In this inspiring episode of Amplified: The Engineers Journal Podcast, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Stephen Ringler, Managing Director of Space Store, shares his journey from working on NASA’s Juno mission to launching a space-themed retail and education company in the UK. Host Dusty Rhodes delves into Stephen's early fascination with space, his experiences navigating large-scale engineering projects, and the challenges of budget cuts in the space sector.

Stephen also explores the power of inclusive space education, revealing how Space Store aims to make space accessible and exciting for everyone — from schoolchildren to corporate teams. Packed with insights on testing, risk management, active listening, and keeping passion alive in a demanding industry, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in engineering, innovation, and the future of space exploration.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●    Space belongs to everyone - not just scientists and engineers.
●    Testing is critical: break it until it stops breaking.
●    Communication and collaboration are essential in large-scale engineering projects.
●    Active listening leads to better engineering outcomes and more relevant solutions.
●    Drive and passion need support - from self-talk to strong mentors.
●    How space innovation directly benefits life on Earth - from MRIs to climate tech.

GUEST DETAILS
Stephen has over 20 years of experience working in the Space sector as a Pointing Precision Engineer, Programmatic Analyst, and Business Developer. With his training that began at UCLA and his vast experience and network in the Space community, his aim with Spacetime Development is to provide top-notch business development support and engineering services to high-tech companies. Stephen enjoys exploring castles and playing board games, jazz piano and drums. 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/   
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
•    "Break it until it stops breaking, and then we can send it to space."
•    "The space industry belongs to everyone."
•    "We bring space to Earth - that’s what we do."
•    "Sometimes we solve problems that people don't have."
•    "If you're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of a human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else."
•    "If I lost either engineering or teaching, I think I would die a little on the inside."

KEYWORDS
#SpaceEngineering #STEMEducation #AerospaceInnovation #EngineeringLeadership #SpaceForEveryone #TestBreakFix #FutureOfSpace #InspiringEngineers

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, The Engineers Journal podcast. 

Stephen Ringler  00:04
The space industry belongs to everyone. If we're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of the human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else. And I have to make that point that it's for everyone. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:12
What happens when a rocket engineer has a Build A Bear epiphany on a date night? We're about to find out with today's guest. It's an engineer with years of experience in aerospace engineering, working on everything from NASA's Juno mission to wrestling with the ultimate challenge, how do you make space accessible to everyone? And here's the kicker, he has actually cracked it. He's created space store, the world's first space themed retail concept, built using a team that includes NASA astronauts. Loads and loads of interesting conversations about problem solving as we chat with our guest today. It's a big welcome to Stephen Ringler, how are you? 

Stephen Ringler  00:56
Very good. Thanks so much for having me dusty. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:59
You're welcome. Listen, I have to start off and ask you, how did you I normally ask people, How did you get into engineering, but you're different. How did you get into space engineering? 

Stephen Ringler  01:08
Yeah, it's funny. There's really two reasons. The first reason is, there's a show called Star Trek The Next Generation. And I tell people, when I grow up, I'd like to still be captain Jean Luc Picard, and I'm getting close. I'm getting close. I've got the you've got the receding hairline there, yeah, got the hairline going. That would be a dream to meet him. And then secondly, my grandfather worked on the Apollo missions, and I thought that was super cool. So I was like, I gotta learn more about this.

Dusty Rhodes  01:36
Wow. So did you? Was your grandfather, like, able to share much about what he did on the Apollo missions. How was he involved?

Stephen Ringler  01:43
So what I have picked up is he worked on the logistics side. So there's quite a lot of logistics of transporting different products, etc. So that that was the side he worked on. And I believe the company, the company he worked for, was ultimately bought by Boeing. 

Dusty Rhodes  02:00
Ah, very good. So basically, you started off with life. You had the interest in engineering. You wanted to solve problems. It was in your blood with your grandfather, yeah, and you're a natural Trekkie. There you go. You had no You had no choice. 

Stephen Ringler  02:12
And you know, my parents bought me a really nice telescope when I was young, too, and that just was fascinating. I Yeah, so I was sold

Dusty Rhodes  02:21
You were done, never looking back. So listen, tell me that some of the stuff that you were actually involved in, because you're well known for being involved in NASA's Juno mission and its ultraviolet spectrograph instrument. What was your engineering role in that project? Yeah.

