TIME PACING THE FUTURE

CULTIVATING THE LIGHT-SPEED GENERATION - CLASSICAL CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION: STEM, Arts, Humanities, & Health.

In 2005, Governor Perry of Texas and the Texas Workforce Commission funded SPACE TEAMS and the Institute for Educational Robotics at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio to pioneer FIRST Robotics programs in the State of Texas. The program would grow through the contributions of dedicated volunteers from families, local business, and charitable organizations to become the Texas FIRST Robotics Franchise. Andrew Schuetze from Inspire Academy led the way with the support and counsel of Dr. Francis Xavier Kane, or "Duke" as he was known to San Antonio students. 

Duke was a a leader in the development of the Global Positioning System. For the last decade of his life, 2003-2013, Duke operated the Schriever Institute dedicated to the pursuit of peace in space, global collaboration for space exploriation, and technology strategies to sustain the human element in time.  During the period, 2011-2012, Duke and Hu Davis, Apollo 11, Lunar Capsule 5, Vehicle Manager, collaborated with area RAM High School STEM students to conceptualize and design Cloud 2.0--energy, communications, and computing via space-based solar power.

Duke's idea is that the new generation is global and acts at the speed of thught--he called this generation the "light-speed generation.” He saw light-speed'ers as a global unfettered generation in terms of age and location, it was for him a matter of communicating and acting at the speed of light.

For Duke, everything was accelerating. 3Ds.com released tools that 5 men and women could do what it took rooms of hundreds of engineers to do in a matter of real months... To prepare for a world of increasing technological complexity, Duke, like General Robert F. McDermott advocated conecting contemporary technologes and knowledge to real world problmes but most importantly at the nexus of character. To achieve this connection, classical education, global education, education for citizenship and leadership matter more than ever. The way ahead for these innovation warriors was in many ways a reflection of how America prepared it's next generation at the outset of the Space Age in 1957.

Little knows, the cultivation of science and technology students and workers in the 1950's was as much about the humanities, arts, social sciences, and human health and medicine as it was about physics or the emerging field of computer science. Duke's ultimate goal was to pursue space exploration with an eye toward Mars. he felt education of the next generation is "....all about creativity, design, and the intersection of art and science, human creativity, human technology.”

San Antonio’s SPACE TEAMS & TIER—a program of the Alamo Community College District’s Texas Institute for Educational Robotics (TIER), 2006 Inaugural Free Summer Camp.

When SPACE TEAMS/TIER was founded, General Robert F. McDermott and Col. Duke Kane (USAF, ret.) positioned the pursuit of Mars as the key to the Alamo region’s development. According to the two leaders, children are the necessary ingredient of the future and Mars is the lure that can inspire the next generation.

“SPACE TEAMS can return San Antonio to the path of human development and space exploration making it in the realm of possibility that the first person to walk on Mars will be from the Alamo region.”—Robert F. McDermott (Brig. Gen., USAF ret.) and Francis X. “Duke” Kane, Ph.D. (Col. USAF, ret.)

SPACE TEAMS/TIER feeds multiple levels of education, from industry license and Associate in Applied Science degrees to Ph.D. The program is positioned as a feeder pattern across industry sectors including cyber, aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, and scientific research and development.

"THE FIRST PERSON TO WALK ON MARS WILL BE FROM SAN ANTONIO." --Duke Kane (Col. USAF) 

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas - Technical Sgt. Jill Rodriguez, 24th Air Force non-commissioned officer in charge of deployment operations, held the portrait after it was unveiled for Col. (Dr.) Francis X. Kane, president of San Antonio's Schriever Institute, to see the permanent representation of himself to be hung in the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame located at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., in a ceremony March 2 here.

 

IMAGE and Caption - U.S. Air Force, Photo, Theodore Koniares

In 2004, when Duke was President of the Schriever Institute, he developed a concept for a virtual school for the study of space, STEM, philosophy and art to sustain San Antonio’s space and technology legacy. Duke and Hubert Davis, former manager of the Apollo Lunar Module 5 Project, propose a radical strategy for both energy and education.

For energy, they suggest we purse the “energy cloud”—space-based solar power. Though this sounds like science fiction, the technology, space-based solar power, was realized in a 1968 invention of Dr. Peter Glaser of Arthur D. Little Corp. Later under Hubert’s guidance the technology was tested in a NASA program in the 1970’s.

