Kara Cunzeman talks to us about Strategic Foresight, a tool that helps us address tough questions like - how do we navigate difficult issues in space policy to arrive at a preferred future - or - how do we envision the long-term view, going beyond the status quo to meet future challenges and opportunities? Buckle up to blast off into some future space scenarios with Kara Cunzeman.

Who owns what on the moon? Legally, nobody according to the United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty. With an array of space agencies and private companies destined to launch a multitude of lunar missions in the coming decades, the principles of the 1967 treaty will be put to the test. How will we mediate the multiple stakeholders set to explore the moon? For answers, we turn to space lawyer Antonino Salmeri, who specializes in the governance of space resources and lunar activities.

Blast off with Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. We delve into the latest scientific methods in the search for technosignatures or evidence of extraterrestrial technologies. Listen in as we discuss the relevance of the Drake Equation and the Kardashev Scale in today’s search for ETIs, the significance of discerning Earth’s technosignatures, and the latest predictions of identifying an extraterrestrial technosignature within our lifetime!

Will extraterrestrial, self-replicating robotic systems pave the way for building sustainable industrial lunar ecology? Now that NASA and other space agencies are focused on returning humans to the lunar surface, researchers like Professor Alex Ellery are developing new robotic systems capable of operating in extreme conditions like the moon. Ellery is advocating for self-replicating machines to develop and build a sustainable industrial lunar ecology, whereby precious resources like ice and regolith are recycled or reused.

What are the challenges and possibilities for processing Big Earth Data to address real-world solutions? From predicting destructive landslides and urban traffic jams to tracking illegal deforestation and human rights abuses, Professor Thomas Blaschke’s research has contributed to a better understanding of humanity’s global impact. Listen now and discover advancements toward building an emerging Digital Earth and the potential to develop a new field of academic inquiry, Astroinformatics!

How to design a durable and decipherable message for an intelligent species elsewhere in the cosmos? We talk to team members from the International Space University's Space Studies Program about their project Eternal Echo, an assignment to create an updated version of the Golden Record, a gold-plated copper disk of sounds and images affixed to both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. Team members explain their methodologies and ponder the implications of Messaging Extra Terrestrial Life (METI), the future of humanity, and the need for open-access science to improve life on Earth now. 

Space Forward talks the CEO of Spire Global, Peter Platzer, one of the few space entrepreneurs who predicted early on the exponential growth and value of nano-satellites, as well as their impactful role toward harnessing big data for solving problems here on Earth.

We continue our talk to Harvard Professor Avi Loeb about his work with Breakthrough Starshot, a proposed flyby mission to our neighboring solar system Alpha Centauri, and how his recently funded Galileo Project might demystify Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.

In Episode 10, we talk to astrophysicist Avi Loeb about what he thinks we might find in the observable universe. Will it be biosignatures that will reveal extraterrestrial life? Or technosignatures, evidence of a past or present alien technology?

We discuss Earth's first on-orbit satellite inspection service with William Crowe, CEO of the Australian startup High Earth Orbit Robotics, who is on a quest to “makes space assets transparent”. We unpack how this space start up pivoted from asteroid mining to space situational awareness, and future business to scale for the Moon, asteroids, and beyond!

In this episode, we will explore the rapid miniaturization of spacecraft, commonly known as Chipsats, Wafersats, Sprites, Monarchs, Kicksats, Starchips, or even just “Smart Dust” with Zachary Manchester, who received critical acclaim for his crowdfunded Kicksat project, deploying an armada of chipsats in LEO. Manchester is also a researcher with the Breakthrough Starshot team, working on an interstellar spacecraft mission to Proxima b.

In this episode, we talk to Mehak Sarang, research lead at MIT’s Lunar Open Architecture project ― a tokenized, crowd-sourced, sharing-economy-like satellite constellation that functions as a public utility. The project is housed at MIT’s Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative with the goal “to invent, create, and deploy ideas that seem exotic and impossible today, but could be commonplace in ten years.”

In this episode, we talk about the rise of the space marketplace and how the Satsearch Product Knowledge Graph helps solve problems for space marketplace users. What kind of Acquisition Loops work best in the space sector, what does their Experiment Framework look like, and should space marketplaces scale vertically or horizontally? Our guest is Narayan Prasad, co-founder, and COO of Satsearch, a global marketplace for the space industry, accelerated by the European Space Agency.

We talk to Matthew Weinzierl, an Associate Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. Weinzierl has worked as an economist for McKinsey & Company and The White House Council of Economic Advisors. Professor Weinzierl’s early research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, and more recently he has launched an array of projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications.

In this episode, we seek to understand the decision-making environment in which Space Business Angels operate and the mindset they follow when making investment decisions ― exploring best practices, and getting an industry outlook from those with skin in the game.

In this episode, we’ll take you on a deep dive into the physics of space travel. Are we merely grappling with a challenging engineering problem or will new breakthroughs toward an entirely new physics be required in order to utilize space to its fullest potential?

In this episode, we talk to Timiebi Aganaba-Jeanty and examine the bottlenecks toward international and intercultural collaboration here on Earth, preventing humanity from becoming a prosperous, inclusive, and peaceful multi-planetary species.

This episode has at its core the implications of Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation, which figures the hard limits of rocket-based payload transportation to Earth’s orbit. We uncover alternatives with Joshua Bernard-Cooper, a researcher at the International Space Elevator Consortium.