Stephen Ringler  02:35
So it was a really cool role. So I worked as what's called an inheritance analyst. So the ultraviolet spectrograph is an instrument that had flown on previous missions. And one of the things we do with NASA is when we're bringing on a previously flown instrument and looking at it on a new mission, we need to analyse how much heritage comes from the previous instrument, how much is new, and how's that going to affect the system? So I was brought on board to look at past instruments, the current instrument, and basically say, Yeah, this is this is good to go. So that was my role.

Dusty Rhodes  03:13
So did you have to come up with ideas for let me just double check, was this the actual same physical instrument, or were you looking at kind of version one, and you then had to go and create a version two? 

Stephen Ringler  03:27
Yeah, great, great question. So versions of instruments, like, if you ask any, anyone that works in the industry, engineers, they're never happy with what they have. They always want to make it better and better and better. And so I think this was version three or four of an instrument, and it had quite a few upgrades. And it specifically had upgrades on certain motorized parts that I had expertise in. So there's something called a stepper motor, which is a certain kind of motor that I was able to help with the analysis of and ensure that it was doing what it needed to do.

Dusty Rhodes  04:02
Okay, cool. What about NASA? Because, I mean, it's a huge organisation. I'm guessing there's a million people working for NASA or something like that. It's a lot. It's a lot, all right? And the problem with organisations like that is that they are just full of different agencies and sections and fiefdoms and little kingdoms and everybody you know, and you're trying to work across all these people and be nice to everybody, but yet some of them are really getting in your way. How do you let me ask you, what were the key challenges in that kind of like collaboration, working with a lot of different agencies, and as well as the challenges, how did you overcome them?

Stephen Ringler  04:44
Great question. So I think you're right. So if you think of any bureaucracy, any large organisation, you're going to have what we call stove piping, so people working in kind of very specific sections, and you have. To learn to work across the stove pipes to make anything work. So let's just take Juno, for example. The mission probably had somewhere around 1000 2000 people that worked on it at some point. So communication is gonna be key. And that's everywhere from the highest level setting the objectives, the science missions, all the way down to the instrumentation level where I worked, which is setting what instruments are going to go into space. So you have to just learn to be friends with everybody that you meet. So a very important piece of advice for engineers is really, always be kind like always try to make friends with everybody that you're working with, because you never know when you're going to have to work with them, and it turns out, you're going to be meeting lots of strangers on these projects, people that you haven't worked with before in order to make it progress. Because one kind of interesting fact about space missions, especially ones that go out to the outer planets, is we have very specific launch windows that we fly. So if we don't make that launch window, if we don't hit that date, we don't send the mission, or we have to wait another year or two. So hitting that deadline is very important.

Dusty Rhodes  06:05
That's a hell of a deadline. You don't normally get that that tight? Why? Why is the deadline that specific?

Stephen Ringler  06:12
It really comes down to the alignment of the planets, quite frankly. So it's where the planets are at any given time, because we use something called gravity assists to help us get a spacecraft out to the outer planets as well as to the inner planets. What that means is that a satellite, as it approaches another object, it could be Mars, it could be Earth, it could be it could be any object that we have in space, and we will fly around that object and be able to slingshot around it to get some extra speed. So that's the reason that we have to have them aligned correctly.

Dusty Rhodes  06:46
Okay, so essentially, what you're doing, you are engineering a project that is aiming for a moving target.

Stephen Ringler  06:51
Yes, everything's moving in space.

Dusty Rhodes  06:55
Wow. I'm trying to come up with an engineering equivalent of that, and all I can think of is, like you're trying to build something on a barge on a river that's moving and you need to finish it before you reach the bridge. Okay, okay, I'm not an engineer. Engineer. I always tell people, I'm a sound engineer. That seems to cover it. That's that's my excuse for getting in here.

Stephen Ringler  07:15
Sound engineering is great, too. I do that as well, and we look at frequency plots all the time on spacecraft, just like we do in sound engineering. 

Dusty Rhodes  07:23
Well, listen, tell me a little bit about this, actually, because I want to go back to the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument. I mean, what is it? Sounds exotic, but what is an ultraviolet spectrograph instrument? What does it do? And how does it work? 

