mission that you have at UH or somebody has at UH to figure out what the interests are of the future and how those interests can be nurtured and fed and generate training programs, educational programs that fit that picture. Is that a university function? Well, sure. And as a matter of fact, we're about to launch a new website that's workforce focused in January. Social media. Well, this is gonna be a live website that has all the jobs in the state of Hawaii, but also all the projections of where the economy's going. And it also will show us where the opportunities are, but also where the danger is. So I mean, I think that, you know, your question is key. And that is the fact of the matter is we're going, we've organized a set of meetings around the state, sector by sector banking health, you name it, the hospitality sector at the top, because, you know, frankly, industry's tired of having meetings. They don't wanna have another meeting. They want to be part of a coherent conversation that moves forward. Now this aerospace summit will be part of our strategy to build our own strategic plan for the aerospace aviation industry. We're gonna take information and of course, people's participation and build it into this strategic plan. Why, to put another plan on the shelf? No, it's, we've gotta make an argument like we do across the economic sectors about the return on the investment. If we grow this sector, if we do some of the things Jim's talking about in terms of space flight and drones, again, I'll make the point that drones, as you pointed out, this article, suddenly we're seeing drones move into HECO's mode of operation. Yeah, what you're referring to is yesterday's announcement in the Star Advertiser that HECO has created an unmanned air systems division. And today or yesterday had a demonstration of this in front of the press and everybody else. So HECO, a main line, main infrastructure in Hawaii is moving forward in that division. 10 years ago, I remember saying to my wife, watching a helicopter fly sideways up the side of the coal aisle, inspecting those lines, I go, it's a drone job, right? So it's moving and Bezos and others are talking about a commercial application, et cetera. But the point here is that we've got to do our work. You said, what is UH doing? I'm, UH, as I said before, cannot do everything itself. We've reached out to the private sector. We're reaching out to the government sector, DBED and others to have this conversation around the state with economic sectors. But to do the same thing we wanna do here with the Aerospace Summit and the Aerospace Strategic Plan, what is the return on the investment? If we grow this sector, how many new jobs? Living wage jobs. And the fact of the matter is, is that many of the jobs we produce today in the sectors that are prominent are 40 plus percent. They don't require a college degree, right? And so there's real question about, how much living wage jobs we're producing and how sustainable that is. So this is part of not only the excitement Aerospace, but the quality of future life for our children and for the life in Hawaii. Jim Lolley, who's a venture capitalist, lives on Kona, he was Kleiner Perkins and HP and he's been part of a lot of UH and community efforts. He said something really important. I thought when we were talking about moving into these areas, he said, Hawaii is one of the most beautiful places in the world and it should be one of the places where some of the smartest things in the world are going on. This is a smart area for us to get involved in. We're voyagers, we've got a history of voyaging, and so now the drones are becoming sort of mainstream as you point out, but somebody looks at the second panel and it's something about space transportation and they go, well, that's too wild. Well, a few years ago, drones were too wild and now it's becoming mainstream. So we can take the space transportation piece, for example, and decompose it down to the pieces that Hawaii can take on. That's the sort of reality we need to form out of this. We'll take the common denominator and the partnerships Jim's talking about and put teeth in it with what you're talking about, which is how does Hawaii really grab ahold of this the day after the conference is over and start moving forward? Right, but you need more than plans, right? We need these partners, we need to collaborate, but we also need a policy environment. Bingo. I need the government that helps incentivize this forum as well. We need to take this group of this intelligence coming together next week and help it drive bills and legislative decisions in the legislature and maybe we need that as an output of this as well. And you've taken, you've thrown drones on the table three or four times and you're waiting for me to take the bait. I know that, Peter, because I've got the session on drones, it's 11 o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, folks, down at the Capitol. And I've got a panel, too. It's gonna be something, and we're trying something new here. Aerospace, I'm from aerospace. Aerospace is frankly all sucked up in PowerPoint. And we do long PowerPoint presentations that don't necessarily get anywhere. That's what we do in aerospace. And we're trying to take the reverse of that in this drone panel. We've got 11 people, either 10 or 11 on the panel and I think two of them are actually phoning in. So we're giving them very short time to quickly get to their point. What's the message? Because there are so many opinions, so many points of view, they're all need to be listened to. Some have more strength than others, but we've got investment people, we've got the FAA, we've got education people, commercial practitioners. Exactly, and we've got the PPUTRC head. There's a number of, so many dimensions to this UAS thing. But the other thing is it's interesting, when you speak of the economic future and the return on investment, people like ESPN are interested. Way non-traditional aerospace names are coming into the game, Amazon, Google. And this thing moves at a different pace than those traditional aerospace. So we have a whole new dimension, or center dimension, we have to wrap our arms around. How do we capitalize on that in tourism? I mean, tourism, we need to think of that aspect of it as well. It's a, you know, you talked about the pace. It's a, clearly a disruptive technology. And as you point out, fascinating, that HECO is moving in to the area and starting to normalize this activity. You can't help but think about refrigeration beginning of the 20th century. You know, we had refrigeration, it was in a few homes, but ice harvesting lasted for two more decades, right? So we approach change in an interesting way. We're afraid of it, or we don't notice it. But the point I think that's so compelling that you're making is that, hello, it's here. Exactly, hello, it's here, and get ready. And don't expect that the traditional paths of the past are gonna carry us in the future. There