[Narrator] 20 winners, all under age 20.

$100,000 to drop out of school and pursue our dreams.

This is Teen Technorati.

This is N-245.

It's home to a lot of space scientists,

astrobiologists, and some astrophysicists.

I used to work in this office.

I'm between break times at UC Berkeley.

An amusing artifact in here

is the Star Trek poster right over there.

I find it very inspirational when I'm working

in the depths of code, trying to get

the modeling coefficients just right.

Hey, Chris.

Hey, come on in, Rebecca.

How are you doing?

I'm Chris McKay.

I'm a planetary scientist here at NASA Ames Research Center.

Do you have enough material, physical sample,

to do the experiment?

(Chuckles) Plenty. I've got about seven transects,

where each transect is about 10-15 samples.

We discussed the samples that I collected

in French Polynesia last semester.

We're now working on genetic analysis to see

what's related to what in these rocks

that I collected from the inner tidal zone.

From my perspective, Rebecca is at a decision point.

She's clearly got the capability to do science,

but she's also entrepreneurial.

She could really be a role model for other women

as to what possibilities are open.

Science is something you can do.

Or starting tech companies is something you can do.

To the Thiel fellowship, I now have the time

to pursue my research interests as well as my company idea.

Honey Badger Aerospace intends to do prequalification

of small satellites in space before they get to space.

Today, right now, we're gonna be introduced

to Moon Express, which is aspiring to put the very first

commercial private robotic space craft

on the surface of the moon.

And by doing so, to change the definition

of what is possible.

Everything that we care about, fight about,

and find precious on Earth,

energy, resources, land, territory,

it's all available in infinite quantities in space.

The first kids born today will be looking up

and seeing lights on the moon.

So, as we create space colonies, we learn to live

in other worlds, we're not only increasing our survivability

as a species, but we're replicating our basis

here on planet Earth, which has so far,

only constrained to one potential point of failure, right?

The dinosaurs didn't have a space program.

Sure, go ahead.

How do you plan about terraforming?

I love the idea of terraforming

and I've kind of grown up with the idea of

some day, we're gonna terraform Mars.

But the magnetic field is such that the particles

flying off the sun, strip off the atmosphere over time,

causing a set of collisions that removes the atmosphere.

So, what if instead, we actually restarted the dynamo?

That might be a great idea of how we'd do that.

We use this facility to develop our own engineering test

of our first concept of our lunar landers.

We wanted to have a scalable system, so we could start small

and scale it without redesigning the entire thing

as the market responded.

So, what we can up with was this space craft design.

We could get all the way from Earth orbit

to the surface of the moon

just with this little guy right here.

At Moon Ex, I really learned and saw first hand,

the need to have this kind of pre-qualification go on

before we send something into space,

so you can be able to tell the person

who's carrying your payload whether it will be safe or not.

We've given you an orientation of S.U. and lunar express.

We showed you the hover test facility.

We saw the mock-up lander.

Now, you're gonna meet some of the really important people

behind the vision that's making it happen.

Let me introduce Andy Aldrin, Buzz's son, our president.

Andy.

The opportunity to come here and actually participate

in sending space craft to the moon

and developing the moon commercially,

is just a dream come true.

I brought Andrew, Jake, and Mike to meet with you

as a sample of the younger generation of engineers

that are twenty-somethings, at the same age basically,

as the twenty-somethings who created the Apollo program.

I'm Andrew Mitchell.

I'm an electrical engineer here.

I work in the avionics department.

I graduated from the University of Michigan.

I worked on Q Sats there for three years

and I've been working out here,

working on some pretty amazing things.

I dropped out after my sophomore year of college

when I was 20 years old to come work here

because I figured, you know,

I wasn't going to get this opportunity when I graduated.

We all have stories about how our parents

reacted to dropping out of high school or college.

I'm curious to hear how your parents felt

about you trying to do this.

My mom was incredibly surprised when I brought it up.

Of all the kids that she knew,

I wouldn't be the one to drop out of school,

but given the opportunity, she was pretty supportive of it.

It's all about the people and the relationships you build

and you can do amazing things.

I know some of you are space nerds

and we're gonna be seeing you again, I know.

So, I've had the privilege of meeting new friends

and new amazing people.

Now, I've met you.

So, let's change the world.

It's really cool to see the old space side

and the new space side working together.

There's crazy things that happen in the space environment

you can't really prepare for,

but you gotta try to prepare for it.

What if you could test it in space

before you could get it to space?

That would be awesome.

The company I'm pitching is actually

Honey Badger Aerospace and ironically,

this is exactly what we're trying to look at.

Yeah, I'd love to talk to you more about that,

especially about the practice of being an engineer

at such a company.

I'm looking at starting hiring

over the next few months in particular.

Cool. I can go and run and grab a notepad or something

and give you my email.

How many times you guys get to use

Houston, we have a problem?

(Chuckles) Uh, there's too many problems.

We'd get tired of saying that.

Let's go to the moon.

Go point up.

That was really good.

[Narrator] Tune in for the next episode of Teen Technorati

when Thomas shares his plans to cure cancer.

And be sure to subscribe to the Wired channel.