Stanford University

2007- Today

With a long career of accomplishment behind me I decided it was time to focus on doing something I really enjoyed, which was astrobiology and as it turned out, the emerging entrepreneurial space enterprise.

Once a person has served at a very senior level, such as Center Director, there are a rather substantial number of ethics issues that are involved. The majority of the most restrictive things occur in the first year after you’ve left a senior position.  There’s certain exceptions for qualifying institutions of higher learning or nonprofits.  Both Stanford and the SETI Institute (where I worked during a transition year following my Center departure) qualify for that, and so I was able to move from Ames and create new projects reasonably easily.

After this year of transition (2006-2007) the people in the Stanford engineering school in what is effectively the aerospace engineering department—Stanford calls it the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics said, “We’d really like you to come over and help train the next generation, and oh, by the way, we need some new programs. Can you help us find some new programs?” That was a great offer. Great people. Didn’t have to move. My appointment was initially as a so-called Consulting Professor and more recently Adjunct Professor.

I worked with the previous chair, Brian Cantwell, whom I still work with, and the current chair, and since my arrival in 2007 have been involved in and developed a number of programs.  One important milestone is I finally made the time to write a book about my restructuring of the Mars Program, Exploring Mars:  Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery.

Another project that appeared in 2012 was leading the charge of putting together a coalition across multiple institutions in a proposal to the FAA for something called the Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation (COE-CST).  I had been interested in this ever since my time at Ames, when people were just starting to talk about personal spacecraft, and my meetings with Elon Musk in 2001. 

I led the successful proposal to the FAA.  I was the director of the Stanford COE-CST for its first six years and then in 2018 I stepped down and handed it off to another member of the faculty.  The savings from my salary allowed that group to continue working in important areas like space traffic management.

Here’s the official description of the initial coalition:

COE-CST encourages and facilitates the collaboration of world-class scientists and leverages shared resources and capabilities to maximize the synergy amongst government entities, academic partners, and industry affiliates. The nine COE CST member universities are: Florida Institute of Technology (FIT, or Florida Tech), Florida State University (FSU), New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, (NMT, or New Mexico Tech), New Mexico State University (NMSU), Stanford University (SU), University of Central Florida (UCF), University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), University of Florida (UF), Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), and University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB).

Another fun and important project was the creation of the journal New Space, which is to my knowledge the only peer-reviewed journal that’s devoted to the emerging entrepreneurial space industry. While I had written the Mars book, starting and sustaining a journal as Editor-in-Chief was even more work although quite gratifying. Here’s the overview of the publication.

I first became acquainted with journal publisher Mary Ann Liebert around 1998 when she came to talk with me about setting up a publication focusing on astrobiology. I agreed to help and we got the journal started. So, years later when commercial space started to emerge as an enterprise, with Virgin Galactic and and Space X on the scene, she reached out again to ask me to create New Space.

I served as the journal’s inaugural Editor-in-Chief for 6 years and wrote many editorials through the years, now collected here!

A few years after its founding, Mary Ann and I thought there might be another place for the journal to be recognized, so I reached out to Ken Davidian, my colleague at the FAA. With no conflict that he could identify, he helped to make New Space the official journal of The Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation. Ken became an Associate Editor and very recently agreed to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief as I have moved toward at least semi-retirement.

My time at Stanford has also included teaching, giving guest lectures in courses led by other colleagues in the Department and more recently creating and co-teaching a course on Space Policy. The idea for the course came first from a number of the students who wanted a broader view of space exploration than the engineering disciplines. Partnering with a Stanford economist friend of mine, Ward Hanson, we created a course that dealt with entrepreneurship, military space, space science, human exploration and what happens “inside the beltway” in Congress and the White House. The course drew 22 students in the first year, received good feedback and may be repeated again.

As a primarily graduate department, “Aero-Astro” as it is colloquially known requires that Faculty spend some significant part of their effort advising graduate students as they progress toward their Ph.D. Over the years, along with Brian Cantwell, I have advised 4 students who successfully completed their Ph.D and are now gainfully employed in space research.

One other element that is expected of faculty is community service. My contribution to that has been through participation on various NASA and National Academy Boards, Panels and studies. The complete list of all these efforts may be found in my CV but a few are worth more explanation. Since my appointment in 2007, my NASA advisory work has steadily moved upward to the highest level, the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), that provides guidance directly to the NASA Administrator. In my term there I was able (with others such as Tom Young) to emphasize the importance of a strategic plan for humans to Mars. Indeed it was during this period that I developed and co-chaired a workshop that outlined how NASA might be able to affordably send humans to Mars. The results were published in New Space and by the Planetary Society.

Over that same time, I have participated in 8 different studies and committees organized through the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). While all of the activities were important, the ones that stand out in my memory were service on the Steering Committee of the Decadal Survey for Planetary Science (2013-2022) and two studies of Planetary Protection. The Decadal Committee was the one that recommended unequivocally that next most important major space science mission for NASA was Mars Sample Return. It was quite gratifying to be part of the team and now seeing it come to pass, first with Mars 2020-Perseverance.

I found my work on Planetary Protection to be difficult but ultimately successful. Our Committee was able to provide NASA with a new strategic blueprint that will satisfy the requirement of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to neither allow harmful contamination of another body such as Mars nor allow any material from an extraterrestrial source to contaminate the Earth.

Finally, as NASA pursued the Commercial Crew Program and announced a competition for the first companies to provide transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS), I was contacted by SpaceX. That contact led to me being the Chair of the SpaceX Commercial Crew Safety Advisory Panel beginning in 2012, a role I continue to hold today.

The Advisory Panel goes to SpaceX a few times a year, evaluates progress and any problems with that program, and then makes findings and recommendations that I include in a letter report.  The Panel consists of two former astronauts, Leroy Chiao and Ed Lu, a former flight surgeon at Johnson Space Center (Richard Jennings), and the former launch director at Kennedy Space Center (Bob Sieck). We originally also included astronaut Mark Kelly, but now he is a Senator from Arizona. Our advice about what we observed and what we think would make the program better goes to Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, Hans Koenigsman and the other people at SpaceX responsible for sending people into space.

I continue working on individual projects that excite me, but now I also choose to leave time in the day for other things. The development of this site is one example as is planning for another book .

Playing music with friends and spending time with my wife at our cabin in the redwoods of Northern California and our Victorian flat in San Francisco fulfills me deeply. While nothing in my career has been without its challenges, the “rocket boy” in me is immensely proud of the last 50+ years of space accomplishments.