 Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Mogulov from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, we're going to be talking about the launch and the pun is intended, the launch of the Berkeley Space Center. It's an exciting and unprecedented initiative for our university. It's a project that's going to extend Berkeley's physical footprint into Silicon Valley and our academic reach, well, to quote Buzz Lightyear, to infinity and beyond. With us today to describe and discuss the joint venture that will build a new 36-acre research and innovation hub at NASA Ames in the South Bay is Chancellor Carol Christ, Professor Alex Bayed, Associate Provost for the Berkeley Space Center, and of course, the one and only Director Fries, the founder and executive director of the Berkeley Space Center Project. As always, we welcome and we actually need your questions to help inform and fuel the conversation and your questions can be posted whenever you wish on our Facebook Live site as the conversation proceeds. So without further ado, Chancellor, let me start with you. And if you just begin describing sort of in broad strokes what this project is and why you see it as being so important for the university's academic mission. Thank you, Dan, and welcome to everybody visiting in today. Berkeley has been a place of transformational partnerships. Many of you, I'm sure, have seen the movie Oppenheimer, which has some information in it about the birth of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. We have a growing partnership with UCSF across the Bay. This is another opportunity for what I think will be a transformational partnership. About five years ago, Janet Napolitano, the then president of UC, came to me and said, would Berkeley be interested in developing a piece of land on Moffitt Field, that's the former Navy airfield that's immediately adjacent to NASA Ames for both a research park and academic programs. I thought that was an incredibly intriguing opportunity and started to talk to people on campus and whether it would interest them. And the answer was a resounding yes. The Space Sciences Laboratory has, which is probably our most generously funded through government funds research unit on campus, already had many partnerships with NASA Ames, was very excited about this opportunity. We were in engineering, beginning to develop an aerospace program, and it would give us access to Silicon Valley and the companies there, and the opportunities for degree work that we could offer there. So we started thinking about the idea, we appointed a faculty committee to evaluate the idea. It was chaired by Gordon Rouser. It submitted its report, I think, in 2019. And I think it's so exciting to have the closeness to NASA Ames that this Berkeley Space Center would have and enable us to explore even more than we have, the field of aerospace, fields of remote sensing, fields of space medicine, space health. The possibilities are really tremendous there. Thank you. Alex, let's dive a little deeper into the academic side. I know whenever I've spoken with you about this project, the excitement is palpable. And I've also wondered of whether Berkeley Space Center is capacious enough as a name to capture all that's going on. Unpack for us a little bit the academic aspirations and vision of this project. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. And it's very exciting to be here today. So when people think about the academic mission, there are different pillars that we really have at the university, the research part, the educational part, the service part, and also the entrepreneurship. I'll stay at the higher level for now, but we'll dive a bit deeper later. On the research side, like the Chancellor mentioned, similar to LBNL, we're creating an ecosystem in which we can co-locate UC Berkeley teams, private sector teams, and NASA teams around a variety of topics that go far beyond space. I mean, include aviation, quantum computing, planetary sciences, biology, health, and many others. On the educational side, we're already running workshops at NASA at the Berkeley Space Center, even before we build it. For example, CDSS and Haas run a workshop, an inaugural workshop on AI. Soon we'll be running certificate programs, probably also with Haas and CDSS, and hopefully not such a distant future professional master. So the Berkeley Space Center also embodies this teaching and education mission. The third pillar is service. We mentioned SSL before. SSL is already fulfilling a lot of the service missions working together with NASA, with their operations center and satellites, and the Berkeley Space Center will really expand that. And the fourth, maybe, is the entrepreneurship. And you know, we have many incubators on this campus. There have been many conversations led by Director Fries, in particular with Skydeck, about the notion of created Skydeck aero at Moffitt. You can see in all of these dimensions that the Berkeley Space Center really will accelerate the footprint of Berkeley and many academic technological fields and the geographical footprint of the university. Let me make sure I understand before I move on to Derek in terms of the academic scope and the vision for the program. It's not just space, right? What are the other key academic elements? If I'm sitting out there in a department office right now listening to this and wondering, am I going to have a part of this? Give us a little bit of a bigger picture, a more detailed picture of which academic areas this is going to touch on. Absolutely. So there's 18 colleges at Berkeley, to my knowledge, and there's really space for all of them at the Berkeley Space Center. So if you think of NASA's core missions, they're the, in some ways, the anchor to the site. So just to repeat them, the space part, space exploration, aviation, sustained life in the extreme environments, space robotics, remote sensing. But then if you start expanding all the adjacent disciplines, then you find quantum computing, firefighting, climate change, additive manufacturing, planetary sciences, and so on. And on this campus, we've been working with all colleges. For example, there are faculty who are already talking about art in space or how to use construction technologies developed in the Center for Environmental Design for Planetary Construction. So I think there is really room for all the colleges. And I have spoken to all the deans and many of their leaders throughout the last couple of years. And I'm