The year 2021 was full of triumphs in humanity’s venture to space. The Mars Rover Perseverance (cost: $2.75B), which I have been proudly working on for seven years, landed on the red planet in February to search for the sign of ancient extraterrestrial life. To the relief of many anxious scientists and engineers who are involved, an Ariane 5 rocket successfully launched the James Webb Space Telescope (cost: ~$10B) on Christmas morning, which will search for the light from the first stars and galaxies of the universe. The International Space Station (cost: >$100B) expanded its floor space with the addition of Russia’s Nauka module (with a pulse-pounding event after the docking), hosted numerous scientific research, and welcomed 17 visitors from five countries, including a Russian actress and a Japanese billionaire tourist. Speaking of billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson went up to the edge of space on suborbital spaceships built by their own companies after investing billions of dollars from their wealth. Jared Isaacman paid an undisclosed amount (likely ~$200M) to SpaceX and made a historical 3-day orbital flight on Inspiration4 (which also raised $200M donation for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, augmented by Isaacman’s $100M and Elon Musk’s $50M donations).

Now, with all the glories in space, let’s look back and see how humans are doing on our own planet. According to the World Bank, 9.1-9.4% of the world’s population (~700 million) live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 per day in 2020, and potentially ~150 million more in 2021 due to the continuing pandemic. A similar number of people (663 million) are undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. These problems could be made even worse by the ongoing global climate change, for which the global leaders could only find incomplete and highly compromised solutions in COP 21. And here in LA, more than 60,000 people are living on the streets.

How can we justify spending billions on finding microbes on Mars or catching photons from the beginning of the universe while millions of kids are starving on Earth? Why do we dare to unlock the secrets of heaven while there is no shortage of important problems on the ground?

As a person who is engaged in space missions and is paid a salary from taxpayers’ money, I think I have a moral obligation to face this question. I don’t think I can offer a solution right away. My intent in writing this article is not to convince everyone, which I don’t think I can. But at least I should explain why I think my job is still important to humanity, and be open to conversation with those who have different opinions, rather than shutting my eyes to what I don’t want to see.

So let me try.

Unsatisfactory Answers

A typical response to this question goes like this: space is humanity’s future, our dream, and you cannot underestimate the value of inspiring our next generation. I found this answer unsatisfactory. Don’t get me wrong, perhaps I am one of the people who appreciate the value of dreams the most because my entire life has been driven by a dream of space. But if I meet a mother of starving children in Afghanistan or somewhere, what would she ask from me? Would she ask me to share my experiences on Mars rovers and encourage her kids to pursue their dreams? Of course, not. She will surely ask for $100.

Those who advocate the “colonization” of Mars claim that it could save humanity from potential extinction because we will have a “backup” just in case. Some even suggest to “nuke Mars” to accelerate terraforming. I humbly disagree. There is no backup for a kid dying now. Besides, how many mistakes have we made under the name of colonization in our past? (FWIW, Mars might be inhabited.) And if homo sapiens is foolish enough to destroy its home planet, I think it should rather become extinct before messing up the second one.

Then, what would be a reason, if any, that we should still explore space?

This question is deeply personal to me because I once decided to give up my dream for it. My decision at that time was probably affected by my experiences from backpacking trips to more than 30 countries during my college and graduate school years. I wandered every inhabited continent, including sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and South Asia, without hotel reservations or tour guides. To me, it was my personal space exploration – adventures into the unknown. I just didn’t want to be ignorant. I was born and grew up in one of the most fortunate corners of this planet, and I thought I must learn about other corners, not just through books but with first-hand experiences.

I met a boy in Banjul, Gambia, a refugee from Guinea-Bissau, who didn’t know his own birthday. Tens of street seller kids near Datong, China (it was in 2002 and China was poor at that time) fought each other in front of me over who to sell a little souvenir to me. On a stinky, unpaved street in Varanasi, India, I had to coldly ignore the groan of numerous beggars, some were deformed or without a limb or two, because otherwise I could not walk even a hundred feet. I saw a woman in a church in Thessaloniki, Greece, who was kissing an icon of Jesus and sobbing sadly.

I felt helpless. My dream, my PhD research, or any effort to unlock the mystery of the universe, was completely irrelevant at these corners of this planet. So I thought I should make a big trajectory correction maneuver of my career in the middle of my PhD. But I did not know which direction I should go to. I lost my dream.

In the end, I came back to where I started, and I am now working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was a long story and I will write about it in another opportunity (there is one in Japanese if you can read it). It was a detour in my career, and it probably cost a year or two. But it was a meaningful detour because I found an answer to the question. It is likely not a satisfying answer for everyone. Perhaps I should call it my faith rather than an answer. But it is what I believe in from the bottom of my heart.

Memento Mori

To explain my “answer,” I have to start from a principle of mine – and perhaps of many others. I said in this article that my entire life is driven by my dream, but actually, that was only half true. It is driven by a dream and fear — a dream for space and fear of death.

I got my dream when I was six after seeing Voyager 2’s spectacular encounter with Neptune. About the same age, I started wondering what would happen to me when I die. I think initially it started out of my curiosity. With the same mental power to imagine the end of the Solar System, I imagined the end of me. My first thought was that I would no longer be able to watch TV. My family was secular, so no one gave me an immediate answer. At funerals, people were saying that s/he went to heaven, but I was not sure if I would believe it. And as I grew up, I started realizing that a logical conclusion, at least for a science-inclined non-religious teenage boy, is that death is simply the end of subjective experiences. What I call, I will vanish away just like a morning dew on a leaf.

That is a terrifying thought. I wished the fear of death would somehow disappear when I was older, but it didn’t. There are moments in the night – not every night but once or twice a month – when I am suddenly haunted by the thought that my consciousness, my memory, and my feeling will someday disappear into nothing. It was often triggered after I drank alcohol. More than once, I screamed in front of a mirror and scratched all over my body in a desperate hope to escape from fate.

The only way to reclaim peace in my mind is to think about how to make my life meaningful before it disappears. How to make sure that I feel happy and satisfied when I close my eyes for the last time.

At the bare minimum, I have to provide for my family and myself. I want us to always be safe and healthy. But with these, will I be satisfied at the end of my life? Surely not. I want more.

So, I would work hard and buy us a cozy house with multiple bathrooms, and a car or two of the latest models. We would go on vacations every summer to a tropical island, or maybe own a vacation home near a beautiful lake in the mountains. I would buy a new iPhone every two years with an ever-increasing number of pixels in its cameras and subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited so that I can listen to my favorite songs anytime, anywhere. Will that be a satisfying life? Sure, it is certainly much better than living on the poverty line, but I doubt materialistic wealth can help me much in the last moment of life.

So what do I want? What would give meaning to my temporary existence in this universe?

There could be a wide range of answers. My mother once said my sister and I are the meaning of her life. Steve Jobs famously asked John Sculley, the then-president of Pepsi, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?”

I want to leave my mark – even just a tiny mark is OK – on humanity’s Great Journey to space. If I am fortunate enough to achieve that, on top of a happy family life, I would be able to close my eyes on the last day of my life with a peaceful state of mind.

Memento Mori. That is my guiding principle. When I am unsure about what to do, I remind myself of my death. That often helps me to find the right way.

Memento Mori for Civilization

Now, I propose to use memento mori as a guiding principle for our civilization, too.

I think it is reasonable to assume that, just like ourselves, civilization is mortal. Even a person with the healthiest possible lifestyle cannot escape from the eventual death. Even the most prosperous empires in history did not last forever. I don’t know when or how. I hope it is not in the next few hundred years. But at some point in the future, maybe thousands or millions of years later, there will be the last day of human civilization.

Will a civilization get eternal life in heaven after its death? I don’t think so. The death of civilization simply means the end of everything we created – technologies, cultures, history, art, poems, and songs.

Then, what does this civilization stand for?

The primary role of civilization is to provide for its “family,” by which I mean the entire human race. As I wrote above, it has not fulfilled this responsibility because there are still ~700 million people living in extreme poverty. However, as opposed to the common perception, we have actually made substantial progress in this regard. In 1820, 75-80% of the global population lived under extreme poverty (Source: Clio-Inra). It improved to ~60% in 1920 and ~9% in 2020. And now the world produces more than sufficient food and wealth for everyone. It is just a matter of distribution. It is certainly possible, for the first time in history, to completely remove poverty and hunger from this planet in the next tens of years if, and only if, we have the will to do so.

But if we keep everyone safe from poverty, hunger, or any physical danger, are we done? I don’t think so. It is known that the average self-reported life satisfaction by country is highly correlated with GDP. Improving people’s material well-being is indeed an important function of civilization. It is not wrong at all to wish for air-conditioned housing for everyone, and maybe with a TV set for entertainment and a music player to enjoy nights. It would be a great idea to make the Internet available to everyone. Every hardworking man and woman deserves a relaxed vacation time. And every single kid on Earth deserves a present from Santa Claus.

But is that all? Does this civilization exist just to materialistically satisfy its inhabitants through the exploitation of the planetary deposit of resources and energy? How do we want to be evaluated by another civilization in the distant future that would excavate and study our remains? In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was just two words: “mostly harmless.” Or it might go like this: “The relatively short-lived Civilization 2BiL!u7987 originated from the third planet of the Solar System was thought to be rich enough to supply almost every inhabitant with a personal transportation vehicle, a portable communication device with a characteristically big LCD screen, and access to the global communication network for mainly exchanging their self-promoting images or praising/condemning others.” Is that all that our civilization is meant for?

I hope not. Like every one of us, I think there must be a meaning that this civilization was born on the Pale Blue Dot in the barren vastness of the Cosmos.

The Meaning of Civilization

Then, what would be the meaning of the life of civilization? How can it leave its mark – even just a tiny mark – on the immense time-space of the universe?

It is not an easy question, and the answer is certainly not singular. There is a saying that “the wise learn from history” — so let’s look back at our history and see if we can get some hints.

In the 10,000-year history of our civilization, there were countless chiefdoms, kingdoms, or empires that rose and fell on the Earth. Like we don’t have a name for every star, most of them are forgotten or even undiscovered. What we have in our history books is a highly sparse and biased sample of fortunate ones. But interestingly, the member states of the prestigious club are not limited to those that are the most prosperous or expansive.

Take, for example, the Nasrid dynasty. It was one of many small Muslim dynasties in the Middle Ages that barely survived between the dominant empires of the time, which only claimed a small portion of the Mediterranean coast of Spain from the 13th to 15th centuries. What made this rather insignificant kingdom remembered by history is the Alhambra, majestically standing on a hill in the city of Granada. When I visited Alhambra in 2003, I was completely overwhelmed by its beauty. Its inner walls and ceilings are filled with delicately crafted geometric patterns out of marble, while its courtyard exhibits a harmony of stones, water, and flowers placed in perfect symmetry.

Art, including music, is not merely a consumable entertainment for contemporaries. It is a tangible representation of philosophies, beliefs, and technologies accumulated and matured through a long span of time in civilization. I think that’s worth it for this civilization to leave behind.

No history book of the world can ignore Ancient Greece. But it was a collection of many competing city-states, or poleis, that usually had insignificant territorial extent, with the exception of the very short-lived empire by Alexander the Great. It was economically highly prosperous, but it is not their material wealth, which was supported by slave labor, that reserved the prestigious position in history for them. It was their philosophy, science, literature, and art. And since many other ancient civilizations also left great philosophies, literature, and art, I think what made Ancient Greece (Athens in particular) truly outstanding was science.

Science is more than a collection of knowledge. It represents the humble recognition of our own ignorance, as well as our desire to learn more. If it is not among the purposes of the species that calls itself homo sapiens, what else could be?

Among the rich ethnical diversity of humanity, Polynesians are a unique group of people with outsized recognition compared to their relatively small population (2 million or 0.025% of the global population). It is not just because they are the people who welcome rich tourists on tropical islands. It is their amazing voyage. Without a compass or a steam engine, they sailed away from Taiwan about 5000 years ago and traveled tens of thousands of leagues to spread all over the Pacific islands, from Indonesia and Micronesia to Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and eventually to New Zealand. They also sailed across the Indian Ocean and reached Madagascar. The difficulty of such voyages would be comparable to modern interplanetary flights. It is simply marvelous.

Voyage is not just a result of expansionist desire or Manifest Destiny. It is also driven by the same curiosity behind science to learn more about the unknown worlds. A milestone of the physical achievements of civilization. I think it is another meaningful item to be remembered.

Art. Science. Voyage. I submit that the meaning of civilization can be found among these uniquely humanistic activities. Of course, there could be more. What do you think the meaning of our civilization is?

How much did we achieve?

How much did we achieve regarding the three items I identified above?

I cannot speak much about art because I am not an expert. Or perhaps no one can because it is simply not possible to estimate how many artistic expressions are not explored yet.

I can say a bit more about science because there are many known unknowns. For example, we don’t know yet how life emerged from the primordial soup, or why and how consciousness arises from a neural network of our physical brain. We haven’t characterized 95% of the energy of the universe. Since we don’t know what it is, we simply call it dark matter and dark energy. And we don’t know yet if we are alone in the universe. We have not found any evidence of extraterrestrial life or intelligence. But as Carl Sagan famously said, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

What about voyage? Imagine that the Solar System is the size of a baseball stadium (if you are not living in a baseball-loving country, a soccer stadium has a comparable size). On this scale, Earth is just 0.1 mm (0.004 inches) in diameter. And the furthest place that we traveled, the Moon, is only 2 mm (0.08 inches) away. There are a number of uncrewed spacecraft flying across the stadium. But there are only two so far — Voyager 1 and 2 — that went outside.

In terms of science and voyage, our civilization is still like Athens before Socrates or Polynesians before setting off from Taiwan.

