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>> Alice Carruth: Welcome to "T-Minus Deep Space" from N2K Networks. I'm Alice Carruth, producer of the "T-Minus Space Daily Podcast". "Deep Space" includes extended interviews and bonus content for a deeper look into some of the topics we cover on our daily program.
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On today's episode, we are joined by Dan Dumbacher, executive director of AIAA. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, better known as "AIAA", is well-recognized amongst the aerospace industry. I started off asking Dan to walk us through the vast areas that AIAA covers.
>> Dan Dumbacher: AIAA is the world's largest aerospace professional society, 30,000 members around the world. And our role is to help our members and all of their organizations be successful in the aerospace industry. And we do that by sharing the knowledge, convening all the people to work on problems together, and help celebrate and advocate for what the industry needs.
>> Alice Carruth: That's a really quite broad spectrum of what it is that you're doing at AIAA. And I absolutely love the fact that you really focus on education. Could you talk me through some of the things that you offer for students and education for people that work in the industry as well?
>> Dan Dumbacher: We do a whole myriad of things. We have competitions for students, we have high school memberships, we help the teachers with content, we have scholarship opportunities, and we competitions like Design/Build/Fly, where university teams come together to -- in a remote control aircraft competition, and we help support other activities, like rocket launch competitions, all to help the students learn at the high school, university level so that they become the professionals that we need for the future.
>> Alice Carruth: Which is really important, as we know, for the entire aerospace industry, and certainly something that I know they're lacking in when it comes to recruiting new people and new blood coming through. Now, AIAA does an awful lot of events throughout the year. Can you talk us through some of the things coming up in the next few months and how people can perhaps get involved in those?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Well, the big one coming up in October is what we call "ASCEND", "Accelerating Space Commerce and Exploration and New Discovery". The idea here is to bring the entire space community together, the civil space community, the commercial space community, and the national security space communities, so that we can work on problems together, understand what everybody's needs are, help communicate out what's happening, and tie the technical research to -- with the economics and all of the business plans in this emerging commercial space business, and also with the policymaker so that we can continue to move forward what the industry needs to help build that Cislunar Space Ecosystem, and to help everyone be successful.
>> Alice Carruth: So you mentioned advocacy, and you were recently named as a member of the new committee set up by the FAA for commercial human space flight rulemaking. Can you talk me through what that committee is going to be looking at and what it is that you as the AIAA representative is going to bring to that committee?
>> Dan Dumbacher: That committee is looking at potential rulemaking around human spaceflight from a launch and reentry kind of perspective. It's just getting started. The idea is to do the research and to pull the community's inputs together to help decide or determine what's best for the industry moving forward. And you see a broad set of industry participants. The FAA is an observer, other government agencies are also observers. From an AIAA perspective, we're involved with this one and at least one other one like it on the aviation side, and we're there to help be that objective voice for all of industry that represents corporate, government, as well as academic -- the academia world.
>> Alice Carruth: So the rulemaking committee was really pulled in together because the learning period that was given to a lot of these commercial companies is looking to come to an end in October. But you're not a hundred percent sure what's going to be happening with it. What's your opinion about that learning period? Do we think that perhaps it needs to be extended, or do we think that we've perhaps learned a lot, particularly recently with all the cadence buildup with the new space flights happening right now?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Well, we've certainly learned a lot, and now the question becomes as you look forward and you're trying to figure out what needs to be done to help grow the economic engine, you've got to start figuring out if regulation is needed, if so what type, at what level, at what depth. And there are a lot of questions that have to answered. And this committee is going to be searching through and trying to address all that. If I give you a little bit of an analogy, Alice, it's one of the reasons that we have such a successful commercial air transportation system is because we've put the time and the effort to learn from our failures, we learn from all of the technical issues with airplanes through -- across all the decades, and then the regulation and the safety that we have engendered into commercial air travel has made it the safest transportation system known to humans. Space is in the early phases of that similar process, and so we're trying to take the lessons learned and figure out what the next steps need to be.
>> Alice Carruth: Now, you've had quite an impressive career starting off as a Purdue graduate, I believe, going on to NASA, then going back and working at Purdue before going to AIAA. What are your insights into how much this aerospace industry has grown in the last few years, in the last few decades?
>> Dan Dumbacher: It has grown a tremendous amount. If you look it, I think various numbers, over $500 billion in FY22 commercial business, a lot of that's commercial satellites. But you can see with what's happening with Blue Origin and SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic, and all of the growing emerging companies, you can see this opportunity for new markets, new products, the comparison I use with the students of today is when I got out of school, you only had the opportunity to work on Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope in a few missions; Spacelab, those kinds of things. Nowadays, we have gone from that situation to where there's the National Security Space that has grown tremendously, because of the needs there. It has commercial -- space companies are growing and they are developing those new markets, those new launch vehicles. And it's just a tremendous growth. The -- and you actually can see it in the numbers. The aerospace engineering programs, just the aerospace engineering programs around the country, are all growing tremendously. And it's because of the need and the interest.
>> Alice Carruth: Which is also really important, I'm assuming, for national security as well. And we're starting to look at space domain as a new area for us to really be concerned with. What are you finding out from AIAA about that focus on space as a new war domain?