really looking forward to have all the units involved in that academic mission. Super. Now we're going to get into a little bit of the weeds of the joint venture of the partnership with you, Derek DeFries. Derek, if I'm correct in remembering, you're a former member of the Board of Regents and president of the California Alumni Association. Yeah, right? Yeah, it's true. I'm always on brand, I have to say. Yeah. So how did you get involved in this? And what attracted your attention? How did you wind up as founder of this project? Well, I was lucky enough to join the campus in a strategy role about four years ago. And much like that conversation that Janet Polatano had with our chancellor, I had occasion to have a conversation with the office of the president as well. And it was, it reminds me of everything that happens around here, which is the accidental conversations, the accidental collisions that really bear fruit. And it was just a casual conversation over a cup of Pete's coffee on Broadway near UCOP with our executive vice president and CFO of the system, Nathan Brostrom. And much like the chancellor was approached, Nathan approached me and said, you know, we really do want to think about what could happen in NASA Ames on this property that has been held open for many, many years for the right academic partner. And it was really taking that nugget of information and saying to Nate Brostrom, I think there's something there. And so much like the chancellor has taken on those conversations with various members of her administration and faculty leadership, I started having similar conversations with others and really found that the time was right. We're sort of in this zeitgeist of a moment with the romanticism of space, but there's a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship happening around this topic as well. And it's not, as Alex said, about space or aerospace in general. It's everything from, you know, from quantum computing to robotics to drone technology to advanced aviation and energy. We are in a certain moment when our society is really rewarding people to take on risk. And as you've seen us develop under the leadership of Rich Lyons, the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem on campus, and the proliferation of Skydeck and Citrus Foundry and everything that's going on at Sotarja, the moment was right to really say, let's take that nugget of an idea, which for me was a cup of coffee. And for others, it was other types of conversations and see what we could do with it and grow with it. And I was lucky enough to get the early sponsorship of people like Dean Diana Wu from the Extension program who said we could teach in Silicon Valley to Mike Riley at Executive Education who said, I really want to think about executive leadership courses down in Silicon Valley. It's a brand new population and we have to teach California's workforce as well. And it was also our former provost, Paul Alavisados, who said this could really be the next Lawrence Berkeley laboratory but in Silicon Valley. Let's really explore and get deep. So because I'm a former president of the Alumni Association, I gathered a core team of Robert Gatelli, Michael Sin and Van Nguyen, who's a former ACC student body president. And the four of us really started to grapple with this and we started having dozens and dozens of conversations about how this could actually happen. So that was four years ago. And now we're here today with the public launch. Yeah. And I see you've already got the swag. You got the shirt. You got the emblem. The merch, the merch is coming. The merch is coming. That's a little frightening. I understand you have a video and some designs to show us. Not quite yet, folks. I want to make sure that going into that and before we look at the designs that we talk a little bit about the money, something that's always important. So this is a joint venture. What does that mean? Is the university building down there? What exactly is the private sector involvement here? How is this being funded and what are the financial ramifications for the universe? Well, we knew that there was going to be some challenges towards funding any opportunity that was away from the core campus. We have, I would say, very desperate needs on campus to look at our facilities and to really make sure that our core campus is strong, healthy, and has a very strong infrastructure. So we knew that public monies were really not the preferred approach here. So this project is a new type of public-private partnership. It does not use public money. So in very simple terms, when we build a new building, either through a Triple P or we do it on basically state appropriated funds, that's one of the tools in our toolkit, which is we can use our debt capacity, we can use our balance sheet, or we can use appropriations that are given to us by the UC Board of Regents or from the state of California. We're not doing that here. What we are doing is going out to the third market, the capital markets to fund this development. So we helped, sorry, we negotiated a ground lease with NASA and we did that with the help of our development partner, SKS Partners, who's been amazing so far. They helped us devise a financial scheme where we are going out to institutional investors that will actually pay for this development. So that's an important footnote here is that we're not trying to take away from the core campus needs, but doing something entirely new, which is entirely reliant upon investors who are coming along with us on this journey for real estate development. So some of the structures, or a lot of the infrastructure that will be constructed down there won't be for the university, it'll be for private sector industries that want to partner with us, with NASA that are involved in some of the areas that we're going to be researching. Yeah, really the way that this works is that there's a 1.4 million square feet and for just analogy purposes, that's about the same amount of square feet that's in the salesforce tower. So you can look right across the bay and try to divide that to about 10 or 12 buildings. Another way to look at it is we're going to allocate about a million square feet to private industry because that's truly the power of the Berkeley Space Center is we're going to bring Berkeley, we're going to be there with NASA, and we're going to be there with that third leg of the stool, which is private industry. Because as I've said before, each of us can accomplish