MIT Reveals the Future of Space: Beyond Artemis 2!

Hello. Good morning. Wonderful to see you all. How exciting. Um, so it's time to get things started. I'm Julie Shaw. I'm the department head of aeronautics and astronautics here at MIT. And I'm delighted to welcome you to space tech 2026. Um, this is a very exciting moment to be holding uh space tech, a very exciting moment in in space exploration.

Artemis 2 is underway. I watched with my children last night the incredible images from the far side of the moon um and the four astronauts uh 248 655 miles away from Earth uh the furthest away from our home planet any humans have have ever been. Um incredible. It's an extraordinary feat uh of engineering of collaboration um and one of many examples of the groundbreaking work happening in the space industry uh today and the people in this room are in many many ways the very heart um of this work. Um and so today it's a wonderful

celebration of MIT's unique role in the space innovation ecosystem. Um and this is a theme that emerged as a part of our uh strategic uh planning um effort. Um we've had so many wonderful conversations with with many of you here, our alum uh industry leaders um that uh emphasized how vital MIT and our

department is in producing aerospace engineers uh that bring this kind of bold vision uh creative problem solving and innovative thinking to the space industry. Um and so we continue our work here today with new ways to to collaborate um to share uh and celebrate our past and to look for uh the new pathways forward. Um we have a really

exceptional agenda lined up. Um and we have an amazing MC. We have Professor uh David Mandelle. He's an engineer, a historian, um a startup founder himself. Um he spent over 30 years um at the forefront of the aerospace industry. Um and is a scholar of innovation. Um he's author of the award-winning book, The New Lunar Society, which expertly applies the lessons of the last industrial revolution to the current boom in aerospace um and engineering driven innovation. And so with that, I'll pass it off uh to David. Thank you.

>> Thank Thanks, Julie. I'll be your MC today, but Julie al also asked me to say a few words of introduction, which may end up being a bit of an invocation. Um, as she mentioned, it's it's such an exciting time in space. Everyone here I'm sure is a a mutual space geek and we follow things and uh I've been teaching a class in entrepreneurship and aerospace and you know part of that class is always we sort of follow what's in the news and there's been big news you know pretty much every week if not every day for the last couple of months in both human space flight and the space industry in general. Uh obviously

Artemis is going on today as we speak and um uh the the SpaceX IPO coming up this spring is also a big deal and um kind of puts the icing on the cake of the influence that SpaceX and many of its alumni have had and we're beginning to see really interesting startups in a lot of different spaces in a lot of different industries um uh bringing the techniques that that uh young people learned working at Starlink into other areas. And I'll just give you one

example, which is one of my favorites. Um, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is an MIT spin-off out here in Devons, uh, broke the record for raising venture capital in Massachusetts by a factor of 10 um, in one year a couple years ago. And, um, Bob Mumgard, who leads that company, um, actually took the Apollo class that Larry Young and Jeff Hoffman and I teach. and um told me he took it 10 years ago. He said, "You know, I uh" and I've always said, "We don't teach that class to celebrate the past. We teach that class to learn about um how to do big projects." And Bob said, "You know, I I took the Apollo class and I realized you can do big projects. They don't all have to be laid in over budget. Um and they can accomplish big things." And I thought that was an amazing compliment. Um, but he also says, you know, all our purchasing people at Commonwealth are from SpaceX. And man, those people can get things out of industry and vendors that I've never seen anybody do. So um one of the themes of the entrepreneurship class is also the pervasiveness of space engineering, aerospace engineering in general techniques, technologies in so many other aspects of technology, manufacturing, even consumer technology, way beyond the kind of 60s model of spin-offs like Tang. Um and um but I I

would also add just as a little bit of a caveat, uh another event from the last couple months was the reclassification of the Starlininer incident as a class A mishap, which basically means we should consider it a fatal accident and folks only survived because there was one missing hole in the Swiss cheese and it was just dumb luck. And um I had a student do a dissertation a couple of years ago, 10 years ago about the three US fatal human space flight accidents which were all about 17 to 19 years apart. And um we're past that from challenge for from Colombia. Um but it's still always a good cautionary tale. I do think that NASA has vastly improved the safety pro protocols and internalized uh many of these lessons. But um I recommend that you all read that mishap report. It's it is eyeopening um and important to think about. Um lastly um as Julie mentioned

um I wrote a book uh a new book called the lunar society um which is not about space exploration. about industrial development. Um, but it is about a group that called themselves the Lunar Society in the 1740s in Birmingham, England. Um, because they met under the light of the full moon to talk about science and the application of science to industry. Um, and that group included um, Matthew Bolton and through that group he met James Watt who became his business partner and together they commercialized the steam engine, applied it to industrial production and created the industrial revolution. Brian Franklin was part of that group. So was Joseph Priestley. Um and the book is again not a celebration of the past but asking questions about what we can learn um from those innovators. Um not least that

um innovation is not a moment or a single invention. But I think as we'll see today and and Dave Miller embodies um it's it's a layering of generations of people who work together and build on each other's work and build with each other and collaborate and take things in new directions. So I thought just walking over here it occurred to me I should read the the final paragraph of the book the Lunar Society. Um although I thought maybe I had the month wrong. I thought this conference was in April and not in February. Um, but there's an old saying that it's not spring in New England till it snows in April. So now that it's snowing, it's spring. As I was putting the finishing touches

on this book in 2024, a total lunar eclipse captured the attention of America. I watched with old friends on a farm in rural Vermont. Julie and her family were not far away. Um, the roads of New England were clogged with traffic as millions of people traveled to the path of totality to catch a glimpse of the shadow. All of us were struck by the sense of unity and wonder that accompanied the collective view. Standing on a celestial body, gazing out at our nearest neighbor. That eclipse suggests that every that the very phrase lunar society aptly describes the world we are building toward. A lunar society

looks outward from the legacy of Apollo to future explorations. The gaze sees the solar aura around the moon or reflections of thousands of years of human mythology and aspiration full of mystery but pockm marked by the heavy bombardment. A face of light against a dark background embodying natural cycles. Hopefully, as it did for James Watt and Matthew Bolton, that light will guide our way home.