And I humbly think space exploration is a quest for the meaning of civilization. We fly probes to planets, satellites, and asteroids in the Solar System and beyond to understand how we came into being and search for signs of life. We launch space telescopes to understand how this universe was born, find out what the remaining 95% is made of, and look for the signature of life or even civilization in the atmosphere of distant exoplanets. We send men and women beyond the Moon to push the boundary of our voyage. I’m sure that is what Archimedes or Hipparchus would do had they lived now. Space exploration is not anything new. It is as old as our civilization because it is merely a continuation of the Great Journey that we started when our ancestors left Africa.

The Final Golden Record

Having said all that I wrote above, there are priorities. The vast majority of GDP must be used for providing the basic needs of people, including food, housing, education, health care, and physical security, and for further improving their material life. But at the same time, I think we should use a few percent of our effort to continue the never-ending pursuit of the existential value of ourselves, like art, science, and voyage. (FWIW, NASA’s budget accounts for ~0.1 % of the GDP of the US.)

Of course, some may think there is no such thing as the meaning of life. Likewise, some may argue that it is pointless to even think about the meaning of civilization. I cannot say such an argument is wrong.

But as I ask myself memento mori and struggle to find the meaning of my life, I think this civilization should also ask itself memento mori.

Imagine what humans would do in the last days of civilization. I think they would build a physical memory device with zettabytes or yottabytes of storage space, write all the art and knowledge humans produced in history, and launch it to the interstellar space with symbolic instructions about how to decode the data, hoping that someday an alien civilization will find it and inherit what we’ve done. Basically, the extreme version of Voyager’s Golden Record. What do we want our descendants to write about us? That’s the question that we have to ask.

And going back to my personal goal, I hope my work of a lifetime will contribute to a byte or two of the Final Golden Record.

If you enjoyed this piece, we also recommend Hiro’s related essays, including Why Do We Explore Space for Science?, A Story of a Former International Student: Tucson, MIT, and Mars Rover, and Perseverance: My Dream to Land on Mars! 🚀

A moment of truth; a critical point of reflection, consequence, or change.

Welcome back to The Overview! Over the past few weeks, the space community has been grappling with deep uncertainty. From sweeping NASA workforce cuts to high-stakes budget battles in Congress, the nation is entering a period of reckoning about the future of space science.

• 📉 NASA budget cuts: 4000 employees, or about 20% of the NASA workforce, have opted to leave the agency through a deferred resignation program initiated by the Trump administration. The departures coincide with proposed cuts that would slash NASA's science budget by 47%. Congress is pushing back strongly, with both Senate and House budget drafts rejecting the most severe cuts and maintaining funding closer to current levels.

• 🚀 Space for Weather: Satellites are instrumental in understanding the Earth’s atmosphere and surface activity. These are the objectives of two NASA science missions currently in the news, TRACERS and NISAR.

• 🪐 ICYMI: We hosted Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future and founder of Core Memory, at Stanford recently. We discussed a variety of aerospace topics, from the current startup scene and his time researching and writing about SpaceX and Rocket Lab!

• 👋 Also, if you haven’t joined The Overview Discord, we’d love to see you there! Come chat about the latest happenings in aerospace, emerging technologies, and help shape what we explore next:

Join the Discord!

🚀 Aerospace News

Aerospace is crucial for a wide range of technological activities, including defense, communication, and positioning. All of these aspects are currently under discussion in the industry, with major undertakings like the United States’ Golden Dome commencing with substantial government investment (see some of the latest comments about the Golden Dome’s development plan).

Today, let’s take a look at one important aspect of space missions: weather monitoring. Specifically, two weather and earth observation missions that are currently in the news:

NASA’s TRACERS Mission Launches

Source: Space.com, NASA

On July 23rd, the NASA TRACERS (Tanden Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The purpose of this mission is to measure and understand magnetic reconnection at the Earth’s polar cusps, which occurs when solar particles interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. This is crucial in understanding space weather and how it affects the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists will combine data from TRACERS with other missions such as NASA’s MMS, PUNCH, and EZIE for complete analysis. TRACERS includes a pair of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit.

TRACERS is a NASA mission led by Professor David Miles at the University of Iowa, along with other institutes and NASA centers managing and providing instruments for the mission. Missions like TRACERS are an example of impactful projects that students, even at the undergraduate level, can get involved in through participation in research labs at their universities!

ISRO and NASA’s Joint NISAR Mission on the Horizon

Source: NASA

On a much larger scale than TRACERS, NASA (specifically its JPL branch) and ISRO have joint forces to develop the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite, which launched successfully on ISRO’s GSLV-F16 rocket on Wednesday, July 30th.

NISAR is going to use a new radar technology called the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which takes advantage of the moving radar to create a “virtual antenna” that is much bigger than the actual antenna and produces very fine-resolution images. In the case of NISAR, this measurement is at a centimeter scale. NISAR will be one of the first missions to use SAR to map the Earth, using two different radar frequencies (S-band and L-band).

Centimeter-scale radar measurements of the Earth’s surface provide valuable data for all sorts of environmental monitoring applications, such as earthquake hazard detection, soil moisture measurements, predicting volcanic eruptions, and more.

NASA Budget Cuts

Source: NPR, Sky & Telescope

The space agency is facing an unprecedented workforce crisis. Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opted into the Deferred Resignation Program introduced by the Trump administration, reducing NASA's workforce by about 20%. This will reduce the agency from 18,000 to 14,000 employees.

This workforce reduction coincides with proposed budget cuts that would dramatically slash NASA's science programs. The Trump administration initially proposed cutting NASA science funding by 47%, from ~$7.3 billion to ~$3.9 billion, though Congress is pushing back with more modest reductions.

The proposed cuts would have forced the cancellation of 55 missions across NASA's science portfolio. Threatened programs include the Venus missions DAVINCI and VERITAS, the gravitational wave observatory LISA, and long-running missions like the Chandra X-ray Observatory and New Horizons.

Nearly 300 NASA employees signed The Voyager Declaration, a formal internal protest citing the long-term damage caused by ending missions and shrinking the workforce.

⛏️ Featured Technology

We were lucky to have Ashlee Vance visit the Stanford Aero/Astro department early in June for an informal fireside chat. The talk was moderated by The Overview’s Anshuk Chigullapalli and Tycho Bogdanowitsch (who previously contributed to the Overview on this podcast). We went through a lot of fascinating topics, such as:

• NASA’s budget cut, Elon-Trump feud, and Jared Isaacman’s nomination cut

• Commonalities between aerospace founders

• Surprises from investigating SpaceX and Rocket Lab

• Lessons for students and early career folks

• Europe’s aerospace landscape

And more! Check it out for some great insights.

Full Article

💬 Quote of the Week

As we face this moment of reckoning on funding in NASA, it's worth putting the stakes in perspective:

“The taxpayers’ money that NASA spent on scientific exploration was $22 per person per year in the US before the proposed cut. As a comparison, it spent $5,600 and $2,600 per person per year on healthcare programs and national defense, respectively, in FY24. Of course, there would be a wide spectrum of opinions on what constitutes an adequate spending level. But I humbly think that $22 per person per year is a reasonable expenditure to find the meaning of human civilization in this vast, silent universe.”
— Hiro Ono, Why Do We Explore Space for Science?

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — Reckoning Edition. We hope that amidst all the uncertainty, we don't lose sight of what makes space exploration so important to who we are as a species.

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about making aerospace an inclusive and welcoming community. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

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We had Ashlee visit the Stanford Aero/Astro department early in June for an informal fireside chat. The talk was moderated by The Overview’s Anshuk Chigullapalli and Tycho Bogdanowitsch (who previously contributed to the Overview on this podcast). Below, we present a shortened, edited version of our conversation. We went through a lot of fascinating topics such as:

• NASA’s budget cut, Elon-Trump feud, and Jared Isaacman’s nomination cut

• ULA

• Commonalities between aerospace founders

• Surprises from investigating SpaceX and Rocket Lab

• Current aerospace and defense startup landscape

• Lessons for students and early career folks

• Astra and Chris Kemp

• Space sector trends

• Europe’s aerospace landscape

Enjoy reading!

Anshuk: Thanks for coming, everybody. Please welcome Ashlee Vance!

Tycho: Let’s start with the elephant in the room. It’s been a wild couple of weeks—NASA’s budget was slashed, Jared Isaacman’s NASA nomination was withdrawn, and now Elon Musk and Donald Trump are publicly feuding. Any thoughts, or behind-the-scenes info, on what’s going on?

Ashlee: Well, first of all, thank you all for organizing this. Yeah, where to begin? I think this falling-out was inevitable. I was surprised that Elon and Trump’s relationship lasted as long as it did. I think Elon and Trump wanted to get things out of each other for some time, and I always sort of thought pretty quickly after the election it would fall apart, just because both want to be the center of attention. I was surprised when all those early stories were coming out where people were saying Trump was Elon’s puppet, and Trump seemed to tolerate that stuff.

I know some stuff's been reported, which I know is true. Elon physically shoved the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. As much as Elon was on this mission, ultimately, he gets very fixated on what he wants, and so I'm sure he was rubbing people the wrong way. Something fractured that relationship pretty badly and in a more dramatic fashion than I thought.

The Jared Isaacman stuff, I think, is really sad. I think that was NASA’s maybe last chance to stay relevant or become relevant again. He's like a pretty principled guy who had the right energy. He's not a SpaceX lackey, he's not an Elon lackey. I think he's a pretty independent guy, and this was just Washington politics at its worst. This is like the same thing that's been happening to NASA. Anyone who has read my books knows that I hate Richard Shelby - he was doing the same sort of stuff for decades. He was just looking out for Lockheed Martin and Boeing at the expense of the bigger picture. I don't have tons of insight beyond some of the stuff that's been reported, but curious to see how long this goes on.

Tycho: What can commercial space companies do now? Just wait it out?

Ashlee: I don't even know if that's as much of a problem now, you know? SpaceX has turned things in a pretty dramatic direction. Elon being out of favor is probably gonna push more money to Rocket Lab and maybe Blue Origin. Since Richard Shelby retired, I feel like the tide has turned. A good indicator is that ULA is trying to sell itself. So yeah, I wouldn't worry about commercial space too much. There's plenty of opportunity.

Anshuk: Quick follow-up, any idea who ULA is going to sell to?

Ashlee: It’s tricky. Blue Origin would have been the most obvious choice last year, but they are now hitting their stride. The question is, how much value does ULA necessarily bring? Launch is a horrendous business. Before, you used to be a rocket company or a satellite company, and now you want to be a space company. Rocket Lab is making huge chunks of the satellite buses, getting into solar panels, everything. SpaceX does the same, with Starlink. All the rocket companies are going that way, and I think ULA is sort of disadvantaged in that. You're just buying what, like, 10 or 11 launches a year. And they put themselves up for sale, like, what, 18 months ago? It’s a tough spot.

Anshuk: Let’s move to a different set of questions. You spent a lot of time with Elon, you spend time with Peter Beck, with Chris Kemp, and many others who are big founders and industry leaders in the space industry. Any commonalities between them that you think young founders should look into?

Ashlee: Over the past two decades, out of the many rocket startups that have emerged, only SpaceX and Rocket Lab have truly stood out. Despite the U.S. having more startups and a deep bench of aerospace talent—often veterans from SpaceX, the companies all ended up vaguely the same. They were all trying to make a small rocket, for which the physics are dialed in. So it’s kind of crazy that Rocket Lab, based in New Zealand and led by a CEO who didn’t even go to college, managed to succeed against the odds.

I spent six years trying to figure out what the secret sauce is, and the best thing I could tell was that I underestimated how much effect the CEO has on a large organization. That sounds kind of stupid, but I always figured that once you have enough people, it’s very difficult to maintain some kind of culture. But if you look at SpaceX’s culture, even with thousands of people, or with Peter’s perfectionism, it’s likea religion around engineering that filters down through the company.

Tycho: Great. Were there moments in your research for any of these companies where something changed your perception of them just completely on a dime?

Ashlee: Elon tried to sue me and destroy my family.

Tycho: After the book?

Ashlee: Yeah, that changed my perception.

Tycho: Are you back on better terms? I know you said that you didn’t speak for years afterwards.

Ashlee: Yeah, we’re all good now. But yeah, that's a good question. When I was working on the SpaceX book, a lot of people still doubted whether Elon actually understood rockets — he was calling himself the "chief engineer," which sounded hard to believe at the time. But when you see him up close, you see the good and the bad: while there are people who know more about rocket science, Elon had genuinely learned a lot and was making real technical decisions. That shifted my perception. Initially, I bought into the public narrative, but being around him changed that. Hanging around Elon also changed how I think about life a bit. He's extremely existential about everything, always pushing this sense of urgency and importance. It made me question whether I was really focusing on the things I cared most about, or just doing too much without prioritizing. I’m not saying everyone should live like that — SpaceX is infamous for burning people out — but it made me rethink how I allocate my energy.

Peter Beck is very straightforward. The guy was born to build rocket engines. Rocket Lab has this Apple-like secrecy that’s rare in aerospace, and Peter is always steps ahead of what he publicly shares. The company’s shift from a rocket company to becoming a full space company — if you look back, he was plotting that for years. I’m not sure that fully answers your question, but those were some of the takeaways from spending time with them.

Anshuk: During my undergrad, around 3-4 years ago, it felt like there was a new small-sat launcher startup all the time. Now I feel like most of them are gone, and everyone’s talking about defense startups. Maybe that’s because of Anduril. What do you think about this, and what do you think the next big aerospace thing is?

Ashlee: Yeah, it’s a big question because a lot is going on. I think you’re really looking at two hype cycles here. People had been chasing the idea of commercial space for so long, but it just wasn’t working. A handful of very rich people tried and failed, and I think when SpaceX started to break through, it rebooted this latent desire, especially for people who had grown up dreaming about space. Suddenly, after SpaceX, people wanted to be the next Elon, and venture capital was flowing into the space sector; you didn’t need to be a government or a billionaire to build rockets. But as expected, a lot of those companies were building very similar small rockets; it didn’t make sense to have 12 versions of the same thing.

I think we’re starting to see a second wave of rocket startups — companies trying different approaches. You’ve got kinetic launch companies like SpinLaunch and Longshot. People are still skeptical, but we are seeing players there. And there is a shift in attention now to mid-size and larger launch vehicles.