great things separately, but together we can accomplish heroic things. That's super important to really unlock the potential of the site, is really attracting private industry to want to cohabitate with us, to habitat there separately, and to really collaborate with us on our research. And we estimate that about 50% of that total square footage will be either UC or UC-affiliated partners of ours, including private industry. All right, before I go ahead, Alex, go ahead. If I may add to that, I think the conversations with the private sector are starting now, and this is really exciting because in some ways we can build facilities and infrastructure at Moffat at the Berkeley Space Center that we might not be able to build here on campus. I mean, things about groups working on fire chambers to turn to test burning and firefighting technology. Think about irradiation chambers to test plants and biology in space and radiation-resisting components. Think about very ports to test the drones for delivery of cargo, et cetera. And so the way these buildings will be shaped is going to be very crucially influenced by the partnerships that we are able to seal now, because it takes time to build infrastructure. And this is going to be part of what we do in 2024, engaging all these stakeholders with the 18 colleges on the campus on things they would like to see built together with the private sector at the Berkeley Space Center to accelerate their research. Yeah, thanks for adding that, Alex. Carol, please. Let me just add to what Derek and Alex have said. We worked very hard on financially de-risking this project so that it would not become a burden for the campus. So the risk is held by our development partners, SKS partners. And the campus investment in terms of money is really quite minimal. What we're giving to this is our access to this amazing 36-acre parcel of land and our name and reputation. I think it's an amazing partnership in which we're going to see so many opportunities for our faculty and our students from the companies and industries that will take up residence there. Chancellor, I want to come back to you in just a second and ask about this sort of growing importance of the university's support for entrepreneurship and also translational research. But before doing that, Derek, I understand you have a video and some designs to show, and I can say so we can actually get a look at what we're talking about here. So take it away. Well, it really speaks for itself, but we've had the amazing partnership with SKS partners and HOK and field operations who put together a video rendering what we call a fly by. And I think we're our team is prepared to show that to the audience. Nice. Derek, I can only note that all the people in the video looked very happy. So when, how long is this going to take? When is occupancy expected or is this something that's going to roll out in the years to come? How's it all going to take place? Well, we do have a full development schedule and this is a proposed project that's subject to approval by the Board of Regents. So we can't forget that there's going to be a comprehensive Environmental Quality Act review. But once that is complete in the next 12 to 18 months, and after we receive Board of Regents approval, we're really off to the races. But as Professor Byron noted earlier, the conversations of collaboration are already happening today. We're already in deep conversations with many industry partners with NASA on what is the potential of the site and how can we start those programs now? How can we start teaching down near Silicon Valley today? So what I'm mostly excited about is that we are building programs today and new partnerships with industry today that will then relocate into the Berkeley Space Center once those first buildings go up. So I get a little emotional, I have to say, every time I see that video, because you can imagine, like a, you know, I've been sort of calling myself employee number one of Berkeley Space Center because of being past that torch of carrying this opportunity on behalf of the campus. And to see it even worn out in a rendering or and seeing that we've grown from a team of one and two people to now, you know, dozens and dozens of people working on this project. It's really interesting to see how great things can happen at Berkeley, great things can happen at NASA. It's just so impressive to see how people really grab, gravitate towards new ideas. I think that's that the core and the ethos of Berkeley is that we are built, we are ingrained, you know, as a student here, I was taught how to, you know, really do the best and to take risk and to carry something forward. So it's just really an exciting opportunity to really see this thing start to come to life. Yeah, fabulous. I'm going to turn to questions from the audience in just a second, but before doing so Chancellor, one of the words that's come up a lot with, and you mentioned it and Alex and Derek as well is, you know, this idea of translational research or the idea of partnership with private firms that perhaps can do things that a university can't. And also this idea of support for entrepreneurship, two things that obviously weren't on the agenda. For example, when I was in college, why have those two things become so important to the university? Yeah, thank you so much, Dan, for that question. It's one of the biggest changes I've seen in my decades at Berkeley. When I was provost in the 90, I held a meeting of faculty members and venture capitalists because the faculty members were really interested in how they could move their discoveries in the laboratory more quickly to the venture capital space. We have this day long meeting and everybody left really scratching their heads, thinking this distance over the transom seems so long and so hard. But now, some 30 years after that meeting, we see so much surrounding the campus and in the campus that makes that that distance is so shortened. So we have the Baker Fellows Program, for example, that is a competitive program that gives faculty members resources who have wanted to translate their discoveries to the business space. We also have Skydeck. We've got the Citrus Foundry that Alex mentioned before. We've got the Baker Bioengineuity Hub in the old Art Museum. We have plans for an innovation zone downtown that will have a climate ingenuity hub as well as an incubator and accelerator for discoveries that come out of the IGI. So this is a direction in which Berkeley is just