The Balkans Join the Space Conversation.

When we in the space industry talk about making space accessible for all, there are a lot of platitudes thrown around. Spaces for everybody, we often say, and it is true. But it's also not hard to notice that not everybody is in space. There are a lot of voices, a lot of people, a lot of nations that are missing from the space conversation. And our guest today is from a region that's often misunderstood and blind, and also left out of the space conversation entirely. And she is working very hard to change that. Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmazes. Today I'll be speaking with analog astronaut Martina Dimosca. Martina was included in AI Devilay's Diverse Dozen during this year's Ascend conference. And she talked to me about representing her home nation of North Macedonia and the Balkan region in general on the global stage. I come from a small town called Kichevo in a country in the Balkan region, Macedonia. So the Balkans doesn't really have a space agency per se. We don't have space industries. We have few small bodies here and there that do some activities that are just emerging right now. So growing up, I've always been fascinated with space. I wanted to have a space career, but the opportunities were scarce. I went to pursue a bachelor's of material engineering and nanotechnology at the faculty of technology and metallurgy. And then after my bachelor's, I was looking for opportunities abroad. The Balkan perspective, when you want to work for ESA or NASA or even the private space sector is not ideal. As we're not a part of the EU, we're not a part of ESA. We are having so many ITER regulations when you want to work for a government or even a space company. They don't usually go international because it's in a way a national question of who works for space exploration because of security and many other similar reasons. So it's not an easy path. It's a roller coaster of a lot of scarce opportunities that you have to grab and adapt and just shift your life and go to different countries so you can have your closeness to the sector. So it's definitely not a straight line. You could not wake up one day and be like, "Okay, I want to be an astronaut, so this is the path I'm going to go to." Or "I want to be in the space sector and be an aerospace engineer, so this is the path where I'm going to go to." We don't have those space educational capabilities or even the opportunities in the region. Yeah, and culturally too. Tell me a little bit about being interested in space where maybe it's not so much part of the cultural DNA. What is that like? So it is really scarce and people do look at you like you are crazy. So you talk about this space career or the space niches. When you ever mention space in the Balkans, they usually think about astronomy. So looking through the sky with a telescope or something similar, we don't even have an observatory in our country that's functional. So it's either observing celestial bodies and you get questions for that, but they don't really understand the scope of the space sector or the space ecosystem or how it is developing. It is really far out of reach in our mind. So nobody really pursues that. But also it is a laughing stock when you mention space exploration. We had a really interesting case where Montenegro is launching their first satellite, the country of Montenegro. So they got the money from the prime minister and it was almost an anti-campaign. People were asking, "So why do we need this? We'll never reach it." It was a laughing stock in the Balkans for having such a pivotal moment to progress towards novel technologies and connecting your region to space. So even from my experiences when I say, "Oh, I aspire to become an astronaut," or just culturally as a cultural norm, the Balkans is a bit more traditional. Being a young girl with a lot of interesting hobbies, they cannot really picture you as a serious scientist that can actually aspire to that career because I love, for example, makeup and girly things and cosplay and photography. So it's not a traditional serious scientist that's... It's not that path. I express my creativity more of a millennial like we all are. So there's not a lot of place for the Gen Z and millennial and Gen Alpha dreams in a way. Yeah. No, I told you, my family is Northern Greece and I was visiting them last summer. I was a lot of like, "What are you talking about? What? This skepticism, deep skepticism of like, "What on earth?" That's not... Get real, get serious. Nobody... That's not a real ambition. So I've encountered that in my own family of people not taking it seriously, which is just a very culturally ingrained thing, which is just a shame because there are extraordinarily smart people in the Balkans, a lot of engineering know-how, like a lot of science and engineering know-how. And then where does one go from there? Yeah. And I've actually witnessed that and people who actually come from abroad and live in the Balkans, they find more intricate challenges into the day-to-day activities because of so many instability and uncertainty. I do get some aspects of that, but then again, our IT industry is booming. We do have a really elaborate IT sector there because of our really capable engineers and chief workforce. So one of the things I talk in my Ascent Op-Ed is how to make the space sector sustainable, but make it accessible for all through new coming actors. So imagine if our IT industry is booming like that, if we can connect space exploration as a niche to that, it could become really profitable and just have a certain spin-off and combine both the techs and the space sector into a novel industry that can benefit a region. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many use cases for how that could make so much sense. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned something really fascinating, especially given many countries in the Balkans not part of the EU, so they are locked out of ESA in that way. And then you have ITAR restrictions. So I mean, is the path really you have to go, like a lot of people just go, "I'm going to go to the United States." Sometimes that can be the easiest path. Is that the only path? I mean, what are your thoughts on that? No, it's not the only path. Education-wise, I went to Kent State and I was a part of the aerospace campus. Then I went to do the commercial space studies program at Florida Tech with Andrew Aldrin, the son of Buzz Aldrin as my professor. I even got a scholarship as the first Balkan woman through the Aldrin Family Foundation, as I've been told. And then I went to the Masters of Space Studies at the International Space University, which is located in Strasbourg, France. So my space education is quite elaborative and quite diverse when it comes to living in different countries and studying and working and doing research, right? So yeah, it's not the only path. However, I will say that it's the best commercial path. You do have many opportunities in the US when it comes to familiarity of the language. Usually, Balkan people do learn a lot of English, then familiarity with the culture because the US media is really prevalent internationally. Like everybody knows the Oscars and whatnot. And just the space sector commercially has a lot of success and it's really accessible. So when you want to do, for example, human spaceflight, it's a logical place to belong into a space-bearing country that's really evolving in such manner. Because arguably, I'm not sure if we'll ever have a space agency and then have astronauts or something interesting like that in the Balkans unless it's a really big pull from a government if you want to do it through the government and through funding a space agency on our own. That's a long process. But if you want to collect your experience to a sector, it has to be like that. But it's still hard. Again, you cannot just wake up and be like, "Oh, I did this interview in this great IT company like Google. I've passed all of the processes and now they're going to give me a work visa." The space sector is not like that. You're usually automatically excluded from the interviews if you're a foreign national. So you cannot even apply because of those barriers set in place. And it's not a global movement yet. Yeah. It strikes me as you tell me all these things. I hear so much when I interview people for this show about how there is a huge talent shortage and how many people like yourself are not being easily included in this search for talent because I think there's a systemic barriers keeping folks in the Balkans and many other regions out, even though they have the expertise and the excellence there. What would you say to companies that are actively trying to address their workforce shortages? How can they better partner with smart people like yourself who are living in countries where maybe people don't often think to look? Yeah. So there are so many pathways that they can actually take. I really know a great director of a space agency. He was a director of a space center and he did not really care about where you're coming from. He had a legal team and he actually took the extra typing, the extra work to make it happen. And he was hiring people based on interest, passion, perseverance, and qualifications. So if you were to came to him in his reign and era, after you passed all the interviews, he was going to go to the legal team and say, "I don't care how, make it happen, this person needs to work here." So there were those situations set in place and they have left that research actor with a lot of legacy from what I've heard from people working there and from the past activities that they had and how things were conveyed. That made the center really diverse and really innovative in solutions because they were diverse teams problem solving and those teams really take different perspectives into one and create amazing solutions. So I would say if you are in power or if you can actually either hire or give opportunities to take the extra work and set those strategies in place to either offer real remote work or somehow separate the ITAR sensitive parts versus the more general parts that can give somebody the qualifications to easily move and actually do some work. Because when I hear space professionals and international even being there and having all the authorizations after a long, strenuous and expensive procedure of coming and living and working to the US, they still are unable to access vital parts. It still limits their career. So we do need some kind of a reform that's going to target space professionals and fill out that shortage with diversity and people that are internationally renowned and can come easily there. So we just need to find a viable framework in my mind that's going to solve these solutions. But it has been done before. It's just there needs to be a will and understanding. We'll be right back after this quick break. Well certainly with the workforce shortage that everyone keeps talking about, I think that I hope people hear you because certainly the need is great and the reforms are definitely needed. I think that's very well said. It strikes me as I'm speaking to you. I jumped sort of into the one part of the interview I wanted to get to, but I skipped over some other stuff and I feel like I need to go back a little bit because you talked about your fascinating journey, all of the education that you've had. You have already done amazing things. You're an analog astronaut. We didn't even mention that. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yes. Well, I don't know. I think that's a part of the people. Don't really brag. It's a part of our culture. People are reserved. It's not a thing. So you have to take it out of me. I'm pulling out of you. Aside of all of the educational and research capabilities I've shown in the past, I am actually an analog astronaut, the first female Balkan analog astronaut. There's somebody from Greece who was a male analog astronaut that I've connected with him before, but I'm the first female Balkan analog astronaut and the first in Macedonia and many other countries, a central Greece. So I did serve as a commander on the Lunaris-Seline mission. We've served on ESA's funded July startup and astronaut interplanetary agency APISIS mission together with Aleslo Boda, the ESA astronaut reserve. We've also been a part of the NASA-supported UND ILMA with my crew. So I have so many missions behind me and I'm also a senior NASA ambassador with suborbital space flight certification. So I had so much training, like I don't know, a certified non-escooba diving certificate for my year-long diving in Germany in freezing temperatures and in lakes, but also a lot of like credentials and passing pre-eliminary tests, pre-eliminary education until I came to this mission. So yeah, that's just one notch under my belt for more experience in the sector. I tried to work as much as I can to, again, grasp every opportunity. So these missions span from the US to Spain to Poland. It's the bulk of life of trying to belong. I get it. I'm very fascinated by analog astronaut missions. I think what you all do is not giving enough praise and attention, quite honestly. I'm not just saying this because you're my guest. I've spoken to other analog astronauts and I think it is just really, really cool work and it's very important work and it gets overlooked. So could you tell me a bit about what your mission was like, what you did as an analog astronaut? Yeah, so every mission is different. So for example, in UND Ilma, we had a different habitat than we had in Abbasis and otherwise. So we were in a cave in Spain. We were really isolated. It was really secluded and cut off from everybody that's not a researcher/analog astronaut. In Poland, we had a World War II bunker now actually remodeled into a space habitat. So it's really different from habitats to experiments with some of the experiments that were a part of. They were launched on the ISS and were the baseline, for example. So think about our missions as this really structured life where every hour is calculated for you and you have a bunch of research to do that's really important for the space agencies involved, for the organizations and universities involved, and for the researchers and the PhDs. So you're not only this test subject that has to have a really strict schedule where we have to do a lot of work, but you also contribute to other lives and impact their careers. But your mission is there to test things before flying them to space. So if you have any particular interest of which one you'd want me to tell you more about, it's really interesting. Everyone is unique, but there's also underlying things that are quite similar to each other as well. Okay, so tell me about, yeah, I've got several to choose from. Tell me about the time you were in a cave. Let's start with that one. I'm fascinated by that. Yes, so when we were with Astroland and Gelais, we were in a cave in Katambria. Hopefully, I'm not butchering that. We were in this habitat that was looking like the Mickey Mouse from above. So you had the dome and that two years that were our sleeping quarters. And we did a lot of research from flying our drone and inspecting the cave and the microbiome because they have a really, really interesting microbiome that's growing on the walls. And it's really interesting to actually look at what it is, observe it and just do some science with it and gather some of the samples. But we did so much, obviously, physiological research, so much cognitive research. We've donated so many things like your usual, your blood, your samples of your skin and how bacteria develop. We've tried to do UV long trees. So we had a lot of aspects there. But we had a quite interesting crew. We were a diverse crew, three women and three men. And it was quite a challenge because we were really deprived of so many things. We were deprived from sunlight. We only ate freeze-dried food. And on some days, we only ate emergency bars. We had a limited quantity of water. We did not shower. It was quite a robust mission and quite challenging for me because you're there with a real astronaut and you're learning a lot from them. But the bar is really high. The fidelity of the mission is really high. But the team was quite amazing in a way that they took care of everyone in their own way. It was quite an amazing mission and it was quite transformative to me personally. And I did grew a lot. I seen in that mission what a good team is. What it means to actually be a part of a team who will be there for you. Like, I've learned how to make my voice heard. I've learned how to learn from the best. It was quite a comprehensive mission. Wow, that sounds incredible. How long were you doing that specific mission for? Was it a few days, a few weeks? How long was that? Yeah, it was a few days. But we had also pre-flight and post-flight. But it was amazing. With that training, we did learn how to climb for the first time. I mean, I did. People were experienced climbers before, but it was my first time learning how to climb. It was a lot of fun activities that we have to learn before and post-mission. That was quite amazing. Wow, oh my goodness. When I look at your resume, your bio of all the things you've accomplished already and that you are also still, you're finalizing your masters right now. Is that correct? Am I getting that right? Yeah, the International Space University. I am trying to find my internship to finish. So I finished all of the modules successfully. I did my research. It's just, again, trying to find that