By SHANNON O. WELLS
About four years ago, Alan George’s building curiosity about how much Pitt faculty members shared his passion for space-oriented research reached a tipping point. He just had to know.
Sending an email to every faculty member in the Swanson School of Engineering, George, who is department chair and professor of electrical and computer engineering, asked if any of them was engaged in space research. If not, would they like to be? What topics might be of interest?
“And I was pleasantly surprised by the response,” he said. “About 40 faculty members just in the engineering school said, ‘Yes, yes, this is something I’d really like to do.’”
Sufficiently encouraged, George branched out into the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences faculty, several Health Sciences schools and the School of Computing and Information (SCI).
“After a couple of months, I had over 100 faculty members across campus expressing strong interest and specific topics being listed that they’d like to work on related to space research and education,” he said.
This culminated in a PowerPoint presentation in 2020, which, though well received by Pitt administration, was not ideally timed, given the global pandemic then at hand. George persisted, however, finally getting approval in 2023. “They said, ‘Go ahead. See what you can do. See what you can organize.’”
That fall, the three Lunch and Learn seminars George and his colleagues held across campus — topics included space engineering, space science and space medicine — marked the public genesis of Pitt Space, which was officially launched this September.
On its website, the Pitt Space Initiative is billed as a “dynamic hub of space research, where passionate teaching and commitment to excellence converge to produce leaders and technologies of tomorrow for the U.S. space community.”
“We’ve got lots of research activities on campus, and more coming,” George said. “We’ve got space courses that are being created, space programs that are being built on those courses, all kinds of things that we’ve been cooking on for a while.”
As Pittwire recently reported, Pitt Space builds on Pitt’s legacy in space education and research, including the analysis of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 mission, and the groundbreaking work of Samuel Pierpont Langley, a faculty member who led the renowned Allegheny Observatory. In 2017, the National Science Foundation’s Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC), established its “alpha base” at Pitt, with George as its founder and director.
Space race reboot
The program reflects what has become a full-blown renaissance regarding space exploration and its integral role in technological advancements, a re-ignition of the excitement surrounding the first moon landing in 1969. In other words, George and his colleagues have a lot to be enthused about in 2024.
“I’ll tell you, if we did this 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense,” he said. “Even five years ago, it wasn’t as promising as it is now. And the reason is, we’re in the second space race that mankind has known.”
The first such “race,” from the 1950s through the ‘70s, was based on competition between the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union. Cost-cutting and changes in government priorities, however, led to a tapering off that only recently started reversing itself, George explained.
“In the last five or 10 years, it’s really just exploded, and a big part of that is commercial industry being involved in the space community,” he said. “This is the hottest the space area has been since I was a little boy — since the ’60s and the ’70s. There is a projection by several experts that right now we’re sitting on about a half-a-trillion-dollar global market.”
In the space community, George sees that growing in a decade to about $2 trillion. “It’s a big marketplace and a growing marketplace.”
Industry, he explained, has taken on the space-development role once held almost exclusively by government.
“In fact, in some cases, the government is a passenger. Its industry-driven, industry-motivated. You’ve got companies like SpaceX and others that are doing amazing things,” he said. “That’s not the government doing it. That’s private industry doing amazing things.
“Then the government basically just becomes customers: ‘Please fly this payload for us to the Space Station. Please take these people to the moon.’ For us, it becomes a service industry where these companies do all the heavy lifting — literally and figuratively,” he added. “And the government basically just pays for it as a service, and other companies pay for it as well.
Planting a flag
George credits Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research, for suggesting the strategy that got Pitt Space traction on the Oakland campus.
“We asked for his advice and encouragement,” which George assumed would be along the lines of “‘Keep growing as best you can, and one day this might go somewhere.’ But he didn’t say that. He stood up and he said, ‘You should just plant a flag.’”
In other words, make the mission and goals publicly known, then let the resulting interest and momentum carry it forward.
