A little more than 200 people, mostly UNC students, spent Saturday with their heads above the clouds.
UNC’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space hosted their first symposium on Saturday, which included a visit from an astronaut, a planetarium show and speakers who discussed the future of space and the role North Carolina can play in it.
“North Carolina is poised to miss the next great leap in aviation,” said Jeff Krukin, aerospace and defense consultant and keynote speaker at the symposium.
Krukin said North Carolina, famous for its role in aviation history, has the potential to become a center for commercial aerospace and aviation companies, but has not yet lived up to it.
“It’s real money, real business, real things happening — but not happening here,” he said.
Krukin said there is also a lot of potential for entrepreneurial firms such as Blue Force Technologies Inc., an aerospace hardware development company located in the Triangle.
Krukin’s lecture highlighted the business side of the space industry, which many audience members were learning about for the first time.
“There are a lot of very specific projects going on in North Carolina in our immediate vicinity that I had no idea about,” said Nate Goldsmith, a freshman at UNC-Greensboro who attended the lectures.
Astronaut Andrew Feustel, the final speaker at the symposium whose missions have taken him to the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, discussed his experiences in space and his optimism for its future.
