The Space Shot- Ep 443: From Wichita to the Moon: CosmoShox at Johnson Space Center

00:00:00 Maggie Schoonover: I am like a fangirl of the design challenges that the NASA's office of Stem outreach, and I think you could ask every student that's ever participated and you would get a slightly different answer. I know what kind of bubbles to the top or like what we what we hear over and over again. Mainly, it's the joyful experience of working with what become like very good friends over a long period of time. And then the students really just not knowing that they were capable of these things.

00:00:34 -: The NASA Suits Challenge directly engages students with authentic NASA mission scenarios, and the solutions these teams have created could help shape the future of space exploration.

00:00:45 -: Three. Two one Cosmo Lions

00:00:57 -: I know you need it for that positive energy.

00:01:01 John Mulnix: All right, you got the charger, the mouse. We're good. All right, I'm gonna get in the camper. Lunar rover here.

00:01:11 -: Anyway, I had a great time networking with people, talking to people. Um, and I would one thousand percent do it again. So if you're here and you want to join me, go, Wichita State. You totally should join cosmos rocks. Okay. Thank you. Oh, dude.

00:01:26 John Mulnix: More bugs.

00:01:28 -: Um, another thing that was really cool was networking. Um, I got to talk to some really cool people. Um, and just different aspects of NASA that you don't even think about, right?

00:01:38 President John F. Kennedy: For the eyes of the world. Now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond.

00:01:46 John Mulnix: This is the space shot. Episode four hundred and forty three From Wichita to the moon. Team Cosmo shocks and the twenty twenty five NASA Suits Design Challenge. I'm John Mullenix. This is a very special episode for me since I was on the twenty twenty five Wichita State Cosmos team. I also got to travel to Houston for test week at Johnson Space Center, and that experience was an absolute blast. And I just want to say thank you again to the incredible NASA employees and contractors who made that test week an unforgettable experience. Ten student teams from across the United States converged on Houston, Texas, in May for a lunar inspired design challenge and a shot to test our designs at NASA's Johnson Space Center, specifically the Planetary Analog Test Site, also known as the Rock yard. This episode is going to be a bit different than normal, and that's all the preamble I've got today. So with that, let's get to this episode.

00:02:52 Astronaut Gene Cernan: We're going to have to push that. Okay, let me get it. That's all right. I'll wait till you're ready. Okay. Bag it. Yeah, I got it. Okay, let me get this other thing done. Bob, this is Gene, and I'm on the surface. And as I take man's last step from the surface back home for some time to come. But we believe not too long into the future. I'd like to just let what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.

00:03:44 John Mulnix: It's been fifty three years since humans last walked on the moon during the Apollo program. The audio you just heard was of astronaut Gene Cernan, audibly tired as he completed the third and final Eva or extravehicular activity. During the final Apollo mission, Cernan spent over seventy three hours on the lunar surface during Apollo seventeen with his crewmate, geologist Harrison Schmitt. The pair explored the Taurus-littrow Highlands while command module pilot Ron Evans orbited above. While the future of human exploration was uncertain in nineteen seventy two, the crew of Apollo seventeen could have never imagined that it would be over a half century before humans would return to the world we had just barely touched. Now, in twenty twenty five, it's nearly time for humans. The crew of Artemis three to return to the surface of the moon to explore the lunar south pole.

00:04:45 Astronaut Gene Cernan: And as we leave the moon and taurus-littrow, we leave as we came. And God willing, as we shall return. With peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed. The crew of Apollo seventeen. All right. Roger, Geno. Thank you very much.

