Curiously enough the women we did have at Copernicus were successful entrepreneurs in Tech and Space.

Occupation at Copernicus

3/4 of participants were pursuing degrees at traditional universities while the rest was split between paid employment and pursuing entrepreneurial ventures. Curiously enough two of the three women were entrepreneurs in space and tech, the other a consultant at Bain & Company. Copernicus II is going to be focused much more on building new ventures out of the findings at the program.

(If you are an entrepreneur or investor interested in space startups, drop me a line at moritz@exosphe.re)

Fields of Study represented at Copernicus

While most participants studied either Physics, Mathematics or Economics, there was a surprising level of diversity. Several people held several degrees or were working towards additional ones.

We even had one of the very few space lawyers present: Kamil Muzyka is the legal advisor to TRED Laboratories and extremely knowledgeable about the legal landscape in space exploration, asteroid mining, etc.

Educational Level at Copernicus

This counts only the highest level of formal education achieved. Multiple degrees and skill not certified by a university are not included. Many had additional knowledge in coding.

Most participants were studying either in the US or the UK, but their nationalities covered 3/5 continents. Our notable guest from Japan was the lovely Kayoko Oshima, co-founder of the Japanese Space Elevator Association and principal at Jump To Space.

All in all a rather diverse group and by no means expertly knowledgeable in space elevator research. That is not necessary — though each and every participant did feel very much out of their depth a majority of the time, there was always somebody else to go to for a missing piece in the puzzle.

Experts are important, but only as resources to the participants. The depth of knowledge about a specific field is useful for speeding up the research done by participants, but it cannot replace it. Neither should it.

Lesson 2:

Availability over Structure

Michael Laine presenting his Lunar Space Elevator Infrastructure module

Going into the program we had a well defined schedule with quite a few theoretical sessions planned. With titles like “The Noumenia Process for the Lunar Elevator”, “The state of the art in Nanotechnology”, “Commercialisation of Space”, and “Space Colonization” we believed we had covered all our bases for getting everybody on the same page. Apparently too many bases…

Having lectures was good for building a common understanding of the problem and field, but it proved hindering in Week 2 when participants were dying to get to work. It reminded me of our very first entrepreneurship bootcamp, where we stayed too close to what you might call the “lecture model” we were trying to break away from. The theoretical part cannot take up more than 20 % and should be well fitted to the program. Though there are many interesting topics in space science, not all of them add value to a program that deals with a very specific problem like the endogenously-powered space elevator.

The lesson here is that having experts present is incredibly valuable, provided they spend more time helping the teams to refine the questions they’re investigating than presenting content in a one-way street. It’s the hard-won, hands-on expertise of many years spent in their respective fields that enables the participants to work through problems faster and close in on the right questions to ask in less time. There needs to be some structure so that people can work without having to worry about where to meet, when to eat, and so on. But this structure should always be amenable to change and stay in service of the goal, not become an impediment to work.

Lesson 3:

Creating over Expanding

Alan and Alex at work

While the challenge we had set up with the Endogenously-Powered Space Elevator (“EPSE”) was maximally interesting (real bacon as our friend FAKE GRIMLOCK calls it), the prospect of doing detail-oriented research on somebody else’s idea did not appeal to the bright minds at Copernicus. I am unsure what exactly the reason was. Most likely it was a combination of the following factors:

Little trust in their own ability and that of the group to make significant progress — that is to say paper-worthy — on the complex problem of the EPSE in the limited amount of time available. In the introductory exercise of writing down both a hope and a fear, the most common fear was “not knowing enough/being the least competent person in the room”. No familiarity with concepts like serendipity and agile development, how they work, why they are important and how they can be applied to a research setting. A general feeling that the whole experience should be “fun”, leading to an overreaction to the anxiety inherent in doing anything new where there isn’t a map to follow and theoretical questions are accompanied by group difficulties. Rather than embracing the chaos, the urge to hold something concrete in ones hands by the end of the program was very strong (and understandably so).

In their applications our participants had the option to choose either the Technical Team or the Economics Team to work with, and they were allowed to switch during the first week after sampling their team mates and the type of work to be done. What ended up happening was that smaller groups formed, each coming up with their own ideas and concepts for space elevator related technology.

One group researched and developed a novel zeppelin design for Using Helium Balloons in Tower Construction, powered by solar panels and spanning several dozen meters.

A second group came up with a 20 km high tether tower serving as a base station for the space elevator while allowing for a comparatively simple construction and financing process because of its multitude of peripheral uses not tied to the SE — a similar design patented by the Canadian firm Thoth Technology made the news just a few days ago.

A third group wrote about a Tether Severence Scenario for Lunar Elevator Model that Visitor Michael Laine is working towards with his company Liftport Group.

And another group did a study on General Tether Design.