>> Dan Dumbacher: We like to approach it from the defense perspective. Hopefully there is no war in that domain. We know that there are situations that need to be addressed, things like space debris, space traffic management, and we have a taskforce set up with that. And that becomes a big part of the ASCEND conversation that we'll have in October, like we talked about earlier. And if you want to build a Cislunar space economy, you have to figure out how to manage and coordinate all of the debris that's already in orbit so that people can be -- you can put their products where they want to put their products, and therefore, deliver the services that make the businesses viable. So we're working on all of that together. And we want to help continue to advocate for the peaceful use of outer space, and help build that economic engine all the way to the moon and eventually beyond, for the benefit of all humankind.
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>> We'll be right back after this quick break.
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>> Alice Carruth: So one of the areas we keep having come up in conversations on "T-Minus" is cybersecurity and space, and not being enough focused on that with commercial space customers. Has AIAA got any programs in place to help these new space startups figure out exactly what they need to be doing for cybersecurity protection up in their space assets?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Actually, we do. Several years ago, we started an effort of helping make people aware of what the cybersecurity needs so that it could be factored into the design and development operations process upfront. And you will see cybersecurity content across all of our AIAA events. ASCEND is the space event, Cytec, our research and development event, and AVIATION, our aeronautics event, all have elements of cybersecurity in there, because everything we do now with -- particularly with the autonomous systems must be able and capable of protecting itself from a cybersecurity perspective. So we saw the need several years ago. We have brought in new cybersecurity companies, we get them connected with the aerospace companies, and we bring together the people to get those conversations going so that they start working on the problem early.
>> Alice Carruth: So a real focus of AIAA seems to be networking. What kind of opportunities beyond your events do you offer to people that want to come and join AIAA as an organization?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Well, obviously, the events, that's a big one. But with our webinars, our online events, that's another part of it. We will also do smaller events around certain topics, like autonomy, or space traffic coordination, or cybersecurity even. We will have smaller events along the way so that people with their right interests and their right needs can all get together. And then there's also all of our publications, the different journals and the technical papers that come from the conferences is how we share the knowledge. And we purposely try to set up and look for ways to get those connections made. Our job at AIAA as much as anything is to share the knowledge and help build the connections. And we do that from across the technical professional community, as well as the policy and economics communities, so that it's all working together.
>> Alice Carruth: So obviously AIAA is America-based, but I'm assuming you do a lot of work globally. How have you found that interaction dealing with our global partners, and friends, and advocacies around the world?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Well, an important thing to remember, Alice, is these challenges we talk about for the future of the industry are not just country-centric. They involve the globe. And so -- and there are allies and there are adversaries. And we have to navigate through all of that. But I can't work on space traffic coordination, or Cislunar space economy, or autonomous aircraft without bringing together and connecting the international efforts into this as well, because it all has to work together. So a little under 20% of our membership is international. We are reaching out more and more to them. For example, I was just over at a European space conference this past month in Switzerland to help make them aware of what we were doing at AIAA and how they could get engaged, and we've gotten a lot of interest out of that. And we're looking for those opportunities to help connect those dots; because these are global problems and we need everybody working together.
>> Alice Carruth: And what are your insights into what you see as the priorities for an organization on AIAA as things grow in the next few years?
>> Dan Dumbacher: Our mission statement is to help our organizations and our professionals succeed, and so we have to stay abreast of what the industry needs are moving forward and get ahead of it, so that we can help channel the efforts where they need to be channeled and make sure our role is to help all of the industry. And so you see us working at a certain level. We will stay out of the company agendas and business plans. We are aware of them so that we can help the industry. They help define for us what needs to be accomplished. And our job is to bring all of the aerospace professionals and the adjacent markets, the adjacent technologies that can help solve the problems, bring all of that together. And we do this with ASCEND so that we can work on those tangible products, those tangible outcomes that the industry needs to be successful. And so that's going to be our focus. And to help -- and in doing that, we bring along the workforce of the future. We're addressing the problems and the space, the research and development and the aviation domains, and thereby helping the whole industry. So it's quite a job, quite a challenge, but it's our role, and we work hard at it.
>> Alice Carruth: And you do an incredible job as well. And I --
>> Dan Dumbacher: Oh, thank you.
>> Alice Carruth: Want to say a massive thank you to that.
>> Dan Dumbacher: Well, we'll just continue to make the emphasis. Everybody come join us at ASCEND in Las Vegas October 23rd through the 25th. We're expecting at least 2,000 people there, with speakers, and technical sessions, and all kinds of opportunities to network and to learn what the latest is going on from a company perspective, research perspective, and a government perspective. So we look forward to that. And then, after that, hey, join AIAA, join our taskforces and help us solve the problems that are needed to help make society's lives better, because that's what we want to do.
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>> Alice Carruth: That's all for "T-Minus Deep Space" for August the 12th, 2023. 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 of the rapidly changing space industry. This episode was mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tree Hester, with the original music and sound design by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Brandon Karpf. Our chief intelligence officer is Eric Tillman. And I'm Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening.
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