Stephen Ringler  07:36
Great, great question. So there's something called the electromagnetic spectrum, which is effectively where all light passes through. And you and I and all the listeners are very familiar with a very, very small section of that spectrum, and it's called the visible spectrum, and that's what our eyes can see. Okay, that's everywhere, from the colour red all the way up to the colour blue, and everything in between. But that's just a very small section of it. It actually goes way beyond that. You've heard of radio waves, which might be how some broadcasts going. Then you've also got microwaves, what we use to heat up our food. And then you can get even into ultraviolet light. And ultraviolet light we cannot see, but we know about some of the effects right? Ultraviolet light is one of the things we try to protect ourselves from, the sun or sun sunscreen, and also, we made an instrument that can look at that specific light, and in that specific light, we're able to detect things that we couldn't see with our eyes or with the optical so That's why we have different instruments that run in ultraviolet, infrared, microwave. There's all, all sorts of different instruments.

Dusty Rhodes  08:48
So occasionally, when we see something on the news about a new galaxy has been discovered, a new star system, or something like this, or new pictures have come in from the satellites that are orbiting Earth. I mean, they look amazing. I mean, the colour is huge, and it just it looks like a piece of art. But better is that the kind of thing that has been captured by the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument.

Stephen Ringler  09:13
Ah. So the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument works in a very different way than the telescopes that you see. So the telescopes that we see like take James Webb Space Telescope, which is the new kind of biggest and brightest and awesomest telescope in space that works in the infrared, so it's a different light that we don't see. And when you get those images, it's taken just like a camera picture that we would take on our phone. So it comes in as like a square, okay, but then we can't actually see any of that light, so we have to do what's called false colouring of the information that comes in to turn it into something that you and I can see.

Dusty Rhodes  09:51
So then, if that was looking after infrared, then the ultraviolet side of things, what do you discover with your instrument?

Stephen Ringler  09:58
So the ultraviolet, um. Sensor is a scanning sensor, so it actually looks at it's a little hard to explain, but basically, instead of looking at like a square picture, it even though the focal plane is still a square, it's actually only looking at a very small slit, and then all the rest of the pixels have to do with different wavelengths in ultraviolet. So it's doing a scan of Jupiter as it goes around, and the primary thing it's looking at is what's called the Northern Lights of Jupiter. So the Northern Lights of Jupiter are just like what we have here on Earth, except they're three times the size of planet Earth. They're gigantic. And the reason that's interesting to scientists is because Jupiter has one of the biggest, strongest magnetospheres in our solar system, apart from earth, and the magnetosphere here on Earth is what protects you and I from ultraviolet rays coming in and hurting us. So it's another it's effectively a big magnet, and we're studying that with the ultraviolet spectrograph.

Dusty Rhodes  11:04
Cool. Now, before I know that, because I love all of this, I'm just a space and an aviation kind of a guy coming back to kind of a engineering aspect of that. What's the biggest professional challenge you faced?

Stephen Ringler  11:17
Okay, I'll tell you what I think the biggest professional challenge I faced. It really comes down to being sold a dream when I was a kid about we're going to send humans to Mars. We're going to go to these ice planets around Jupiter. And then when I got into the industry, and I worked for NASA, watching the budget GET CUT and CUT and CUT and CUT was incredibly painstaking, and so much so that, and I've heard it's gotten cut even more that I actually decided to up and leave where I had dreamt of working forever and to try a different model, which is here in the UK, where they do things a bit more commercially. Now, no model's perfect, whether you use kind of the government funded model, if you use a more commercial model, but that that was a really big challenge for me to see, that you have to start doing more or the same with less and less money. And that actually became to a point of diminishing return, and we're still not on Mars with humans.

Dusty Rhodes  12:21
So for you, then the solution was, right? I'm not putting up with this anymore. I am a person. I have got my own dreams and things that I want to achieve, and I've got my heart in this to a certain extent. If it's not going to work here, I'm going to make it work somewhere else. And I think what you've done is literally jumped out of the pan and into the fire, because it's one thing having a professional challenge in a big organisation, but you decided to go out and then do it on your own, on a completely different thing, and share your passion and enthusiasm for, you know, engineering and space and everything the world, by uh, setting up a space store. So tell me, tell me kind of where, because you've a great story to go with this. All right, you went from NASA to build a bear, or another way. You went from Build A Bear to starting a space store, and you did all this on a date night. Of all things, are you crazy?