00:05:14 John Mulnix: Why the lunar south pole? It's because this part of the moon is home to craters that could house materials left untouched since the early days of the formation of our solar system. The scientific possibilities of exploring this part of the moon are only one part of the why behind our return to our closest celestial neighbor. Pushing the boundaries of what's possible with space technology brings back benefits for those of us here on Earth. There are more Apollo spin off technologies than I can fully recount here, but three that jump out to me are flame resistant textiles originally for spacesuits and vehicles, which are now used in firefighting garments. Water filtration systems, which now help bring safe water supplies to people around the world, and fluid recycling chemical processes which help remove waste from fluids. And they have improved how kidney dialysis machines function. A myriad of technological benefits have come from NASA since the agency was founded in nineteen fifty eight. If you ever want to go down a rabbit hole, look up NASA spinoffs. And I'm pretty sure I've just saved you from boredom for a couple of weekends at a minimum. The Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, shuttle, International Space Station, and countless robotic and scientific missions have led generations of people in America and around the world to pursue careers in Stem fields. These missions have also inspired normal, everyday people. I think I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a NASA t shirt or bag or ball cap while I'm going about my daily life. I wonder how often do you see a NASA meatball or a NASA worm logo as you go about your day? And that's why these NASA design challenges are so important. They help inspire and build the high tech, skilled workforce of the future. As part of the effort to return to the moon, NASA sponsors a number of student design challenges. The one that we're talking about in this episode is the suits or spacesuit user interface technologies for students. Design challenge suits is a challenge that brings students from across the country together to design user interfaces. In twenty twenty, five, teams were paired together with one team working on a user interface for a pressurized lunar rover, while the other worked on a heads up display for an augmented reality headset. The designs that these ten student teams created for the twenty twenty five Suits Design Challenge could help inform interfaces for future human missions. NASA design challenges give students an opportunity to build and test software and hardware, while gaining insights from NASA mentors and design evaluators. And crucially, this challenge also meant that teams had to collaborate across country to ensure that their separate designs would work and talk to each other during test week.

00:08:25 Dameron Cook: Anybody else have any questions, any clarifications you want from us or we'll be right there.

00:08:32 -: Three. Two. One.

00:08:44 -: I know you need it. Positive energy.

00:08:48 John Mulnix: All It's hard to believe that test week has come and gone. The frenetic pace of test week traveling on a Sunday, checking in briefings and talks at Johnson Space Center. Late night tests at the Rock yard. Than an early morning tour. Visiting the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. Checking out historic mission control. Getting to see the actual mission control that they're using for International Space Station missions, and also somehow managing to catch a plaque hanging ceremony for one of the flight controllers, which was an incredible experience. That week was non-stop learning and fun, but there was a lot of build up to test week. It took months of preparation for Team Cosmos to get to the point where we could go down to Johnson Space Center and test our design.

00:09:38 Maggie Schoonover: Hi, I'm Maggie Schoonover. I'm director of the Openxr lab and faculty with the College of Innovation and Design at Wichita State University. And I'm the lead faculty advisor for the Wichita State NASA suits team, which I've led since twenty twenty. I was actually talking to somebody about this earlier in the week where it feels like almost like the before times and the after times. So if you think about like BC and AD, I think of it as like before suits and after suits and especially like before test week and after test week, because you can really watch how students grow over the course of the nine months of the challenge, or at least like the six months by the time you get to test week. And then they grow, in my opinion, almost that much more over just those five days in Houston. I remember I was talking to Damron at one point. I think I told him it must have been like January or February. He's like, well, we're halfway through suits now. I was like, no, no, no, we're not halfway through suits until like the week before test week. Um, I am like a fangirl of the design challenges that the NASA's office of Stem outreach puts on. Um, just because it's it's always been hard for me to try to concisely explain, like the value of suits. And I think you could ask every student that's ever participated and you would get a slightly different answer. Um, I know what kind of bubbles to the top or like what we what we hear over and over again. And mainly it's, um, just the, the joy, the joyful experience of working with what become like very good friends over a long period of time. And then the students really just not knowing that they were capable of these things, of building these kinds of cool products. And then, um, you know, being able to interface with experts at NASA, you can speak for your own experience, John, but like, just, you know, I like watching everyone's faces when we get down to Johnson Space Center and just kind of like the awe and the overwhelm. It's like we made it like we're here. And it takes all week for you guys to believe that you deserve to be there also. And so that it's just very, very hard to recreate that kind of experience with other programs. Like it's an I wish that we could take every student down there. We obviously can't. Um, but for those students that do get to go, it's such a formative experience that it's, um, I've had some students say that it was like that was a life changing experience, and it would have been for me, too, if I had had that in, in college. And so that's why I love doing it and making that available to students, because I do often wonder, like if I had had a suits experience in college, like how much more, how different would my career look? Or how different would my perspective on what I was capable of be? And that's kind of fun to know that I can provide that for students now.