are new paths we have to discover and may happen. And we have to learn how to say yes. I mean, frankly, one of the first reactions that we saw in Hawaii was the attempt to legislate against drones, because of the association. I think that's based on lack of information. Once again, this team can really help put together the information that's in a positive sense. Now, I will say, in the case of drones, counter drone is just as big as drone. Counter drone means identify, track, and locate. And because if you're a construction company, or even worse, if you're a movie company making a movie shoot, you absolutely don't wanna have some other drone flying over your set, taking videos and posting them on YouTube that night. And same for a construction site, same for anything. So, one of the big factors that we're slowly coming to realize, maybe fastly, you're not coming to realize, is that people have to begin controlling their airspace by knowing what's going on. And so, counter drone will become a big part of the business. So this, again, that's a dimension nobody would have thought of a couple years ago. No, and then you mentioned research and UH. I mean, one of the big areas not only in the control of airspace, which we've got some history with, with aircraft transportation, et cetera, we're pretty good at it. But this is a new dimension, will require new software, new technologies, new jobs. I mean, I can't underwrite that enough. New software, new analysis methods. And the new virtual technology that's coming on. You got people wearing the virtual goggles, flying drones, for God's sakes. And actually, I like that. I'm thankful for that lead as well. Twice you've been me that leads, I'll finally take it. We use the word drone racing. It's gonna be a big event out in Kuala Lumpur later this month. Drone racing could be looked at as the drag racers, or some other low end of life, right? It's not really that. It is all about multiple streams of information and cognition, seeing in one or two D and computing it in 3D, acting in 3D, dealing with real and imagined object disturbances in your flight path or objects that come up that you have to deal with. And getting around that course as fast as you can. Racing is how you measure it. But that is really where the next step is going in fact. We were out at one of the power plants around here earlier this week trying to fly inside the smokestack. And I tell you, the drone racing guys would do a much better job than I can flying inside that smokestack. So we're gonna give that a try here. But there's a lot to be added by that component. It also adds competition to the mix. And let's not forget also. I mean, 10 years ago, I remember talking to faculty about distance education and online education. They go, well, you know, it's clunky, it doesn't work, it doesn't do it. 10 years later, it's a totally different industry, right? And so what we see today is not what is. So don't imagine that the barriers of today are gonna carry through tomorrow, break them down and figure out. So Jim, we're helping you out here. And we're... This is so much. And I hope people will consider coming down to the Capitol again. It's gonna be on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 4 and 5, starting at 8.30 on Tuesday morning. And Peter is gonna give an overview with the panel on the low-hanging fruit, aerospace and Hawaii, why it's such a strategic growth sector for our state that will focus on these various areas, aerospace, space transportation, UAS technologies, aerospace education and training, developing the next generation of entrepreneurs that can take this to the future. And there is a free lunch involved, isn't there Jim? Sorry? Is a free lunch involved, is it or not? Yes, it's free lunch. Free lunch. Oh, there you go. How can you beat that? There you go, I'm there. Okay, you have to be there. You're opening the show. I might stay for lunch. Yeah, okay. It's food for thought, what can I say? Okay, and once again, I think the takeaway is from this conversation here, which I hadn't thought of before, but this issue of keeping this pool of information flowing, that seems to me the most important thing here. And it will have this event, but there'll be a lot of ideas that are, you know, the sunshine principle. You shine sun on something and it expands into some new ideas. So how do we collect, Jim? Let's throw this challenge at Jim. Jim, how do we take the ideas to start that people have a week later and have them come into the picture, have them harvested, have them reacted to? Sure. Because I'm sure people are gonna have four times as many ideas the week after than they have at the conference itself. Sure, as Peter mentioned, we're gonna be incorporating all of the recommendations from the conference into a strategic development plan, sharing that with the governor and the legislature, coming up with a vision for the next five years and thinking about, okay, five years from now, where could we be? Where would we like to be? And then working backwards, strategically and tactically to figure out how to begin from here to there. Who needs to be involved? What kind of partnerships do we need to build? What type of funding resources? Public sector and private sector can be complementarily linked together to move us forward. But the bottom line in all this, this has to be massively participatory, not only getting the private sector and the public sector together, but Joe Q. Public. If the common man understands the value or what? And the future potential of space exploration. I think generic, I think. That's our future. Okay, and so maybe we can use the community colleges as part of that connectivity into the public. Isn't that about the closest thing that high value things go out into the public through the community colleges? Sure, and certainly the nice thing about drones like aviation, I'm a real proponent of aviation because if you wanna get a kid interested in math, put them in a cockpit. Suddenly they wanna learn math because they wanna do that. Same goes with drones. We know about kids that didn't like math science. They're taking these things apart, putting them back together, and it's fascinating. So it's a great portal to STEM careers and STEM interest in math and science and engineering. So I know we have to add economics to that because that's what the ultimate goal is of understanding where the payback is and such. But maybe the community colleges, once again, play a significant role here. They are outplaced, they're everywhere. And I think I know somebody who's sort of in charge. Well, count us in. And that would be you, Peter. Dr. Peter Cully, thanks for coming on the show today and talking about the Aerospace Summit and Jim Chris Cully. Looks like the Skype goddess from Kailua to Honolulu, no problem. That sounds terrific, thank you. We'll see you guys all Tuesday. See you down there tomorrow, setting up, Jim. Thanks a lot, folks. We'll see you next week. Alrighty.