Stephen Ringler  13:16
Of all things with, with my lovely wife, who we are still very happily married. No, I mean, it's I personally find looking back on it, because this was about 11 years ago when I moved from NASA to the UK, and they in the UK, they brought me on board to help set up, or not set up, but expand their space community here at a place called Harwell campus, which is a Science and Technology campus that hosts what we call the space cluster. So when I came there was like 20 ish space companies. Now there's like 100 there's quite a few people working in space. But I came over with the feeling of, you know what, I'm a little lost. To be quite honest. I had this dream to work in this one place. I did that. I loved it, but I got disappointed, so I was trying to find myself, and within the first three months, we had to go back to America for a work trip, and we were on a date, we were walking through a shopping centre, and we saw Build A Bear, and I was just like, Huh, what if we had build a rocket. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't there be kids like me who maybe, know, not into stuffed animals, but more into rockets? Wouldn't that be rad? And that's where it just snowballed so. And what's funny is, I've never actually created the build a rocket part of the company, yet. I would like to someday, but it just snowballed into this thing about, well, okay, there is still people. There's young people that have the same dreams that I had when I was a kid. But how do we how do we bring that to them, and how do we bring it to them, also realistically, so they understand what they're getting into so it's not to say, stop the dream. I think we should still send people to Mars. I think that's a great dream. We should do. It, but how are we going to do it? What are the what are the obstacles? What are the challenges, like funding that gets in the way and working cross globally? How do we, how do we make these things work? And so that's that's kind of where that passion all got directed to, for space door.

Dusty Rhodes  15:14
So you're kind of thinking of kids who, like you said, you little bit of space in your blood with your your grandfather, you like watching their space shows on on TV, and you wanted to reach and just touch it and try it out and see if there's some See, this is kind of the core mission of space store, where kids, teenagers can come in and they can touch it and experience and kind of get an idea of it. How do you do this? Because, you know, you're still on earth, to give them a sense of space.

Stephen Ringler  15:43
Well, we bring space to Earth, that's what we do, and experiences is what people are looking for. When we started the company, I asked two questions to a whole bunch of people. The first question was, do you like space? Yes or no, and would you pay for an experience of space on Earth, yes or no. And it turned out that 96% of people said yes, they like space. 92% said they'd pay for an experience of space on Earth. So I thought, well, that's a pretty good market to go for. That's almost everybody. But of course, we had to pick and choose different categories to kind of start with, and the journey has really led us to doing a huge focus on the education side. So working with young people between the ages of 15 all the way up to 22 but then also you'll be, I'm sure you know, you said you're a big space enthusiast. There's a lot of adults out there that love this too. So we actually work with corporations, and we go in and provide kind of edutainment. And I think of one of my jobs in life is to try to convert people from whatever industry they're working in to come over to the space industry, even as adults.

Dusty Rhodes  16:51
So let me ask you, Steven, what actual activities then do you offer at space? Or give me examples?

Stephen Ringler  16:57
Well, we do all sorts of activities to get people interested in space. And one thing to I know we're going to talk about engineering, but I must make this point, and that is that the space industry belongs to everyone. So if you think about it, if we're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of a human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else. So that means we need to think about food, clothing and fashion. We need to look at architecture, we need to look at design. We need to be able to tell stories creative writing. We need to be able to tell history. So I'm mentioning subjects here that aren't engineering and math, and I have to make that point, that it's for everyone, and so that is one of the core drivers for us, is that we have activities that cover the gamut. Because, as I mentioned, 96 people, percent of people like space. Why would we want to close off our industry so that only the small five to 10% that might pursue engineering, and that's one of the problems that I discovered when I worked back at NASA. And it's not a problem of NASA, per se. It's a kind of a global problem we have in our industry that we focus so much on. You have to study math and science if you want to do this, and then we've really pigeon pigeonholed ourselves, and now a lot of people just feel very distant from the space industry. They don't know what we're doing. I remember when, and you might remember this too, when the Space Shuttle Program was retired under President Obama, I had so many people ask me, oh, so the space the space program is over, like the space program is not over. You still use Sat Nav to get to where you're going. You still use credit card machines that go through satellites, you know, like, What are you talking about? And we as an industry have had a problem of being able to keep the public engaged in what we're doing. So I want to make that point that it's not just for science and engineers, but we do activities across the whole bit

Dusty Rhodes  19:02
it's come but it's that's kind of like, you know, in engineering is like, you know, scientists and engineers build buildings, and then the other 90% of the population don't give a darn How was built, all right, but they use it. So it's the same thing in space. So what you're doing is, you're kind of showing the 90% hey, here's the kind of things that you'll be able to do, but we still need the 10% of engineers in order to kind of figure out the problems. Figure out the problems and put

