Tech News Briefing

Tech News Briefing

Tech News Briefing is your guide to what people in tech are talking about. Every weekday, we’ll bring you breaking tech news and scoops from the pros at the Wall Street Journal, insight into new innovations and policy debates, tips from our personal tech team, and exclusive interviews with movers and shakers in the industry. Hosted by Zoe Thomas

TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2022

5/31/2022 3:00:00 AM

Now Hiring: Industry Jobs for the New Space Age

The modern space race has taken off, thanks in large part to the growing role played by private companies. As businesses send up more missions, build their own space stations and even think about mining the moon, they will need to find and train new types of workers. On the first episode of Tech News Briefing’s special series about the developing space economy, host Zoe Thomas looks at space jobs that go beyond astronauts.

Full Transcript

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Zoe Thomas: This is your Tech News Briefing for Tuesday, May 31st. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Bezos.

Speaker 2: (inaudible) start two, one.

Zoe Thomas: Branson.

Speaker 3: In 60 seconds, and that is a full duration burn, folks. We are headed to space.

Zoe Thomas: Shatner.

Speaker 4: So much larger than the meaning of life and oh my God.

Zoe Thomas: Webb.

Speaker 5: James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

Zoe Thomas: Billionaires, celebrities, massive telescopes, hundreds of satellites, they were all launched into space last year, and that pace doesn't seem set to slow in 2022. The modern space race has taken off, in large part, thanks to private companies playing a larger role in an arena traditionally controlled by governments. Here at Tech News Briefing, we wondered how that fast growing private space sector is shaping up. How will it be built? Who gets a say in what it looks like? And take it all together, does the growth of the private space sector herald something completely new? A space economy. All this week, we'll be looking into those issues with a special four part series. Today, we're kicking things off with the people who will be making the future of the space economy possible, the space workers.

Speaker 6: So I foresee that a large influx of companies come to us saying, "Hey, I've got a dozen of workers that need training and I need them done within a week. Can you do that?"

Zoe Thomas: What kind of jobs will be available in the emerging space economy? What training will they need? Will those jobs actually be based in space? We'll dive into that after the break.

Speaker 7: A new era in space dawning from historic Pad 39A tonight. Once NASA astronauts launched Saturn, Apollo, and shuttle missions here. Tonight, for so-called civilian astronauts will blast off.

Speaker 8: It is the world's first all civilian crude mission to travel into space. The ship's commander is billionaire, Jared Isaacman. He's partnering with SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, to make this dream a reality.

Zoe Thomas: Last September, four civilians took off from Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, and orbited the planet for nearly three days. The inspiration for a mission was the first time a crew flew around the Earth without a professional astronaut on board. It's commander and the person who paid for the trip was Jared Isaacman. He's a trained pilot, but even Isaacman, along with the mission's other crew members, had to train for about six months for the trip to space.

Jared Isaacman: We flew Resilience, that's the same spacecraft that took NASA's crew one to the space station for six months and brought them home. We went through all the same trainings, you know, how to bring the ship home manually if something goes wrong. How to deal with fires and communication failures and depressurization events. How to deal with on orbit medical issues.

Zoe Thomas: They learned all that. How to deal with whatever a trip out of Earth's atmosphere throws at them from astronaut trainers like Glenn King.

Speaker 10: Okay, ready to run?

Jared Isaacman: Yeah, we're ready. Ready, Glenn?

Glenn King: Ready to go.

Jared Isaacman: Ready to run.

Speaker 10: Okay.

Zoe Thomas: King is the Director of Space Training at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center, or NASTAR Center in Pennsylvania.

Glenn King: Running three, two, one, flipping. We're focusing on the physiology of how you're going to cope, let's go into space, and how you're going to cope with returning back to Earth.

Zoe Thomas: Part of his job is talking clients through high G-Force training in the company's human centrifuge. King knows first hand about the toll that high altitudes can take on the human body. He started his career as a halo jumper in the military, flinging himself from planes flying at over 15,000 feet. It was here that his interest in physiology took off. He says after the military, he studied the science behind how human organs embody parts function. And now king has found himself in a pretty niche role, using that knowledge and his own experience to train would be astronauts.

Glenn King: When I've got a dozen people here who are excited to become astronauts who have that desire and that burning in their heart to want to go to space, and I see their faces light up.

