 Major news in the space exploration field this week, SpaceX is planning to deployment on a quarterly basis of several cargoes of satellites going up into space. And there's one institution, which happens to be a historically black one, which is concerned about this effort. James Russell, endowed professor in Hampton University's Department of Atmospheric Sciences is here to join us this evening to talk about SpaceX's program and what implications it could create for Hampton's satellite mission. And it's teaching and training at the Institute. So Dr. Russell, it's a pleasure to have you on this evening. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Today, SpaceX launched this payload or their first payload of satellites going up for pay into the atmosphere, into orbit around the earth. You have concerns that if this keeps up at the pace that they are intending to keep it up, that Hampton satellite program could be in some serious trouble given the convergence of a lot of things going around orbit in space. Does that kind of capture it correctly? Well, it's almost right. Certainly I'm very concerned about it. We do have a responsibility for a number of satellites in orbit right now for, but the one that's most concerned with this launch is with the AEM satellite because AEM is a Hampton University mission. We're the only HBCU to have full lead responsibility for a major satellite mission. And the launch of the SpaceX rocket carrying these payloads was delayed today. So it'll be tomorrow morning at the same time, 9.24 Eastern time in the morning and be launched from Kate Kennedy. So my concern is really large that with this launch, not with downstream launches, but this very launch poses a real and present danger to the AEM spacecraft due to a potential collision. The Hampton mission specifically, I know one of its great acclaims is that it's a mission that helps to identify destructive weather patterns and it's helping folks in the United States to be able to foresee the way weather is forming and what kind of impact it can have. But are there other elements that are important too with Hampton's mission that concern the everyday person outside of weather or have larger implications for NASA at large? One of the main goal of the AEM satellite mission is to study something called noctilucid clouds. Noctilucid means the night shining. And these clouds occur 50 miles above the surface. They capture the public attention because if you ever hire latitudes where they form most of the time, you can't miss them and they capture your attention because they're very beautiful iridescent clouds that just shine and you just have to look at them. The reason they're important is because the things we think cause their formation are things that humans are doing that could affect the clouds themselves. They need three things, they need cold temperatures, they need water vapor and they need dust in order to form at these high altitudes 50 miles above the surface. So that's a whole thrust of AEM and in fact, what we have found in some of our early results after over some time now, we've been in orbit almost 14 years collecting data with AEM. And so one of the things that we have learned is that over the past about 30 years as we determined using AEM data and other satellite data, we have learned that the atmosphere at 50 miles above the surface is getting colder. And also there's more water vapor in the atmosphere. So that's the two ingredients that you need. And then the third ingredient is meteor dust coming into the atmosphere and we've proven that. So that's why AEM is such an interest to the public. It's great interest to Hampton University itself because it's wonderful for teaching, it's wonderful for basic science studies that we're all interested in. It's wonderful because we're working on a real problem that could affect the earth itself. You had a career at NASA, long-term career at NASA before you came to Hampton University. Have you ever seen, and I know that, I guess, privatized space missions and exploration and going up into space with private funding is relatively new, but did you ever think that you would see something like this or commercialization to the form of jeopardizing other missions, other publicly funded missions? No, that never crossed my mind or any of the people on my team's mind. In fact, I would say even NASA, up until in the last few years when the escapeability for launching large payloads that was multi-satellite payloads came into being. And so now what has happened is it is a real danger. It is a real major concern for us at Hampton University, especially, and we won't be the last one. This is something that's not gonna go away because they're planned to launch these satellites, groups of satellites, and this one is 143 satellites. They plan to do something like that on four-month intervals into the future, and that's just for SpaceX company itself. There are other companies too, for example, others would be wanting to launch those large payloads, but it's money in it, it's a profit. And so they're doing this for that reason. And they're doing it at, I think, the real jeopardy of science and also the collection of data that are very useful to mankind. What can be done about it? Because I know there's no governing body per se over space. So it's tough to make a claim like somebody stopped this, but is there something that the academic community can do? Is there something that everyday citizens can do to alert the government about the possibility of having a mission interrupted, particularly one that's so unique is the one led by Hampton? Yeah, well, of course, not only interrupted, but destroyed, that's my major concern. I think that it's a high likelihood. And I just say that because when you put that many satellites into the same orbit as say the AEM satellite, if you're asking for trouble and it's a real concern and there's especially a concern because no one has been able to give me a defensible probability of collision. So they don't know what the probability is of a collision right now. And I wanna mention one other thing about this, that not only affects AEM, but it can affect all many other satellites as well. If for example, if one of these satellites is gonna be launched tomorrow morning, 9.24 Eastern time from Cape Kennedy in Florida. If one of these satellites collides with AEM, it will cause a breakup of the AEM satellite. Those pieces then will fly out into orbit in the same orbit and collide with other satellites and the process will continue and you will end up with a trash dump, basically, of debris. And I'm not sure that people have really thought this through from that aspect, but I think it's a real possibility and I'm very concerned about it. I think that the SpaceX Corporation executives who have a very definite money motive, I think they also would be responsible, but there was no reach out to me in particular to discuss what it would do to this mission. And it's the same orbit, so it's just a real concern. But doesn't it stand to reason that SpaceX wouldn't want their stuff destroyed either? Why does it not matter to them? That's a question I don't know. I have tried to connect with the project manager for this transporter one mission unsuccessfully. So I'm not sure why they haven't addressed that point or are concerned about that point, but it's real. Again, I'm assuming that not just advocates of Hampton University, but of HBCUs at large, would take particular interest in this. What is it that we can do to try to appeal maybe to SpaceX folks or maybe to NASA or some other authority to say this is a dangerous thing? And let's assume that the Hampton, the A-mission gets destroyed. If the satellite gets destroyed, does that mean that all the work, all the money, all the years, all of your work is just gone? Is that what that means? That's exactly what that means. And I'll tell you something else about that point that you raised, which is a very good point. We started promoting AIM 10 years before we finally got it into orbit. It's a long process. When we proposed, there were 44 proposals. Two were selected for flight and then only one made it and that was AIM. And then that list of proposals that were selected for the top eight for consideration included the organizations like our universities like Stanford University, MIT, whose amp was included in that, St. Louis University was major universities in the country. So it is for us to have gone this far and collected this almost 14 years now of beautiful data. And we've had some very important science results that are 350 papers in the literature now that have been produced as a result of AIM. And then there are more. It would be a tragic loss to lose this mission after coming this far and knowing what it takes to get there. You can't just propose a mission tomorrow and expect for it to be launched even a year from that time. It just takes a long time. So yeah, it's a real, it would be a major loss. So I'm sorry, but you wonder whether the question was a very important one. What can other HBCUs do? At this point, unfortunately, it's so little time left. I mean, unless there's another weather problem, then it goes, it'll be lost tomorrow morning at 9.24 Eastern time and from the cake, but presidents of university's contact. Contact of HBCUs, have presidents contact SpaceX, let them know if they're concerned. That would certainly be a help. I mean, the only thing that's gonna change you now is pressure because what's driving us is a profit motive and they feel like that they'll be able to launch these satellites and theirs will be okay. You asked that point earlier about why wouldn't they be concerned too? Part of the reason is, about half of their satellites they're launching have fuel on board the satellite to control its orbit. So they can move it up and down a little bit in order to avoid collisions, but AIM doesn't have that. And also the other half of the satellites they're launching did not have that kind of control. So that's the ones that I'm concerned about that would impact AIM.