The video is a compelling journey of the speaker's childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, transforming into a pioneering role at the forefront of new space exploration avenues. She shares her excitement of witnessing the world from space, particularly through initiatives such as the orbital reef space station program, and talks about how commercial endeavors are expanding access to space, integrating more nations and industries.

The speaker reflects on the value of embracing different perspectives and innovative technology developments gained from space exploration. Examples include collaborations that have advanced techniques in medicine and fluid physics, making strides for both space missions and applications on Earth. Programs encouraging youth involvement in space research are emphasized, capturing the excitement of future generations in pioneering space endeavors.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. audrey powers [ˈɔːdri ˈpaʊərz] - (n.) - A name mentioned, likely referring to a colleague involved in space missions. - Synonyms: (individual, person)

And when I saw this picture of my colleague, this is audrey powers flying on our new Shepard rocket, it really sort of reminded me of that time, except for one thing was always different.

2. zero g [ˈziːroʊ dʒiː] - (n.) - A term used to describe a zero gravity condition, often experienced in space or simulated environments. - Synonyms: (microgravity, weightlessness)

Years later, I had a chance to take a group of my students at MIT on a zero g airplane ride.

3. microgravity [ˌmaɪkroʊˈɡrævɪti] - (n.) - A condition of experiencing very low gravity, akin to being weightless, often found in space environments. - Synonyms: (weightlessness, zero gravity)

And it alternates between coming up over the top of the hill and free fall in microgravity and going down and being pushed into your seat with about two times your body weight.

4. physiology [ˌfɪziˈɑːlədʒi] - (n.) - The branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts. - Synonyms: (biology, anatomy)

We were there to do research to study the impact of gravity changes on physiology and fluid physics on technology.

5. ariel silks [ˈɛəriəl sɪlks] - (n.) - A performance art in which artists perform aerial acrobatics while hanging from a special fabric. - Synonyms: (aerial dance, fabric trapeze)

So I joined the circus. Not exactly, but I did take up a practice as a very, very amateur. ariel silks artist.

6. orbital reef [ˈɔːrbɪtəl riːf] - (n.) - A space station concept, mentioned in the context of representing a commercial presence in space. - Synonyms: (space station, orbital platform)

Today I dream a little bit bigger. As the head of sales and strategy for the orbital reef space station program, I get to really think about what happens as we come into this new era in low Earth orbit.

7. silicon wafers [ˈsɪlɪkən ˈweɪfərz] - (n.) - Thin slices of semiconductor material, such as silicon, used in electronics for the fabrication of integrated circuits. - Synonyms: (semiconductor slabs, electronic substrates)

One is silicon wafers

8. reusable [riːˈjuːzəbl] - (adj.) - Able to be used again or more than once. - Synonyms: (recyclable, renewable)

The rocket you see behind me is New Shepard. It was the first fully reusable space system to go to space, come back, be sent back to space again.

9. karman line [ˈkɑːrmən laɪn] - (n.) - An internationally recognized boundary of space set at 100 kilometers above Earth's sea level. - Synonyms: (space boundary, space limit)

Since that time, we have flown almost 10% of all the women who have ever gone over the karman line into space on our new Shepard rocket.

10. overview effect [ˈoʊvərˌvjuː ɪˈfɛkt] - (n.) - A cognitive shift in awareness reported by astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from space. - Synonyms: (space enlightenment, cosmic perspective)

And for decades, astronauts have been reporting what we now call the overview effect.

How space helps us approach problems differently - Erika Wagner - TEDxISU

When I was a girl, I used to dream about being an astronaut. And I would have this recurring daydream about being in the mid deck of the space shuttle, looking out the windows at the earth. And I remember thinking about how amazing it would be to see the black of space and the blues and the greens and the whites of our planet have my hair floating crazily. And when I saw this picture of my colleague, this is audrey powers flying on our new Shepard rocket, it really sort of reminded me of that time, except for one thing was always different, because in my daydreams, I was always upside down. And it sort of struck me that when I thought about how we came to experience space, it wasn't supposed to be the way that we experience Earth. Space was a place for us to experience new ways of seeing and new ways of being.

Years later, I had a chance to take a group of my students at MIT on a zero g airplane ride. So for those who haven't been on a parabolic flight before, this is a 727 flying in a giant roller coaster in the sky. And it alternates between coming up over the top of the hill and free fall in microgravity and going down and being pushed into your seat with about two times your body weight. We were there to do research to study the impact of gravity changes on physiology and fluid physics on technology. And truth be told, I was also there because I really wanted to dance on the ceiling. And that's where the photographer caught me for this photo. What I found really natural about being in microgravity was floating. And that sort of surprised me, actually, that this idea that we would suddenly become unbearably light and just sort of float up off the floor. What didn't make sense to my brain, what my brain totally rejected in ways that surprised me, was being upside down. That when I was upside down, I had trouble telling the difference between the ceiling and the floor. I would look at my students, who I knew very well, and I couldn't tell if they were smiling or frowning. And it struck me that if I were ever going to get a chance to go to space and I wanted to be fully present in the work I was doing and the experiences I was having, I was going to need more practice.

