The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and other failed missions led NASA to rethink how it fostered leadership and culture.

Now, NSW-based Crazy Might Work is using an ultra-modern version of the same program, based on the current space program, to share those learnings with other organisations and leadership teams.

In this special episode recorded at the Australian Space Summit & Exhibition, Paul Hawkins, the company’s chief combobulator, talks to host Adam Thorn about the firm’s origins in Antarctica, whether leaders are born or made and how NASA became the Best Place to Work in federal government for the eleventh year in a row.

This week, the third annual Australian Space Summit & Exhibition took place at the ICC in Sydney.

Now a two-day event, headliners included senior figures from the US Space Force, Virgin Galactic, and the new head of Australia’s Space Command.

In this special episode, recorded during the event, Space Connect’s Adam Thorn and Defence Connect’s Liam Garman and Stephen Kuper discuss the key takeaways from the summit.

Space Connect has just announced that the Under Secretary of the US Air Force, Kristyn E. Jones, will headline this month’s Australian Space Summit and Exhibition.

Jones is one of the most senior figures involved in the US Space Force and oversees the entire US Air Force’s annual budget of more than $205 billion.

As part of her role, she also directs the US Air Force’s strategy and policy development, weapons acquisition and technology investments while being the principal adviser to the Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall.

In this episode, Defence Connect’s senior analyst, Stephen Kuper, chats about the significance of her appearance, and what local industry can learn at the event.

This month, Space Connect reported how researchers operating the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in NSW used an athletics-style method to measure the speed of neutron star jets.

The international team timed the phenomenon like a “100-metre sprinter” to record that it travelled at 114,000 kilometres per second – one-third the speed of light.

In this episode, Tom Russell, who led the research, talks through the mysterious jets and how they developed a new way to track them.

Plus, he discusses why the ATCA telescope is still such a pioneering machine and what the future of the research holds.

We’re less than two months away from our annual Australian Space Summit and Exhibition.

The two-day event will be the biggest yet, featuring headliners including Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and the commander overseeing the US Space Force’s Indo-Pacific team.

Hosting the event is Alan Duffy, a professor in astrophysics and pro-vice-chancellor of flagship initiatives at Swinburne University.

He joins the show this week to discuss his incredible career and the biggest issues in the sector this year.

An astronomer from Curtin University discovered 49 new galaxies from just three hours of operating the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

Dr Marcin Glowacki was leading an international collaboration aiming to study the star-forming gas in a single radio galaxy.

However, while the team didn’t discover the star-forming gas in the galaxy they were studying, they instead uncovered other galaxies when inspecting the data later.

This week, Dr Glowacki tells the story behind his incredible finding.

A new industry-wide group dedicated to promoting diversity in the space sector has launched with the support of the Australian Space Agency and Defence Space Command.

The Australian Space Diversity Alliance (ASDA) aims to help senior leaders and minimise the barriers that marginalised groups face.

This week, two of its co-founders, Mei He and Dr Elise Stephenson, talk about the initiative and what they hope it will achieve.

This month, Space Connect reported how researchers from the University of Sydney discovered that Earth’s interactions with Mars can drive deep sea circulation here on Earth.

The teams used geological records of the deep sea to discover a link between the orbits of the two planets and past global warming patterns.

In this episode, co-author Professor Dietmar Müller talks through the research and the unique collaboration with Sorbonne University in Paris.

He also discusses what comes next and how researchers can use their discovery to understand better future climate outcomes.