 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It is noon on Thursday, folks. Ted Ralston here, overlooking downtown Honolulu in our Think Tech studio with our show, Where the Drone Leads. And you might ask, where the drone leads, where's the lead today? Well, the drone can lead all the way to Mars. You can believe that, stopping at the moon on the way. And on our show today, we have two incredible people who are involved in that very activity. We have Sandy by the Big Island, both by Skype. We have Hank Rogers. And we have John, there you are. OK, we got Hank and John. And both involved in the international moon-based project is coming around. And one might ask, how does an international moon-based project relate to drones? It relates to drones when that discussion took place about a year ago in the state capital, where we had the annual aerospace day at the space at the capital. And one of our panels in the unmanned air systems or drone domain had a very excited response to a space challenge that Hank Rogers threw his way. And there's been incredible interest in how these two ends of the STEM spectrum come together. Drones on the one end, dealing maybe at the marina level. Space travel at the other end, dealing in the Mars level. And so you just had a conference last week, Hank, where you pulled all these things together, including students in educational programs, talking about the international moon-based project and how it might be going forward. Tell us a little bit about how that went. Well, it was amazing. My original expectation was I was going to be able to get the leaders of all the space agencies, which is, of course, like way out of my league, because I don't know any of these people. But what I did get was very close to the tops of a lot of different companies and space agencies get together and tell us what their thinking is. So basically, the way it went was we had a half a day of speeches and then a half day of working groups. And there were students in every working group. So the voice of the students was heard. And actually, it was probably the loudest voice in the room at the end of the conference. So yes, we are going to build a moon base. Yes, we're going to figure out a spot on the moon where we're going to do it. We figured out pretty much a spot in Hawaii where we're going to do it, because Hawaii is almost the same as the moon in terms of the material. And so this is going to be a Hawaii-centric first step in the restaging of access to the moon. And so you'll experience the isolation and the necessary design standards and things that will allow systems to operate in that austere environment. And the astronomy orientation has to provide a lot of guidance and frame of thought in terms of what those challenges and threats and risks are. So that's where John comes into the picture. Yeah, well, as Hank was saying, Hawaii is the right place. And we believe this is the right time. Hawaii's geologic terrain is probably the best place in the entire world to test anything going to the moon and for Mars. It's a very recent geologic activity, so it hasn't weathered. And so it simulates the lunar dust extremely well. And we've had very successful what we call analog tests of robotic equipment here over the past 10 years, from NASA, from the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency. And it's been an unparalleled success. So this is the place in the world to do something like this, not only because of the high-fidelity science aspect of the analogs. But if you compare it to going to Antarctica or the Arctic, there are very good analog sites there. But you don't want to go there in the winter. And it costs you a few million dollars to mount an expedition. So globally, we're well-placed where anyone from around the world can get to Hawaii easily. And every day of the year, we can be doing real productive work. And that's really incredible. And that would apply primarily on the Big Island, where you have a lot of space. And you have the more recent geology of the island chain. And the thing that's interesting to me is, as we said at the very beginning, the whole world of STEM doesn't really care about scale. STEM can operate at the scale of a lunar mission, a Martian mission, or even a small mission to the marina here with a small drone. The same principles of systems engineering and understanding the threats and decomposing the problem down to solvable stages and then composing up a solution based on approaching those various issues that our barriers applies in both cases. And it's the young people, the kids, who are going to be taking care of all that. So getting their interest up and seeing the commonality between things that apply at the infrastructure level all the way to the interplanetary level, to me is a really interesting thing if we can cause that to happen and cause them to take on the even more challenging issue of how do you generate safety and reliability and repeatability in something as large in scale as that? You know, that's just private, just personally from an aerospace experience background, the world of STEM really needs that additional wrapper around it of the risk management, reliability, and safety aspects and the thinking and the mathematical methods that will learn, that will lead to the understanding of a systems behavior far away and a long time from now and have it be reliable, robust, and safe. So if we can collectively, through the drone game and the Martian game, figure out how that STEM framework can have that wrapper of safety, security, reliability, and trustworthiness wrapped around it, what a value that would be to infrastructure writ large. Are you asking me something here? I'm suggesting you're the champion. And so I think that the A, STEM should be steam, I think the art, the design, is gonna play a very important factor when we actually go. When we go to the moon, whatever we build on the moon is going to be the most amazing piece of construction that we've ever done in the entire history of man. And so what happens is if somebody asks us to build them the biggest newest building in Dubai, for example, that thing is gonna look amazing. And when people go there, they're gonna look at it and say, wow, that was so awesome. And that, we need that wow