Many Roads to Space
There are many roads to space, some more traveled than others, but all essentially important to the human settlement of the final frontier. It’s not just about rockets and space settlements—to survive and thrive off-world will require advancements in biomedicine, food production, legal regimes and their enforcement, leisure activities, and much more. Anything that might be a part of any new frontier must be considered in our expansion to new shores in space, including both planetary and lunar outposts as well as free space settlements. Many Roads to Space highlights the new, the unusual, and the hard-to-categorize endeavors that will be critical to a healthy, productive, and robust existence in space.
Speakers
Holly Melear
CEO & Founder
STEAMSPACE Education Outreach
Holly Melear
CEO & Founder
STEAMSPACE Education Outreach
Holly Melear is CEO & Founder of STEAMSPACE Education Outreach®, creator of the Cities in Space® STEAM education events, and the Co-Chair for NSS International Space Development Conference in 2023.
Holly and her team are creating STEAM and education events for all students globally, growing the next generations of leaders in space. By cultivating the pipeline for industry and academia, and offering opportunities for collaboration and mentorship with professionals and academics, STEAMSPACE offers students an all-inclusive community in which to grow and gain a competitive edge in the world of future space entrepreneurship and education.
Part of the STEAMSPACE mission is to offer industry and academic engagement with students, including the under-represented, breaking down the barriers of socio-economics, ethnicity, disability, and learning differences. Today, STEAMSPACE has hosted over 4500 students since the inception of Cities in Space in 2015.
With a history of over 24 years in the education industry, Holly has extensively trained in progressive education philosophies and techniques, including Project Based Learning and Social Emotional Learning. Holly has received awards and acknowledgements for her passion in STEAM and Space Education and her unflagging support for the under-represented, including the Permission to Dream Award, Teacher of the Year Award, and the Morocco MNSAT Award. She has appeared in such diverse publications as Interesting Engineering, Thrive, and CASEL Magazine.
Chris Carberry
CEO and Co-Founder
Explore Mars, Inc.
Chris Carberry
CEO and Co-Founder
Explore Mars, Inc.
Chris Carberry is the CEO and co-founder of Explore Mars, Inc. (Explore Mars), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit space advocacy organization that was created to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars by the mid-2030s. Carberry is a well-respected expert and influential director of strategic alliances in the space community as well as with non-traditional organizations.
Carberry has presented oral (and written) testimony to both the United States Senate as well as the United States House of Representatives and has been active in all levels of policy engagement with both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
In recent years, he has overseen Explore Mars’ annual Humans to Mars Summit, the largest annual conference focused on sending humans to Mars. He has also spearheaded dozens of programs including the Mars Innovation Forum, the annual Community Workshops for the Achievability and Sustainability of Human Exploration of Mars series, the AR/VR and Space workshop series, the ISS and Mars Conference in Washington, D.C. and in Strasbourg, France, and the Women and Mars Conference in Washington, D.C. He has also conducted programs overseas, in such countries as the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Carberry is also the creator, and one of the senior editors, of the annual publication known as the Humans to Mars Report that was highlighted in the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017. In 2013, Carberry was awarded a NASA Group Achievement award.
Carberry is the author of over 100 articles and Op-Ed pieces that have appeared in such publications as USA Today, US News and World Report, Huffington Post, The Washington Post, San Jose Mercury Times, Foxnews.com, Houston Chronicle, The Hill, The Telegram (UK), The Boston Herald and many other publications. He has been featured in over 100 national and international television, radio programs and podcasts such as NBC Nightly News, Fox News, CNN, BBC World, and NPR and is frequently asked for commentary from print news outlets around the world.
Prior to joining Explore Mars, Carberry served as Executive Director of The Mars Society. He also played a leadership role in congressional outreach events such as the 2006-2020 Space Exploration Alliance Legislative Blitz and has coordinated numerous briefing panels and other events on Capitol Hill over the past two decades. Carberry serves on the Board of Advisors for iGiant and Mars World Enterprises, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Space Society.
Carberry is the author of the 2019 book, Alcohol in Space: Past, Present and Future, and the upcoming book, The Music of Space (to be released in 2022). Both volumes are being adapted into documentary films.
Prior to his space career, Carberry worked as an archivist of modern political papers and was research assistant for numerous best-selling biographers.
Carberry received a B.A. degree in political science and a M.A. in history and archival methods.
Ozge Polson
Director of Commercial Business Development
SCOUT Inc.
Ozge Polson
Director of Commercial Business Development
SCOUT Inc.