Speaker 12: Wow, look at that. Yeah.

Glenn King: That they're in the centrifuge, they're spinning around at high-gs but they say to themselves, "I can do this. I've got this."

Speaker 12: Boy, that's a big elephant I got on me too.

Glenn King: And you see that light bulb go off that, "Yeah, I can go to space now." That's what I love. That's the satisfaction I get from my job.

Zoe Thomas: King has trained hundreds of people for trips to space, including tourists and crew members of several major space companies like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Axiom. King says the NASTAR Center has seen an uptick in civilian clients in recent years.

Glenn King: We're really booked right now. We're crazy busy.

Zoe Thomas: King is one of only three trainers at the center. They're planning on hiring more, but there are other limits they have to keep in mind as well.

Glenn King: We can only get so many people through a centrifuge per day. So regardless of how many instructors I can hire, and they're very hard to find qualified physiologists that have any resemblance of experience in this area, we're just reaching maximum throughput now at NASTAR Center.

Zoe Thomas: Astronaut trainers have been around for as long as there have been astronauts, but some other jobs coming up in the space industry are brand new. Businesses are looking at space as a potential new frontier for living and manufacturing and as a source of raw materials.

Angel Abbud-Madrid: The way we did it during Apollo was to send everything from Earth.

Zoe Thomas: That's Angel Abbud-Madrid, he's the Director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. It's a research university focused on minerals and mining engineering.

Angel Abbud-Madrid: We carried everything, the air that they needed to breathe, the water they needed to drink, all their tools, everything. They were there for a couple of hours and then they came back.

Zoe Thomas: Abbud-Madrid says the cost of bringing something to the moon without humans can cost tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram.

Angel Abbud-Madrid: That is extremely expensive. That's not the way we're going to be able to have a permanent settlement on the moon or anywhere else. We're going to have to use the resources on the moon or on the planet where we're going to do everything that we want. That's what's called the living off the land approach.

Zoe Thomas: But to do that, we'll need people trained in extracting those resources, moon miners. That's where Abbud-Madrid comes in. In his lab in Golden Colorado, Abbud-Madrid's students practice moving rovers across an artificial lunar landscape.

Angel Abbud-Madrid: We have vacuum chambers in which we can simulate the vacuum of space. We put it through very cold temperatures, liquid nitrogen, to very hot. We also have similar of the lunar soil that we have developed from what we know, from the Apollo rocks and the like. We can create this similar so that we are working with things that are very similar to what we're going to have in space. So one of the things that we have is a lunar test bed. It's like a playground with dust, but it's lunar dust, similar to lunar dust.

Zoe Thomas: Using controllers, just like in video games, is students, the moon miners in training are learning how to navigate moon rovers in that test bed. But this isn't just about one profession, moon mining could become an entire sector with lots of different positions. Abbud-Madrid would know. He says his first job out of college was at a golden silver mine in Mexico. He even keeps a small sample on his desk as a memento.

Angel Abbud-Madrid: Exactly the same professions will be needed on the moon. Going through the cycle, you need those are doing the prospecting so the ones that are going to be, they know how to drill, how to excavate and look for the resources. You need instruments that are quite advanced, so you need people that can work on those. Then the next step you need people that can operate excavations either remotely or themselves. Then the chemical engineers and the mechanical engineers and the electrical engineers that do all the extraction of the material. Then the people that process that, you actually need at the very beginning just economies that can actually evaluate if a resource is worth going after. If it's economically to do that.

Zoe Thomas: One major difference to gold and silver mining, this job is remote, really remote. The moon is about 240,000 miles away from Earth. That means it'll take a few seconds for the signals from the moon miners to reach the rovers on the lunar surface. If we ever start digging on Mars, that delay is going to be around 20 minutes. For now to make sure his students are as prepared as possible, Abbud-Madrid's lab has recreated that delay as part of the training. Of course, future moon miners might avoid that delay altogether with a slight relocation. Not all the way to the moon, but...

Angel Abbud-Madrid: You may have a space station going around the moon. The signals can then be sent from a place that is closer than that, and you can have humans on this space station that can be controlling the machines without having to be on the surface of the moon.