factor. So yes, the safety and all those things are important, but I think also the design, the architecture, the creature comforts, the attraction of the place, those are all, I would say equally as important because people aren't gonna have to want to go there. It's not just people that are like, we expect everybody to have a chance to go there at some point in time. You know, I think that there's a second, before we go to John again, I can hijack your thought from them, but I think actually what you just said is the key to that whole issue of safety and reliability and system performance. That's the A aspect of STEM, the A, the arts, the artistic solutions, the art of the possible. And if I can say as an engineer, engineers have proudly stolen everything they can from the art world. All the terms we use like energy, force, momentum, power, those all began life in philosophy or in art expression. And they had some broad, maybe ambiguous meaning. Engineers stole those words and put specific measurements to them, specific calculations to them, and then use them as design tools, but really swipe them from the artist in the first place. So the big picture always starts at the A level, at the art level, and then gets transferred through engineering into practices. So somewhere in there is the frame of reference of something that works reliably, works all the time and does it right, the reliability, safety, that sort of thing, has an A component to it. It would be interesting to take an analogy to automobiles, for example, or self-driving cars or aviation and medicine, for example. Anything that works reliably and see how that analog applies to this world here of STEM and we could actually use the Martian experience and the moon-based experience to drive attention on that. That's what I feel. I think it'd be fascinating. And mathematics, which is an art, is the means by which that will all be expressed. And that leads back over to astronomy, which is all math. Well, there's a lot of math in it. There's a famous cartoon where the students are asking the professor, what's the difference between astrology and astrophysics? And the professor says, lots and lots of math. So we do use mathematics as a language and a tool. And you're very right with the systems engineering, it's sort of like the physics of engineering. You put all the components together and it's an orchestra. They all have to play together. And human factors is a large part of where art comes in. I mean, we had famous artist Roger Dean at the conference and it was a blend of the science and the arts. And it was really brought out through architecture that if we can build a base for robots, very easily, very cheap. But if we're gonna have humans there, the humans have to feel comfortable living there. There are aspects to architecture that just besides the color, but the shape of the rooms and how the size of the rooms and how people feel comfortable. And even though they can work in these environments, subconsciously, these outer design elements can come to play on their mind and produce a lot of stress. And that's exactly the worst thing we wanna do. So it's a huge component of blending the humanity in with the science and we're gonna have a real viable village. And you know what the engineers have done with that very conversation you just led. They've taken that aspect of the interaction with the machine and they've called it man-machine interface. They've called it human factors. They've called it something like that and there is an emerging science that understands that. And in fact, that has to apply to drones also. We had to say drones in this program was about drones. But that same issue applies there because today we have one guy with a hand controller and one drone flying in the sky somewhere. That isn't a very sustainable picture. We have to have the system fly by itself. It has to know when to land and take off by itself just like we do on Mars. And so this whole issue of interacting, the human interacting with the machine and how that's to be controlled. Is it by fingertips? Is it by voice? Is exactly what is it? Is a fascinating study in itself. And as you say, the lower the stress, the higher the value of the interaction. And the less we can become involved with these things and the more they can decide for themselves what the mission needs to be and execute, the better we are. Again, a very common tie between the world of small drones that we deal in and the world of moon and Martian operations that you deal in. So there's a branch of math there somewhere, John. We got to go figure it out. Well, that does point out the value of, before we build a moon base on the moon, building a prototype here, this is where we can test all these factors and blend everything together and really find out what maybe not what the best combination is but some of the more optimal ones. And it will probably be an organic solution that they'll come up, the people that are working in there and living in there are going to come up with solutions that outside people hadn't thought of. And we hope to incorporate those into the eventual one on the moon. Okay, so what's gonna happen there is in that world of complex system interaction, the feeling of arts and the appreciation of something from that perspective will occur and then the engineers will swipe that and we'll label it something and come up with a frame of reference for how to calculate it. Hank. Yeah, I don't like the reference to engineering, engineers swiping or stealing ideas because artists create those ideas as food for thought for the engineers. Artists can envision things but they need the engineers to build them. So I think that that ecosystem of design and engineering is what gets us everything that we know. Without engineers, none of that would become reality. But let me talk a little bit about the connection between drone swarm ability and what I envision for the future. And I'm thinking way in the future because right now, if you ask NASA how are you gonna build something on the moon? They would tell you, well, we're gonna take the same kind of units that we use to make for the international space stations like big cans that fit on top of rockets and we're gonna make it out of those and connect them and