00:12:43 John Mulnix: Speaking of unique perspectives, Team Cosmos is also one of the most interdisciplinary teams to participate in the suit's design challenge since twenty twenty. Nearly sixty students have been part of the cosmos team with eight colleges represented everything from aerospace engineering to game design, graphic design, human factors, biomedical innovation and design, exercise science and industrial engineering, just to name a few.

00:13:12 Maggie Schoonover: So challenges like suits, which are very multifaceted, they require interdisciplinary set of skills. So I find them very important and very valuable, especially being in an interdisciplinary college. Um, because we have an opportunity to show students like, this is what your job could look like, and this is what the expectations will be professionally, is that you do know how to talk to somebody outside of your discipline, and you do know how to tell a story of what you're doing and why. And based on my professional experience and other colleagues that I have, and even friends of the college that will come in and talk to students, is that is a daily issue. You can get paid millions of dollars to help a company solve a tech spread issues, and it won't work if you cannot figure out how to message your goals or your vision to, you know, sea level in that company. And so that comes back down to, you know, making sure you have a shared vocabulary, making sure that you can tell the story, making sure that the value proposition and what matters to the end user, whoever that is. So that could be your lead developer, that could be your CIO, that could be the customer. Like buying the product that that messaging is, is spot on. And so when we get students coming into the program every year, one of the first things that comes up is vocabulary. And so we realize that our computer programmers, um, which is not necessarily computer science students. We have all kinds of students that are do programming like game design, aerospace engineering, um, all of that. And our like graphic design students or art students don't have the same vocabulary, especially around things like documentation. So every single year we have to be like, what does documentation mean to you? And there's like three different versions of what that is. And so for like a coding student, documentation mean is something that you put in the code to understand, you know, what the code block means and like what the intent was. Uh, whereas a design student would maybe use the term um, style guide, things like that. And so realizing really quickly that having a shared vocabulary is important and that the words that you can't assume that everybody knows what you're saying is a really big learning outcome from something like suit. So I think having these interdisciplinary Stem challenges, even for really, really simple, People. Just communication team building aspects. It's one of the best ways that I have to demonstrate that. Show that to students outside the classroom. We also regularly have students asking for projects like this because they have a lot of in-class projects, but they don't have these opportunities that are a little bit more professionalized, that are harder, that span a longer period of time, that are as real world as possible. I would say the third thing is, a lot of students say that this is the first time they've worked with anybody outside of their department. Yeah. So the importance to Wichita State is the applied learning aspect. So Wichita State being an urban serving university in the middle of the country, um, applied learning is is one of the pillars. And this is like in my mind, one hundred percent an applied learning opportunity with both product development and research and design. So basically anything that you can think of that you'd be doing in doing an industry you would be doing in the suits challenge, and you get to collaborate with students outside of your major. And because you're kind of stuck in this formative experience together for six to nine months, you make really good friends. I think it's important to note that, like so, suits actually does not give us any funding for these things. We have to seek that funding in lots of different ways. So we do get some grants. We have some donations from our from the College of Innovation and Design. And then Kansas being an Epscor state, there are some funds available through the State Space Grant for student travel experiences. And so all those things combined have helped us basically piecemeal this program together, um, and be able to pay for our students to go to test week, which is especially important for a school like Wichita State, because a lot of our students would otherwise not be able to attend test week.

