Reaching Out to Texas Teens

The National Space Society of North Texas (NSS-NT) has been doing a lot of great projects recently in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. We get to have fun, while investing in our space future by talking to the people in our communities about space. On Saturday June 4th, in my role as president of NSS-NT, I participated in a Hugh O'Brian Youth (HOBY) Leadership program at the University of North Texas (UNT). I was on a space frontiers panel with Don Garland, an astronomy professor at UNT. It was certainly a very interesting and exciting experience.

The audience was about 100-125 or so high school sophomores. They handled the basic logistics of the program once the speakers had been lined up, and our group of students decided on a basketball/wrestling style entry with screaming fans and cheerleaders and a "Let's get ready to..." emcee. We had been told that the topic was "New Frontiers in Space", but on the program it read "Space: An Expensive Adventure"

Mr. Garland gave a brief talk on 2004 MN and played the Paul Harvey radio piece which mentioned Rusty Schweickart's B-612 talk at the ISDC. Since I was at that ISDC talk I was able to add some additional flavor. We did make sure to keep the doomsday aspects to a minimum as we didn't want to scare them too much, though they did pay attention when he described objects that he personally had seen in the telescope passing between the Moon and the Earth. He then went on to talk about the Deep Impact mission climaxing on July 4th with an event that will be visible to everyone in North America with the right tools.

Then it was my turn to speak, and I decided to try an experiment. I asked the assembly who amongst them actually, pragmatically and realistically thought that they would have a real opportunity to go into space in their lifetime. About one and a half hands went up.

I then launched into a spiel which I only vaguely remember but one that touched on jobs that might include but are not limited to asteroid mining, building solar power satellites, solar power towers at the lunar poles, servicing GEO sats, inventing new materials, making anhydrous fiberglass, mining for LUNOX, cleaning toilets at Moonbase, and myriad other things.

I asked how many had cell phones (>95%), and noted the rare elements that go into their construction, and how we have to tear up our planet to get at them while they await us in abundance overhead, and also noted the billions of dollars in space assets that help support the telecommunications and broadcast infrastructure.

I asked how many had XM Satellite radio and a surprising number of hands went up. I noted their difficulties and why it's a problem that we can't get to our assets to fix them. I also touched on financial, insurance and international aspects and noted that if we here in the U.S. are not the ones going out there and doing this space thing then the rest of the world isn't going to wait.

At the end, before the Q&A, I asked how many of the audience thought they could see themselves doing one of those jobs in space, and roughly 25-33% of the hands went up.

Many of these kids clearly realized the importance of asteroids. They understood the benefit of tapping directly into a 4.5 billion year power supply with solar power satellites and Lunar power towers. They could see why it might be a better idea to stop tearing up our own planet and start tearing up space.

There were a number of them that were obviously future space leaders, primarily in science, mostly girls. I hardly touched on Mars and no one seemed to miss it. After a slow start there were a number of very good questions at the end, touching on things like nuclear power sources, lunar resources, ownership and the OST, HLLV vs. EELV, parallel universes, and all kinds of other wacky stuff.

It was a great way to invest an hour and a half. I always get a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside when I contribute to something like a youth leadership camp, plus a cool t-shirt and some of the smug self-satisfaction one gets when one of the counselors comes up afterwards and says that's one of the best presentations he's seen in years of doing this HOBY thing and they want NSS-NT back again next year. There's also the added benefit of the UNT Planetarium wanting to work more closely with NSS-NT on future outreach projects and the 2007 ISDC.

It doesn't get much cooler than that.

See how much fun NSS-NT has by visiting our chapter gallery at http://nssnt.org/Image/Image/Chapter.

Ken Murphy works as an underwriter and analyst in aviation finance at a private investment bank in the D/FW metroplex. He has a Master of Space Studies, cum laude, from International Space University and was a delegate to the Space Generation Forum at UNISPACE III.