Planes, Telescopes, NASCAR, and Commercial Space? Must be ERAU!

Today's travels took me to Daytona Beach. Between the speedway and the airport sits Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a small private school known for aviation with a brand new program in Commercial Space Operations. I've visited the campus a handful of times, but it had been a while. 

My first stop was the College of Aviation where I met up with Dr. Lance Erickson. He recently asked me to join the CSO Advisory Panel and to come to campus to speak about my company at one of his CSO seminar classes. The class was a mix of undergraduates, including a number of students looking ahead to internships and jobs. I filled them in on who S3 is and what we do. They asked some great questions. And for the first time in the handful of student talks I've given, I awarded all three S3 holographic bookmark prizes to students who were able to give good answers to my questions! A group of them were even interested in creating a microgravity payload to fly on a future parabolic “zeroG” flight.

One of my former professors from my undergraduate university, Dr. Terry Oswalt, is now the chair for ERAU's Physical Sciences department. He was kind enough to chat with me and give me a tour of the new 1-meter telescope which hadn't yet been completed when I was on campus last. We also went out on the roof where we could see smaller telescopes mounted to the roof, the main observatory dome, and the smaller solar observatory dome. The “24” magnet on the telescope mount is from when NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon toured the observatory – perks of being in the Daytona area.

More and more I'm realizing that this blog and my non-work-related outreach efforts are being geared toward students, especially high school and college students. Speaking in these seminars is a great way to meet with interested students and give them my contact information so that they can follow up (which they very rarely do). Even better would be to connect with students anywhere in the world interested in science and space careers who would like to have a conversation and perhaps a continued professional relationship, whether that is mentoring or something more casual. If anyone can point me in a direction to best do this, I'm open to suggestions.