00:17:39 John Mulnix: A big part of test week was the time that we had at the Rock Yard on Monday and Wednesday nights. During this time, we met with our NASA design evaluators and were able to test our interface in a simulated mission environment at a facility that NASA uses for actual mission training. A huge thank you to Kai and Alex for being our design evaluators Monday and Wednesday. That entire process was an unforgettable experience for the entire team. The Planetary Test analog site, also known as the Rock yard, is where all ten teams converged on for test nights during downtime. We got to take some pictures and walk around the simulated Martian and lunar environments. There was even giant spotlights set up to simulate the extreme lighting conditions that will be present at the lunar south pole. Finally, a bit after eleven p m on that first Monday, it was our time to test.

00:18:37 -: So I guess you said this was new this year because I don't remember any of this last year. Okay. I don't think I remember, like, talking to anyone else. Like about anything. Yeah.

00:18:47 -: So they used to have everybody do their own. Like everybody was on the exact same challenge. And like, the ten teams were making the exact same thing. But now it's like five teams are making the exact same thing, and they're working with another five teams that are making the exact same thing, and we have to work with them. So we were paired with Columbia when they accepted our proposal. And so, yeah, for the next semester, that was like one of the goals of like the entire challenge this year was to be able to get like our systems. Yeah.

00:19:13 -: That's really awesome.

00:19:14 Dameron Cook: Yeah, yeah. We'll have two monitors. I'll put one on Wednesday on the other, and then there'll be a third monitor for dust. But basically you're saying that everyone will show up in this screen right here. Pretty much. So you'll see their feet there. Okay. All right. Um, and that's about it for the monitoring tab. So you can go ahead and click up here when you're ready. So this is the pure navigation tab okay. This right here are the two vehicles. So PR is the one that we're in inside of dust. So this is going to be the pressurized rover. The LTV is like the little guy out here somewhere on the field okay. I don't see him right now.

00:19:49 -: He was all the way over there. Oh, he might be like.

00:19:51 Dameron Cook: Little guys, probably behind the silo. So you can, like, see the location. Hi, I'm Damien Cook. I am a game design major here at Wichita State University. I was team lead, um, product owner and technical lead for the cosmos jocks at Wichita State University. And I did a lot of software engineering for our project with NASA suits when we first started suits. Brian Foster, who's our professor, he reached out to me, um, personally. He said, hey, I think you'd be a good fit for this project. And I was like, I don't know what this is. Um, I don't think any of us really knew what it was. Going into it, as far as that goes, is like, I know it's some Unreal Engine related, and I have a lot of skills there and I'd like to push it further. And this seems like a good way to build on those skills. It kind of became clear, clear that it's going to be more of a UI project and like, okay, I can get familiar with Unreal Engine UI tools. There's a lot of built in stuff we can use to make something cool and then like, but first we have to do that whole like proposal phase of like, can we make something decent and like, can we prove it to them? And that was like kind of a large part of that was like figuring out like, okay, how do I work with a team to like make something like everybody's happy with because that's like its own skill in and of itself, making something as a team together. That is quality and it's something we all agreed on. This is the direction this thing is going. And like, how do we apply the feedback that we got from everybody that was all of its own sort of skills that we had to kind of, I think a lot of us were picking up along the way as we went personally, like out of team lead. It was really just, I'm going to be in this environment like every day, like in the like, thinking about agile and thinking about what everybody else is doing and how it's coming together. You know, I was pretty much doing like five hours a day or four hours a day, five days a week or something on this and like that, like really just like got me into that discipline mode of like, this is what a product owner does. And like, I was just there every day working in it. And with that discipline I was, I think I was able to walk away with like a lot more confident in my skills as like far as, like working with people and making something. I literally had like an interview two weeks ago and like the entire time I was talking about being a part of a team rather than like anything like technically specific, because, you know, most people don't want to work with somebody who can't work together. So, like, even if you aren't, like, the strongest technically skilled person, even though I've picked up a lot of technical aspects from this, it's better to be somebody who can work with other people because they're gonna have to put up with you every day, right? So you want to have that skill working with other people more than anything. So agile is a like lake was completely new to me. I haven't had to use it before, even though it actually is, to my understanding, pretty industry standard for video games. It's essentially that tool of like, how do you keep track of everybody and make sure somebody else's work isn't blocking somebody else's work up ahead? And like, why is this happening? And like, do we need to put more resources into it? Does this feature just need more time? It's a really good tool to like, use to like understand all of that so that the engineering aspect of everything can be figured out. So there's kind of like the two parts of that where like there's like the, like the literal like agile skill of like, okay, I know what all these terms are and I can use them with everybody. And then there's also kind of that like other interpersonal thing that like I had to pick up a lot of during this process, um, especially when it comes to like in-person work because like, I'm fairly comfortable, like talking with people over discord and like, you know, figuring things out through there. But our team culturally wasn't as adjusted to that as like, I am. So like, I think a lot of the skills I had to pick up were like interpersonal in person work. How do we get everybody working together and like on the same page on like what features are and all of that? So that's absolutely something I can take away from in the like future. Like in the field work.