exploding. We actually came out better than Stanford in the pitch books list of how many businesses were started by alumni from the Berkeley campus this year. So it's something our faculty want. It's something that's an incredibly exciting new dimension of the university in all three areas that Alex was talking about in the area of research, in the area of teaching and the area of service as we translate our discoveries to the two kinds of products that can help can help humans. Beautiful. We're going to turn. Alex, would you have something to add before I go to the questions? Absolutely. And you know, if I just take a quick deep dive into the vertical of aeronautics and astronautics, I mean, we're building something that doesn't exist today. And if you think of the opportunities for students over the many decades to come to learn aeronautics and astronautics, once we are operational, they will be on a naval base surrounded by infrastructure of unprecedented scale of the largest wind tunnel in the world next to a runway and an airport where you actually can land an aircraft in the direct proximity of venture capital in Silicon Valley surrounded by Google. The Googleplex is already all around the base and by many other private companies in that arena that work there already with thousands of NASA civil servants and contractors working on these missions and together co-hosted with private sector companies working directly with them on R&D. So we're really inventing a new type of education in the field of aeronautics and astronautics. And of course, all these adjacent disciplines we discussed before by being able to do it in this unique place that we're building. If I might add to what Alex has said, we're imagining junior year abroad in Silicon Valley. We're imagining lots of opportunities for internships for our students at these companies that will locate there. We're imagining opportunities for research for graduate students and for postdocs and the kind of partnership with NASA Ames that we currently have with the Lawrence Berkeley lab up on the hill. So let me turn right back both to you Chancellor and to Alex and more specifically one of the questions that came in is what are we envisioning in terms of opportunities for undergraduates? I mean, clearly graduate students are heavily involved in advanced stages of research, but beyond sort of a junior year abroad or in Silicon Valley and it might as well be another country. What else are we thinking in terms of undergraduates? Alex? Sure. So starting with what's already here, NASA has already a lot of funnels, pathways actually which is the name of the program, one of them for internships. What's really great with the Berkeley Space Center is that collocated with it are companies that provide other ways for NASA to give internships to students and because we will be collocated there, I think that naturally what will happen is what we're seeing happening already now is that the number of internships and their institutionalization in particular the way these processes run will really accelerate. I mean, we're talking now up to probably 50 internships all cumulative for that site at the present time, even before our buildings open. So down the road, I mean, this could go to a much, much larger number. But then if we look following what the Chancellor said at more ambitious programs, this notion of a year abroad which every American University in some ways has done somewhere with some countries and some cities, we can do it right here, which is a phenomenal way for us to embed our students in this unique space but also in a broader ecosystem of Silicon Valley. And then if one looks further down the road, so maybe over the next decade, we will create programs located there. Whether we start with One Year Masters because they're easier to put together as a one year program or whether it becomes half of a degree for an undergraduate program and maybe one day a full undergraduate education at that site, it's not going to happen tomorrow. I mean, these things take time, we'll understand. But I would really say it's only a matter of time before it happens. And I think there is a huge demand for it. I think our students are really excited to be located there. So we have to grow this gradually because we understand that undergraduate education requires support services, health services, and there's also the problem of transportation we'll talk about. There's a slow ramp up phase here. But what starts today with internships is going to go into something much bigger over the decades to come. Chancellor, a question for you sort of related to this another question that came in, and it may be a little premature to get into specifics, but I'm curious, generally, how you're thinking about the following. Somebody asked, will there be a way for college access programs to engage and utilize this center when it comes to bridging the gap for more underrepresented high school students who may be interested in STEM? Is this something that the university always brings and always thinks about in regards to projects like this? Talk to us a little bit about where there might be an intersection between these two things. That's a great question. One of the ideas that already has been floated is using that site as a place where we can have a kind of turbocharged summer or semester for students from under-resourced high schools who really want to go into STEM fields, but high schools may have under-prepared them for that. I see enormous opportunity there for attracting diverse students to the incredible opportunities in these exploding fields that have to do with space technology, aerospace, though I should say that the people who suggested the name Berkeley Space Center proposed the name thought of space as being not only space in the way in which we commonly use the term, but space being a location as well. So we imagine many different kinds of programs can be created there, but certainly we imagine it as a place where we can give particular opportunities to expand access. Got it, great. Derek, another question that came in. Somebody wondering if we should be thinking of this as a satellite campus, is housing going to be there? So yeah, tell us about that a little bit. Yeah, certainly. Actually, housing is a problem, obviously, in Silicon Valley. Our ground lease with NASA permits us to build 300 units of housing and also permits us to build unlimited amount of housing for our faculty, staff, researchers, and students. So