All of these papers were written solely by the participants. Visitors and Team Leads only helped to clarify the ideas and facilitated the process. Currently the group leaders are polishing these papers. Several people in our pool of Visitors, Advisory Board members and experts in our network have offered to proof read and give feedback. Steven Patamia, a leading expert in the space elevator community, has kindly offered to do a private peer review. Once these reviews have been completed they will be available online on the Copernicus I page and on the Open Science Framework (www.osf.io), a free collaboration tool built for project-based research. You can check the wiki of our research activities complete with version history today on the project pages here and here.

Lesson 4:

Momentum over Convenience?

The hacker mentality seems to take hold easily with space science research

Though it was surprising to see how much can get done when you put some 30 people into a room for three weeks and have them smash their brains together, I still feel that we could have achieved a lot more with a fourth week at our disposal. By week 3 people were all on the same page and busy doing stuff instead of figuring out how to do it. We had developed a momentum that got cut short because the limited amount of time left made it unlikely to make significant progress.

Our original plan was a 4-week program, but this wasn’t possible for logistical reasons. But then again, in that format it becomes difficult for students, and professionals especially, to take time off from their regular occupations. Indeed, many of the participants told us they would not have been able to participate in an even mildly longer program.

While we did work on very specific problems in space science, we also managed to have a good time in the process. You can see a selection of the best pictures in our album on the Copernicus Facebook Page. Below is a video of Team Puli’s Lunar Rover overcoming an organic obstacle…

Lesson 5:

The Importance of Cultural Technology

As I have written about before, we possess amazing technological capabilities never before seen. Near-instant communication, the unrestricted flow of information, access to the entirety of human knowledge, all on these handheld computers we still call “phones” — the shift from an economy used to scarcity of information to one based on abundance has been underway for not even two decades and already transformed the entire operating system of humanity (at least in developed and developing countries). A sea of possibilities has opened up.

Science is no exception to this trend. The way research is conducted has changed dramatically, because results achieved at the University of Shanghai of Science and Technology by a Chinese professor can be in front of the eyes of an American lab technician at MIT the next day. This allows for an extraordinary level of coordination of human effort on a global scale, thus reducing the need to redo a lot of research and instead focus on new experiments and, most important, on application of existing and new knowledge.

Skinner Layne introducing participants to life and entrepreneurship philosophy

So yes, technology brings with it great benefits. Allowing each individual scientist to specialize benefits everyone with the efficiency resulting from increased division of labor. But this strength is also a weakness with regards to solving the big problems facing humanity. To solve those big problems we need scientists from many different fields as well as businessmen to come together, exchange ideas, do the research, and commercialize their findings. Ideally you would involve young and brilliant curious minds as well to produce a unique environment poised to generate fresh ideas. What we miss is a mechanism to bring (and keep) all of this together. What we miss is cultural technology.

Community-building

At Exosphere we have organized four 8–12 week bootcamps in entrepreneurship and life philosophy with our Hydra programs and its predecessors. In conducting these boot camp programs we have learned a great deal about people and understand not only how to bring very different kinds of people together in one place, but primarily how to build an environment where strangers can form strong enough relationships so that productive work is possible in very limited periods of time. So far the focus in these programs has been on entrepreneurship and learning how to learn, but Copernicus has confirmed our thesis that it also works in a research setting.

Aliaksei Rubanau, Economics Lead at Copernicus, says:

“I see the community of Exosphere as something socially very similar to how extraterrestrial bases will be made. A relatively small number of 20 to 50 people, who don’t know each other before the process, are put in a challenging situation. Big achievements in little time. Given these circumstances, people need to raise their communication skills very fast, exponentially even. These conditions are very similar to the ones you will find in every extraterrestrial base. It’s a very special social life.”

The mechanism by which we are able to achieve this dramatic increase in communication skills is building genuine Community. It is an essential part in all our programs and was introduced to public discourse by the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who had this to say about it:

“Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to “rejoice together, mourn together,” and to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.”

Like an enzyme in the world of biology, community-building acts as a catalyst in forming deep and meaningful relationships between individuals in a very short time frame, thus allowing groups that have gone through this process to do away with the usual niceties you observe at conferences or in professional and academic settings. Instead they start to focus on asking better questions and helping each other overcome personal biases, inabilities, and quirks inhibiting a truly free exchange of ideas.

Freed from the usual constraints that these rules of interaction we inherit from our cultures put on us, time becomes the most valuable resource — “when else will I find this kind of environment again?”, you realize.

An atmosphere of cooperation and shared struggle inspires and moves people to speak and do the difficult thing, persisting through the inevitable confusion when you deviate from the script and see more internal and external variables that they themselves have the power to change. It is in this environment that genuinely new ideas blossom. It is (for now and until something better comes along) our answer to the problem of increased specialization.