And then there’s the defense angle, which is a mix of things. For a while, Silicon Valley was largely against military work, but that’s swung back for a whole bunch of reasons. There’s money to be made, and VCs are funding defense tech again. Companies like Anduril have made that space look attractive. They’re one of the few that are trying to be a prime contractor, not just build a component or a platform. It’s also fueled by the war in Ukraine, the rise of China. The U.S. military knew it needed to modernize before, but had no will to do it. SpaceX’s success helped open up the idea more — it showed that new entrants can handle mission-critical government work, and maybe even do it better than the legacy players.

Anshuk: You've seen a lot of these big space companies like Rocket Lab from early on. What lessons would you pass on to the students here joining an early stage aerospace company?

Ashlee: First off, it’s such an exciting time — you’re all incredibly lucky. In terms of who tends to thrive, it’s often the generalists — the folks who’ve worked across systems like GNC, propulsion. They really understand how the whole machine works, and that makes them incredibly capable. There’s a tradeoff between going to a big name like Starship — which is obviously amazing — versus joining a smaller company where you get to do more hands-on work across disciplines. Early in your career, that breadth of experience is super valuable. Even if it’s not the most well-known company, people in the industry recognize and respect you when you’ve had that “big fish, small pond” kind of exposure. So yeah, that’s probably the best advice I can give.

Anshuk: We had Andy Lapsa (CEO of Stoke) here a couple of weeks ago, and that was his exact point. He was like, you should come join Stoke because there are like hundreds of us, rather than thousands of us.

Ashlee: It's probably quite true, in fact, the closer you could get to like 20 employees, the better, you know? Especially early, if you are confident in your skills, you'll do well. The commercial space probably feels big, but it's a pretty small world, so pay attention to networking because you will see people cycle through companies, everybody knows each other, and they all help each other out. So to the extent that you can, like, take advantage of things like this, or events where you can get to know the people in the industry.

Tycho: Great. Let’s get some audience questions now.

Audience question: What is your take on Chris Kemp? You reported on Astra in your book and featured him in your movie. It seems like Astra is trying to make a comeback too.

Ashlee: Yeah, kind of crazy. I mean, I did not think they would still be around at this point. Things got super dire, and I think they've raised more money. Chris has probably put a pretty good picture of how much more they raised. I suspect they'd probably need more to keep going for a bit. The guy he hired now to run the rocket program, Alan Weston, he's a legend. A pretty serious guy. I don't know, it's always an adventure with Chris. It’s legit, and they are trying.

Audience: Would you buy their products?

Ashlee: I wouldn't buy shares (Note: This is not financial advice). Products? Probably would not be my first choice. I think the thrusters, they were fucked up for a while and now they seem like they're okay.

It's so funny. I mean, he’s had the right intention. All those rocket start-ups at the time would kind of get stuck in perfecting their engineering over the years. Chris came from the software world with a different philosophy; he wanted to run it like a software project, and there’s probably a happy medium in between that he never quite achieved.

So I went to Alaska when they were trying to launch, and then I was there for weeks and weeks and weeks. They rushed the ride there, and then every day there was some new problem; it was hard to get parts, and people were working crazy hours. This thing that was supposed to be quick: light the rocket, throw it away, move on to the next one, ended up dragging on for months and undercut what they were trying to do. So by going too fast, they ended up kind of slowing down.

At least Astra had a different thesis, in terms of manufacturing, going fast, and making it cheap. They had that one launch for DARPA or NASA. Had they been able to string two in a row together, maybe probably would have made it. I know how he comes off in my movie or my book, but he's just unbridled ambition flailing around in the world. I don't think there's anything malicious about it. I do think he sort of believes in what he is presenting and trying to achieve.

Audience Question: What do you think will be the big trends in the space sector, specifically in-orbit industries, in the next 15 years?

Ashlee: I mean, I find it funny. I’ve been covering this stuff for decades now, and nobody ever really provides a very convincing answer to me about what's beyond imaging and communications in lower orbit. Somebody will one day, I am sure, think of lots of ideas. I haven't found anyone who actually has a really good idea, so that does kind of worry me. I see potential in manufacturing in LEO, I can see potential in the data centers in space idea, but I am still pretty skeptical.

As long as Trump keeps going, we're gonna do Golden Dome, and space is going to play a huge role in that. The defense aspect of LEO is only going to increase. It’s probably not like the sexiest thing, but that will happen. We’re also clearly headed toward more lunar activity; it’s just a matter of when and in what form. I think there will eventually be some real industry out there. And then there’s Starlink. I just don’t see the world accepting Elon owning the dominant global communications platform forever. There’s already talk of competitors and alternative architectures, and I think there's a real opportunity for someone to build a more open, universal space-based internet, a platform others can build on. That could be a huge unlock if someone figures it out.

Audience: On the European side, there’s been some activity with Isar Aerospace and RFA, but no major successes yet. Do you see anything coming in the future for Europe’s launch industry?

Ashlee: Europe is in a tough spot. There's satellite stuff, but otherwise you're totally screwed. The European Space Program’s government end is an absolute disaster. I don't even think they have even fully reckoned with what a shit show it is. They completely misjudged SpaceX and are now decades behind on reusability. If they started today, it’d still take them 50 years to catch up.

With the satellite constellations. I mean, there's only gonna be room for so many of the massive communications ones. The US has two going, China's gonna put up one or two. Europe has inherited OneWeb, but the rest of the line-up is currently pretty uncertain.

I think the U.S. and China are now on totally different timelines from the rest of the world — pouring money into AI, biotech, space, and defense. It’s a lot like the Cold War, where two superpowers were racing ahead while everyone else watched from the sidelines. I think the next 10–20 years are going to feel really weird for countries not keeping pace.

And that makes me sad, honestly. I love going to Europe. I’ve met incredible scientists and entrepreneurs there. But I’ve also seen how the system holds them back — university bureaucracies, startup ecosystems that move too slowly, funding that’s hard to come by. I met a guy in Switzerland doing cutting-edge longevity research, and he was stuck in some petty academic fight while trying to spin out a company. I remember thinking: if he flew to California tomorrow, he'd get easy funding by the end of the week. God bless, they have a great work-life balance. But then I contrast that with what I saw in Shenzhen — people at DJI sleeping next to the machines they were building. You don’t have to love that lifestyle, but it shows the intensity and speed some ecosystems are operating at. You are just not seeing that in Europe.

Anshuk: I think that’s all the time we have for today. Let’s thank Ashlee for his time!

Thanks again for checking out this interview with Ashlee. Our goal at The Overview is to continue to share content tailored for students and early career professionals in the aerospace industry. If you enjoyed this article, stay subscribed for more!

Anshuk and Tycho

The measurement or distance downwards or inwards

Welcome back to The Overview! Happy summer solstice — the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere ☀️

As the school year winds down and summer kicks into full swing, we’ve got an exciting edition for you. This week, we’re diving into vertical landings, underground caves, and more:

• 🚀 A successful demonstration of a vertically landing rocket by Japanese automaker Honda’s R&D division, a first outside the US and China

• 🪐 ICYMI: Join Stanford PhD student and our very own Isaac Ward on what caves can teach us about the cosmos

• 👋 Also, if you haven’t joined The Overview Discord, we’d love to see you there! Come chat about the latest happenings in aerospace, emerging technologies, and help shape what we explore next:

Join the Discord!

🚀 Aerospace News

It’s been a while since we last looked at the news, and it is safe to say that a lot of things have happened in the last few weeks. But let’s focus on this past week. On one hand, we’ve got new, exciting undertakings from old players. On the other hand, a continued reminder that spaceflight is hard.

Honda succeeds in landing a rocket prototype

Source: Ars Technica

Honda just tested an experimental rocket capable of vertical landing! The video shows an incredibly stable vehicle that performs a hop to 900 feet in altitude and comes back to land at the landing pad. This would be a first-stage booster of a rocket, with grid fins for aerodynamic control similar to that of SpaceX’s Falcon 9’s booster stage.

Although the rocket is a small technology demonstrator and not an operational vehicle, it shows a key development: it is the first showing of a vertical take-off and landing capable vehicle outside of the US (SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Stoke) and China (LandSat) (Note that there was also a successful demonstration by a student team Gruyere Space Program in Switzerland).

SpaceX is the only company that has been able to make commercial use of orbital reusable rockets so far, so it will be interesting to see where Honda goes from here. A surprising showcase!

Starship Woes Continue

It’s been a difficult year for the Starship program. Since the introduction of Ship V2 on flight test 7 in January, SpaceX has been unable to recreate the successes of the first few test flights (especially those of flights 5 and 6 in terms of ship recovery). Flight tests 7 and 8 both had failures during the ascent post-stage separation, and although flight 9 managed to get further, it lost an engine and control authority while in space on its suborbital trajectory.

On Wednesday evening, these troubles continued with an unexpected failure while Ship 36, the Starship upper-stage meant to fly for flight test 10, exploded while preparing for a static fire test. Based on a tweet from Elon, this was most likely due to a COPV in the payload bay failing below its rated pressure. The result? Likely delays in the next test flight and the Starship program.

⛏️ Featured Technology

Aerospace engineering often reaches for the skies… but what if part of the next frontier is right beneath our feet?

In his latest article, Isaac Ward from The Overview explores how cutting-edge aerospace technologies are transforming our ability to navigate and understand subterranean spaces. From collapsed mines to lava tubes, these underground environments present extreme challenges that demand autonomous, adaptable, and resilient systems. Come learn about:

• Search and rescue in GPS-denied, high-risk spaces that are too dangerous for human teams 🚑

• DARPA’s SubT Challenge, where robotic teams competed to explore and map complex cave systems 🗺️

• Scientific discovery in remote or culturally significant underground sites 🔍

• Testing grounds for space, using Earth’s caves as analogs for Moon and Mars exploration 🛸

And don’t worry—no cave diving required. Isaac keeps things light, fascinating, and accessible (even for the mildly claustrophobic). So dive into the full article below! You just might find aerospace’s next big leap is straight down.

Full article

💬 Quote of the Week

As we explore the depths this week, from underground caves to the foundational challenges of rocket development, we’re reminded that breakthroughs often emerge from the toughest moments:

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, Summer

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — The Depth Edition.

Today marks the summer solstice (June 20), the longest day of the year. We hope you are soaking up the sunshine. See you on Discord! 🌞

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about making aerospace an inclusive and welcoming community. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this article, I’m going to talk about subterranean environments: collapsed mines, cave networks, and the urban underground. I’m going to talk about why we should care about these environments, and the exciting aerospace, robotics, and computing research challenges that these extreme environments pose.

Down the search and rescue rabbit hole

There are a number of reasons why you might like to go down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Probably the most necessary circumstance is in the case of search and rescue.

Traditionally, search and rescue operations in underground environments have been severely limited. Underground environments pose communications blackouts as signals cannot propagate through the solid walls and complex geometric spaces associated with subterranean environments. In other words, there’s no guarantee of being able to teleoperate an aerial vehicle in these spaces. These spaces are also GPS-denied and largely uncharted, impacting an autonomous system’s ability to locate itself. On top of that, environmental hazards such as toxic gases, structural instability, or confined spaces actively threaten first responders, so human presence is often limited or logistically impossible. An autonomous solution would need to solve the problems it encounters on its own. And this is all happening in a time where rapid responses mean the difference between life and death for the rescuees.

I say this to highlight the technical challenges posed by subterranean environments: in these situations, drones need to be self-sufficient, capable of solving challenging navigation tasks on the fly, untethered, and must be able to make life-or-death decisions without human input, onboard. A solution necessitates the collaboration of mechanical engineers, roboticists, computer scientists, computer engineers, and domain experts.

Throughout this article, I’ll point to interesting research and development efforts for autonomously exploring subterranean environments. No specific criteria, just works that I have personally found interesting. Here’s the first: a morphing quadrotor or ‘foldable drone’ out of the UZH’s Robotics and Perception Group and EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, which was specifically designed to maneuver through narrow gaps that would have otherwise been inaccessible.

DARPA and the SubT challenge

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (a United States Department of Defense agency), understood the scale of this challenge when they proposed the Subterranean (‘SubT’) Challenge in 2018-2021. SubT pitted 8 teams, each with real robots, against each other. Teams earned points by correctly (and autonomously) identifying artifacts placed within unfamiliar, underground environments (specifically the Louisville Mega Cavern) that were considered “too dangerous, dark, or deep to risk human lives”. The courses spanned kilometers of subterranean terrain, running through mine-shafts, urban circuits, multi-story ruins, and natural caverns with man made miscellanea.

Oh, and $5,000,000 in prize money was at stake in the final competition. Which is to say that subterranean exploration isn’t just a million dollar problem; it’s a five million dollar problem.

As an aside, in a 2023 article, Ben Recht wrote in his substack ‘arg min’:

“For better or for worse, competition is the core of all of science. Scientists love to claim they are lofty idealists in search of fundamental truths. But in reality, they are ruthlessly competitive megalomaniacs who want accolades for their brilliance to ring out for centuries. I don’t think you can understand the scientific method without understanding this core human element of savage competition.”

A somewhat pessimistic characterisation of scientists! But in this case, it is true that competition moved the needle. Here’s just a few of the papers that came out of SubT (if you’re interested):

• Team CERBERUS Wins the DARPA Subterranean Challenge: Technical Overview and Lessons Learned

• DARPA Subterranean Challenge: Multi-robotic Exploration of Underground Environments

• NeBula: TEAM CoSTAR’s Robotic Autonomy Solution that Won Phase II of DARPA Subterranean Challenge

• Modular, Resilient, and Scalable System Design Approaches - Lessons learned in the years after DARPA Subterranean Challenge

• An Addendum to NeBula: Toward Extending Team CoSTAR’s Solution to Larger Scale Environments

• Resilient and Modular Subterranean Exploration with a Team of Roving and Flying Robots

There’s too much to distill in this short article, but approaches were distinct: Team CERBERUS built a hybrid “system‐of‐systems” that combined legged quadrupeds and flying UAVs under a unified control approach. They used robust whole-body control and multi‑modal, multi-robot perception so that the robots could traverse underground terrain and localize even under heavy sensor degradation.