we have an opportunity here to build facilities that enable our students to go there for a very short period of time or longer if they have a year-long sabbatical or assignment in Silicon Valley, and that holds true with our faculty and our staff as well. Immediately adjacent to our site is another developer who is developing 2,000 units of housing. So there's going to be quite a bit of housing in the adjacent area. Sunnyvale, City of Sunnyvale has approved 20,000 units of housing to be built, and that's right across the airfield. So housing, of course, is of critical importance to all of our people, but we're working on solutions to make sure that there's adequate amount of housing for at least our people that intend to be on the site. Yeah, you know, as long as I have you on that, there was another question that came in about transportation. Let me read this too. Connecting both campuses can and will be a daunting and expensive process to overcome. Where does the university stand in supporting funding and advocacy to support the Bay Pass program? You may not know about that in specific, but how are we thinking about the transportation issues and challenges? I know we have a few years to figure it out, but where's thinking at right now, Der? Yeah, you know, it's 47 miles between Berkeley and Moffitt Field where the Berkeley Space Center will be, and it can take 45 minutes or four days to get there. It can be quite challenging depending on what's going on on the 880 freeway or the 101 whichever path you choose to take. But I'm going to turn to Alex in just a second here because there's been a lot of academic research on this topic, but the way that I have been thinking about this is we will have some immediate transportation needs, but we also have to think about that this site, we signed a 99 year ground lease and transportation will look very different 20, 30 years from now than it does today. You know, we have companies that are working on electric vertical takeoff and landing, EV toll companies that are working on autonomous air taxis. So when we think about this, we also have to be aspirational and dream of what is possible so that we don't build with an immediate solution in mind. So first thing first, yes, we will talk about, you know, how to get there by art or light rail or shuttles, transportation over the water and over the bay through ferry services, which could be potentially a great possibility or even air taxis. So we're thinking about all of those potential solutions, but I think you also have to think about what the end result is with respect to parking. So how do you incentivize people to get out of their cars? In that rendering that you saw, there's a parking garage. We kind of hit it because we actually want to make sure that we actually don't really focus too much on the albatross of what does parking look like. Instead, let's think about shared services. Let's think about how do we get people to that last mile without having compelling them to drive there? And it is Silicon Valley, so people are used to getting in their cars. But this is a district-wide solution. This is a county-wide solution. This is a statewide solution that we have to develop. So it's not very specific to us. But I think I want to turn to Alex because he can talk a little bit about how the faculty is viewing this. Yes, thank you, Derek. Well, you did portray the future in some ways. It's a good time to acknowledge the Citrus Aviation Group, who is very actively investigating the air option for obviously very long from now, not tomorrow. But in some ways, our situation is not that different from many of the large organizations in Silicon Valley. The Googleplex is running a very massive bus system, which is very famous and has made the news many times. It's very comfortable and it has a lot of connectivity options. So people can actually work in the bus and we've seen similar trends with Genentech campus at Oyster Point. So in the present case, our team has retained the Farron Piers, which is a company that can help us with a transportation plan, some of which Derek alluded to. I think what's very important to recognize is that with the massive amount of people that will be located in that center, it's not just our problem. It's really all the community's problem. So think about there's 3,000 people at NASA already and we already know of about 50 of them leave close to the campus and the East Bay, that's already enough to fill one bus every day, which doesn't exist. So by the time we open our own site and Derek will give the max capacity, but it's on the order of I think 10,000 or above, it's likely that the numbers will grow to hundreds. And if you add students to that, which are our people, now we're talking several buses every day. So by the time the site becomes operational, it's likely that a bus line could solve that problem and would be analogous to many of the other big organizations of our size located in the South Bay. The financial model of it is of course still something in discussion, but with many stakeholders including NASA benefiting from that service, it's not just on our shoulders. It's really something that serves the whole community. And so in some ways, we will be no different than people in that geography. So maybe a quick word on the transition, the transition, I mean from zero to 100%, as many organizations that grow will have ad hoc needs. So it might start with a few shuttles on the basis of occupancy and as we ramp our occupancy to a full capacity. And this is not new for UC. I mean, for many years there was a shuttle running between UC Davis and UC Berkeley and such example exists. So in some ways, we're not in uncharted territory, but we're in a territory where now we're going to have the ability to do this in a much more streamlined manner and also much more efficient manner. Many of these buses already for these companies I mentioned, they're electric, they're green, they use the HOT lane, they go really fast, they're very well connected. So in some ways, it's a different way to think about mobility and we'll just be part of that story. Alex, I'm going to stick with you. We have a number of questions from our friends and colleagues at our Space Sciences Laboratory. There seem to be some questions and concerns about their place in the Berkeley Space Center. Let me read to just what some of the questions are. Could you please explain why the university can or is planning to invest in a new Space Center when it already