Zoe Thomas: Right now, several companies, including Blue Origin and Axiom are working to develop privately run space stations with money from NASA. China is building its own station, which is scheduled to be completed this year but will need more engineers to design specific living quarters for people other than highly trained astronauts to live in space long-term. It's tricky because living in space isn't easy. Just ask Steve Robinson. He's done it four times.

Steve Robinson: There's all kinds of gross space stories that I'm not going to tell.

Zoe Thomas: Robinson is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC Davis. Before crossing over into academia, he was at NASA for over 30 years.

Steve Robinson: Let me just say, when you have seven people living in a volume that is about like a minivan for two weeks, you've got all kinds of hygiene you better stay on top of.

Zoe Thomas: Robinson is now the Director of the UC Davis HOME Program, which has funding from NASA.

Steve Robinson: We call it HOME, which is an acronym, of course, Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration. And we're looking at the type of spacecraft that would house people in a deep space mission that has never really been made before.

Zoe Thomas: In other words, he teaches future engineers how to design places for humans to live in space. He says engineers have to plan for things like protecting residents from the radiation and extreme temperatures in space and getting enough exercise so their muscles don't grow weak and low gravity. As well as basic everyday human problems like laundry.

Steve Robinson: People, people go through lots of clothing, don't we?

Zoe Thomas: Currently, astronaut's clothing is not cleaned in space. It's not worth it. Instead, it's used and eventually just thrown away. Robinson and his team have been looking into low energy, low water use ways to clean clothes. As it happens, solving the problem of doing laundry in space may also help solve the problem of muscle atrophy.

Steve Robinson: Could you make a closed washing facility that required human power to wash to do the agitation and then call it an exercise machine? Because exercise in space is absolutely essential. If you want to come home with your bone structure healthy, you have to exercise in space. The ISS astronauts exercise a lot in the order of two hours a day. They have to.

Zoe Thomas: But beyond those run of the mill considerations, Robinson says space engineers will have even deeper issues to think about. Yes, people who create space habitats will need to make computer systems that circulate air and purify water, but they'll also have to consider things like how humans cope with being far away from home, and what happens when they're isolated for long periods.

Steve Robinson: One of the things we found is that traditional aerospace engineering underplays the aspect of humans. Everybody knows that the humans are important but I think traditional engineering has thought that, "Well, that's going to be the job of the medical doctors or the psychologists." But really engineers have to understand if humans are going to live in and interface and interact and team with elements of a spacecraft, including robots, engineers have to know quite a bit about humans.

Zoe Thomas: These questions will become even more pressing as a new generation of humans takes on a wider swath of jobs in orbit. Once space stations open up to a wider range of people and habitats take care of many of their needs, experts say people who go to work in space won't need the same robust years long training that government astronauts were given. Astronaut trainer, Glenn King, from NASTAR Center says nearly anyone could be qualified for a space job.

Glenn King: So these are the kind of people that we're going to need to start screening so we can get large quantities of able-bodied workers into space. When I say able-bodied, I don't mean people with perfect health. These are people with minor medical infirmaries that can go to space and do the job of putting together space habitats, the space hotels, things like that.

Zoe Thomas: In fact, King says he's already been approached by a few companies, which he will not name, to see if the center can train their future space workers. Everyone we asked said, eventually, space jobs will include not just futuristic sounding careers, but also space doctor, space chef, space babysitter to watch the children of the other space workers. Basically, the same kinds of jobs we have here on Earth. But an economy isn't just made up of workers, it's also the things we produce. For that, we need to build bigger and better up in space. How do we do that? On tomorrow's episode, we look into the possibility of space manufacturing. Thanks for joining us for this episode of our special space series on Tech News Briefing. It was written and reported by myself and producer, Julie Chang. Jess Fenton is our sound engineer. We had editorial support from Micah Maidenberg and David Freeman. Our supervising producer is Chris Zinsli. Our executive producer is Katari Yoakam. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.

Looking for more episodes? Find them wherever you listen to podcasts.

HOSTED BY

Host and Producer, WSJ Tech News Briefing, The Wall Street Journal

Zoe Thomas is the host of Tech News Briefing. Before joining The Wall Street Journal, she was a producer and reporter for BBC News. Zoe has covered business, economics and technology stories across North and South America and Asia. She has been based out of bureaus in San Francisco, Mumbai and her hometown of New York. When not at work, you can often find her searching for new culinary delights or food trends to test out.

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