In contrast, the CTU-CRAS team deployed a heterogeneous fleet of wheeled UGVs and drones for exploration. CTU-CRAS emphasized a unique communication architecture – droppable relay “Mote” nodes to extend connectivity – so that the distributed team could explore and report artifacts in tunnels without relying on infrastructure.

Team CoSTAR’s solution (“NeBula”) was distinctive for its uncertainty‐aware, belief‐space autonomy framework. NeBula integrates semantic mapping, multi-modal localization, probabilistic traversability analysis and global planning, which lets heterogeneous robots operate within a unified autonomy stack.

For the sake of scientific exploration

But we’re actually motivated to explore subterranean environments for reasons beyond disaster response and DARPA challenges. What about purely scientific endeavors?

I think three really neat applications of aerial vehicles in caves concern 1) cave surveying and mapping, 2) archaeology, and 3) biodiversity quantification. In each of these applications domains, traditional approaches have involved laborious efforts from scientists to schlep their equipment into remote, dangerous, and confined subterranean environments, to complete some scientific process or analysis. In each case, autonomous aerial vehicles can be used to aid in completing these scientific tasks.

If you want to know more on these three topics, then check out the following resources…

1. Wennie Tabib et al.’s “Autonomous Cave Surveying With an Aerial Robot”, where a cave in total darkness is surveyed autonomously with a drone equipped with a depth camera, vision camera, and various lights. Awesome paper in my opinion! Videos here:

2. KJR’s drone-based approach to preserving Australian heritage assets, in particular Aboriginal rock art and cave paintings over an area greater than 5000 acres. As an Australian, this is particularly interesting, as in May 2020 the mining giant Rio Tinto destroyed a cave system in Jukan Gorge that featured 46,000 year old evidence of continuous human habitation, as a part of mining efforts. This event really elevated the preservation of cultural heritage assets in our national conversation. Video on KJR and company’s important work here:

(and you can also check out their 3D data captures of caves in-browser which are particularly neat: https://kjr.com.au/west-yalanji/.)

3. The Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute’s research program “Shedding New Light on the Cryptic World of Subterranean Fauna”. In this document, the cultural, ecological, and economic value of identifying cave-dwelling fauna is outlined. In particular, lightweight methods for quantifying biodiversity (i.e. how much of a species population lives in a certain area) are outlined, in particular eDNA approaches and meta-barcoding. Recently, research has been published on the use of drones for collecting eDNA samples, and I think research that connects this to cave dwelling troglofauna and stygofauna could be a real slam dunk. In other words, I think it’s possible to use drones to collect subterranean biological samples and quantify the biodiversity of caves in a safe, replicable, and scalable way, thus enabling us to learn more about our least understood critters. Document here (warning: it’s long).

If we continue in the direction of scientific endeavors we reach an extremely interesting application of aerial vehicles in subterranean environments: exploring cave environments on other worlds. Particularly craters and lava tubes on the Moon and Mars. In fact, NASA and other agencies routinely use Earth caves as stand-ins for extraterrestrial ones.

For example, NASA’s BRAILLE project (“Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments”) sent a rover into lava tubes in California to study cave microbes and test life-detection techniques as proxies for Mars. Likewise, scientists have explored Hawaiian lava tubes (Mauna Loa) and California’s Medicine Lake volcano as Mars/Moon analogs.

These analogs inform future space missions: for instance, a NASA NIAC study proposed a “Spelunker” mission to send hybrid rovers down a lunar lava tube skylight, using a tethered lander and multiple hopping/rolling bots to explore underground. In short, robotic teams now routinely practice subterranean exploration on Earth – from domestic cave networks to volcanic tubes – to prepare for finding water, life, and safe havens on the Moon and Mars.

In summary

So that’s a high level overview on subterranean exploration with aerial vehicles. Hopefully, in reading this article, you’ve gotten as excited about aerospace in the underground as I have. I’ve also created a video/resource dump below that talks more about some of the research that we touched on (and research that I had to omit for space). Check them out below if you're interested!

I hope that next time you think about important endeavors in aerospace, that you consider the airspace that lives right beneath your feet… 🦇🦇🦇

Cheers,

-Ike

Link dump

DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event Compilation:

Mykel Kochenderfer at Stanford University talks about robots exploring caves:

Quadrupeds explore caves in the PNW (Lava Beds National Monument) as an analog for life on Mars (NASA Braille team led by Jen Blank):

NASA JPL’s NeBula system exploring Martian-like caves:

Hexapedal robots explore cave systems in South Australia:

A cave surveying robot from CMU’s Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab undergoes in-the-field hardware tests:

And a more technical explanation of their research:

Exyn Technologies’ LIDAR-based autonomous cave drone:

Crash proof ‘Gimball drone’ uses a shock absorbing frame to explore ice caves in the Swiss Alps:

The ‘DelFly Nimble’ - a drone that uses flapping wings for locomotion:

A foldable drone inspired by birds morphs to change shape and size for superior navigation in normally inaccessible environments:

(Congrats on getting all the way to the deepest depths of this article!)

Anniversary

The completion of one full orbit of the Earth around the Sun — marking a year since the beginning of something worth celebrating

It’s Been a Year (or so)!

Hello subscribers (The Overviewers?),

We are a little over one year into the Overview journey, and what a journey it has been! Thank you for subscribing, reading our newsletters, our articles, and for listening to the podcasts. From the beginning, our mission has been to provide aspiring aerospace engineers with engaging articles and podcasts that showcase technical perspectives on the various facets of aerospace and personal experiences from across the field.

As an editorial team, we are proud of the vibrant collection we have built. A heartfelt thank you to all those who have contributed articles so far; you are all amazing! We hope to continue growing The Overview as a space for learning, reflection, and community. If you have a topic that you’d like to see covered or want to contribute something yourself, please feel free to reach out to us!

Thanks again from The Overview!

A Year in Orbit: Some Amazing Prior Work

To celebrate, we’re highlighting some incredible articles from the past that you may have missed. We have also compiled all of the articles on The Overview into thematic sections, which you can explore in our full anniversary retrospective:

First, Alexandra Haraszti’s amazing article about why origami is important for large, deployable space structures, and how her hobby became her research field as an aerospace engineer:

On the more humorous end, we have Mark Paral’s great compilation of anonymous stories about how people he interviewed got their internships. Because you may often end up asking your friends, “How exactly did you land that?”:

Working on engineering projects is one of the best ways to get hands-on experience as an undergraduate. The Brigham Young University’s rocket team knows this since they also won the 2023 edition of the coveted Spaceport America Cup. Check out their story here:

Navigation has been around for as long as humans have explored their surroundings. Now, as robots must precisely operate on land and in space, research into key navigation technologies like GPS becomes critical. In this article, Sukrut explains some of the technology behind GPS and his journey into navigation work:

You may think of aerospace structures as rigid objects, but in reality, they are bending, twisting, vibrating, and interacting with moving fluids inside and outside the body. All this requires analysis and modeling, and that’s exactly what Aaron Fang is an expert at. In this article, he goes over his journey and also why his field is so important in practice:

🔔 Join The Overview Discord!!!

The Overview has always been about building a community to share aerospace knowledge. Now, we’re launching a new space to bring that mission to life:

🎉 Introducing The Overview Discord!
Come chat about the latest happenings in aerospace, emerging technologies, and new articles and podcasts! You’ll also get a chance to give direct feedback on what you want to see next.

Join the Discord!

💬 Quote of the Week

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives . . . It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — The Anniversary Edition. Can’t wait to see you on our Discord!

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about making aerospace an inclusive and welcoming community. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

This past year has been one of remarkable momentum in aerospace. At The Overview, nearly 50 writers and guests have shared their stories, spanning cutting-edge research, personal journeys, and the evolving landscape of the space economy. From foundational topics in aircraft design to the future of in-space autonomy, we have compiled a comprehensive list of the articles and podcasts that have been published in the past year into one place. Whether you’re revisiting favorites or discovering something new, we hope this retrospective offers inspiration, insight, and a renewed sense of curiosity.

— The Overview Team

Controls and dynamics

Fundamentals of how aerospace systems behave and are controlled

• A Trajectory into Guidance, Navigation, and Control

• An Introduction to Loads and Dynamics

Fluids and Aerodynamics

The physics of flow, essential for both aircraft and spacecraft design

• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) - A Gentle Introduction

• Commercial Aircraft Design: A Brief Introduction

Structures and Space Systems Design

How we design and deploy aerospace structures

• How to Fold a Spaceship

• The Overview Podcast #2 — Alexandra Haraszti, Space Origamist

Robots, Machines, and Computing

Autonomy, decision-making, and onboard computing systems

• Robot Autonomy: The Next Frontier

• Can We Trust Artificially Intelligent Machines to Make Decisions in Space?

• The Future of In-Space Computing

• The Not-So-Obvious Parts of Avionics Engineering

Rocketry and Propulsion

The hardware and propulsion systems that make flight possible

• SLS vs. Saturn V: Which was Louder?

• Rocketing to New Heights

• Starship: The Next Giant Leap

Satellites and Navigation

Orbital systems, GNSS, and orbital debris

• The Necessity of Cube Satellite Teams

• Humanity's Journey Towards Precise Navigation

• Space Debris: Understanding the Threat to Our Future Beyond Earth

Space Economics and Industry

The new space economy, commercial developments, and entrepreneurship

• The Overview Podcast #5 — Tycho Bogdanowitsch

• The New Space Guide To The Galaxy

• The Overview Podcast #3 — Cameron Flannery & Evan Kay, Navier AI

Education and Admissions

Guidance on academic advancement in aerospace

• Tagg's Tips on Landing the Graduate School of Your Dreams

• The Overview Podcast #4 — Professor Juan Alonso, Professor at Stanford University

Working in Aerospace as a Foreign National

Navigating immigration, visas, and employment restrictions

• How To Work at NASA JPL as an International Student

• Can You Work in Aerospace in The United States as a Foreign National?

Career Paths and Personal Narratives

Internships, industry insights, and practical career advice

• Lessons I Learned as a SpaceX GNC Intern

• An Introvert’s Guide to Networking

• How’d You Land That?! (Part 1)

• How’d You Land That?! (Part 2)

• Landing an Aerospace Industry Job After Your PhD

Inclusion and Diversity in Aerospace

Belonging and broadening participation

• Looking Ahead: The Future for Women in Aerospace

Onwards to the next orbit! If you’re interested in writing or being a guest on our podcast, feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org.

The integration of two or more academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines to solve complex problems or generate new insights

Welcome back to The Overview! We’ve got an exciting edition for you this week, starting with a new announcement…

🔔 What’s New: The Overview Discord!!!

The Overview has always been about building a community to share aerospace knowledge, and now, we’re launching a new space to bring that mission to life:

🎉 Introducing The Overview Discord!
Come chat about the latest happenings in aerospace, emerging technologies, and new articles and podcasts — with the creators themselves! You’ll also get a chance to give direct feedback on what you want to see next.

Join the Discord!

More in this week’s issue:

• 🚀 Six rocket launches in just 18 hours by five different organizations — from Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper satellites to Chinese and European missions. This marks a new chapter in launch frequency and global space access!

• 🪐 ICYMI: Join Ian Fu, a Stanford PhD student at Stanford whose work bridges planetary sciences and aerospace engineering, as he explores why interdisciplinary thinking will shape the future of space exploration

🚀 Aerospace News

A recurring theme in this news section is that the aerospace sector is booming, which gives us a good batch of material for every newsletter. Well, this past week was no exception, and we saw a true glimpse into the future of the launch industry: an abundance of launches.

Six Rocket Launches in 1 Day

Source: Space.com

Yes, you read that right. In the span of a little under 18 hours, six rockets were launched by five different entities, from four different points on Earth, on April 28th-29th.

Probably what we are most used to are regular launches of Falcon 9 by SpaceX for their Starlink constellation. Indeed, this accounted for two rocket launches. There was one from Florida (Cape Canaveral) and one from California (Vandenberg), both growing the large operational Starlink internet constellation.

There was also a very important (and successful) mission from ULA and Amazon (note: not Blue Origin). This mission saw ULA launch an Atlas V to deliver the first 27 Amazon Kuiper satellites to their desired orbit. Kuiper is Amazon’s own internet constellation, and it plans to rival Starlink’s dominance.

Speaking of internet constellations, one of the launches was a Chinese Long-March 5B rocket, and it sent up a group of satellites for China’s own internet constellation: Guowang. Although it probably won’t compete with Starlink/Kuiper in western markets, it is interesting to see this growing trend in distributed space systems and mega-constellations. It seems like the growth of launch vehicle abundance and constellations has become a symbiotic relationship.

The fifth and sixth launches were the only non-Internet constellation payloads. From French Guiana, Arianespace launched its Vega-C rocket for the fourth time with a forest-monitoring satellite from the European Space Agency. And finally, Firefly Aerospace launched their Alpha rocket from Vandenberg in California with a Lockheed Martin demo satellite. Unfortunately, a mishap occurred on the second stage after stage separation, which prevented the satellite from reaching its intended orbit. More on that here.

Despite one of the launches failing, it is such an exciting time when so many different entities from around the world not only have the capability to reach space regularly but also have a wide variety of payloads to facilitate activity down on Earth. All of these launches were to low Earth orbit, but we are headed to a future where even GEO or deep space missions become a weekly or daily occurrence.

🪐 Featured Technology

What does it take to explore the cosmos?