Duke and Hubert’s goals for human capital development and education include:

• A Virtual and Physical Space Academy in San Antonio, with global reach online
• Emphasis on classical knowledge, humanities, social science, arts and STEM
• The vocations of STEM with an emphasis on problem solving in authentic contecxts, tools and roles
• Human networks to support mentorship and conversations about the philosophy of space, technology, and the future
• Emphasis on creativity, imagination and design
• The first person to walk on mars will be from, or enabled by, San Antonio

If the budding concept in San Antonio has its way, Space-Based Solar will become a project for high school students in collaboration with Jackson Wller and Associates. Using engineering design tools from Dassault Systems, makers of Solid Works, the budding initiative targets space-based solar power as phase one and space exploration and settlement for high school minds and hands in phase 2 and phase 3. In 1957, General Schriever forecast unmanned interplanetary space travel. In 2011, San Antonio is still reaching for the heavens.

Dassault Systems based in Detroit (a Paris, France-based IBM spinoff) has a world-class engineering suite of tools to implement design, and create virtually any complex robotics system (or simple 3D product or animation). Dassault recently acquired SolidWorks and a suite of their CATIA standard engineering tools are offered at a discount at one end of the spectrum for several thousand dollars for a school—compared to up to ~$500,000 for a single industry license of one computer engineering station.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has embarked on a series of programs aimed at revolutionizing the way defense systems and vehicles are made. Titled Adaptive Vehicle Make, the portfolio has three principal objectives: to dramatically compress development times for complex defense systems such as military air and ground vehicles, to shift the product value chain for such systems toward high-value-added design activities, and to democratize the innovation process. The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) effort is part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make program portfolio and is aimed at engaging high school students in a series of collaborative distributed manufacturing and design experiments. The overarching objective of MENTOR is to develop and motivate the next generation cadre of system designers and manufacturing innovators, and to ensure that high school-age youths are exposed to the principles of modern prize-based design and foundry-style digital manufacturing. (FedBizOps.gov)

DARPA MENTOR and Dassault have teamed up to expand access to their engineering suite for product lifecycle management across high school, colleges and universities. Rather than traditional CAD, engineering is now driven by complex mechatronic systems virtualization and simulation across the entire product lifecycle—concept, design, implementation, operation, testing and validation, modeling, manufacturing, manufacturing operations, training, decision support, after action review, and even marketing.

As part of the ageny's  push for CYBER-STEM Georgia Tech has been funded with $10MM and will soon deploy Dassault Systems engineering software (DELMIA) used to design and manufacture the Boeing 787 to high school nation wide for robotics, manufacturing and wind energy. The DARPA MENTOR program is designed to boost engineering skills for high school students, as well as spark an interest in engineering, design, manufacturing, math and science-related college and university programs. The four-year program is focused on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative engineering design challenges for automotive, wind energy and robotics. A team in San Antonio, Texas is working on Space Based Solar Power.

The DARPA MENTOR program is designed to boost engineering skills for high school students, as well as spark an interest in engineering, design, manufacturing, math and science-related college and university programs. The four-year program is focused on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative engineering design challenges for automotive, wind energy and robotics. A team in San Antonio, Texas is working on Space Based Solar Power.   

DARPA's CS-STEM (or CS-STEM, Computer Science STEM) investments in the Computer Science Student Network and DARPA MENTOR are representative of this movement to enable software-based education services delivering state of the practice science and engineering research and development tools students and teachers children and teachers interested in STEM. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded $20MM to Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy to deploy a cloud based services free to people at home and ~$30 a seat in school from the Computer Science Student Network. At the site, students can design, build, program, compete and play with robots. On the same platform in the "cloud" students can make digital stories, educational simulations and video games with ALICE, the legacy of Dr. Randy Pausch who wrote THE LAST LECTURE.

Computer Science Student Newtork from Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy

Raytheon believes tomorrow's innovators need to be inspired by math and science today. MathMovesU is an investment in children's dreams, the talent pipeline and the economic prosperity of our country.

Today, the Southwest Research Institute Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) is measuring Saturn's magnetosphere engulfing the orbits of Titan and most of the ringed planet's icy moons, as well as its famous rings. Data from SwRI's instrumentation recently revealed that Enceladus, one of Saturn's diminutive moons, is linked to Saturn by powerful electrical currents - beams of electrons that flow back and forth between the planet and moon. (Nature, April 20, 2011). NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spotted a glowing patch of ultraviolet light near Saturn's north pole that marks the presence of an electrical circuit that connects Saturn with its moon Enceladus.