Ozge Polson is the Director of Commercial Business Development at SCOUT Inc.. She leads the company’s sales division and is developing the infrastructure and framework for SCOUT to fulfill its mission of making space sustainability and space safety a reality. She has over a decade of experience as an aerospace, defense policy, and business development expert with extensive experience in both commercial and government sectors. She has successfully advised multiple space industry start-ups and managed several multi-million dollar programs from inception to delivery for top defense companies. She’s previously held corporate leadership positions at Washington’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center, Hughes Aerospace, and SpinLaunch. Prior to that, Polson worked as an international market entry consultant at KRL International, where she represented Fortune 500 companies and government institutions in front of the U.S. Congress.
Anna Ni
Professor
California State University San Bernardino
Anna Ni
Professor
California State University San Bernardino
Anna Ya Ni is a professor of Public Administration at California State University, San Bernardino. She received an M.S. in Information Assurance and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. of Public Administration from Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Her research interests center on information assurance, innovation adoption, science and technological policies, public-private partnerships, and distance education. She is the author of the book Building Business-Government Relations: A Skills Approach by Routledge, Inc. and over 20 research articles in journals, such as Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, American Review of Public Administration, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, etc. She serves on the Board of American Society of Public Administration (ASPA) Section of Science & Technology in Government (SSTIG).
Justin Park
President
Intergalactic Education
Justin Park
President
Intergalactic Education
Justin Park is an entrepreneur with Master’s degrees in space management and computer science from the International Space University and the University of Iowa, respectively. Mr. Park worked as a consultant at the Ames Research Center during his tenure with Accenture and more recently at NASA Headquarters as an associate for Booz Allen Hamilton. He was a volunteer editor for the Space Generation Advisory Council and in 2017, gave a TED talk on the space economy. Most recently, he was elected to the SSPI – Mid-Atlantic Chapter. His company, Intergalactic Education, has been developing space-centric mobile apps for over ten years.
Elizabeth Kennick
President
Teachers in Space, Inc. 501c3
Elizabeth Kennick
President
Teachers in Space, Inc. 501c3
Elizabeth Kennick joined Teachers in Space (TIS) as program director in 2011 and became President in 2014. Formerly Vice President of Client Technology at Morgan Stanley, she now splits her time between developing exciting ways to bring Space into the classroom, and funding spaceflights for classroom experiments and for teachers. Liz and TIS teachers and students have built and flown cubesat experiments on balloons, gliders, and Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. Now she wants teachers and students across the world to interact with Teachers in Space’s first orbital cubesat, “Serenity”, launching soon with Firefly Aerospace.
Tim Alatorre
Cofounder, Chief Operating Officer, and Chair of the Board
Orbital Assembly Corporation
Tim Alatorre
Cofounder, Chief Operating Officer, and Chair of the Board
Orbital Assembly Corporation
Tim Alatorre NCARB, a founder of Orbital Assembly Corporation, brings more than 20 years of experience in business management, engineering, habitat design, and programming to his roles as chief operating officer and chair of the board.
Alatorre was previously CEO of Domum, an internationally recognized architecture firm based in California. There, he increased revenue by 240% and grew the startup firm to a multinational organization overseeing more than $320 million in construction projects annually. He has supervised the design and construction of more than 600 structures and more than $1.5 billion in construction projects.
Alatorre served as a planning commissioner and member of a municipal Architectural Review Committee for the city of Rocklin, CA, for several years, and worked as a consulting subject matter expert for the state of California for more than a decade.
Alatorre earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.
Elliott Gorfain
Founder
Higher Ground Initiative
Elliott Gorfain
Founder
Higher Ground Initiative
Elliott Gorfain established Higher Ground Initiative with the goal of bringing nature and technology back into harmony with one another for optimal food, medicine, and resource production on Earth and off-world as well. HGI develops and utilizes Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) techniques and technologies optimized in the cannabis industry, while also carefully selecting specific species for the creation of micro ecosystems that are key to the health of the entire system. On Earth, HGI will create stable, efficient, non-polluting, closed-loop micro-ecosystems that can reliably produce high quality food and medicine that is independent of location and the ravages of pests and climate change. These same techniques will be adapted for the astro-agricultural production of food and medicine in space.
Elliott has decades of experience cultivating high quality indoor cannabis and has spent many years consulting and educating clients in the cannabis industry. He started his career as a molecular biologist and has over a decade of experience in the field of biotechnology. While working with laboratory automation, Elliott invented and patented a device that allows laboratory automation platforms to perform techniques that previously only humans could accomplish.