According to Stanford AeroAstro PhD student Ian Fu, the best explorers aren’t just engineers or scientists—they’re both. Drawing from his journey in planetary science and aerospace engineering, Ian reflects on:

• The philosophical divide between scientists and engineers, and how it holds back discovery 🔧

• Ian’s research on icy moons and spacecraft design that bridges both domains 🪐

• A gripping story from NASA’s Galileo mission, where interdisciplinary teamwork saved the day 📡

• How students, researchers, and institutions can build better collaborations 🤝

If you’ve ever felt caught between scientific curiosity and engineering impact—or if you simply want to learn about the planetary sciences, read the full article below:

Full article here

💬 Quote of the Week

“This world is of a single piece; yet, we invent nets to trap it for our inspection. Then we mistake our nets for the reality of the piece. In these nets we catch the fishes of the intellect but the sea of wholeness forever eludes our grasp . . . It is not the nets that are at fault but rather our misunderstanding of their function as nets. They do catch the fishes but never the sea, and it is the sea that we ultimately desire.”
― Martha Boles, Universal Patterns

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — The Interdisciplinary Edition. Can’t wait to see you on our Discord!

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about making aerospace an inclusive and welcoming community. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Ian, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What is Planetary Science?

To pursue my passion for space, I chose planetary science—a dynamic field that explores the planets, moons, and celestial bodies within and beyond our solar system. This discipline weaves together insights from astrophysics, geophysics, chemistry, and more to examine their chemical and physical compositions, atmospheres, magnetospheres, geology, origins, and evolution. By unraveling these mysteries, planetary science reveals the fascinating story of how these bodies formed, evolved, and exist today, deepening our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.

The Separation Between Science and Engineering

You’d think planetary scientists and aerospace engineers would be two peas in a pod—both are fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, both push the boundaries of what’s possible. But in practice, they often operate in separate worlds. I’ve seen this play out firsthand, scientists frustrated by instrument designs that limit their work, and engineers unsure how their new technological development applies to scientific discovery. There is a real philosophical divide between the groups. Scientists want to know why things are the way they are, piecing together the universe through observation. Engineers are focused on how to make things work, solving problems through practical application.

The philosophical divide between seeking understanding and prioritizing practical application manifests in other domains as well: in medicine, researchers uncover disease mechanisms while clinicians treat patients; in literature, scholars dissect narratives and themes while writers craft stories in art; and so on for the arts, literature, economics, and so much more.

But when these different groups work side by side, over time, they start to speak each other’s language. They learn to think more alike, bridging that philosophical gap. Instead of studying the same coin from opposite sides, they flip it together, seeing the whole picture. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. That’s why I’m such a big believer in bringing these groups together under one roof, like we do here at Stanford’s planetary science lab within the aerospace engineering department.

When scientists and engineers share the same space, scientists start to get how design works; engineers begin to see the science behind the tools. Collaboration stops being a clunky process and becomes second nature.

How I've Fused Planetary Science and Aerospace Engineering

My research explores the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, using simulations and inversions to assess their potential for life.

But I also want to shape missions that visit these worlds, working on the complete loop from mission and instrument design to scientific goals and specifications.

In traditional space missions, collaboration exists where various groups negotiate back and forth—scientists focus on potential discoveries, engineers on technical goals. They’re working toward the same goal, but their different focuses can pull them in opposite directions. So, what's wrong with scientists and engineers staying in their lane, speaking from their expertise?

While there is nothing objectively wrong with this approach, it limits the innovation the mission could potentially achieve. With a unified approach, each individual can influence the mission’s design to get the results they want from both a scientific and engineering standpoint, working as a singular group rather than between groups. This approach blurs the line between scientist and engineer, fostering investigators equipped to tackle space’s toughest challenges from all angles.

This is something that I get to do here at Stanford's AA department. For example, we have a lab specializing in autonomous distributed space missions (SLAB) that orbit Earth and another planetary science lab with a past of studying asteroids and dwarf planets in the asteroid belt. I hope to work with both of them, developing a concept for a distributed space system with small-scale CubeSats to orbit and study the composition of near-Earth asteroids.

Success of the Interdisciplinary Approach

This interdisciplinary approach is not just a theoretical idea—it has proven critical in real-world space missions, especially when unexpected challenges arise. In 1989, NASA launched Galileo, the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and study its moons, poised to transform our understanding of the gas giant, its satellites, and even the solar system’s origins. But in 1991, disaster struck: the umbrella-like high-gain antenna, critical for transmitting data back to Earth, failed to fully deploy, leaving the low-gain antenna’s sluggish 8-16 bits per second—far too slow to deliver the mission’s ambitious scientific payload.

Fixing a spacecraft millions of miles away was no small feat. An engineer alone might grasp the spacecraft’s technical quirks but miss how tweaks could affect scientific data; a scientist might prioritize data but lack insight into possible fixes. Thankfully, Galileo’s interdisciplinary team of investigators tackled the crisis together, blending their expertise to devise innovative solutions. They boosted the low-gain antenna’s performance with innovative onboard data compression, optimized scientific pipelines, upgraded ground receivers, and Deep Space Network antenna arraying, raising the data rate to 160 bits per second and an effective bandwidth of up to 1,000 bits per second. By storing critical backlogged data on the spacecraft’s tape recorder for later transmission, they salvaged the mission. This collaborative approach delivered groundbreaking results: the first direct measurements of Jupiter’s atmosphere, evidence of a potential subsurface ocean on Europa, detailed observations of Io’s volcanism, and deep insights into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

How You Can Bridge the Gap Between Fields

The Galileo mission’s success, driven by scientists and engineers working as a unified team, showcases the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. This approach serves as a powerful model for anyone seeking to blend fields, whether in space exploration or other domains. But how can engineers curious about science, scientists eager to tackle technical challenges, or anyone aiming to merge disciplines make this happen? Not everyone is in a place where science and engineering or any other field naturally mix—lots of departments or institutions keep them separate, divided by tradition and/or structure. That’s okay. You can still make it happen with a bit of effort and an open mind.

Here’s how to start bridging those gaps, based on what I’ve learned:

Check out talks or workshops in the field you’re curious about:

• These are easy ways to get a taste of what’s going on without diving in headfirst.

• For example, a planetary scientist might go to an engineering talk and realize a small instrument design choice that they can exploit in their research. An engineer at a science seminar might spot a problem that they feel could be readily solved with new technology

• You’ll hear about current challenges, tools, or questions that might spark a connection to your work, opening your eyes to how the two fields can intersect

Chat with people from other fields:

• Seminars and workshops are great for meeting people—researchers, students, or professionals—who are interested in the same big questions. Ask about their work, share what you’re doing, and see where it goes.

• These connections become the foundation of interdisciplinary work, linking you to mentors, peers, or teams who share your vision, regardless of institutional barriers.

Keep your mind open and ask questions:

• Don’t stick to what you already know. Being open to new ways of thinking or new ways of solving a problem can lead to cool ideas you’d never get otherwise.

• Don't be afraid to ask questions, even if it might feel uncomfortable, this is one of the best ways to pick up a new field of knowledge

An Institutional Case for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Like I mentioned above, an individual can take this interdisciplinary jump with their own initiative, but it is much more effective if this collaboration is built into the structure of their institution. Logistical and bureaucratic hurdles slow the development of cutting-edge technology and discoveries. For example, as a leader in space exploration like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), I saw that the divide between scientists and engineers is deeply embedded in the organization. Scientists and engineers often work in separate buildings, follow entirely different leadership and management structures, and operate under distinct funding structures, yet they must collaborate closely on the same projects. While JPL undoubtedly achieves remarkable results, this structure raises the question of whether more seamlessly integrated collaboration could further enhance its output.

A blended department or institution breaks down these barriers, merging science and engineering or any discipline, to address cosmic questions more effectively and efficiently. Instead of training scientists and engineers in isolation, we should prepare investigators skilled in both. It’s a smarter way to explore the universe, and I feel more institutions should embrace this interdisciplinary approach to spark innovation and push the boundaries of what’s possible. There are very powerful minds working in science and engineering, respectively. Why not have them work together on the same problems to come up with ideas that progress our knowledge in both domains?

The Future Is Interdisciplinary

For those in very traditional settings, the challenge is real, but so is the opportunity. By stepping outside your bubble—whether through a seminar, a conversation, or a new project—you’re not just building skills; you’re shaping a mindset. You’re becoming an investigator who sees problems from all angles, ready to design missions, interpret data, or solve cosmic puzzles in ways that single-discipline approaches cannot. Institutions may not always make this easy, but you can. And as more people embrace this mindset, it will push for departments and programs that train investigators, not just scientists or engineers. That’s how we’ll deepen our understanding of space—by linking ideas across disciplines to answer questions neither side could tackle alone.

Ian Fu

The practice of including people from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds, genders, and identities

Welcome back to The Overview! This week’s edition is all about diversity and how inclusion strengthens the future of aerospace. Let’s dive in!

👩🏽‍🚀 What would it take for everyone to feel like they belong in aerospace? Join Stanford PhD student Michelle Ho as she reflects on belonging, bias, and building a more inclusive future in aerospace ✨

🚀 In aerospace news, Blue Origin and SpaceX are expanding access to space, not just for trained astronauts but for civilians and new faces from all walks of life! 🌎

👥 Personal Experiences

Aerospace engineering is rapidly bringing science fiction to life — from autonomous spacecraft to robotic missions on the Moon and Mars. While the field continues to push the boundaries of science and technology, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in many of its core areas. Building an inclusive future means making sure everyone has the support, visibility, and community they need to thrive.

In this article, join Stanford PhD student Michelle Ho as she reflects on:

• Her journey to pursuing an aerospace engineering PhD 🚀

• The isolation and subtle biases women often face in technical spaces🧍‍♀️

• Advice for women navigating male-dominated STEM spaces 💡

• Actions male allies can take to support inclusion 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

• How educators and industry leaders can create lasting structural change 🏛️

We want to spotlight the responsibility of shaping a more inclusive future in aerospace. Whether you're a student, ally, or professional, this piece offers something for you! Read the full article below:

Full article here

🚀 Aerospace News

One of the most exciting things in the aerospace industry today is that the ability to fly to space (orbital or sub-orbital) is rapidly opening up. In the past, this was limited to career astronauts (or the occasional rich space enthusiast) who received intense decade-long training to fly to destinations like the International Space Station.

But things are changing. This week, let us look at two private spaceflight missions that show that space is no longer just for trained astronauts, but for civilians who may visit space for scientific or leisure purposes! Although the cost barrier is still high, an increasing cadence points towards these opportunities opening up for more people.

SpaceX Fram2 Mission

On March 31st, 2025, SpaceX launched the Fram2 mission, with four crew members on board a Crew Dragon launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket. This mission was undertaken by entrepreneur Chun Wang, who has a personal interest in the exploration of Earth’s polar regions. So, he devised the Fram2 mission (named after Fram, a ship used for early human exploration of the poles), as the first human spaceflight mission to operate in polar orbit, i.e., the first opportunity for humans to see Earth’s poles with their own eyes. The crew was an all-civilian international crew who shared Wang’s interest in polar exploration. As with the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission in 2021, this Crew Dragon was equipped with a cupola that allowed the crew to look out of the capsule. Apart from the sightseeing, the crew also conducted scientific experiments during their 3 and a half days in orbit.

Blue Origin NS-31 Mission

On the morning of April 14th, Blue Origin launched its NS-31 (NS stands for New Shepard, the rocket used for the launch) mission carrying six passengers to the edge of space. This mission is notable due to its high-profile passengers, including international pop star Katy Perry and TV journalist Gayle King. The all-women crew flew past the Karman line for the 11-minute mission, experiencing four minutes of weightlessness with unobstructed views of the Earth and the Moon. Although primarily designed as a tourism experience rather than a scientific mission, the mission showcased the increasing access of spaceflight to civilians with minimal training (with only two days of in-person training required), on a completely reusable rocket!

💬 Quote of the Week

“What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivations, perseverance, and desire — the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.”
— Dr. Ellen Ochoa, engineer and NASA astronaut

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — The Diversity Edition. No matter your gender, age, race, or any other identity, your seat on the rocketship matters. And when you lift off, bring others along for the ride! 🚀

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about making aerospace an inclusive and welcoming community. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Michelle, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

My dream has always been to travel to the stars. I received a telescope for my fifth birthday and quickly decided that I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was nine, I figured out from some amusement park ride that I get really motion sick, so I changed my aspirations to aerospace engineering and have worked towards that dream ever since. I still wanted to shoot for the stars, just from behind the scenes instead. Being a young girl, and now a woman in aerospace engineering has often felt like a lonely road. And as much encouragement as I had, I know many others didn’t have the same opportunities to pursue engineering or even considered it as an option.

In 2022, women and gender minorities made up around 13.6% of the aerospace workforce, according to Data USA. And while progress has been made to increase gender diversity, the technical core of these fields remains male-dominated, especially in robotics, systems, and controls. The field also suffers from a leaky pipeline: many women leave due to a lack of mentorship, limited advancement opportunities, or environments that make them feel like they don’t belong.

Still, I remain hopeful. By building comradery among the women already in the field, extending outreach to inspire the next generation, and encouraging male colleagues to be informed and engaged allies, I believe we can shift the culture. Together, we can open doors not just for a few but for a future where gender is no longer a barrier in aerospace.

Becoming the Role Model I Needed

Aerospace engineering was my entire personality growing up. I spent my childhood reading every space book in the library, watching launches again and again on YouTube, attending space and robotics camps every summer, dressing as an astronaut every Halloween, etc. I believed that getting into a strong college would help me pursue my dream, so I cried every time I got a grade below a 95. I was told my aspirations were unique, but that sense of uniqueness sometimes made me feel isolated too. I didn’t know who to ask for help because I assumed no one could truly relate.

That feeling only deepened when I arrived at college. I found myself surrounded by brilliant peers, but with very few women who shared my passion for space robotics research and wanted to pursue higher education. In the four years of my undergraduate program, I never had a single female professor. I sought mentorship where I could, but I never had a female mentor with my career goals.

Still, I found champions along the way. An undergraduate advisor who planned my path to a PhD. Friends who celebrated my wins. Research that encouraged me to keep learning more. Those moments of support and discovery were what kept me going — and kept me in STEM.

