The Risk of Having Pizza in Virginia
There is a cap being worn these days which says, “Make America Intelligent Again.”
It must be election time!
I do not know if America has become less intelligent, although comedian Bill Maher claims we may have become “too dumb to be governed.”
I love that line because it is funny, but not because it is true. I hope.
Maybe we are dumbing down. If so, maybe I am just in the wrong industry because all of the people around me here are bright, as in really, really bright. As we joke or cry about losing our smarts and sense of adventure in the world, all I see are adventurers. Left and right. Up and down. And not just the prominent, high-rolling, high-tax-bracket explorers of our new space era. Or even the launch companies who put it all on the line in the most publicly visible way.
I am talking about those taking exploration into areas of challenge, such as ethics, climate change remediation, racial and gender diversity, the emotional and spiritual requirements for going to other planets and the risk of moving a business to a place that has zero connection to the industry and trying to make it work.
These are genuine risks being taken by real, genuine risk takers. We are an industry packed with them. It’s one of the most attractive things for me. As an English literature major and not an engineer, I like this business because it needs my skills to tell this story. Risk has all kinds of colors and flavors.
We are looking at a lot of the emergent risks in a new podcast series, underwritten by AvL Technologies and OneWeb Satellites, called “Risk.” (Clever, huh?) We have been talking to people like Will Griffin of Hypergiant, who took the job of Chief Ethics Officer at the Austin, Texas company to make sure that its AI innovations serve human goals. It does not allow a product into the market unless it benefits the human race. We have also had conversations with Jim Oliver, who surprised us with his story of how he ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, where he started his antenna design and manufacturing company in not one, but TWO garages. He surprised us when we asked him what his favorite design of all time was. (You have to listen to the podcast to get the answer: https://www.sspi.org/cpages/better-satellite-world-risk)
We also learned from Frank DeMauro how he felt about making history with his MEV-1 project. I learned about the risks involved and, most importantly, his comparison of pizza in Virginia to pizza in New Jersey.
Dr. Steve Hamburg tells us why the Environmental Defense Fund believes that its new MethaneSat project will, in fact, be part of the first step to reduce global warming.
“Emotions colonized by fear tend to manifest themselves on an over-reliance on cold, cognitive thought and action.” This passage from The Emotional Life of Your Brain is spot on. That is why it has been so refreshing, over the past few years, to watch the evolution of this industry into one that is taking the kinds of creative risks and expanding its vision of growth for the commercial space and satellite community to include a more three-dimensional view of how we can accelerate making our situation better.
We explore it on the Better Satellite World podcast each Monday, and I would encourage you to check it out. It could do for you what it does for me, makes my work in the industry easier and I hope feeds our brain and keeps us intelligent.
NOTE: You can access SSPI’s Podcast series at www.sspi.org/cpages/podcast. A new episode appears every week.