Dante Loretta

And what was interesting to me is NASA and JAXA work together on a lot of different projects, but there's always cultural miscommunications and problems.

And I think we're helping to kind of bridge that gap here.

So I never, ever dreamed when I was in college here that I would actually have a career where I'm exploring the solar system and studying meteorites and asteroids and speaking Japanese and working with colleagues in Japan.

And it really shows the global appeal of space exploration.

It's good news in a world that needs some good news.

And it's a unifying vision.

Scientists and explorers and engineers, they all get it.

Your friends, your colleagues, your

conspirators together in this journey to make something happen.

So it's been a really wonderful experience and a relationship that I expect will continue to grow.

And in fact, this is Masaki Fujimoto who leads the Solar System Exploration Division at JAXA.

Him and his team will be out here in a couple of weeks for now an annual planetary exploration symposium where we look at the new mission concepts that JAXA is developing and help them, give them feedback, reviews,

We're also teaching them one of the things that they've had a hard time with is when we go to a review, a technical review for OSIRIS-REx, we get hammered.

We come out bloody.

The review team is there to tear you apart, to prevent you from making mistakes.

And Japanese space agencies have a lot of big, high-profile mistakes in their program.

They've lost spacecraft that they shouldn't have.

And so we're teaching them that it's okay to criticize the design or the concept because you're trying to make it better.

It's not a hostile situation.

It's actually quite friendly, but it doesn't feel like it.