Today, I’m a PhD. student studying reliable control for uncertain, dynamic environments. And while I’m proud of where I am, I often reflect on how much easier the journey could have been with more visible role models. That absence has driven me to become a role model, mentoring younger students and showing up in the ways I once needed.

What I Wish I Knew — And What I Want Others to Know

This article is not just for young women and gender minorities dreaming of aerospace careers. It’s also for the men who want to support them and for educators and leaders who hold the keys to institutional change. Regardless of who you are, you have a role in shaping a more inclusive future. This is what I wish I had known when I was first starting as a young woman in aerospace — and what I hope others carry with them moving forward…

To Women in Aerospace: You Belong Here

The first time I truly felt a sense of belonging in aerospace was through the Women of AeroAstro (WOAA), an international initiative affiliated with AIAA that supports marginalized genders in the field. I founded my undergrad chapter to build connections beyond my university and, as co-president, collaborated with national chapters to share opportunities and expand outreach across majors. In grad school, I served as our chapter’s Professional Development Chair and was just elected as president, organizing industry tours and inviting gender-marginalized professionals to speak. Our chapter also connects members on campus through fun social events and engages in K-12 outreach to inspire the next generation.

My advice to women who have any sort of interest in aerospace:

• Find your people: Look for communities like WOAA, Society of Women Engineers, or local STEM clubs. Your company or department may have support groups for women and gender minorities (or if not, you can start one!). We may be few and far between, but we all want to find and support each other.

• Ask thoughtful questions and pay attention to the environment: When considering a lab or company, don’t hesitate to observe and ask — do they actively support inclusion? Are they open to conversations about equity and gender representation?

• Define your values: Do you value having a female advisor? Or senior female role models? What does support for you as a female in the field look like? And don’t be afraid to name these values as a priority for you.

• You can be the role model you didn’t have: Every time you speak up, mentor someone, or share your story, you make this field better. Look for ways to engage: give an alumni talk, volunteer at a STEM outreach event, speak on a panel, or even just offer advice to a student who reminds you of yourself.

• Be confident in your expertise: Imposter syndrome shows up for many of us, especially in technical spaces where we’re underrepresented. But your perspective is valuable. You don’t need to have all the answers to speak up, contribute your opinions, or lead.

To Men in STEM: Allyship is an Action

In undergrad, I had many close male friends in my department, and the gender imbalance often sparked competition. I constantly felt the need to prove myself – which honestly isn’t constructive for me or my peers. It wasn’t that my friends believed women were less capable; rather, subtle biases would show up in group settings. They’d ask each other for validation before looping me in, troubleshoot without me, tend to overexplain concepts I already knew, or have me be a note-taker during meetings. The truth is, recognizing bias, especially in your friends, is hard. And calling it out, over and over, is exhausting.

So, if you want to be an ally, start here:

• Pay attention: In group projects, who gets asked for input? Who gets interrupted? Encourage a more balanced discussion if you notice it skewing one way.

• Listen, don’t defend: If someone points out a biased comment or action, take it seriously instead of explaining it away. Commit to being more mindful of your actions and comments.

• Ask how we can be supported: Don’t wait for women to self-nominate for leadership roles. Encourage them directly and voice your support. Ask how you can best back them up in meetings, how they’d prefer feedback, or whether they feel included in key decisions. Support isn’t one-size-fits-all, so ask, listen, and follow through.

• Speak up: Use your voice when you notice exclusion, even when it’s subtle.

Some of my closest male friends didn’t realize how their actions were affecting me until I told them. The truth is, they cared. They just needed someone to show them what support could look like.

To Professors, Managers, and Industry Professionals: Structural Change Starts With You

When I was applying to Ph.D. programs, I hadn’t fully considered how important it would be to find an advisor who recognized the support I needed as a woman in this field and who would foster those values within the lab. Once I realized that mattered to me, it changed how I evaluated programs and labs. I ultimately joined a lab where I feel supported not just professionally but personally, and that has made all the difference. It’s the kind of environment where I feel safe sharing my ideas, asking questions, and pushing my work further.

But change doesn’t happen by accident — it takes intentional effort. Here are a few tangible things professionals and leaders in the field can do to foster a more inclusive culture:

• Representation matters: Hire, invite, and elevate women and gender-marginalized voices — not just for balance but for the broader range of ideas and perspectives they bring.

• Fund and empower affinity groups: Support internal organizations like women’s groups with real resources. Several friends of mine have shared how impactful it is when companies sponsor mentorship programs, organize professional development events, or host social gatherings that create space for women to build community at work.

• Invest in the next generation: Companies can host or sponsor K–12 STEM outreach days, company visits, camps, info sessions, and external women in STEM organizations.

• Create formal mentorship pipelines: Support mentorship programs that pair junior women with senior leaders, where they can meet regularly to talk about life, careers, and navigating male-dominated spaces.

• Audit team culture: Pay attention to how people talk at work and the atmosphere at social gatherings. Are your events mainly inclusive, or do they constantly default to “bro-y” activities that not everyone enjoys?

• Normalize inclusion: Invite ongoing conversations about equity and representation and model what it looks like to truly listen.

The future of aerospace depends on diversity. When we bring in and empower voices from different backgrounds, we don’t just make the field fairer — we invite new perspectives and more creativity.

Final Thoughts

I don’t know where the next generation of aerospace engineers will come from. Maybe she’s a kid glued to the TV watching a rocket launch. Maybe he’s a mentor who learns to listen better. Maybe they’re a hiring manager who decides to shake up the status quo.

What I do know is that if we want to build a world that reflects the best of what aerospace stands for — curiosity, courage, exploration — then we need to build a field where everyone feels supported and included. And maybe that next aerospace engineer is a young girl with a telescope, daring to dream big because someone like you showed them it was possible.

Resources that are used to generate income or create value — including financial assets, tools, and intellectual property

Welcome back to The Overview! This week, we’re diving into the future of aerospace capital — not just in dollars, but in rockets, resources, and new capabilities. It’s the fuel behind innovation, expansion, and exploration.

🚀 SpaceX’s Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — but what exactly will it change? Join Tycho Bogdanowitsch, a graduate student in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, as he shares insights from The Starship Report, a deep dive into how Starship could reshape the aerospace industry.

He also created a curated NewSpace Guide to the Galaxy — a go-to collection of resources for anyone navigating the fast-evolving space industry. We’re excited to feature both the report and the guide in this edition of The Overview!

🛰️ In aerospace news: NASA SpaceX Crew-9 returns home, and Isar Aerospace, a rising German aerospace startup founded in 2018, is attempting the first launch of its small satellite launch vehicle, Spectrum, in the coming days!

🛫 Featured Technology

A few weeks ago, Tycho Bogdanowitsch, a graduate student in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, sat down with Anshuk on The Overview podcast to discuss the current state of the NewSpace business landscape and the major trends in startups and future technologies. A key part of the conversation? Starship, SpaceX’s superheavy lift rocket — and the paradigm shift in what our satellites may look like.

While working at Space Capital, Tycho developed The Starship Report, which explored why Starship will be important, technologies that could most benefit from Starship, and who is already building towards this future. Read the full article below!

Full article here

Tycho also mentioned his “NewSpace Guide to the Galaxy” on the podcast, a list of all the information sources he uses to keep up with the changing aerospace world. We are thrilled he’s published the comprehensive list on The Overview, and we are sure our readers will also find this immensely valuable.

🚀 Aerospace News

The aerospace industry is chugging along as usual, with the biggest news being the return of NASA SpaceX Crew-9. The mission brought the return of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams who had been on an extended mission (note: not stranded) at the International Space Station since June 5th of last year, when NASA decided to return the Starliner capsule that took the astronauts to the station without the astronauts onboard. Since then, the decision of when to bring back the astronauts has been a political talking point. But the important news is: the astronauts are back home safe!

Now, let’s talk about an exciting new company in Europe’s launch scene: Isar Aerospace.

A Promising New European Rocket Startup

Since SpaceX began its run as the dominant launch provider in the world about seven years ago, most other companies and agencies have not been able to keep up. One of the most affected regions was Europe. Ariane-5 was the only operational rocket for the longest time (apart from Russia’s Soyuz, which also took a hit in usage since the Russia-Ukraine war began), and now Ariane-6 is operational — but not at the cadence that some of the younger aerospace companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly are achieving.

Isar Aerospace emerged to change the European launch landscape. Founded in 2018, the German aerospace startup has developed a small satellite launcher called Spectrum. The rocket is a 6.6-meter-diameter traditional two-stage rocket that uses a propane/oxygen propellant combo for its engines.

Within the next few days, Isar Aerospace is going to attempt the first test flight of this rocket by launching from Andøya, Norway, at an orbital launch pad built exclusively for them.

Like many U.S. aerospace startups, Isar is leaning into vertical integration, rapid prototyping, and automated manufacturing. The team has emphasized that this launch is very experimental, and they don’t expect to get to orbit — even a 30-second flight will count as a major success.

Launching an orbital-class rocket is an extremely challenging task, so good luck to the Isar team on their first test attempt!

💬 Quote of the Week

“Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.”
— Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thanks for joining us for The Overview — The Capital Edition. Whether it’s financial investment, technological innovation, or intellectual resources, this week was all about the capital driving the future of aerospace.

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about rockets, startups, and the space economy. Got any thoughts, questions, or topic requests? We’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org!

Stellar vibes,
Tycho, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

During my time at Space Capital, the team and I wrote a research report about Starship, investigating how it will impact the space economy and unlock new capabilities. This article acts as a short preview of the full report, which can be found here and at the end of this article. The Space Capital team and I have also created a podcast and Youtube video giving an overview of the report (which can also be found below). More recently, I spoke about Starship’s impact on the Overview podcast with Anshuk. Now, let’s get started.

How Starship Makes SpaceX a Leader in the Satellite Race

SpaceX’s Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It can transport three times more payload mass and four times more volume to orbit than any other launch vehicle in history while offering the potential for significant cost reductions.

Starship will expand the potential for existing space businesses while paving the way for entirely new industries. Given the magnitude of this change, the Space Capital team and I spoke with 25 senior industry leaders and surveyed nearly 100 top engineering, business, and academic professionals to better understand the dynamics at play. Almost all agreed that Starship is critical to the future of the growing space economy as it unlocks a new engineering paradigm and inspires the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers.

During our interviews, we identified 11 primary use cases that can broadly be categorized as scaling established capabilities and unleashing new opportunities, as shown in the following figure. We then asked our survey respondents to rank these use cases based on technical feasibility and market viability. The clear winner is mega-constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which is both technically demonstrated today and has a large and growing market.

However, we were surprised to learn that few are ready for (or are even thinking about) the changes Starship will bring. At the engineering level, Starship will “end the tyranny of mass efficiency,” Jaret Matthew at Astrolab told us. This fundamental shift will allow spacecraft to be designed with more capabilities, be produced with simpler methods, and fly new mission profiles. More broadly, Starship will accelerate a transition away from the exquisite, expensive, and singular space-based infrastructure of yesterday to the mass-produced, low-cost, large-scale, and distributed platforms of tomorrow.

This transformation will also come with its challenges as Starship faces technical, regulatory, and geopolitical hurdles. Starship is well positioned to weather these factors as it comes to market with three anchor customers: NASA, DoD, and Starlink. Over time, Starship will introduce many novel use cases through its pioneering capabilities in payload mass, volume, and launch cadence.

These use cases range from mega-constellations of satellites to in-space production of pharmaceuticals, and our research uncovered significant differences across the technical feasibility and market viability, indicating potential risks and opportunities for investors and founders. There are a few companies already building for this new paradigm, such as K2 Space’s Starship-class satellites and Starlab’s Starship-class space station, but a tremendous amount of white space remains for innovators to explore. Starship presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for new engineers and entrepreneurs to rethink what is possible in space.

If any of this interests you, please be sure to check out my full Starship report below. Additionally, to put Starship in context with the larger NewSpace economy, please refer to my “NewSpace Guide To The Galaxy” and “Exciting NewSpace Companies” (link at the end).

If you have any questions or want to just discuss anything space related, I would love to connect! Reach out to me via email: tycho@stanford.edu or Linkedin.

Tycho Bogdanowitsch

Final Links

The Starship Report: Download the full Starship report here

Listen to the Space Capital Starship podcast here, where Chad, Justus, and I give an overview of the major themes of the Starship report

Starship Report Intro Video

Exciting NewSpace Companies

Ecosystem Maps and Indexes

Space: A Market Map: A market map outlining key players in the space industry.

Ecosystem Map of In-Space Economy: A visual representation of the emerging in-space economy.

NewSpace Index: A comprehensive directory of NewSpace companies and organizations.

Ecosystem Map 2023 Landscape (Seraphim Space): A landscape overview of space-related businesses in 2023.

The Space List: A directory of space companies, startups, and organizations.

Books

The Space Economy (Chad Anderson): A guide to the business opportunities in the space industry.

When the Heavens Went on Sale (Ashlee Vance): A narrative on the rise of private space ventures.

Space Is Open for Business (Robert Jacobson): A roadmap for entering and investing in the space industry.

Space to Grow (Matthew Weinzierl, Brendan Rosseau): Insights into space as an economic frontier.

Liftoff (Eric Berger): A deep dive into SpaceX’s early struggles and success.

Reentry (Eric Berger): A continuation of SpaceX’s development and reusable rocket technology.

Media Companies / Newsletters / Substacks

Payload Space: News and analysis on commercial space developments.

SpaceNews: Coverage of global space policy, business, and technology.

Ars Technica Space: Space technology news and insights.

Ars Technica Rocket Report: Weekly newsletter focused on rocket launches and development.

TechCrunch Space: Space startup news and investment trends.

The Space Investor: A newsletter focused on space investment opportunities.

SpaceDotBiz: Industry insights on space business and finance.

Space Ambition: A Substack covering innovation and entrepreneurship in space.

Ill-Defined Space: Deep dives into space tech and business.