Stephen Ringler  19:24
it together. And truthfully, we need more than 10% and that's part of why my my goal, and part of why I love engineers Ireland, because you guys are doing this too. You are trying to inspire more people to join the industry for that exact reason. So I do like secretly, not secretly. I want people to get into stems or steam science, technology, engineering, arts and math. I want them to do that, and we do activities along that way as well. I think one that's one that's really fun is we've partnered with another organisation here in Oxford called House of fun, and they have been doing an engineering activity Workshop. At schools using a very cool type of Lego kit. It's a Lego kit that, effectively, I know, wait for it can build over 200 different models. And when I, when I found out what they were doing and how they were doing it, I, like, I leaped on it, and have now become very involved with them to bring the engineering aspect to schools, and we've started engineering clubs, engineering workshops, where I can actually teach kids at the young age of five, six all the way up to secondary school, the engineering process. Because, get this, I mean, I'm at schools. Literally every day. I've been I think yesterday, I was at two or three schools, and last week, I think I went to seven different schools, and I have the same conversations with students, and I say, you know, I teach them about engineering roles, what's a procurement engineer, what's a mechanical engineer, what's a quality assurance engineer. They have no clue about what these rules are, but I can teach them the role and then have them do the role while they're building something around Lego and then I can teach the engineering design life cycle, from requirements to building it to testing it all the way around. And that's one of the activities that I've been super passionate about over the last few months. Since we've we've started this partnership to really get that engineering piece in there as well. So that's one example. I've got many more examples I can tell

Dusty Rhodes  21:23
you about. Well, let me ask you a specific question. Then, I'm an engineer. I'm based in Ireland, going to the UK, either for a trip myself, or perhaps a quick holiday or a weekend away with it, with family. And I kind of think, hmm, maybe I'll get the kids to come along, or maybe I want to see this myself, all right, to inspire that little, ah, career in engineering could be good. Do you have a specific experience that you offer at Space store that will be good in that specific circumstance? Yes,

Stephen Ringler  21:50
yes, we do. It's called astronaut experience for two, but you can do it for four, you can do it for six, and you can come to our shop in Oxford, at the heart of Oxford, at the covered market, and we basically provide you an hour and a half experience that's very hands on, that will hopefully inspire not just young people, but also trying to convert adults to work in our industry. And that activity, that experience includes using augmented reality, which is a type of engineering that we've had to use to create augmented reality. So we have the solar system, we have different rockets, et cetera, that we can use to kind of get those juices flowing. We use virtual reality. So we have a number of different activities that they can they go in and they go into space, and they see what it's like to be in space, and they see what it's like to launch on a rocket. We then take them on a kind of scientific discovery journey using meteorites. So we take actual rocks from space and kind of tell them the story of how we got them here on Earth and what's so special about them. We also have replica space suits. So we actually have suits that aren't the real thing, which are really expensive, and they're not costumes which are really cheap, but they're they're somewhere in between that give a really realistic experience of, hey, this is what a space suits like, and these are the engineering pieces of the spacesuit to keep that astronaut alive. And then we also do a little fun thing about food and how space food works, because a lot of people have misconceptions about how how food works in space, and so we teach them about that. And of course, you get a nice little cool astronaut certificate as you leave. So that's that's probably the best thing. If you're visiting, come to the shop, spend an hour and a half with us. It's good fun. And hopefully, if you're looking to get inspire your kids, it'll do that for you.

Dusty Rhodes  23:35
Cool. If you're planning a trip to the UK spacestore.com.co.com, is the website or just search space story? You get it. Let me move on to problem solving and teams. Did you work with the Aerospace Corporation? Am I right?

Stephen Ringler  23:49
I did, yes. All right, yeah, nearly 14 years I think, wow. And what did you do there? Yeah, so I am what's called a precision pointing engineer. Whoa. It's a fancy way of saying. We like to take things in space and make sure they point in the right direction. Perfect example, if anybody has, you know, TV from you know, satellite TV, there's a satellite above your country. You want to make sure it's pointing at you. That's what we do.

Dusty Rhodes  24:16
Cool. Tell me what were the most critical lessons that you learned while you were there about project management.