00:23:46 John Mulnix: Learning to work with others in a professional environment is a crucial skill as students enter the workforce. Our team learned important lessons about how we approach the design process during this challenge as well.

00:23:59 Maggie Schoonover: So I'm going to quote our faculty, Doug Stuckey at the College of Innovation and Design. So he will say that design thinking helps you make sure you're solving the right problem. And then a lot of the agile methodologies or like innovation management methodologies help you solve the problem, right. And so it's really, really important that you know what problem you're solving at the beginning because it saves you time and money. You don't spend as much time like spinning your wheels. And so that goes back to those kind of those boundaries that you want to create to foster innovation rather than stifle it. So that's kind of the first part is you want to make sure you're spending your energy on the right problem. And then the second part is that really, at the end of the day, it does not matter how smart you are or how perfect your solution is, if you can't tell the story of why it's important, and that we kind of see that across all industries and all disciplines, it's not necessarily like the smartest person in the room that gets the recognition. It's the person that can tell the story the best. And so we try to focus on that quite a bit, mainly because we just we don't want good solutions to get lost because somebody didn't understand what you were trying to do. It's human centered design, really. So design thinking helps you ensure that the design remains human centered, especially once you start building it and, you know, laying down code or hardware or anything like that, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of building it, and then you kind of forget about the end user. And so I think that design thinking and, you know, journey maps and storyboarding really help us to continually come back to how is the user impacted by this? Does it actually help them solve the problem? So that whole process is very iterative. And it needs to be iterative because you inevitably get a little bit off track. Repeating that cycle over and over again helps you come back on track. You evaluate, is this still solving the right problem? Do we need to pivot that whole process? That whole innovation cycle is is what I hope students are really getting out of suits. And I think that that's really what NASA wants us to get out of suits. Also, in addition to all these other technical skills. I think it's important to remember what part of the product cycle you're in. Also, by the time you have astronauts in space inside a spaceship. Yeah, failure is not really an option. Like, ideally, you've tested so much that failure is is not going to happen. Or at least you have options when there is a failure somewhere. At this point, this very early stage rapid prototyping, you have to fail because you're trying to get rid of all the bad ideas. And I think that students really do struggle with that, because it's so such an antithesis to what they are experiencing, like in class, because they are students. And so when you have like, you know, K through twelve and then, you know, like eighteen years of education telling you one thing, which is you want to get as high of a grade as possible. So you want your homework to be as perfect as possible, and then you get thrown into this rapid prototyping environment where failure is actually a good thing, because it's kind of back to Thomas Edison saying like, well, I found, you know, nine hundred and ninety nine ways to not make a light bulb. And that's just as valuable as the one way that does work.

