Proposed Solutions
Our ad hoc coalition of aerospace educators, engineers, scientists and administrators, believing that there is no substitute for the hands-on approach to producing the workforce talent that this country's aerospace community needs, has begun to develop an independent set of solutions to the problem of providing space access for student payloads.
The initial action items agreed upon were:
1) Work with U.S. launch vehicle providers to add provisions for "secondary" educational payloads to all their vehicles.
2) Investigate the use of tax credits to reimburse these launch vehicle providers for each educational payload they fly.
3) Encourage the U.S. Department of Defense to increase the funding for the Air Force Research Laboratory's University NanoSat program and provide recurring annual DOD launch allocations dedicated specifically to university payloads.
4) Investigate the use of tax credits to reimburse U.S. commercial telemetry ground system operators to receive telemetered data from student payloads in orbit and to distribute these data to the students via the Internet.
5) Request NASA and other U.S. civilian government space agencies to provide support for travel, transportation and integration of student payloads that will be flying on U.S. launch vehicles as a result of the initiatives described above.
6) Encourage NASA and industry to include accommodations for student payloads in new launch vehicle designs.
7) Establish policies to encourage space-related Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, University-Affiliated Research Centers and government agencies to make their surplus and prototype flight hardware and their test facilities available to student experimenters for building and flight-qualifying their payloads.
8) Create a bridge between university-level space experiment programs and K-12 science, technology and math initiatives underway across the country.