The New Space Age Conference

Charles Swanson of PPPL and Mike Paluszek of Princeton Satellite Systems attended the MIT New Space Age Conference at MIT on March 11. It was held on the 7th floor of building E52 at MIT.

Building

Princeton Satellite Systems was a sponsor of the event. It was a great event! There were a number of interesting presentations including one on the history of the Iridium Program. Iridium was almost ready to deorbit the constellation when an investor cobbled together enough money to keep it flying and then found a new market in places without any cell phone service. They are now  launching Iridium-Next. After the disappearance of the Malaysian Flight 370, the airlines realized that they need to know the position of all planes in real-time. Iridium offered a hosted payload to do that and that payload is effectively funding the new satellites. The speaker showed us a image from their satellite showing the tracks of aircraft.

Professor Loeb gave an overview of the Starshot project to accelerate small sails to 20% of the speed of light. He discussed some of the challenges of the program. The speed was selected specifically so that the probes would reach Alpha-Centauri during the lifespan of the investigators.

Boeing gave a talk on composite structures. The speaker, Dr. Naveed Hussain, VP of Aeromechanics Technology, The Boeing Company, showed how established companies are innovating.

Spaceflight gave a talk on their launch services. We plan to work with them to launch our test satellites.

At lunch Charles and I sat with a group of students from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Princeton University. We were joined by Mark Jernigan, Associate Director, NASA/JSC Human Health and Performance Directorate. We talked with him about the challenges of human spaceflight to Mars.

Charles and I were on the propulsion panel. Charles gave a spectacular overview of the plasma physics of our nuclear fusion engine. I filled in the DFD system details. We had a few questions from the audience.

Our 2017 extern, Eric Hinterman, gave a great talk on the oxygen from carbon dioxide project that will be tested on Mars. It would produce the oxidizer for return missions thus saving money. My wife, Marilyn, took pictures of the panel.

IMG_3933
IMG_3932

At the reception we were the only sponsor with a table display.

Table

It was a great event! We look forward to attending next year!

 

This entry was posted in Aerospace and tagged by Michael Paluszek. Bookmark the permalink.

About Michael Paluszek

Michael Paluszek is President of Princeton Satellite Systems. He graduated from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering in 1976 and followed that with an Engineer's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1979. He worked at MIT for a year as a research engineer then worked at Draper Laboratory for 6 years on GN&C for human space missions. He worked at GE Astro Space from 1986 to 1992 on a variety of satellite projects including GPS IIR, Inmarsat 3 and Mars Observer. In 1992 he founded Princeton Satellite Systems.

1 thought on “The New Space Age Conference

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.