00:27:14 Dameron Cook: The first eye opener for me, like when we started doing that, was the journey map. Actually, whenever you come in like a project like that, there's like so much like you go in so many different directions. But like whenever you're saying like, hey, put yourself in the shoes of like the actual target audience of this thing. And then just like walk through what a journey for them looks like. And suddenly you get like this really, really great perspective on like, what do I want our product to do? And because of that, I was able to ask myself that question specifically, which is like the most important one is like, what do I want our product to do? Because then you can start working around like, okay, this is how this thing's going to actually work. And like, this is what features this needs. And like we can start thinking about how important each one is because we have deadlines and we got to hit them. And we need to figure out what needs to get done first. It was really just that journey map process was like really big eye opener for me as far as like that. So like now we know what we want to make. So then it's like we get into that prototyping phase of like, okay, how do we show this? I think one mistake we were making is like, we really didn't spend enough time on paper at first. And like, we would just, like, jump a little too fast into Figma. Like, only after like, one meeting or so. Um, but like, we really needed when we started to fix was when we started going to coffee shops and, like, working together and, like, talking through issues and like how we want to do that because that's the design that actually got accepted was the one where we did that process of like, we we drew it out, we talked it over, we debated respectfully and we, you know, yeah, obviously we're we got along pretty well as a team. Uh, so like once we started doing that, that's when like our designs actually went to that next level was like whenever we did the paper first and then we went to Figma and like got things more solid because, you know, and then because the Figma, it takes time to do that. But the paper, it's like I'm drawing rectangles. This is where it's going to be. Um, like I'm a big, uh, artist. I love to draw and like, I'm really trying to, like, integrate thumbnails into my process so much more because, like, if it looks good, tiny, and if it's selling the emotions that you want it to sell tiny, then it's going to work big. But you have to make tiny first before you can move on into that big, full project. So like that was really such an essential part of it.

00:29:35 John Mulnix: We've been talking about the high level processes for designing our project this semester, and we'll hear from Damron again soon as he talks us through what team cosmos has built and tested at Johnson Space Center. Before we get to that, I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about test week. Being on the JSC campus was an unforgettable experience, walking around the campus and seeing the different buildings. You really get a sense of the history that has taken place there, mixed in with the hopes and promises of what we can do in the future. For instance, we were walking by building two when space history nerd me glimpsed the Lltv, the lunar landing training vehicle that's on display in that building. I made a point of dropping back through the following day, and was treated with being able to check out some artifacts from the earliest days of the space program, all the way up to the present day. Most strikingly, though, this building has an incredible mural that was painted by famed space artist Robert McCall. The mural was commissioned by Jsc's then director Christopher Kraft in nineteen seventy nine. The title of this mural is, quote, Opening the Space Frontier. The next giant step. I wish that more of us had been able to see this mural during test week. The work that student groups do at colleges around the country help America take these next giant steps into the solar system. I'll include a picture of that mural in the show notes and all my Space Shots website, so please take a moment to check it out if you don't know what I'm talking about. For me personally, the entire week at Johnson Space Center was a treat because you're walking through history and the future every day. Um, that's enough editorializing for now. Um, so we're going to hear from Damron again to talk about what we worked on for the twenty twenty five Suits Design Challenge. One last quick note, too. Um, when Damron references EV, he means extravehicular crew member in this case.

00:31:43 Dameron Cook: Let's let's start with dust.

