The existing space-environment connection is not clear to a lot of people, both inside and outside of the agency. I absolutely think NASA should keep doing the “S”/ space in its name (that’s why I work at NASA!), but I also believe that its past and current work have directly aligned the agency with helping to understand and mitigate many environmental issues of today.

Some connections between NASA/ space and the environment:
• NASA launches and manages many Earth-observing satellites, which have provided data critical to understanding climate issues.
• Following on this previous point, NASA hosts the scientific talent to address many climate related issues of the day.
• NASA technologies used for spaceflight (solar panels, water recycling, many more) can have practical uses for terrestrial sustainability/ environmental/ climate problems.
• NASA’s system engineering approach has many parallels with the Earth Systems complexity of Spaceship Earth.
• The first whole, beautiful pictures of our Earth came from Apollo astronauts.

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Today I had the opportunity to represent younger generations at the AIAA’s 3rd Space Exploration Conference, on the Generation Y panel. Simply put, I’m in awe of the reaction.

Directly after the panel, and into the evening at conference social gatherings, numerous people came up to e and other Gen Y panel members to say that the panel really affected them and that what we had to say was very relevant. To be clear, some certainly had constructive criticism to offer (more below), but the reaction overall was extremely positive. People were actually thankful to be given the perspective of a younger generation, and were inspired by the ideas we discussed. Our 90 minute panel generated apparently 36 questions, which I later found out was the narrowed down number of questions given to the moderator; this was by far the most questions for any panel yet. People also loved the non-traditional use of powerpoint– and mentioned that they were inspired to try something different next time around! Go JSC team!! I revamped the NASA CoLab talk in the spirit of the Gen Y Perspectives powerpoint, and am glad I did so (change can happen :D).

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