“(Rutenbar) said just go for it, jump in with both feet, and we’ll figure out what we need and move forward from there,” George explained. “So that’s what we’ve been doing ever since last November.”
The recent launch of the Pitt Space Initiative, which George said will one day be the Pitt Space Institute, marked “us planting the flag.”
“Some of it came from SHREC. Some of it came from lots of other groups on campus, astrophysics, for example. And we’ve been putting all these pieces together for the last year,” he added. “Last month, we had our official launch, and we’re on our way.”
Pitt Research is prioritizing three areas of space-related research:
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Engineering: Creating and operating advanced spacecraft systems and applications for on-board sensing, processing, storage and communications while maximizing spacecraft reliability, performance, adaptability and AI integration.
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Science: Combining cutting-edge observational and computational technology with theoretical techniques to better understand the properties and evolution of the universe, from the dynamic processes of Earth to structures of the largest galaxy clusters.
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Space medicine and biomanufacturing: Designing/developing technologies to support astronaut health and leveraging the space environment to produce biomedical technologies for terrestrial use.
Pitt Space, George said, brings with it a range of “strengths.”
“First of all, it’s focused not just on research, although that’s prime, but also on workforce development. That’s a big draw in the space community,” he said. “There’s a great demand for space engineers and space scientists and even space doctors. And there’s not a very big supply.”
With a lack of schools producing these kinds of graduates, he said workforce development, and creating the kinds of education and training programs needed “to produce these space engineers and space scientists and space doctors” are key aspects of the Pitt Space mission.
A growing reputation
Rob Cunningham, vice chancellor for research infrastructure, said when he arrived at Pitt in 2021, he was pleased to discover that SHREC — and space research in general — was part of Pitt’s academic landscape.
Talking with fellow faculty about space-related efforts, Cunningham learned of opportunities to “do research across a broad range of topics, using departments and schools,” including the Swanson School of Engineering, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
“When I was deciding what research I would pursue here at Pitt, SHREC and Alan George made it easy for me to set up that research program and start working with Ph.D. students,” he said.
When the 2023 Lunch and Learn events proved successful, subsequent meetings were held with industry representatives about growing workforce needs and with Pitt faculty about collaborations to “amplify our collective research.”
Pitt Research subsequently joined the Keystone Space Collaborative, a nonprofit organization supporting the growing space industries in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The partnership places the University at the forefront of what Cunningham called the “growing Pittsburgh community doing research, development and easing commercialization of the amazing technology coming out of Pitt’s many research labs.
“(George) was especially important. He pulled together key faculty and many teams and is leading our effort to develop the space engineering program,” he added. “Alan has many years of valuable leadership experience and many useful connections. His work leading SHREC is first rate, and he is widely respected in academia and in industry.”
Another key faculty member in the Pitt Space initiative, Afshin Behshti, joined the Pitt community this fall as director of the Space Biomedicine Program, associate director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and professor of surgery and computational and systems biology.
Cunningham called Behshti’s expertise in space medicine an “important piece in the broader Pitt Space landscape.”
“This is the start of an exciting chapter for Pitt,” said Cunningham, who recently was invited to the National Space Council’s Workforce Coalition to talk about Pitt’s new initiatives. “I’m excited to work with Alan, Afshin and the other Pitt Space leaders as the University grows its reputation in this area.”
With Pitt Space up and running, George said the main challenge now is “spreading the word about Pitt Space, across campus, across Pittsburgh, across the region, across the country.”
“We need help any way, and every way we can find it, to spread the word, to make people aware, so that we can find more activities to target and more entities to benefit,” he said, with social networking, a new website and LinkedIn page all part of the outreach efforts. “We’re also going to have some faculty workshops, where we help faculty members to form teams and build proposals and go after some of these space-funding opportunities that are out there.
“And their odds of winning are going to be much higher than they would have been,” he said, “thanks to Pitt Space and the support we provide, and the shared facilities and all that it brings.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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