has a top research center in space research? Wouldn't it be better to invest in the further development and better integrations of the SSL? Another one asks what's going to be the role, what's going to be the function, the purpose of the Space Sciences Lab after the Berkeley Space Center, how will the collaboration work? So in the largest possible context, speak to our friends and colleagues at the SSL about how this all works together. Great. Thank you. Great question. Great questions, Dan. So first, let me acknowledge the SSL, the Space Science Lab has been really one of our key and really visible anchor points to NASA and it's been really an asset for us in developing that relationship from the start. And in fact, when I say from the start, Steve Beckwith, the then director was involved in the Rosser 1 report that Chancellor alluded to earlier. Eriya Rousseff, the current director. Hold on before you run on, just make sure people understand what was that initial route? What are you in effect saying that he was involved in the Rouser report? Thank you for asking the clarification because it's a bit of a context thing here. So in 2019, when the campus decided to get involved at NASA, the first committee was formed under the chairmanship of Gordon Rouser that the Chancellor alluded to earlier. The role of that first committee was to establish whether Berkeley should pursue the opportunity or not. Steve Beckwith, the then director of SSL, was part of that team and with great enthusiasm and the whole committee really pushed the engagement and said like, yes, we should engage. That led to the process that essentially concluded with the launch of the center a few weeks ago. And in parallel to this, a second committee also chaired by Gordon Rouser and it's really a good opportunity for me to thank him today because he's been such a fantastic leader and inspirational figure to lead these committees. Gordon Rouser in his second committee then put together a vision by which we're going to operationalize the center and launch it. And Ilya Rousseff, the current director of the Space Science Lab is part of that committee and was essential in shaping that vision. In parallel also, SSL has been with us all along. In parallel, when the former Vice Chancellor for Research, Randy Katz put together the infrastructure task force, Abby Tripali, who is also a senior leader at the SSL, was one of the co-chairs of that committee to define the vision of how we would develop that infrastructure. So I think what's great with SSL is SSL has been with us on that adventure from the start. The leadership has been extremely involved. And so to the second part of the question, which is a legitimate question, is why not more in SSL? So first, going back to the earlier part of the conversation today, Derek explained very clearly that the investment is external, so it's not the campus' dollars or the public dollars. But also it's important to recognize that the engagement we're having with NASA at the Berkeley Space Centers go far beyond space. They include biology, they include aviation, propulsion, and many of the other disciplines that represent the 18 colleges of the university that are also part of that ecosystem. So onwards, I think that the Berkeley Space Center will accelerate the involvement of the Space Sciences Lab with NASA, either by providing more opportunities here on campus or by potentially providing extensions, if there's more things that we can't build here that we could do there. And it will also enable the campus to engage with NASA on a variety of other topics that go beyond the scope of SSL. You know, all this, Carol, it makes me wonder just how you see this project. I mean, we saw the renderings and they look very fancy, but is this largely a done deal or is this really now the time where we're sort of throwing open the doors and engaging the community? Where are we in the whole process and how you think about it? It's very much a point where we have a general container for this project. The 36 acres, we have a design, which I love for the campus, but now we have to do the hard work of figuring out what goes in those buildings and what are the best ways we can use this incredible resource that has come to the Berkeley campus for the benefit of the Berkeley campus. So it's very much a time for ideas. We just got the second Rouser Report, which will be circulating to the community and seeking community ideas. I also should reassure people that the governance structure of this project involves the office of the president, involves the chancellor, whoever that person is, as well as SKS partners. So the campus retains control of this in the way in which the governance has been structured. Let me stick with you for a second. Do you have any concern about ways in which we need to be careful about what kind of private sector partners we have? I mean, we're a unique institution with a very particular set of values, and I know in the past there's been some concern expressed about public-private partnerships, if not on our campus and others. How do you think the university can and will go about ensuring that the firms and entities we partner with understand who we are and what our values are? That's a great question. First of all, the fact that we are a partner will attract companies that feel they have something to gain by that partnership. So there's that in the first place, but we ultimately have veto power over partners that we think are inappropriate. Got it. Derek, we're talking about potential partners, and I think as a lot of people are aware there's all this talk about a doom loop in San Francisco and the crisis and commercial real estate market. So there was a press conference that rolled out, the Berkeley Space Center a month or so ago. Are the phones ringing? Are they? They really are. My job has gotten a lot harder. I have to say we've gotten a tremendous amount of number of inbound inquiries, to say the least. We're operating two websites. The one is external to the campus, and that's BerkeleySpaceCenter.com, and then one internal to the campus called SpaceCenter.Berkeley.edu. And on average, Alex, myself, and Amy Gardner from University Business Partnerships is fielding probably eight to 10 inquiries a day. And these are real inquiries, and they're very different. Some of them are interested in locating on the site. So these are private industry potential partners and tenants, but there's also people coming out from the science community, like