00:31:44 Dameron Cook: Dust is called the digital Unreal Engine simulation tool. Or something along those lines. It's a, uh, it's a virtual world that is comprised of, like, real data of the moon. And then that data is punched into Unreal Engine. That's a video game engine, and it has really good lighting and but it's all real time. That means it can like, you can directly edit it or like you could walk around in that space and it'll still look really good. Um, so it's a recreation of the lunar south pole inside of a game engine using real lunar data. And what a lot of our challenge was, was like using that engine, a rover inside of that engine and like it, controlling it and keeping track of it inside of our own program. And that program that we made is called Luna. Luna is a user interface tool that could keep track of both, like originally that rover inside of the inside of dust. And then also it can keep track of two EVs which can be like kind of like real person data as far as like keeping track of somebody's heart rate or like making sure that their suit pressure is all good and things like that. And a lot of our work that we were doing was with Luna and like we were trying to make it like as what's the term we were trying to make it like as like reducing cognitive load. Like that was like our main goal for Luna was how do we reduce as much cognitive load on the user as possible so that they can track, you know, they had a lot of things to track, such as like the data of two EVs, such as their heart rate and their respiratory rate and their suits, and then as well as their camera feed so that we can see what they're seeing. And then they'd also have to keep track of the rover and make sure that it can go from point A to point B, and they can actually do some small controlling of Rover inside of it. And then also like making sure that the geological steps are all being followed whenever it's time to get to that. So like the person who's using the Luna UI has like a lot to keep track of. So it's our goal as designers was to make it like as efficient, like keep them in one area for as long as possible while they're doing their task. So they aren't like constantly flipping over or so that they could like get a quick read of like, okay, this is the most important need to know type stuff. So like if, um, somebody's like heart rate was in danger, they would like immediately see it because it's red against everything else being blue. And then they would know, oh, okay, we need to keep track of this data because it would immediately jump out to them. Fairly obvious example, but like, that's just the kind of work that we were doing. And like making sure that it all worked was making sure we had a really smart UI that could adapt to live data and make sure that, like, everything that the the EVs were safe, because that's really our main priority was safety, safety, safety.

00:34:32 -: All right. Thank you all. And thank you for being here to invest in our students. Um, so we're going to start with our first team. Our first team up is team from Wichita State University. So please take the floor.

00:34:51 John Mulnix: I'll just use this. Good morning. We are Wichita State University team CosmoShox and we are excited to be with everybody this morning. We're going to kick it off. Um, we have a very interdisciplinary team. Um, everything from aerospace engineering to exercise science, um, which I think is one of our strengths. And we're going to be talking about that more in a little bit. Um, for this year's design challenge, we were tasked with coming up with a user interface for a pressurized rover, um, that helped astronauts and future users reduce their cognitive load through unique tabbed system, which Damron is going to talk about more in just a second.

00:35:26 John Mulnix: The final event of test week saw schools presenting their designs to a panel of flight controllers, engineers, even an astronaut. And other schools. Wichita State was up first, and we kicked off the end of test week with our presentation. Sadly, a PowerPoint error prevented us from showing our user interface video, but Damron and Janis rocked the presentation pitch. One of the coolest parts of the exit pitch session was the awards that were presented to colleges, and it was announced that Maggie won the Artemis Educator Award.

00:36:01 Maggie Schoonover: They introduced the awards last year, and there's a three awards. Two awards are designated like during test week based on design evaluators observations, and then the third award is nominated by the students on the teams, and so the Artemis Educator Award is given to the faculty member who inspires their students to achieve more than they thought possible, and that is based off of student nominations. So obviously it means a lot, a lot, because that means that not only was NASA did NASA like, give me that award, but that's because you guys on the student team nominated me. And obviously whatever you wrote was very convincing. And so it's very humbling and very validating that the work that we're doing is appreciated. The fun part is that last year's Artemis award was also went to Wichita State's faculty advisor for suits. So that's two years in a row that our faculty have been awarded that, which is pretty cool. It evolves. My I guess my opinion of what makes a great student experience evolves every year as I learn more. But, um, I think it's really heavily based in the idea of servant leadership. So I want to be like a guide or a mentor. I want to. Yeah. So it's like the bumpers in a bowling. Yeah, in a bowling alley. Like, I want to give you guys a enough enabling constraints. So I want to give you guys enough boundaries that you can, um, focus on what's important and you can honestly innovate better with some amount of constraints. And so I try to get that balance just right between like, be creative and be crazy and come up with that, that great new idea. But also let's not spin our wheels too much because we honestly don't have time. Um, nine months in the challenge, like, sounded like a long time, I'm sure, at the beginning. But now that you're at the other side of it, I mean, it was very fast. And I remember talking to other faculty, um, a couple like last year or the year before, trying to get more collaboration and kind of explaining the concept and the feedback was just like, well, that it would take years to build that kind of product. It's like, well, yeah, in a professional setting it does, but that's not what we're doing. We're doing rapid prototyping and innovation. And so the whole idea is, what can you build in six months or nine months?