then you have a moon base and then you have Robert Bigelow who says, you know what, I can in that same space I can put an inflatable so we can start with something that's the shape of a can and blow it up into something much bigger. And the problem with all of that, first of all is that you have to bury everything under two meters of regolith on the moon. Regolith is basically what the powder or the grains of that's on the moon dust and that's to protect against cosmic rays and charged particles coming from the sun. The moon has no magnetic field and it has no atmosphere which is all things that protect us from that stuff. So if we're building something on earth and we're using robots or we could say tele-robotics we can control them because they're right next to us but if they're on the moon, they're three seconds away and so that creates a little bit more of a complication but if it's on Mars, they're 20 minutes away and it's a 20 minute round trip to communicate with them. So, as you see with the rover where people gave instructions every once in a while and then they have to think about what are you gonna do for the next hour. That's a really slow way of doing things. So by the time we get to building stuff on Mars and I would say we should practice it on the moon is these things are gonna have to operate autonomously. So autonomous construction robots. I like to think that they're sort of like our version of termites so that they can dig, they can build, they can do everything that termites do. I'm talking about African termites not the one that are like reading my house. I'm talking about Africa where they build mounds and they have like civilizations underground where they grow food and all that stuff. We're gonna have to learn from them what to do on the moon and if we can create robots that communicate with each other and do all that stuff, amen. That's a home run and that's something that we can do here in Hawaii. We can study all that stuff. And you know, I think you just laid the base for bringing quantum calculation, quantum computers into this game because what you just outlined is such a complex adaptive system that I don't think what I call the linear programming we use here in most of our operations which are basically used to be Fortran and it got turned into various other engineering codes but that is all rule-based and role-based to a large extent. We've gotta make this conditional-based or self-determined in some way similar to the way the term might operate as you say or people operate. So there's a whole branch and I would suggest there's a term called linguistic geometry that is a budding branch of math that tries to look at strategic superiority for how you make decisions. It uses the structure of language, once again the arts. It uses, language has incredible powers, it's got adjective, verbs, nouns, it's got various things that convey meaning and these guys have begun using that as a frame of reference for the math and so that the math can sort of do reasoning based on both expedient, least cost, least risk, whatever it might be in very small computer frames, laptops. So there's a whole dimension here that is to me fascinating and we need to not let John off the hook as our representative of the math organizations here and have him own that. But we'll get back to that. We're taking a one minute break and be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said what's happening guys? They told me they were making music. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m., please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea, Aloha. Still Thursday noon folks, Ted Rawson here downtown Honolulu and our compatriots over on the Big Island, Hank Rogers, John Hamilton from both the International Moon Base organization and from University of Hawaii Department of Physics and Astronomy and Math. We'll put Math in there too, okay. We're having a violent conversation about how exciting the future is gonna be with the kinds of things that are on the horizon that you're stimulating, Hank, and the partnership you brought together last week. I think it'd be appropriate to give a shout out to all those folks who attended that and talk a little bit about what came out of that from a motivation perspective and where it might go. But we don't wanna let go of this idea of incredible math coming to the picture in ways we might not even know yet that are gonna be useful to handle these really complex systems in a really effective way. So again, a shout out to those folks who came and a little bit of what you see coming as the next step out of the Moon Base conference last week. Are you asking me, I guess so. So what I see, we had nine working groups and again, students were involved in online groups and so each of the working groups now has sort of a life of its own and we're looking to go to whatever next step for each one of those there that that's coming on. For example, we have a group that is on commercialization and that commercialization group is all about trying to figure out how to make money by doing all of this, going to the Moon or even during the prototyping phase and it's amazing the ideas that the high school students came up that we're actually going to try to put into action as ways to fund this whole thing because traditionally it's been funded by the taxpayer through NASA. And so the whole Apollo program was a huge, you can call it a burden, but the way it was done is and the way things get done in NASA or in the government in general is, you have an idea then you go out and get an RFP and then a bunch of companies compete and then you come up with a program that costs X amount of money. But that's not how private industry works. If you want, if you're thinking that you're going to build a product, here's going for it and you're not spending huge amounts of money. So I think that the Moon base is going to be a public-private partnership. That's another working group. How do we manage public-private partnerships? Rather than be the government who does it like the ISS, how do you do it with a public-private partnership which brings the cost way down? ISS costs billions of dollars and it's still like everybody's afraid of it. And that's just because there are only space agencies involved. If