Date: Various throught out 2023

Here are pictures from various aerospace conferences I attended in 2023. This was the first year of post-COVID normalcy, and I definitely caught up on all the missed travel from the years prior! I traveled to a total of 5 meetings: AIAA SciTech, NASA Goddard Contamination Control, Materials, and Planetary Protection Workshop (CCMPP), Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC), Applied Space Environments Conferences (ASEC), and European Contamination Workshop. Here are pictures from the first 4, the last one, being in Toulouse, warranted a separate page.

AIAA SciTech

Dates: January 23-27, 2023

The kick off was the AIAA SciTech that took place in early January at Maryland's National Harbor right by D.C. Despite having lived in Alexandria, and later Falls Church, VA for many years, I have not really visited this site much. I ended up staying at the Gaylord Hotel adjacent to the convention center. I did not have any talks here. Well, I was supposed to have one but AIAA pulled my paper since I thought the ridiculuous a month-prior deadline for paper and video (??) submission was not real. In my years of conferencing, I have yet to come across such crazy deadlines like this on. This comment also goes in hand with my love-hate relationship with AIAA. This is the main professional organizationi for aerospace engineers but I find their conferences to be a really bad value. SciTech is expensive! And it's not like we have many options, meetings like the Joint Propulsion Conference that I used to go to during my college days, got later folded with other meetings (Energy?) and eventually folded under. So SciTech is basically it. For the in excess of $1k registration fee you get basically just the entrance. There are also few measly coffee breaks. But to give them some credit, the program was excellent. I very much enjoyed the plenary sessions with leaders of various governmental agencies. This was also a great opportunity to reconnect with colleagues I have not seen in a long time. I ran into my Virginia Tech lab mates Rick, Julien, and Randy, met face-to-face Yasin from the JHU Dragonfly project, and caught up with Luis from OrbitalATK and now Northrop Grumman.

CCMPP

Dates: September 12-14, 2023

Then in September, back from my extended European mini-sabbatical, I traveled to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for the Contamination Control, Materials, and Planetary Protection Workshop. This is an excellent meeting - partly due to being free, but mostly since I prefer smaller workshops over massive conferences with multiple parallel sessions. Here I presented on a work done last year on implementing CAD capability in my contamination simulation program. One wrinkle to this conference was that, upon landing, all groggy after the red eye, I found out that all car rental companies were out of cars. This made me feel like being in that Seinfeld episode of "you can take a reservation, but can you hold a reservation?". The only company with cars available was Sixt, due to the reason they are also very expensive as they offer a luxury product. Not knowing what to do (Uber did not seem like a viable option for some reason) I signed out a BMW. This was my first time driving somewhat of a fancy car - my "other" car is a 12 year old Kia Soul.

GEC

Dates: October 9-10(me)/13(conference), 2023

Then few weeks later I flew to Detroit, MI, from where I took a shuttle bus to Ann Arbor, the home of University of Michigan, for the 2023 Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC). This was my first time to UM, despite knowing a lot of people from it, due to UM being an electric propulsion (EP) powerhouse. Another first was that I was here not to present, but to support a talk given by two really bright USC students, Olivia and Kayden, the leads of the USC ASPEN advanced spacecraft propulsion student club. Historically this club was focusing on nuclear thermal propulsion, but few years ago I suggested to them a new project involving development of a solid-fuel plasma thruster mainly for CubeSat deorbiting applications. Their presentation outlined the design, showed some plasma plume pictures, reported on thrust measurements obtained using a pendulum and a laser system, and also introduced some preliminary simulations that I ran using my code Starfish. Here I also caught up with many other colleagues that I have not seen since pre-COVID, including Justin, Trevor, Kristina, and Elaine. Elaine and I even for a morning jog around this extremely massive campus. I stayed in a cozy AirBnb located right outside the university. The highlight was a record player with some old Dean Martin LPs.

ASEC

Dates: October 9(conference)/11(me)-13, 2023

Despite GEC lasting all week, I had to bail Tuesday lunch time, shortly after Olivia and Kayden's talk, to catch a flight to Huntsville, AL. Turns out, I submitted an abstract to the Applied Space Environments Conference (ASEC) without verifying that it does not conflict with other meetings - and it did! This was my first time to ASEC, and first time to Huntsville after like 20 years, and I was pleased with both. This was another small workshop, similar to CCMPP that I prefer. The conference banquet was also amazing; it took place at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration with classical music quartet strumming under a Saturn V upper stage. The evening features presentations from Blue Origin, among others. The conference itself took place at the AC Hotel Downtown, overlooking a nice park with a fountain. I stayed at the near by (walking distance) Embassy Suites. I utilized Lyft for the airport rides. I also went for a morning jog to explore this town. Huntsville is small, but seems like a good option for somebody wanting a simple life, while getting to work on some pretty awesome aerospace projects.

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