Stephen Ringler  24:23
So okay, on project management. I mean, I think this goes across technical and project management is testing, testing, testing. So when it comes to putting something in space, you can't go fix it. So the rigor that's required to test and make sure something works on the ground before we send it up is incredibly important, because if it gets up there and something breaks, that's it. You're done. You've just wasted hundreds of millions of pounds or more. So I think a lot of people don't appreciate that in the engineering design. Cycle that after you build something. So you design it, you build it, and then you test it to be very comfortable with when you test it, it to not work, and then to go back and circle around the design and build part that is just going to happen. And a lot of people kind of think, Oh, well, if you have a really good design, it's just, you build it, it's just gonna work. Yeah, that is just not the case in engineering, in any form of engineering, but in space, especially because we have no means to fix it, or virtually no means to fix it. So that would be number one lesson is make time for the testing. Really plan your testing out until that time.

Dusty Rhodes  25:37
And do you also make it a point of try to break it. I mean, go out of your way to try and break it? 

Stephen Ringler  25:43
I go out of my Yeah, that's funny. You say that. I tell people that my middle name is, I'm going to break it. And that's on purpose, like, because I'm a test engineer as well. And actually, on some recent projects, I've been training up some young test engineers, and I tell them their job is you need to break it. Break it until it stops breaking, and then we can set it to space.

Dusty Rhodes  26:07
Okay, well, then let me ask you. Then following on from that, because one of the Okay, I'm gonna say in inverted commas, exciting things about space engineering is that things go wrong and frequently, and things blow up and, you know, talk about breaking things. Goes wrong. How do you approach risk management? Because that's such an important part of engineering, how do you approach risk management and mitigation for these engineering technologies,

Stephen Ringler  26:34
risk management and risk mitigation is like the top of the list, especially for space programs, but you have to categorize risk based off of the objective of your mission. So what do I mean by that? So for NASA, there are four different classes of missions. There's a, b, c and d, simply put a James Webb telescope, no tolerance for risk. That thing has to work. We're going to put all the money we can possibly into it. That's why it cost over 10 billion pounds or $10 billion Excuse me. Class D is more on the research side. We're going to we're going to accept risk. We're going to see what the risks are and say, You know what, I'm going to live with that even though it might go wrong, because we're going to spend less money. So at the start of pretty much any engineering meeting that you're running, whether you're on a Class A to Class D mission, you start with the risks you have, what's called a risk register. You you've identified. These are the key things, and how are we taking those risks from week to week and making sure that we're conscious of them, we're trying to mitigate them, or we're going to accept them. So that's, it's, it's, frankly, it's the start of every meeting.

Dusty Rhodes  27:43
Wow. And you can apply that, of course, to every engineering tech project across course, is just a good philosophy. Another thing I want to ask you about was, I mean, you're a very good public speaker, and listening to you chatting here is evident. I'm thinking of engineers where you've got a project and you've got particular technical things behind it, and you want to make it work, all right, but then you hit that wall where you have to make a presentation, all right, and you're talking to people who are not technical, or they're stakeholders, and they're more interested in the money, and you're trying to communicate this complex technical information to them as because you need them to sign off on or say, yeah, what's your way of dealing? Because you've dealt with some really mad stuff, all right, but yet, you need to get funding for it. So how? What's it? What? What tip? One or two tips you would have for presentations, for engineers, to convince

Stephen Ringler  28:36
people, I've got a few, I've got a few tips. The first tip is that people are people. At the end of the day, all humans eat, all humans sleep, all humans have hobbies. So think about every human you meet as like they're actually probably not that different than me. They probably are interested in something. They probably like something to eat, and they probably live somewhere. So if you kind of bring your guard down to the point of like, Hey, we are all in this together, and we're humans, I think that that's one kind of block that helps. Because I think when I first started, I got this impression, and don't get me wrong, you do need to respect those that are that have gone before you. You need to have a deference. I think that's very important, especially for for young engineers to really think about, you know, how do I respect the the folks that have gone before me, but also remember that they're people, and they've gone through the same path that you're going through. So that that's, that's kind of tip number one, it's kind of that mind, mind change about who you're working with. Tip number two is, if you can get involved, even at your own company or with some of your friends, any sort of kind of like weekly or fortnightly practice, how to practice talking technical or talking to different people. We do that at the company, one of the companies I work at, and I can see a huge difference in some of the folks. Yeah. Yeah, tip number three is talk to a mirror. And this sounds weird, but I think one of the problems that we struggle with internally is that we struggle to be okay with who we are. You've probably heard this before. Suddenly you're on a microphone and you hear your voice, and it's higher than the voice that you hear in your head, and that immediately puts people off, and they think, Oh, do I sound like that? And I might you need to become okay with who you are and how you sound, and I found the best way to do that is, if I'm gonna give a talk or I'm gonna give a speech, is I stand in front of a mirror, I'll look myself in the eye, and I'll give myself that talk. And you can learn a lot from that process. So those are three tips. I've got more, but yes, I think it's very important to practice those skills.