internship that's not going to be exploitative, meaning it's going to pay for you to be there. And pay for you doesn't mean $150 per month. It means somewhere you can actually go and live and not dab into your savings. It has to be a living wage. So many of our internships are quite exploitative in the space sector and meant for just dealing with the elite because they're not paying you. So when you're coming from nothing, you cannot just sustain yourself living abroad in a really expensive country without exhausting everything you have or just financing yourself. It has to be a really well-compensated internship somewhere, but where I can also legally belong. Those two things are really hard to find. So that's what's stopping me to graduate. I have to both find an internship that pays me and an internship where I can legally work as somebody coming from Macedonia. So it's a lot to take in. Well, we're putting out the call with you to folks who are listening. Martina will have her information in the show notes because I think it's very important that you call out those things specifically because you're right. Those are incredible barriers that are very unfair in the space industry and they really are excluding a lot of extraordinarily talented folks like yourself. These are the kinds of things explicitly that need to stop happening in order for the industry to grow in the way that we know that it needs to grow. So thank you for calling that out because it needs to be said. When you complete that internship, wherever it may be, do you know what you want to do afterwards? Is there a long-term path that you'd like to follow? So several things. First and foremost, I'm a social entrepreneur. I've actually found the International Space Alliance. It's an NGO that's there to make access for space exploration available for underrepresented regions and underprivileged communities. So that's because of necessity. I had to make something established like that to help everybody in need. So it's also existing both in the Balkans but in California too so we can apply to separate grants and actually make some movement and be present worldwide. I do want to develop International Space Alliance to the point where we can actually have serious space involvement in the Balkans. We've been doing so much through it. We've been everywhere from the US to Europe to Latin America to India to Africa to the Balkans with so many initiatives behind us and partnerships. But it's there to make people aware of their potential and find them a niche towards space and just develop those regions that might need some push but also hopefully to fly a lot of people commercially into the space sector. That's a separate niche that will need some time to actually be developed. But why not? I do believe in commercial space. I'm a fan of new space and I hope we do that and make it happen. But aside of that, I am pushing the Balkan region to actually even governmentally fund the space agency or just a space body like that. So we're active on all fronts across countries with so many partnership organizations. So those two and then obviously my path towards a decision where I'm going to live. Is it going to be France? Is it going to be the US for now? The commercial space sector in the US is thriving and I am biased so I'm going to end there. I have a profound love for France actually. I live there. It's really beautiful but I think my belonging is going to be in the US in the future hopefully. So fingers crossed. Fingers crossed for you. I think the United States would be very blessed to have someone like you with us. So as an American, I'm very biased. I would love for you to join us here. But France would also be extraordinarily lucky. Martina, I've really enjoyed speaking with you not just because I'm a Balkan heritage person but also because you are a truly extraordinary person who is doing incredible things and you are also working really hard to elevate the community that you are a part of which I think is so important. So thank you for shining a light on that. I want to make sure I give you the opportunity to say anything we didn't mention. If there's anything else you wanted to talk about, please go right ahead. Thank you so much Maria for having me. Honestly, my work is so extensive both in hours but also in so many projects. I would just encourage everyone to offer a helping hand because many people don't realize that it's a really small act for them to go through search and bureaucracy or figure out some processes if they're hiring international talent. Yet through that they're impacting the life of that person. They're changing their life but not only their life but the lives of so many in the community who can see themselves within this really diverse person that they're hiring and they can actually do so many innovations or just believe in themselves more because so many dreams are not as elaborate when you're coming from less. So you're doing that but you're also, you're utilizing your efforts in your legacy to be international and potentially change the entire scope of the future of humanity. So it's so many small acts but you're truly making these diverse leaders come to life and change their community. So I really want to just encourage anyone to hire more international talent and go through all of the loopholes. And yeah, just thank you so much for this lovely conversation. I can now wait to hop on the podcast again in some years from now and just track progress and talk more about this both for our Balkan heritage that you understand and also just catch up. You're lovely. That's it for T-Minus Deep Space brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. T-Minus Deep Space is produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpey is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmaus. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]