I had an opportunity to speak to some very important students over the past few weeks. These students were in a 10-week long summer NASA Robotics and Propulsion Academy. Five of these bright students were on loan for part of the summer to help the Rocket City Space Pioneers (RCSP) with our Lander modeling and design efforts. These are some great up and coming young engineers. Yesterday was their last day as interns at Dynetics and we made them “Official Members” of the Rocket City Space Pioneers. The team won first place in the “Design” category from NASA. I, along with other representatives from Dynetics, watched their presentation today and attended their graduation. Peter Davison, Tim Holland, Josh Hooks, Allen Bordelon, and Evan Helmeid display their Rocket City Space Pioneers XPRIZE Test Bed. I was fortunate to speak with Robotics Academy students at the Holiday Inn in Huntsville the day before they were to go fly their rockets in Manchester, Tennessee. I spoke about our Rocket City Space Pioneers effort. I got a few tough questions following the talk. They had some cool rockets to look at. They showed me how they were taking pressure data along a nosecone during launch. There must have been 20 to 30 channels of data. I was very impressed. I also got to meet some of the students at the University of Alabama Huntsville for a focused talk on propulsion. I talked about all the various systems used in the commercial space arena today. Some of the systems I described are what our RCSP lander uses. We talked about mono-prop peroxide thrusters as well as a derivative that uses kerosene and actually almost doubles the performance of the same thruster. We spent a lot of time taking about hybrid rockets and the lessons learned when I worked SpaceShipOne propulsion and the challenges that we would have had scaling that technology up by a factor of 3 to 4. We talked about nitrous as an oxidizer and the challenges of doing a nitrous blow-down system with multiport grain designs. We talked about mass fractions and the sort. The students asked some awesome questions and I was having fun! Last week I was at the NewSpace Conference in San Jose, California. It was fun and interesting. I talked to many commercial-minded folks who were either working in or trying to figure out how to work in the space industry. I spoke about the sub-orbital market and how important it could be to NASA to near-term inspire young people and students and teachers in our education system. I believe that the space tourism vehicles could offer a great sub-orbital platform to fly student experiments and a few select teachers that carry and operate these experiments. This format could be very affordable and relevant to NASA, to teachers, and more importantly, tostudents. The idea of students designing and building an experiment and watching it real time as their teacher activates and operates it would be awe-inspiring. I did get to speak to a few folks at the conference about the RCSP effort. Many asked how it was going, and I was able to bring them up to speed. I also got to spend time speaking with Bob Richards, as well as Fred Bourgeouise. I met new XPRIZE Foundation representative Julie Zona, and I had an opportunity to talk with Amanda Stiles. I also ran into Michael Doornbos of Evadot.com. On other fronts I met folks who were doing cool and leading edge propulsion projects back at their companies. Some of them had brought hardware to show. That’s what I’m talking about!