00:38:34 John Mulnix: John here again and I've got an editorial before we end. This is me speaking here as someone who studied history, space exploration and technology for a little over a decade now, here's the thing programs like suits could disappear. The current NASA budget proposal zeroes out NASA STEM engagement programs. Cutting these programs from NASA's budget won't just affect universities, it will affect the workforce pipeline for Artemis and beyond. Sadly, we are already seeing how these cuts are affecting NASA. And most bafflingly, these cuts come at a time when the agency is gearing up for future Artemis missions. If America is serious about returning to the moon and being the first nation to reach the lunar south pole, Congress must act to restore NASA's budget and to restore it to a level that represents the reality of the work that the agency does for the American taxpayer. Point three percent of the federal budget is what NASA operates with. This is a tiny amount of money, especially when one considers the outsized impact NASA has on American dynamism. Casey Dreier with The Planetary Society notes that the, quote, twenty twenty six white House budget directs NASA to send humans to the Moon and Mars with the smallest civil servant workforce since fiscal year nineteen sixty, which began in the summer of nineteen fifty nine. Dreier also noted that this level of funding hasn't been seen since before the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, launched to space. To be completely blunt, this makes no sense. Returning to the moon and going to Mars will not happen with the current budget. America is ceding decades of leadership in space exploration and high tech fields with our current budget. What I saw while I was in Houston was the energy and dynamism of college kids, future members of our workforce who thrive in these kinds of high stakes environments. Suits and NASA design challenges generally are low cost, high impact programs that help inspire and develop the workforce of tomorrow. These students are already doing the work. Congress needs to do the work and figure out a budget that enables NASA to continue to do the incredible work the agency is known for around the world. Team CosmoShox went to Johnson Space Center to test our interface, and we came back inspired. This generation of students isn't just dreaming of the moon. Many of us are designing for it now. We need America to prioritize the work that's being done to send humans to the lunar south pole for the first time through the Artemis program, and the technologies we develop for the Artemis program. And Mars exploration won't just help us explore space, they'll help us solve problems here on Earth, too. Apollo eight astronaut Bill Anders, who captured the iconic Earthrise photo, once said, quote, we came all this way to explore the moon. And the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth as we close. Take a moment to imagine what we might discover about our planets and about ourselves as we push beyond the moon in the coming decades.

00:42:18 Astronaut Gene Cernan: What I believe history will record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.

00:42:29 John Mulnix: Let's rise to the challenge of our time so that our destiny tomorrow is more incredible than we can even imagine today. Thank you to everyone involved with Team CosmoShox this year. To everyone on the twenty twenty five CosmoShox team. Thank you. A special shout out to Kai and Alex, our NASA design evaluators, who gave us meaningful feedback that should help the twenty twenty six cosmos team do their best work. Also, another thank you to Alex and also Ryan, our mentors and Wichita State alum for their time and expertise this year. Thank you to our hosts at Johnson Space Center for facilitating an unforgettable week. Lastly, thank you to everyone at Wichita State and in Kansas who made this trip possible. Whether it was time or money or both. Thank you. The music for this episode was licensed through Blue Dot Sessions. Full music details are in the show. Notes. If you enjoyed this episode, let me know. The format is totally different than anything I've ever done, and it took a lot longer to record and produce. I'd love to hear your feedback and if you've got ideas for the future, send them to John at thespace Show.com. One final thing you a shout out to the Titusville Public Library for giving me a spot to work on the final parts of this episode. When I started recording this episode, I didn't think I would be working on it on the Space Coast, but here we are. That's it for this episode. I'm John, and I'll catch you on the flip side.