a scientist at one of the legacy industrial complexes who reached out and said, I just want to know how I can help. How can I advance this cause? Because I really believe in what you're trying to do here. We've had some outreach from international organizations, some NGOs, that think that there's some real opportunity to do some joint research on the site. We've been getting inquiries from venture capital and also startups. One of the things to think about is, with Skydeck, for example, although we have many incubators and accelerators on campus, we incubate hundreds of companies a year, and they need a place to go. So we have places for them to go on campus, but they need to go into graduate places with larger spaces. So in many senses, we're building a new home for these startups. You can look at just aerospace in general because that is one of the theses we're talking about. Companies like Space Kinetic, which was started by a student from Haas and a student from the College of Engineering, which is a dynamic company that is going off in the races. Companies like Skyling, which incubated at Skydeck. Our own doctor, Agonino's company, Squishy Robotics, which licensed technology from NASA Ames that she was working on. And then now she started a company called Squishy Robotics. So the companies are there. So it's almost like if we build it, will they come? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Wow. Yeah. And I might add to what Derek has said. It's a mistake to think of this as an office complex. It's a laboratory space, and it's manufacturing space. And so if you notice development in Berkeley, for example, and all of the laboratory buildings that are being built in the west of Berkeley, and the enthusiasm of the city for Berkeley's expanding its laboratory space in the Berkeley Innovation Zone, as we're calling it. So that there is, although the demand for office space is declining, the demand for laboratory space and for manufacturing prototype space is increasing. How interesting. If I could add to that, Dan, I couldn't agree more with the chancellor. In fact, that's probably a better answer than the one that I gave. Probably. Yeah, undoubtedly. I would always defer to my chancellor. But I think that there's sort of this rhetoric about the doom loop in San Francisco, that yes, there is a dearth of office space. That same notion doesn't really hold true in Silicon Valley. So yes, we are talking about bespoke facilities with unique assets that companies can bring to bear. That's what we're most interested in. But even an R&D facility needs some office space. So there will always be a balance. But one of the things that SKS partners has been really, really add in about and clear about is these buildings need to be flexible. Because first, we have an interest in space and space technology, and that is the flavor of the moment. But when you look at the real estate cycle in 12 years from now, and Rich Lyons has also communicated to us about this, in 20 years from now and 30 years from now, it might not be space technology that is the most needed. So when we think about building the Berkeley Space Center, we're really thinking about how can we make sure that these spaces are flexible and can adapt over time so they don't always remain a manufacturing site or an office complex or something like that. So we're being really, really careful about how do we think about this space and as we grow into it over time. Yeah, thanks for that. That's a great answer. And I wanted to add something. Alex, please. Thank you. Talking to our own community and trying to explain also what that means for us. There's really two form of recruitment tracks. There's the tenancy model and that's really what the way hold on. Hold on. Recruitment of who? So when we want to have companies join the Berkeley Space Center and become tenant, there is an intake model that we just spoke, and that's really Derek and his team will lead that. But starting today, there is also a second avenue that we are very actively pursuing, which is the creation of industry consortia to support the research that we want to conduct today on this campus and on that site. And that's very important because that's how you, all of you in the community at Berkeley can become involved today. There are many companies that you are probably interested to work with, companies that somehow have gravitated in your ecosystem and that do R&D activities aligned with your labs, with your groups. And so now is the time when we really is push and pull like many of them call us like Derek mentioned. The phone is ringing a lot these days, but we also will have a very concerted effort to do outreach in the coming month and in the coming years. I'll take one example. There's a lot of faculty involved in firefighting research. And in this very month, they are discussing with companies of how the buildings could support internal burning chambers to test fire at that new site. That's an example of something that is also going to lead to a lot of R&D funding. We're hoping that once and even before that facility is built at the Berkeley Space Center, if we continue the conversation, a lot of the adjacent activities leading to it will lead to academic research, funding PhD, funding students, funding labs. And this is where over the next couple of months, Derek, myself and many others will try to visit all the units on campus to see how we can engage all of you in shaping that campus together around the topics that you're interested and you see as fertile grounds for your research at the Berkeley Space Center. Got it. Let me follow up on this for people who are interested and clearly this is kind of a table setter as we begin this process of engaging with the campus and getting ideas and explaining the details. There have already been a couple of questions or comments that came in, people who are interested in working there and somebody who says they're a space physicist and they want to help facilitate the development. How do people who want to get involved, get involved now in this project? Absolutely. Thank you, Dan. So both for internal and external people who are listening to us now, we have an inquiry form. If you go to the website and what's the website? Hold on. Do you know? So we have spacecenter.berkeley.edu which is spacecenter.berkeley.edu. Okay, go on. Yeah, perfect. And then you will see an intake form there and you can disclose everything needed, whether you're external and industry and represent