Meet Lucas Lowery: The 12-Year-Old Shaping Future Space Missions

Susan Wise: Hi, and welcome to Stars Launch Pod, Space Technology and Research Sciences, brought to you by StarSciences.org, where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. I’m your host, Susan Wise, and I’m honored to have with us Lucas Lowry. Lucas is a seventh grader from Toms River, New Jersey.

Interested in space since he was in preschool, he’s been participating in aerospace groups, presentations, conferences, camps, and summits since he was just six years old. He has attended multiple Humans to Mars Summits and is now also a proud member of the Aerospace and Innovation Academy’s Wolf Pack, which encourages kids to research and present technical papers all around the world.

We got to meet because of our mutual friend Kevin Simmons, who was on my podcast not long ago. So it’s very nice to have you here, Lucas. Nice to meet you.

Lucas: Nice to meet you as well.

Susan Wise: All right. Could you tell us a little bit more? I mean, you’ve been staying very busy, but you’ve also been doing some presenting recently.

Lucas: Yeah, so I presented at the Humans to Mars Summit you talked about—twice. I’ve also presented twice at the Small Satellite Education Conference at Kennedy Space Center, and I presented once at the SmallSat Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Susan Wise: Wow, that’s amazing. So tell me—I know you’ve got a lot of goals and things you’re working toward—but is there something that you’re working on right now to help further the space industry?

Lucas: Well, I am working with the Wolf Pack team that you talked about.

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Lucas: So we not only help with the papers, we also build our own CubeSats. Me and everyone else in the group are developing ourselves for our careers in the aerospace industry. And I’ve been doing that not only by writing these papers, but by working on some of the CubeSat missions that they are currently building.

Susan Wise: And those are the satellites, right?

Lucas: Yeah, the small satellites.

Susan Wise: Okay. That’s very cool. Now, I know you also have your eyes on Artemis, you have your eyes on Mars. Is that true?

Lucas: I do. I mean, I am very, very interested in Mars and the Artemis program. I think in the future what I want to do is work on engines or some sort of engineering for the rocket engines on an Artemis-like program—something going to Mars or something along those lines.

Susan Wise: Well, I’d like to know—so far, what has been one of your big “aha” moments, where a lightbulb just went off and you were like, “Oh, this is so cool”? Do you have one of those?

Lucas: I do, actually. It’s actually how I got into space. So I was at a planetarium very close to me. The county college near me has its own planetarium. Believe it or not, I got scared of a laser show when I was four or five. And then the actual director of the planetarium recommended one of Janet Ivey’s space camps. And that sent me on a pipeline. I went with her, and then during the pandemic I actually worked in Zoom meetings with her and a couple of other kids.

Susan Wise: That’s Janet’s Planet, right? Yeah.

Lucas: Yeah. And then that kind of led me to the summits, because she is the education director of Explore Mars. And they are the people who run the Humans to Mars Summits. So I got there, and through a couple of connections I ended up joining the Wolf Pack, and I am where I am today.

Susan Wise: That is so cool. What has been—being young has its benefits, but it also can be challenging. People look at you and say, “Well, you’re only in seventh grade,” but you’re super smart. So what has been one of your biggest challenges, and how do you overcome that?

Lucas: Well, it’s probably a few things. One of them is I’ve had a speech impediment for a long time, and I’ve only been able to present at these conferences and write these papers where I am today through years and years of intensive speech therapy.

Susan Wise: That’s so cool. That’s really facing your challenge and truly not only overcoming it, but embracing it and going on to do these presentations. That’s amazing.

Do you have any advice you’d like to share with some of our listeners, or maybe even somebody your age who’s interested in space or science and collaboration?

Lucas: I would say, first of all, you can do what you want to do. But also—for the kids, especially those interested in space, even younger than me—a study actually showed that it is significantly harder to get into the aerospace industry if you’re not doing space camps and starting to get involved by fourth grade. So if you like space, get involved. Try to find space camps. Do what you need to do.

Susan Wise: I also heard—didn’t you talk live to astronauts in space? Can you tell me about that?

Lucas: So my district did a thing where we could put in our own questions and ask them to astronauts on the International Space Station. And we had three or four questions, but I was the only one selected from the middle school. I forget the question, but I do know that I was selected and asked.

Susan Wise: That’s so cool. I got to talk to—well, I didn’t personally talk to them; they talked to us. I did a broadcast one time for the grand opening of that new ride at Disney in Florida. It was like you were going up on a rocket. What was that called?

Lucas: Mission: Space, I think.

Susan Wise: Yeah, yeah. And this was years ago when they first launched it, and they had a big launch party. I was a broadcaster then, so we were doing a live broadcast there. And part of it was they had all these broadcasters at this event, and it was at night. We were sitting there and they had this big giant screen up, and all of a sudden there they are—from the International Space Station—the astronauts. They were telling us good luck, congratulations. And then a guy in a jetpack comes up and flies over us. That was unheard of at the time. It was cool. It is very cool.

Is there anything else you’re working on right now that you’d like to share?

There is a mission that we’re working on right now called NeoSeeker. It is a 3U CubeSat that plans to do a flyby of a near-Earth object. But we’re running into some issues right now with funding, because we estimate between $1.5 and $5 million for it.

Lucas: And, you know, as a bunch of high schoolers and middle schoolers, that’s not very easy to get.

Susan Wise: No, funding is always an issue. But it also seems like interest in space and science has actually kind of revved up. I feel like it’s becoming more and more popular right now.

Lucas: Yeah. I mean, I feel like it is definitely getting more popular and spreading a bit.

Susan Wise: Lucas, do you have a past or present passion project—something that your heart is really passionate about?

Lucas: I actually just presented at one of the Kennedy Space Center conferences on AI, and that was great to work with. And I think it’s really important to get research done with that, because AI is an emerging technology. It’s going to become more and more popular, and it’s especially needed to figure out how to use it in smallsats, which was mainly what my presentation was about.

Susan Wise: Yes, AI is everywhere. It’s amazing.

Lucas: AI has those sorts of useful implications in everything—podcasts…

Susan Wise: It does.

Lucas: The whole entertainment industry, and also healthcare, science, and space that we were talking about—even everything, really.

Susan Wise: I know. We have to make sure we fill the AI with good information and safe information, you know? Because it can be… it’s very powerful.

Lucas: Yeah, you have to train it, so you want to make sure it’s being trained on the proper things.

Susan Wise: We need an AI to monitor our AI.

All right, Lucas. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story, and we can’t wait to see what’s right around the corner for you. I’ll be watching for you and your connections with Artemis and hopefully Mars one day.

Lucas: Well, thank you for having me on the podcast.

Susan Wise: All right. Be sure to join us where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. We’d like to invite you to join StarSciences.org to get a free one-year membership. Just put in the promo code FRIENDS321. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review and make sure you subscribe. Until next time, keep looking up. Thanks, Lucas.