Giving Thanks to Space, Students, & the Importance of Inspiring the Next Generation of Innovators
Happy Thanksgiving! I can’t think of a better way to spend my Thanksgiving morning than responding to my Twitter family and discovering wonderful projects that will not only move us forward in our journey into space exploration but inspire young people to realize these are really cool careers and there has never been a bigger opportunity for anyone interested in anything space related to have a chance to be part of the next exploration frontier.
Check out this fantastic group of students from Canada, @SpaceConcordia, and the work they are doing. They won the Canadian Satellite Space Design Challenge in 2012 and they are now working on a satellite that can heal itself if it is damaged in space for the competition this year. These are the kinds of innovations that will be needed as we begin to plan for human exploration into space whether it is low Earth orbit, in our Solar System, or beyond. Materials science is an area of STEM that I have begun to do work in with my educational outreach and while designing, building, and prototyping robots, moonbuggys, race cars, and rockets is always fun, the materials they are made out of are key to these mechanical creations be successful.
They have three days to go on their Kickstarter campaign. I’ve made a contribution because I believe that it will take all of us who work in STEM education outreach, the space industry on all continents, and the forward thinkers who never believe in the word can’t but find a way to be able to prove they can. I’ve been blessed over the years to have some wonderful people, government agencies, corporations, and non-profits support my dreams in working with students in urban communities to realize they can dream big and the sky is no longer the limit.