[Herald Interview] Korea’s space sector should strive for ‘balanced portfolio’

Steve Chien, long-time NASA engineer, advises importance of having diverse space ecosystem

Steve Chien, an artificial intelligence engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, speaks in an interview with The Korea Herald in Seoul on Thursday. (MIT Technology Review Korea)

The Korea AeroSpace Administration, the government’s new space body, officially began operations last week with the hope of vaulting the country into the category of the top five space leaders across the globe. Steve Chien, a longtime artificial intelligence expert at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, says the space sector should try to have a “balanced portfolio.”

“You have the government. You have big companies. You have small companies. You have universities. They all have a role to play. The important thing is to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses,” said Chien in an interview with The Korea Herald at Coex in Seoul on the sidelines of the EmTech Korea Conference on Thursday. He delivered a presentation on the impacts of AI in space at the conference.

Chien has been working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1990. Managed by the California Institute of Technology, the JPL is NASA’s only federally-funded research and development center.

He explained that there are certain things that different space players -- the national space agency, KASA in Korea’s case, big aerospace companies and smaller companies in the current era of new space -- can do and are more capable of doing.

“Like a company of 100 people, if they decide to do something, they just do it,” said Chien.

“They can move very quickly because they’re not the government. They don’t (need to) get approval," he said.

Highlighting the importance of space in the world now, the JPL engineer offered a positive outlook for the establishment of the KASA and the country’s space sector.

“KASA -- I think it’s a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “(The Korea Aerospace Research Institute) has already done amazing things in space and I’m sure Korea can do amazing things in space because Korea has amazing talent in engineering.”

The KASA has set targets of accounting for 10 percent of the global aerospace market, fostering more than 2,000 aerospace firms and creating 500,000 jobs by 2045.

“To me, the fundamental challenge is ‘What is the goal?’" said Chien.

“Is the goal to have certain missions to exotic places? But one of the articles I read said one of the goals is to foster the aerospace industry in Korea. Those two are not the same thing and so you would probably do different things depending on how relatively important those things are.”

The KASA laid out seven strategies to push for. Four of them are: technological plans to enter the new space launch service market, forming a satellite ecosystem, expanding space exploration beyond the moon to Mars and deep space and securing leadership in the new aerospace industry. The other three are: establishing bases for the space sector by setting up an industrial ecosystem for space, strengthening the government’s functions as a national aerospace policy control tower and expanding global influence in the aerospace sector.

By Kan Hyeong-woo(hwkan@heraldcorp.com)