Intersections (by Filip): A newsletter discussing the intersection of space and other industries.

Case Closed: Covers the commercial space industry.

Celestial Citizen: A perspective on space sustainability and policy.

TerraWatch Space Newsletter: Insights on earth observation and satellite data.

Casey Handmer's Blog: Technical analysis of space-related topics.

Molding Moonshots: A blog on ambitious space projects.

Research Reports and Databases

Payload Research: Research reports on space business and technology.

Space Investment Quarterly Reports | Space Capital: Reports on space investment trends.

Space Capital Publications: Analysis and insights on space startups and funding.

Starship: The Next Giant Leap: A report on SpaceX’s Starship program.

The Race for Space Superiority: An analysis of the competitive space industry.

Jonathan's Space Report: A long-running report on satellite launches and missions.

Gunter’s Space Page: A detailed satellite and launch database.

Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity (McKinsey): A McKinsey report on space's economic impact.

The New Space Economy (Morgan Stanley): A Morgan Stanley overview of the growing space economy.

Space Industry Database: A database of space-related companies and investments.

Podcasts

The Overview Podcast: Discussions on space innovation and technology.

Payload Pathfinder: A podcast on space startups and investment.

Space Capital Podcast: Investment-focused insights on space tech.

A VC, a Headhunter, and a Trainer Walk into a Bar: Conversations on leadership in space.

Manifest Space with Morgan Brennan: CNBC’s take on commercial space.

Main Engine Cut Off: Commentary on the space industry.

Saturday Startup Stories: Interviews with space entrepreneurs.

Marcus House: Space industry news and analysis.

In-Orbit: A podcast covering satellite and space policy.

The Orbital Mechanics Podcast: Engineering-focused space discussions.

YouTubers

Scott Manley: Explains space science and engineering.

Everyday Astronaut: In-depth coverage of rocket launches and space exploration.

Saturday Startup Stories: Space-related startup interviews.

Other Media

Wild Wild Space: A space documentary on Max.

New Space Frontier Film: A YouTube documentary on the space industry.

Job Boards

Space Talent: A space industry job board.

Space Workforce for Tomorrow: A job resource for space careers.

Fellowships

Matthew Isakowitz Commercial Space Scholarship: A mentorship and internship program.

Brooke Owens Fellowship: A space industry fellowship for women.

Patti Grace Smith Fellowship: A fellowship for Black students in aerospace.

Zed Factor Fellowship: A diversity-focused aerospace fellowship.

Zenith Canada Pathways Foundation: A space fellowship for Canadian students.

Other Organizations

Commercial Space Federation: A trade association promoting commercial space policy and collaboration.

Space Generation Advisory Council: A global network for young professionals in the space industry.

Satellite Industry Association: A trade organization representing the satellite communications sector.

Space Foundation: A nonprofit supporting space awareness, education, and policy.

Secure World Foundation: An organization advocating for sustainable and secure space activities.

Interplanetary Initiative (Arizona State University): A research and education initiative focused on advancing space exploration.

The Planetary Society: A nonprofit advocating for space science and exploration.

Space Frontier Foundation: An organization dedicated to enabling human settlement of space.

National Space Society: A group promoting space development and human spaceflight.

The Mars Society: An organization advocating for Mars exploration and colonization.

Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS): A student-run organization supporting space exploration and development.

A shape or process refined to minimize resistance, enhance efficiency, and manage turbulence—whether in flow, design, or progress

Welcome back to The Overview! As spring brings fresh beginnings, we at the Overview are embracing the power of streamlining—refining past developments to push the boundaries of aerospace. We’ve got an exciting article on CFD and major updates on lunar landings and launch advancements!

🌊 Ever heard of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)? A fascinating yet often daunting field, CFD is a crucial tool in aerospace engineering, shaping everything from aircraft design to rocket simulations. This week, Tagg breaks down the basics of CFD in a fun, easy-to-understand introduction that he promises will be more enjoyable than your fluid dynamics class.

🌘 There’s plenty of aerospace news this week that will have you “over the moon” excited for the future of space exploration! With lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines and the first full mission of the Ariane 6 launch vehicle, there’s lots to digest from a packed month of aerospace news.

🛫 Featured Technology

Join Tagg as he dives into the world of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)—a field that, at first glance, might just seem like a way to generate cool, colorful flow visuals. But behind those mesmerizing swirls and colorful drawings lies a powerful tool that helps engineers design aircraft, predict rocket performance, and even simulate parachute landings on Mars (which, coincidentally, is what Tagg spends way too much time thinking about).

In this fun and accessible introduction, Tagg breaks down the why, what, and how of CFD—no advanced math degree required. Whether you're an engineer, a student, or just someone who enjoys learning a new aerospace topic, this is your chance to get a glimpse into the world of fluid dynamics, vehicle design, and the magic of simulation.

Check out the full article below — we promise a “turbulent”-free experience with no “shocks” ✈🔥

Full Article

🚀 Aerospace News

Not one, but TWO private companies landed spacecraft on the moon in recent weeks—marking a significant step in streamlining commercial space exploration.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander aced its landing near a crater in the region of the moon called Mare Crisium. It’s already sent back some stunning images and begun its scientific mission. It is one of many missions NASA is sending to the moon as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to “perform science experiments, test technologies, and demonstrate capabilities to help NASA explore the Moon as it prepares for human missions.”

Another private company funded by the CLPS initiative, Intuitive Machines, had a less successful lunar landing with its IM-2 spacecraft, which touched down near the Moon’s south pole on March 6. The lander, possibly dealing with faulty laser altimeter data, landed more than 400 meters from its intended landing site. The company later confirmed through images that the lander was on its side, and they called an early end to the mission the next day. Though the mission was cut short, each attempt refines and streamlines lunar landing techniques, paving the way for future success.

March 6 was a BUSY day for space, as we also saw the Ariane 6 launcher, developed for the European Space Agency (ESA), launch a spy satellite to orbit on its first full mission! The project is funded by Germany, France, Italy, and several other European countries, and the rocket was launched out of Kourou, French Guiana. This marks a HUGE step for Europe in reducing its reliance on foreign (mainly American / SpaceX) launch providers.

💬 Quote of the Week

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but where there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ✨

Thanks for joining us for The Overview—The Streamline Edition. Every breakthrough in aerospace—whether refining CFD models or perfecting lunar landings—relies on streamlining processes, testing ideas, and learning from each iteration. We hope you find ways to streamline progress in your own pursuits, whether in engineering, exploration, or beyond.

Enjoyed this edition? Share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about aerospace! We’d love to hear about your daring first steps—feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org with any feedback or requests for future topics!

Stellar vibes,
Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: Linkedin | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube

However, CFD is actually not as difficult of a concept to grasp as some make it out to be. Sure, it can be intimidating when you get into the details and the work going on behind the scenes. Sure, it can take years or even decades to really master the art of CFD. Sure, your fluid mechanics class may have left you scarred and determined to stay as far away from fluids as you can for the rest of your career. But, the basics of CFD needed to understand the subject at a general level are not that bad.

In this article, I aim to share the basics of CFD that I wish I had known when I started my graduate career in a CFD-heavy area. I did not do any CFD in my undergraduate degree, so starting some graduate-level courses in CFD was a bit of a rude awakening. If I had known some of these low-level basics, I would have been much better prepared to tackle CFD at a high level.

I aim to quickly and simply teach just three things here:

1. Why we need CFD

2. The basics of how CFD works under the hood

3. When CFD is not so great and what we’re doing about it

There are many great CFD engineers out there and a plethora of good resources, so I make sure to point to resources and borrow ideas from those who know much more than I currently do. Additionally, I focus on aerospace applications, but most of the concepts are applicable in any industry that uses CFD.

Why we need CFD

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a simulation tool that engineers use to predict the fluid flow and its effects on objects. You take your object, say an aircraft wing, put a model of it into your CFD software, prescribe fluid flow properties such as Mach number and angle of attack, and then your CFD tool simulates the resulting fluid flow around your wing and the resulting lift and drag. But when exactly would you use CFD instead of just testing the wing or using other easier methods to estimate these quantities?

Here are three scenarios that demonstrate the need for CFD in aerospace:

Scenario 1 (a cheaper way to test): you’re an engineer tasked with improving the efficiency of an aircraft your company is designing. You come up with a great idea on how you’re going to change the wing design to increase the lift-to-drag ratio, now all you need to do is test it out and your boss will see that your brilliant design will save the company millions. (For a great article on aircraft design, see Aurelien’s post on Commercial Aircraft Design)

The problem is, how are you going to test it? Are you going to build an entire aircraft just to check if your hypothesis is right? Or are you going to do some hand calculations and trust that your theory is 100% accurate?

Enter CFD: a chance to run a realistic simulation on a computer that will give insight into your design changes and save you the millions of dollars and months/years needed to construct a new aircraft anytime you tweak your design.

Scenario 2 (supplementing test data): you’re now a test engineer and you’ve gathered some wind tunnel testing data for your new aircraft. However, you noticed some unexpected behavior at a couple of test points. The wind tunnel was also not able to produce every single condition that you want to investigate before flying your aircraft for the first time. How do you know if your observed behavior in the wind tunnel is accurate or just a mistake in the wind tunnel experiment? How can you get data on the flight conditions the wind tunnel was not able to produce?

Enter CFD: a great tool for supplementing test data. You can use your wind tunnel data to benchmark your CFD simulation results, ensuring that they are accurate, and you can double-check your unexpected results to gain insight into the behavior. Additionally, CFD tools can cover any flight condition and vehicle shape, although some conditions and vehicles are much easier to simulate accurately than others.

Scenario 3 (testing the impossible): you’ve switched jobs and you are now working on a vehicle that is impossible and/or extremely expensive to test in the real world. For this example, we’ll use my PhD research topic: Mars parachute deployments. To test your parachute’s performance during deployment at supersonic speeds in the Martian atmosphere, your options are slim.

Each rover we send to Mars costs multiple billions of dollars and takes years of planning and preparation, so testing your parachute by sending it to Mars is not possible. The next best option is testing your parachute in Earth’s upper atmosphere where the state of the air is closer to that in the Martian atmosphere. However, even this testing is extremely expensive and can take months or years to plan and execute. So how do you test and improve your parachute design?

Enter CFD: a research tool that can be used to investigate problems that are impossible or too expensive to test repeatedly in the real world. This example I’ve used here on Mars parachutes is still an active research topic in CFD, but the point is CFD can be used to investigate phenomena that we may have a hard time reproducing in the real world.

The basics of CFD under the hood

Ok great! So we’re sold on the when and why of CFD, but now how do we go about it?

Here are the three main parts of a CFD simulation.

Part 1: The mesh.

The mesh in CFD is essentially a grid where every point represents the fluid state (pressure, temperature, velocity, etc.) at that location. There are many different types of meshes (see the figure below), but generally, a mesh will be fitted around a surface such as an aircraft. No fluid goes inside the aircraft, but it does exert forces and moments on the surface. When you run your CFD solver, the incoming fluid from the fluid mesh will be diverted around the mesh of your solid surface, and the resulting quantities of interest (lift, drag, skin friction, heat transfer, etc.) will be tracked.

Part 2: Solving the Navier Stokes equations on the mesh

Now the scary part: math! A CFD solver needs to solve the Navier-Stokes equations on the fluid mesh. But don’t be scared! We’re just going over the basics here, and I promise I keep it simple. In fact, I will write the compressible Navier-Stokes equations in a terrifyingly simple form:

Here, W is a vector of the “conserved” variables (the fluid’s mass, momentum, and energy). Next, the blue term with R is just a fancy way of writing the divergence of viscous flux in each direction (x,y, and z), and the green term with F is the same but for the inviscid flux. Here are some definitions to help:

Viscous: how much a fluid resists motion due to internal friction, or “how easy it flows.” Honey is much more viscous than water. So, viscous flux is the flux due to viscous forces (internal forces that resist flow), and inviscid flux is the flux due to things like the bulk motion of the air flowing left to right. Many times we ignore viscous effects as we start learning CFD, which makes things easier to keep track of.

Flux: the rate at which a quantity passes through a surface. If I give you ten dollars per minute, there is a flux of money from me to you.

Divergence: Divergence measures the net rate at which a quantity flows out of a control volume. In the context of the Navier-Stokes equations, it quantifies the spatial variation of fluxes, representing how momentum and energy are transported within the fluid. Its mathematical definition is:

So it is the change in x-direction flux with respect to x, plus the change in y-direction flux with respect to y, plus the change in z-direction flux with respect to z.

👉 Thus, you can think of the Navier-Stokes equations in English as:

How your fluid’s mass, momentum, and energy change with time is equal to the outward flow of viscous flux minus the outward flow of inviscid flux.

Now we just have to solve these equations on the mesh. What does that mean? It’s simple (if you ignore the details)!

You start at time t=0. For every fluid cell, you calculate the flux of mass, momentum, and energy given the state of the cell and all the cells around it. The new state of the fluid in this cell at the next time step, say t=0.1, is calculated from the original state of the fluid and the fluxes into and out of the cell.

For example, if one cell has a super high pressure, and all the cells around it have a super low pressure, then after a step in time the pressure in the high-pressure cell will likely go down while the pressures in the surrounding cells will go up. The change in the state of this cell is influenced by the flux with all the surrounding cells!

Of course, there are a lot of mathematical details that go into solving these partial differential equations in time and space that I’ve skipped over, but that’s what a CFD class is for. This article is just to give you a general idea of what’s happening so that you’re ready to crush that CFD class when the time comes. For a nice article on CFD basics diving more into the math, check out this. For some fun YouTube videos covering the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, check out this and this.

Part 3: Converging to an answer

Now that the solver is set, all the CFD solver has to do is keep stepping forward in time and solving the Navier Stokes equations to determine the fluid state at each cell at each time step. Usually, you’ll just start by initializing every fluid cell to have the same state, often called “uniform flow.” You’ll then set some boundary conditions (e.g., tell it that the incoming flow is at Mach 0.6 and your plane is a hard wall that the fluid has to flow around), start your solver, and have it take small steps forward in time, solving for the new fluid state at each time step.

