LunarFlux, TKS Ending, and Piano | May 2024 Edition
"The worst choice is nothing at all" - Aatik Chopra
Hi! If this is your first time here (or you need a refresher) I’m Ayaan Naha, a 15 y/o building projects in space tech today to make an impact in the future.
Let’s take a look at what’s happened in the last month!
Table of Contents
Our Moonshot Idea: LunarFlux!
Video Timeline: 0-5 mins - Presentation | 5-10 mins - Feedback | 10-15 mins - Awards
On the weekend of May 11th, my team presented our moonshot company idea: LunarFlux. What is a moonshot? A moonshot idea is essentially a radical solution to a huge problem, that could be deployed in 5-10 years using some kind of emerging technology. Teams of TKS students around the world participated in the Moonshot Challenge, where we came up with moonshot ideas that could potentially become a company in the future, if we choose to pursue it further
Me and my partners Sinem Ünlü and Tashfia Diha came up with lunarflux. Our company, LunarFlux, aims to tackle the energy storage issue that will be faced by NASA during the Artemis Missions. We realized that Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) could potentially solve these issues with energy storage, if the technology was developed further. That’s what we based our company on. We ended up winning “Most Innovative Company” and it was a huge win!
Behind the scenes, we had been working on the project for 4 weeks, but really we didn’t settle on an idea until around 2 weeks in. This project was a perfect example of Parkinson’s Law in action. In the final week, we were firing on all cylinders trying to get the presentation and details worked out. The final 48 hours were most intense, since we had to rework our presentation and add way more detail.
Overall, it was a really valuable experience working on such an interesting project. Our team hopes to validate this idea and get some feedback from experts to see if it would be viable on an actual mission.
End of TKS + What I Learned:
The end of May marked the final TKS session! If you don’t know what The Knowledge Society (TKS) is, it’s essentially a program meant to bring out the potential within teenagers.
The final session was about living a successful life. Before answering how to do that, we figured out what the realistic worst-case scenario for our lives is.
For most of us, it boiled down to this:
Mediocre job you don’t love
Little financial freedom, barely paying bills
Not enough time to pursue hobbies/passions
Then we figured out what would happen if, from this point on, we did nothing out of the ordinary. As in, we magically revert to normal teenagers and don’t do anything special for the next 10 years. We realized our lives would just turn out into the worst-case scenario. In fact, we are already on the path toward the worst-case scenario of our lives.
So if we do nothing, we end up in our worst-case scenario. Therefore if we do something, anything, we’ll end up in a slightly better position.
So, what should we do? Well, rather than doing nothing, we should do something to give us an unfair advantage over others in our lives.
We need:
Unique Skills
Learn to code ai models, build robots, read brainwaves with BCIs, code a sounding rocket, etc.
Write articles, make videos, start a podcast, build a website, etc
Unique Knowledge
Read books, listen to podcasts, keep up with news within your field for new ideas, etc.
Unique Relationships
Talk to experts in your field, talk to experts outside your field, have philosophical conversations, have technical conversations, get guidance, teach them something new, etc.
Go deeper than a LinkedIn connection request. Get to know the people for who they are
And with that, make sure you get:
Sleep
Exercise
Proper Nutrition
All to keep your mind/body in shape. Without mental clarity, it’s easy to stagnate.
All that together, and you can do pretty much anything you want in your life. You could become a professional music producer, a CEO, a rocket engineer, a researcher, anything. Above all, you can live a life you won’t regret.
Finally, I’d like to give a huge shoutout to my TKS Director, Aatik Chopra for guiding me through this journey over the last 10 months. I can’t thank him enough for all the work he did coaching me, giving me feedback, helping me with general life struggles, etc.
Summer Recital
Usually, I’d include a recording of the recital, but it was cut short. Instead, I’ve included a recording of me playing the songs at home
There’s a lesson you can learn from this though (you can learn something from any event if you try hard enough). It doesn’t matter that the recital recording was cut short, because I know the pieces. I can play them whenever I want. Getting whatever participation certificate and a round of applause doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the skill I built: playing piano.
Same for anything else. You don’t need to do things for praise or for the certification or the award. They’re good, but what matters more is you built that skill. If instead of doing things for the end result, you do things for the satisfaction of doing them, you’ll get way more joy from doing the thing than you otherwise would have.
TL;DR don’t do things as a means to an end.
With that said, here are my two songs:
Love Like You - Rebecca Sugar
Being Human - Rebecca Sugar
Up Next: June
In June, I’ll be starting the Lumiere Research program, where I’ll begin writing a research paper under a PhD student, which could be published in an academic journal in the future. In the last week of June, I’ll go to Los Angeles to participate in the Summer Springboard program, an opportunity to spend 2 weeks at UCLA and learn about aerospace engineering from real professors, meet other ambitious teenagers looking to work in the space industry, and enjoy life as an undergrad at UCLA would!
That’s it for this month!