So I joined the circus. Not exactly, but I did take up a practice as a very, very amateur. ariel silks artist. And when I'm in this practice, it's given me a chance to practice ways of seeing and new ways of being. Being upside down, understanding my body, understanding the world around me, gaining perspective. When I was envisioning being an astronaut as a young girl, I was envisioning being in that mid deck of the space shuttle, looking through these little tiny windows. Today I dream a little bit bigger. As the head of sales and strategy for the orbital reef space station program, I get to really think about what happens as we come into this new era in low Earth orbit, where we're not just nation states building and owning and operating space platforms, but it's actually this new advent where commercial entities are coming and taking over the mantle, opening up space to new users, new use cases.

When we think about new ways of seeing these windows, we call it the sky canopy of windows, are not just small portals, but they're actually sort of full body, immersive space experiences and getting to see, as we pass over our planet, 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every single day. The modules that link up along this backbone are all sorts of things. It's a modular design that allows us to grow as the markets grow and change, as markets are changing. And not just nations, and certainly not just the big nations with space agencies, but really increasingly a global presence in space. That's open to agriculture, it's open to hospitality, it's open to manufacturing, it's open to film and arthem and all the other things that make us human.

The orbital reef logo is evocative of coral reefs here on our own planet, and it's intentional. We envision, really, that this presence in low Earth orbit is what happens when many small things come together to be greater than the sum of their parts, that we get an ecosystem that is built out of these collaborations. What happens when you have an ecosystem? You get greater efficiencies, you get resources that are shared, you get communities that bump up into each other and create new ideas. And I think that's one of the things that I find really exciting about this new era that we're entering into now. My very first job in blue origin was working with our new shepherd payloads customers. These were researchers that were trying to understand the impact of gravity on the systems they were working in.

What you see here is an acrylic tank that was built by Professor Stephen Colicott at Purdue University. And Steven was interested in the era of how we start to refuel satellites on orbit. How do we take something and not let it become space junk, but have it be reusable? And as Stephen was working with the way that we measure and guide fluids in a system like this, you don't have the same dynamics as you do on the ground, heavy things don't sink, and light things don't float. So we had to use new insights, new ways of seeing to understand the fluid physics. As Stephen was doing this work, he bumped into another friend, Doctor Marsh Kuttineau, who was an emergency room physician in Virginia, who was thinking about a very different problem. Marsh was trying to figure out, how do you treat a collapsed lung in space? And it turns out that this is a fluids in air problem, just like refueling satellites.

So he and Stephen got to talking together and developed an experiment to develop a new medical device that would allow the collapsed lung to be treated without the presence of normal earth gravity. And this is useful for astronauts in space, but it turns out that it's also applicable on the ground, as you have someone who's in an environment where acceleration isn't constant. Where does that happen? It happens on helicopters that are medically evacuating patients. It happens on ships that are in high sea states. Insights that we gain, these ways of seeing and being in space are applicable to making life better here on Earth. But perhaps one of my favorite insights that happened from this research was a phone call that Stephen got from a local elementary school teacher whose eight year olds wanted to know if fireflies, lightning bugs, would glow in space.

In some ways, this is a very simple question, and a professor could have given a very straightforward answer. But rather than doing that, Professor Kalakat said, what if we found out together? And his students took the things that they had learned about the way that fluids behave in microgravity? They worked with the eight year olds, they built an experiment, and they found out, indeed, lightning bugs, fireflies, will have no problems communicating in microgravity. But even more important, they gave these eight year olds the gift of believing that space was part of their future, that they had designed something and flown it and gained new insights, new ways of seeing in the world at blue Origin.

We believe in a future where there are someday going to be millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We are thinking about the ways in which these new perspectives, these new tools, these new ways of seeing and being in space, connect us to each other and also to our home planet, to this blue origin that we call Earth. The next step beyond Earth for us is the moon. This is our mark two blue moon system that is being designed in conjunction with NASA for the Artemis missions. And when we think about going to the moon, we're thinking not about just flags and footprints, but going back to stay. And in order to do that, we need to learn how to live off the land.