In many cases, such as when you’re calculating the lift on a wing, you wait for the solver to converge to a steady state. This means that at each new time step, the fluid state is not changing. Your solver started with an unrealistic, uniform flow, and it updated it step by step until it reached a realistic flow over your wing (for example). Once you reach the steady state and your answer is no longer changing at each time step, you stop the solver and analyze your results.

In other cases, however, you’re not looking for a steady state. You’re looking for how the fluid behaves as a function of time, sometimes called an “unsteady” simulation. For example, with my Mars parachute, the flow will continually change as the parachute opens up, inflates, moves around, etc. as it descends through the atmosphere. I’m not looking for just one steady-state answer, I’m looking to investigate the behavior of the fluid during this dynamic process.

When CFD is not so great and what we’re doing about it

So yes, CFD is awesome and the general process under the hood of the solvers can be understood with some effort. Great! Let’s just use it to solve all of our aerospace problems!

Well, not so fast. There are some limitations to CFD. As my advisor is fond of saying, “There’s no free lunch.”

The main two limitations of CFD are accuracy and time, as I describe below. Most research topics today can be categorized as fixing one of these two general issues (as is the case for pretty much any computational tool, because of course we want them to be perfectly accurate and super fast).

Accuracy

It’s hard to get a correct CFD answer and hard to know if it’s correct. However, we have made amazing strides in CFD in the past few decades and we are able to simulate some pretty complex problems with good accuracy if we have enough compute power and time (and a smart engineer running the simulations). A few areas of CFD where we are still working on learning how to model them accurately include:

• Hypersonics, or very high-speed flows where the fluid gets so hot that some crazy things start to happen

• Turbulence modeling helps make CFD practical by taming the chaos of high-speed, “swirly” flows since actually simulating every tiny whirl and eddy would take forever (and way too much computing power)

• Multiphase flows, like when we start to have bubbles appearing in boiling water or cavitation from something like an explosion

• Fluid-structure interaction problems, where we not only have the fluid moving over an object, but the object is also moving due to forces from the fluid

• Aeroacoustics, where we are trying to understand and predict the sound created by things like jets, rotor blades, or shock waves

These are just a few of some very complicated (and very interesting) applications of CFD where accuracy is extra difficult to come by.

Time

A large chunk of current research is also dedicated to speeding up CFD because many CFD problems of interest (like my Mars parachute) take hours or days to simulate. Even when we use a supercomputing cluster with parallel simulation (splitting the problem into pieces and solving it with a bunch of computers at once), some problems remain so expensive to simulate they are not worth the time.

Here are a couple of research topics and new ideas that are helping CFD run faster:

• GPUs. Originally developed for gaming systems, GPUs are great for problems that can be run in parallel (like training Artificial Intelligence and running CFD). This new technology can greatly speed up CFD simulations once the CFD code is properly adapted to work with GPUs.

• Reduced-order models (ROMs). ROMs can speed up CFD problems 100x while maintaining 99.99% accuracy. What’s the catch? ROMs require training data, so you have to run a bunch of full-dimensional CFD problems first. Additionally, some problems have too many parameters (variables) and this makes training ROMs extremely expensive.

• Machine Learning (ML) an AI. Everything these days is starting to use/benefit from ML and AI, but it’s not as easy to predict fluid flow as it is to generate a paragraph about the Renaissance. AI requires huge amounts of training data, which is hard with CFD. Eventually, we may be able to train an AI to predict the CFD solution to any given problem, but that day is not today.

Conclusion

You made it! Hopefully that didn’t scare you away from CFD but rather got you PSYCHED to become an aerospace engineer with the knowledge and tools needed to become a fluids master.

This was a brief overview of the general field of CFD, but there is so much out there to help you on your way. Check out the links in this article, take a class on fluids and CFD, and most importantly, go find a way to get some experience using these tools on real problems. Learning by doing always beats learning by reading an article by some guy named “Tagg” online. So, go find a lab/club/internship/class to practice CFD and receive mentorship!

Other resources to go learn and practice:

✈ Anderson has a great set of textbooks (commonly used in undergraduate and graduate classes) on aerodynamics, compressible flow, and CFD.

💻 For a free, open-source CFD code, check out OpenFOAM.

🧑‍🎓 Follow some CFD gurus/influencers on LinkedIn: Rajat Walia, Justin Hodges, or connect with me (less of a guru but willing to connect and chat).

May your convergence be fast and your residuals be low.

– Tagg

The readiness to take on bold or challenging tasks with drive and resourcefulness to overcome obstacles

Welcome back to The Overview! This week, we’ve got a thrilling lineup of aerospace news and an exclusive interview with a leader shaping the future of flight and higher education.

🎙️ Sit down with Professor Juan Alonso, Chair of the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Stanford University. From his journey as an international student at MIT to leading one of the world’s top aerospace programs, Professor Alonso shares invaluable insights on education, career growth, and the future of aerospace engineering.

⛏️ Asteroid mining is on the verge of becoming a reality! Astroforge, a California-based company, takes a bold step toward extracting rare and valuable metals from asteroids. With their upcoming space mission Odin launching today or tomorrow, Astroforge is set to become the first private company to launch a dedicated deep-space mission—going beyond the Moon not just as a payload, but as the first commercial venture to explore an asteroid for future mining operations!

👥 Personal Experiences

This week on The Overview podcast, we had the privilege of speaking with Professor Juan Alonso, Stanford’s Chair of the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. A distinguished professor with an array of diverse experiences—including a stint at NASA Headquarters and starting his own company—he shared valuable insights on:

🧑‍🎓 His journey and skills for success as an international transfer student at MIT, a graduate student at Princeton, and landing his first professorship at Stanford

📝 His advice for engineering students, including what he looks for when admitting students to the department and what mindset applicants should have when applying to top programs

🛩️ His vision for the department and aerospace engineering over the next 5-10 years, and the three pillars of aerospace he sees the department pursuing during that time

The discussion centered around students and developing engineers, so if you’re an aspiring aerospace engineer you won’t want to miss it! Watch the full episode below or find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Full podcast here

🚀 Aerospace News

From new steps in eVTOL aviation to two major NASA science missions (SphereX and PULSE) launching this week, there’s a lot to cover with recent aerospace news. But let’s talk about a brand new type of mission in the commercial space sector: asteroid mining!

Space Mining Takes its First Steps

Source: New York Times

For decades, asteroid mining has been a dream. There are asteroids in our solar system that are classified as M-type, meaning they are rich in metals like iron, nickel, and even rare metals like platinum. Extracting these materials could revolutionize in-space manufacturing or even provide valuable resources for use back on Earth.

Now, that dream is turning into reality. Astroforge, a company based in Huntington Beach, California, is going to be the first to test this concept out. A few months ago, they launched a satellite called Brokkr-R to low-earth orbit to test some of their mining technologies, but the mission was unsuccessful. With lessons learned, they are now taking the next step with their deep-space mission Odin, which aims to survey an asteroid called 2022 OB5 to see if it has a useful quantity of metals. If this mission returns positive results, then their next mission: Vestri, will aim to land on the asteroid and extract these metals!

Odin is launching today or tomorrow, along with Intuitive Machines’ second lunar lander IM-2 (which we have written about before!)

By being the first company to realistically attempt this, Astroforge will also be the first commercial company to attempt a deep space mission beyond the moon! All prior deep space missions have been by major space agencies such as NASA, ESA, or ROSCOSMOS. So regardless of outcome, this is an exciting endeavor. Let’s hope Odin can make it past the moon and go on to see some shiny metals!

💬 Quote of the Week

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
— Lao Tzu

Thanks for joining us for The Overview—The Initiative edition. We hope this issue inspires you to take bold first steps, seize opportunities, and embrace the challenges ahead.

Enjoyed this edition? Share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about aerospace! We’d love to hear about your daring first steps—feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org with any feedback or requests for future topics!

Stellar vibes,
Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

Follow us on: Linkedin | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube

The path followed by a moving object under the influence of forces; the course of a journey shaped by intention and adaptation

Welcome back to The Overview! After a short break from our regular scheduling, we’re back with an inspiring new podcast episode and updates from an extraordinary few weeks in aerospace:

🎙️ Sit down with Tycho Bogdanowitsch, a Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate student, as he unpacks his journey from Columbia University to the cutting edge of the New Space industry. From tackling orbital debris mitigation to navigating space investment, Tycho shares insights on the future of commercial space.

🌞 Meanwhile, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket successfully reached orbit, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and SpaceX’s Starship Flight Test 7 delivered progress despite setbacks

👥 Personal Experiences

This week on The Overview podcast, we hosted a talented aerospace engineer who is currently an Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate student at Stanford, Tycho Bogdanowitsch. Tycho has many unique experiences, from work in orbital debris mitigation to developing a market research report at a space investment firm. Anshuk sat down with Tycho to discuss:

🧑‍🎓 His internships and past experiences as a student at Columbia University.

🛰️ A look into the current “New Space” industry, filled with budding startups and rapid innovation.

🚀 A discussion into where commercial space is headed, and some trends Tycho is keeping his eye on.

🎧 Looking into Tycho’s list of favorite aerospace media, such as books, films, podcasts, etc.

Watch the full episode below or find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

Full podcast here

🚀 Aerospace News

The last few weeks of January were tremendous for aerospace! As some people have said online, these few weeks would have been a good year for the space industry a decade ago. We will highlight three major aerospace events that happened within two days!

A quick shoutout to the Indian Space Research Organization for the success of their SPADEX mission, which saw India become only the fourth nation to successfully dock two satellites in orbit!

Blue Origin is Orbital!

Blue Origin’s long-awaited massive New Glenn rocket finally lifted off on January 16th, 2025 to great success! The second stage (code-named GS-2) reached orbit successfully along with the test Blue Ring payload. Reaching orbit on its debut launch is almost completely unheard of for rockets (especially one this big), so this feat is extremely commendable and speaks to the immense effort the Blue Origin team put in. The secondary goal of landing the first stage of New Glenn (called GS-1) did not happen, but that was a stretch goal for the first launch either way.

Two (!) Spacecraft are Headed to the Moon

Source: Guardian

We reported last month that 2025 is going to be a great year for lunar missions, with landers from multiple companies getting ready. Two of these landers, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience, launched on board the same SpaceX Falcon 9 on January 15th. It’s the first lunar lander for Texas-based Firefly, with the lander expected to reach the lunar surface and attempt landing in March. The Japanese ispace lander is going to take a longer route, with landing expected in late May or early June. ispace previously attempted a landing attempt in April 2023 but failed due to an issue with their altitude estimation logic and radar systems.

Let’s hope both these landers are successful as we usher into a new age of lunar exploration!

A Bittersweet Starship Flight Test 7

Starship took off smoothly from its Boca Chica launch site in South Texas on Thursday afternoon, January 16th with a completely revamped upper stage named “Ship V2”. Amongst various upgrades included a dramatic reduction in the size and change in position of the forward flaps, and multiple experimental tiles to guide future heat shield design decisions. SpaceX proved that the successful booster catch from flight 5 was not a fluke by once again performing it perfectly (with less fire this time!). Unfortunately, the second stage saw a malfunction in the aft, leading to a loss of communication and the flight termination system destroying the rocket over the Carribean. Although it created some spectacular views, it seems like safety is likely to be brought up by regulatory boards before the next test flight.

💬 Quote of the Week

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Thanks for joining us for The Overview—The Trajectory edition. From rockets finding their trajectory to Tycho’s insights on navigating the evolving space industry, this week is all about charting a course forward.

As we celebrate Valentine’s Day, it’s a chance to reflect on the trajectories that define not just space exploration, but our own paths—whether in careers, ideas, or the relationships we cultivate.

If you enjoyed this edition, share The Overview with a friend or colleague who’s passionate about aerospace! We’d love to hear about your own trajectory—feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org with any feedback or requests for future topics!

Stellar vibes,
Tycho, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac

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🧑‍🎓 His internships and past experiences as a student at Columbia University.

🛰️ A look into the current “New Space” industry, filled with budding startups and rapid innovation.

🚀 A discussion into where commercial space is headed, and some trends Tycho is keeping his eye on.

🎧 Looking into Tycho’s list of favorite aerospace media, such as books, films, podcasts, etc.

• 0:00 — Introductions

• 0:20 — Working on the ‘Decavitator’ (the vehicle that holds the human-powered speed record on water) at MIT as an undergraduate

• 3:33 — Transferring to MIT as an undergraduate from Spain in the 1980s

• 5:10 — What skills help you succeed at a school like MIT?

• 6:45 — What extracurriculars did you do as an undergraduate?

• 8:25 — On the importance of student’s having initiative

• 9:27 — Experiences outside the classroom

• 10:31 — Being inspired to do more than we think we can

• 11:23 — What made you want to start graduate school instead of work in industry?

• 14:22 — Becoming a Stanford Professor

• 15:46 — How to best take advantage of career opportunities

• 16:45 — “In order to have one good idea you need to have ten bad ideas”

• 17:52 — You need to know when to quit

• 19:00 — Experience working at NASA

• 22:05 — Entrepreneurship and starting Luminary Cloud (https://www.luminarycloud.com/) and the best ways to make change

• 23:50 — The importance of NASA, and its role in being between industry and academia

• 26:45 — Advice for students applying to academic programs

• 28:30 — “Admissions offices are looking for interesting people”

• 29:09 — “Don’t get caught in the rat race”

• 31:03 — We have a responsibility to make the most out of the opportunities we’ve been given

• 32:45 — What selection committees are looking for in graduate students

• 35:47 — Grades are not the destination, the destination is learning

• 36:30 — The importance of presenting yourself well during interviews (and other soft skills)

• 38:11 — Professor Alonso’s vision for the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at Stanford University

• 41:17 — The most important areas in Aerospace engineering over the next 10-15 years

• 45:30 — Wrapping up