Dusty Rhodes  30:46
I also want to ask you about kind of engineering skills, because from what I've read about you, it appears to me that you've got kind of three key engineering skills. All right. One of them is passion, all right, which a top skill for anybody. But do you think that turning passion into career can be a bit of a killer, like I was always into radio broadcasting, and then I got into and I loved it for a long time, and then eventually, kind of, how do you keep that passion alive and then use that passion to motivate teams

Stephen Ringler  31:19
that that's, that's, I think, fundamental to, again, us being human beings. If you are doing what you love, it doesn't feel like work, and you put your heart and soul into it. Now, I have had similar experiences that you've just mentioned around, okay, but I really like this maybe hobby, or I like this thing, and I don't want it to die because it becomes work. Yeah, so there's that kind of balance. And I think what's important, and I found to work for me, is, you know, is to learn about myself, of where does my Where does my day to day passion lie, where I can every single day, know that I'm going to enjoy what I'm doing and test that. In fact, before I even started space store, I tested it for like, a couple years. I wanted to see, will I keep working in evenings to make sure this is, you know, what I want to do for the next 10 years, because that's what you have to give when you start a company. But then I also have other passions and other things that I enjoy, like fish tanks, role playing, games, computer games, jazz piano. These are all things I like and I enjoy. I could probably do some of those things for a job, but I keep those as things that I'm like, Ah, I can. I can spend a little bit of time with that here and there. And I think that help for me is what helps balance it. But one last thing I'll say is that I discovered this in my 40s is I didn't appreciate and that, you know, you're a product of your parents a lot of times. And both of my parents were teachers, and I didn't appreciate that inside of me was the desire to teach. And now I have found that 50% of my time I spend doing engineering, and 50% of my time I effectively do outreach or teaching. And people ask me, Well, Which part do you like more? And I'm like, Well, honestly, if I lost either of those, I think I would die a little on the inside. So I need both of those things to kind of keep me going.

Dusty Rhodes  33:13
It's funny when you share your passion with other people, their interest then drives your passion again. It just keeps the fire going. It's great. Another key skill that I think you would agree with is listening, and especially active listening. Are you able to share an example of where active listening kind of improved an engineering outcome for you?

Stephen Ringler  33:35
Yes. So active listening, I can't emphasize this enough. One of the pitfalls of engineering is engineers love to solve problems, which is great. That's why we're engineers. We solve problems, but sometimes we solve problems that people don't have. And we'll just go down that path, and we will try to make this amazing thing, whatever that might be, and then we make it, and we show it to people, and they're like, Oh, well, so what? Like, I don't want that, right? And that's where active listening comes in. So there are, there are two kinds of ways that you can do research and develop products. One is called push, one is called pull, and in my experience, 95% of everything we do is what's called pull. That means that I need to talk to the customer. I need to talk to the person that's ultimately going to pay this from before I even draw anything on the board about what's your problem, what's your pain point, what are the things that are driving you crazy and keeping you up at night, and then focusing on that throughout the entire engineering life cycle. So an example that worked really well this last year, I've been leading both from a project and the technical side of project called stridor, which you can learn more about. We've got a little bit on the BBC you can see, and it's a robot that is. Designed to help clean up bad stuff, so things like chemical, biological or radiological incidents, and it helps kind of clean those things up so humans don't get in the loop. And one of the reasons I think this project has been so successful over the last year is that we got the operators, the biologists, the chemists, the people that wear the bunny suits that have to go in and use swabs and sweat to, you know, high heavens and all the we got them at the very beginning and said, tell us what your problems are, but not just them. We every month, we would bring them in and say, Are we getting it right? Are we doing the right thing? And I think that is why we've had an incredibly successful project that's continuing on. So that would be my two cents

Dusty Rhodes  35:42
on that. The third key engineering skill that I wanted to ask you about was drive. And specifically, we all have bad days and we all have setbacks. How do you maintain drive with yourself and your team?