We need to use the resources that we find when we get to the moon in order to make this more sustainable. Well, what resources are available on the moon? It turns out there's not a lot. But you do have sunshine, you do have rocks and dust, and you have water ice. Now, water ice is a talk for another day. It's going to be really exciting when we get to the point where we can harvest that, split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and empower the propulsion and the oxygen that we need to breathe in lunar settlements in the future.

But before we even get there, there's something much more fundamental that we can do. This is a solar cell that was made entirely of lunar regolith simulant. Now, it's a fancy way of saying rocks that have been ground up, they have composition that mirrors that, that we see on the lunar surface. And what we're able to do is we're able to take that simulant to melt it down and to create three really important things. One is silicon wafers. These capture the energy of the sun, photovoltaic cells. The second is aluminum, and we use that to make wires that transmit that energy. And the third is glass that we use to protect the systems.

So we're able to take just solar power and rocks and make solar panels that grow. And from those solar panels, we make more power and make more solar panels and make more power. And what we're able to do then is to do all the things that we'd like to do on the surface of the moon. And that is whether we're growing plants or building structures, communicating with Earth, we're able to build the foundations on which we'll be able to grow. And it turns out that just like the fluid physics work that Doctor Kolikov is doing, this isn't just relevant to the space environment. The same technology can be used here on Earth, because if you can make solar panels out of just rocks and solar energy, you suddenly get new sources of green energy. If you have systems that can process minerals, you get greener sources of the kinds of materials that we need for our own future on our planet, new ways of seeing, new ways of being, new perspectives brought from space back to our home planet.

The rocket you see behind me is New Shepard. It was the first fully reusable space system to go to space, come back, be sent back to space again. And for me, this was a really fun experience as a mom. I have two kids, and my youngest, when he was about eight years old, was in the Cub scouts. And one of the things our Cub scout troops do is they build small model rockets. And we went out to the park near our house with a group of kids. We put little safety glasses on them, and we did our countdown, and we launched all these rockets. And the kids went off chasing them in the field and then went off to go have a snack, except for my little guy, who came running back to his scoutmaster and said, I need another motor. And his scoutmaster looked at him and said, what do you mean, you already launched your rocket. He said, but rockets are reusable. You launch, you land, you repeat.

At eight years old, he had already internalized the things that he was seeing in the space marketplace, in the space ecosystem. He knew that the future that he was living in was different than the past that I had grown up in new ways of being. When we got to doing human space flights with the new Shepard system, the guy in the cowboy hat is Jeff Bezos. But the person I was really cheering for that day was the woman standing next to him. This is Wally funk. And at 82 years young, she became, that day the oldest person to have ever gone to space. But Wally's story is a great one, because in 1960, she was a young aviatrix. She is gathering time, flying a bunch of different aircraft. And the same time that the Mercury seven astronauts were being put on the COVID of Life magazine, she and twelve women were also selected. We call them today the Mercury 13. And they went through similar training and testing as the male astronauts, but never got a chance to fly. So after a career of testing airplanes, becoming the first female inspector for the FAA and the NTSB, Wally was given the chance to become the person who had waited the most on earth for a chance to go to space.

Since that time, we have flown almost 10% of all the women who have ever gone over the karman line into space on our new Shepard rocket, opening up the perspectives of girls and women around the world to who belongs in space and seeing themselves there? On our 25th mission of New Shepard, we got a chance to fly. Ed Dwight. In 1961, Ed was a test pilot and was selected by John F. Kennedy to be the nation's first black astronaut candidate. But given racism and politics in America, never got a chance to fly. He went from being a test pilot to a second career as a sculptor. And when he finally got a chance to fly, he came out that door smiling and sticking out his tongue, and he said, I had told myself I didn't need this anymore. I lied.

We have had a chance to fly the first national from Portugal, the first Egyptian astronaut, the first openly LGBTQ astronaut, the first parent and child, the first married couple. So many firsts that are not interesting only because they sit in a record book somewhere, but they're interesting because they become the representation that goes out into the world and inspires so many others. With each of our flights, we're also flying artwork that's made by kids all over the world. With our club for the Future program, kids are drawing their vision of the future, sending it to space, and having something that they envision, that they are part of this future. And at the end of the day, that's really what it's all about.

Because when we look out the window, what our astronauts are seeing is our home planet. And for decades, astronauts have been reporting what we now call the overview effect. This is a connection that they feel looking out the window. That is an awe and a transcendence, a connection not only to the people around them, but to the planet itself that changes the way that they see in the world and that changes their ways of being in the world. And I'm really proud to have been a part of this journey where we are opening up these doors wider and wider so that more people and more communities can feel themselves welcome in this journey of space. I hope someday that I get to go, but in the meantime, you'll find me practicing. Thank you so much.

Technology, Space Exploration, Inspiration, Innovation, Global, Leadership, Tedx Talks