we had private companies involved that brought systems to bear on that project that were doing it for other reasons besides spending taxpayers' money or whatever you want to call it, I think we would have had a much lower price point and then it would be much easier to swallow for the public. And because it's within range of companies actually doing it themselves, you get people funding their own thing. And so this is going to be a transition in the way space is looked at similar to what's taking place in the space launch game today. We've got SpaceX, we've got Blue Origin, we've got a few other companies out there that are completely changing the landscape in terms of how rocket launch occurs and the prices come down to half what it is from the traditional suppliers. So the same things that will occur here, you're going to have a commercial motivation and in particular, as you've done, associate it with the kids. I was really intrigued by your comment that every one of those nine working groups had students involved, high school students, is that right? High school students involved in all nine and they're going to have a principal role, they're going to inherit this in 10 or 15 years. And so the role is bigger than just as an advisor. They are the participants and they are the beneficiaries of all this work. They are the future. And as Hank had brought out earlier that during the Apollo landing, the average age of most of the engineers at NASA were in the mid 20s, which meant that they were in school when Kennedy gave this famous speech. So these are the future people that are going to be doing everything up there. We go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hot. That was the Kennedy speech and the 16 year olds bit on that. And when I repeated that at the event a year ago, that's when they came up and I said, today I'm challenging high school students to go and build this moon base. The next day, a young student from one of the schools in Honolulu walked up to the edge of the stage, pointed at me and said, Hank Rogers, we accept your challenge. And it was like, whoa. What do I do next? Okay, you are on. So basically us gray hairs, our job is to give the young people chance and then get out of the way. And I said, everybody in this conference who has any gray hair from today is a mentor. You are mentors. And any students that have any question is allowed to call any of us and get any kind of advice. And basically that's how we're going to move forward. That is pretty incredible. And then of course that implies having a teacher cadre who can follow in suit and can you the inspiration when you're doing something else? And so we have to work on that, I guess as well. How do you, I haven't ever thought about that, but we have an obligation and responsibility here. Creating a really exciting core of activity that can have many directions. Nine in this case, we need to keep feeding it. Keep enthusing it and keep empowering it with speakers, advisors, mentors, teachers. So that's an interesting social challenge here for us. Yeah, somebody at the conference called me a social architect. So putting all these various thinkers from different areas together and figure out who needs to be at which table and all that. And I think as a first experiment for me to doing something like this, I think we did surprisingly well. That's fantastic. And so how does this get publicized? How do people join in if they want to? How do other schools, other teachers hook in? How about companies that want to be part of this? So we have one of the working groups is PR. So they're working totally on this, how to reach out to companies, schools, whatever and get them involved. And so we'll be doing websites. We had cameras everywhere. We even had on the individual work group sessions, we designed a table where 13, 14 people could sit around the table and we put a camera right in the middle, a 360, 240 camera that recorded everything everybody said equally. And you can use an iPhone and watch that and you can turn it around and then you can see whoever's speaking. And then we can pick that up and put that in a video. So we're looking to make YouTube videos. We're working with, because do you remember who was that? I think it was Discovery Channel people were there that are doing a movie about this. So the making of the moon base. I mean, there's lots of other interests. We had three film crews there at the same time and a photographer. So that's fascinating. And that once again what intrigues me is that same level of energy and creativity is required to make the whole drone thing work. You mentioned that you've got to have swarms working together in a cooperative fashion, a leader of followers and adjust as situations occur and such, which takes us back to John and we have about 30 seconds here. John, representing the math and science organizations, we need to somehow capture this and enthuse and inspire that new level of expressive math that helps us move through these areas. Well, extra math is the key for most of these high technology fields. And besides the high school students we had there, they often came with teacher chaperones. So we enthused the teachers and there's nothing more inspiring than the space program to ignite the imagination of the young people. And I see the prototype moon base building here as a great magnet for Hawaii's school children to be inspired, come here, do things. We could have school groups coming over. And then a lot of these people are going to be employed there doing their own experiments at the prototype moon base. And developing the new forms of calculus that let us do all that, which I won't let you off on that one. Anyway, gentlemen, thank you very much for this really exciting report from last week and actually report on the future as well. And glad to see that Jaden and the gang from university lab school were a part of the action. Hank and we ought to also do a shout out to Jim Chrisifuli who put that whole event together in the capital last year and led us to this point here. So once again, thanks for coming on the show. Drones in space tied together, I love it. John Hamilton, Hank Rogers, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, to the moon. Air, we go to the moon. Okay, got it.