this company or whether your faculty X working in this lab are interested to do ABC. And then all of these inquiries are sorted according to the themes and then we try to get back to people as fast as we can, given their high level of inquiries. But this is a database we're building so that over the next 12 to 18 months, we have a very concerted effort to really architect the way we're going to build that research ecosystem altogether based on the interest of people. Super. Derek, were you going to say something? Yeah, no, I agree with everything that Alex has said. I would also say that, you know, we're actively seeking cosponsorships. So if you have a program or an event on campus or you want to run an event or workshop or series of workshops, just by way of example, in Silicon Valley, we want to actively work with you to find those early places where we can incubate those programs and then grow obviously into the Berkeley Space Center. So don't be afraid to reach out. I want to mention another key fact, which blew me away, which was at the public launch, which admittedly was during a very difficult time and continues to be a very difficult time right now in our culture. We received 150 million impressions through social media, through earned media, through TV, print, online sources. That should tell us something. That tells us that what we're doing here has some traction and has just unborn opportunity. It's just incredible to think about. But we also want to make sure that we continue to use that, the power of that information output by taking existing programs and services that we have, partnering it with the Berkeley Space Center, and then moving it out into social media using those impressions that we received. So I think there's a real opportunity to not only showcase what's happening at Berkeley Space Center, but showcase everything that's happening on campus today. And if I may build that super briefly. Yes, we don't have a built facility at this time. It will take a few years. But we are already running a lot of programs there. I mean, really a nice way for me to acknowledge CDSS and Haas who run that very first event on AI. But if you are from the Berkeley community, if you're interested in running events there, getting engaged even before we have buildings, it's possible. And the enthusiasm of NASA to support that is enormous. So we will love to do it with you. A couple of detailed sort of questions follow up before we go to closing thoughts. Alex, somebody asked, are there plans to include Berkeley Extension classes slash students in the Berkeley Space Center at this point? Is that anything we've given thought to? Absolutely. And we are, go ahead, Chancellor. I was going to say the same thing as you. Absolutely. It gives us access to another audience of Extension students without the 45 minute or four day drive up to the Bay Area. And in fact, it was actually one of our first early proof points that this could be a potential site was through Extension. It was the former Dean of the Extension School, Diana Wu, who enthusiastically supported, you know, moving into this effort. And now we've obviously been having conversations with our new Dean in that area, Rick Rousseau, about potential education opportunities in Silicon Valley as well. So, Derek, let me stay with you for just the last round of questions, some closing thoughts. So if all goes according to plan, what are we going to be saying and thinking about the Berkeley Space Center 10 years from now? Wow, it's hard. It's hard to get my head around what happened in 10 years from now when I'm just so excited about what just happened a month ago. But I think that one thing that we always think about is the possibilities that we don't even know are out there. And 10 years from now, I can imagine a significant discovery or a company that was incubated or accelerated through a program at Berkeley Space Center that really truly changes the world. We think about extraterrestrial, you know, ambition and advancement and discovery. But really, it's always those outer space ideas that really have benefited our own planet. And we're looking to heal the world, right? So I think that I couldn't even possibly dream of what the possibilities are. But I know and hope that in 10 years from now, I'm going to reflect back on today's days like today and days like the public launch and say, I'm really glad we did that. I'm really glad we really pushed this through. I'm really glad that, you know, the whole host of people that started attaching themselves to this opportunity and really believed in it and supported it and voted on it and approved it. We'll think back and say with gratitude that we did something right. Yeah. Beautiful. Alex, I have to say ever since the very first day I talked with you about this project, probably a year or two ago, it's like you're just dripping with excitement. It came through today. Why are you so excited? I'm so excited because all the things I see happening today, Derek give the fantastic high level picture. I'll give a narrow one, but from the perspective I said, I see us retraining the workforce in so many disciplines in data science and AI and computing and robotics at that site. So I see a new generation of engineers and scientists and Berkeley-trained students emerge. I see discoveries happening with these co-locations of these labs, things that we couldn't do in isolation, that the private sector couldn't do in isolation, and maybe we couldn't do together without the maybe involvement of NASA. And I see also companies coming out of that ecosystem, creation of jobs and connecting to the local communities, which NASA is already doing so well. So from my perspective, the reason why I'm so excited is that we're really inventing an academic ecosystem that doesn't exist today and that's what really excites me in the morning. Yeah. So Carol, I really only have one question for you and just between us. Did it add a little icing on the cake that we're moving into Stanford's backyard? It certainly does, especially on big game weekend. I think there's only one thing left to say. I think that would be Go Bears, right? Always Go Bears. I want to thank you guys so much for your time today. The excitement is palpable. It's just a thrilling project. The Space Center website is there. For those of you who have additional questions and we look forward to tracking this project as it grows into something significant. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.