Stephen Ringler  35:57
That is, that is probably one of the hardest parts. And I think another word that folks might use is something called Grit. Maybe I don't know who would use that in Ireland or not, but this idea of, how do you make it through when you're having a bad day? And there's a lot of different skills, a lot of different things you can do, one that I found has been very helpful for me, is something called positive self talk. So this is a technique that falls into something called cognitive behavioural therapy, and that's where you can't really change your feelings, but you can change your thoughts. And by changing your thoughts, you can help, you can help get through tough feelings, and so being able to self encourage yourself is one of those things. I think another thing is, is to keep your eye on the prize. So if you think about, I mean, take space store, for example. You know, 10 years ago, it was an idea at a shopping centre with my wife, like walking by Build A Bear. Then it eventually became something on paper. Well now, now we actually have a shop. Now I actually have a business that that's been profitable for the last year. It's actually working. And if I had given up three, four years ago during covid, when I had to put all of my life savings into the company to keep it going. I basically we had to do everything we could. It was at that time. It was at that hard part where you had to really have that, that inner fortitude and that drive, and remember the prize is still there. Keep fighting for it. And also, I mean, the third thing I'll say is you got to surround yourself with people who have gone before you. So I am very keen on mentorship. I have mentored multiple mentors. They can be they can be older, they can be younger. It doesn't really matter. It's people that maybe have done what I would like to do, or what I'm trying to do, or maybe are doing the same thing at the same time, and keeping those people around you to just say, No, keep fighting, keep doing it. It's worth it, that those are the things that I think really have helped me with. Drive.

Dusty Rhodes  38:06
I usually like to end a chat with asking, you know, where do you see yourself in five years time? It's the ultimate question everybody hates, right? But you're, you're a wee bit different, Steven. Can I ask you, where do you see the major long term benefits of space engineering for humanity as a whole over, say, the next 20 years, or even up to 2050

Stephen Ringler  38:31
I love that question, because I think that's one of the things that should continue to drive us to go to Mars, to go To the moon, to put people in space, because the technological benefits that we humanity have received from space is just mind blowing. And again, this is another part of the puzzle that we as an industry have struggled with, is helping people understand what they're benefiting from because of that. I mean, take the MRI for example, right? The MRI exists because of space. Our modern day refrigerator takes place because of space. Our modern day computer chip takes place because we develop something called state space, which is now used in every computer. So there's all these things that we just really wouldn't have done had we not gone to space. And so I think over the next 20 years, personally, we should be investing more in space exploration, because it's going to continue to provide more benefit for here, us, here on Earth. And take climate change, for example. Climate change is real, whether it's human made or not. It doesn't matter. The climate is changing, and we as humans need to adapt. So we need to think about what are ways that we can make those adaptations, because harsh living conditions already say, living in the desert or living in, you know, on the equator is just going to get harsher. So if we're trying to live in an even more harsh environment, like on the Moon or Mars, all. That technology is completely applicable to us here on Earth. So that is what I would think. Over the next 20 years, we should invest more in space globally. I think every country should do more. And yeah, I think it's going to

Dusty Rhodes  40:16
benefit us. Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of, you know, spending 5% on NATO or your defence budget, or whatever you were to also spend another 5% on exactly that.

Stephen Ringler  40:28
Oh, my goodness, I can imagine. Can you imagine? I mean, it would be, it would be mind blowing. Now I, you know, since I've got the platform, I'm going to go ahead and say something that I believe pretty strongly in. I think that, I think you're right. I also work in defence, and I appreciate defence. It's an important thing. I have no problem with it. But to your point, I think there are ways that we could vector money towards things like education and research that are going to help make this place, make our world a better and more peaceful place that will benefit us in the long run. So absolutely agree with you on that.

Dusty Rhodes  41:06
If you'd like to find out more about Stephen and some of the topics that we chatted about today, you'll find notes and links in the description area of this podcast, including to Stephen's website, which is spacestore.co, but for now, Stephen Ringler, a managing director. Oh, hang on. What is it, Steven-  I blow things up for fun – Ringler! Stephen Ringler, Managing Director of Space Store, thank you so much for joining us. 

Stephen Ringler  42:03
Thank you so much 

Dusty Rhodes  42:07
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. Our podcast is produced by Dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advanced episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineers ireland.ie for now until next time, from myself Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.