Astronaut Yvonne Cagle at Horizon Summit. (Courtesy of the San Francisco 49ers)
On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, 10-year-old Yvonne Cagle was climbing an old oak tree beside her house. She remembers her dad shouting her name, calling her inside to watch the TV. Flickering in black and white on the screen, she saw men in clunky suits more than two hundred thousand miles away step out onto a dusty surface: Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin making history as the first humans to walk on the Moon.
“At that moment, my dreams took wings,” she told the crowd of sports industry execs, entrepreneurs, and investors at Horizon Summit on Friday. She sees significant inspirational power in spaceflight in not just reaching for the stars but also in everything from teaching science to running businesses.
Fast forward through undergrad (biochemistry, San Francisco State), grad school (medicine, the University of Washington), and a career in the Air Force flying all manner of different aircraft (F-111s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, helicopters, air-to-air refuelers, etc.), Cagle joined NASA’s astronaut class in 1996.
“After 15 years I realized those jets no longer seemed to go quite fast enough nor quite high enough,” she said.
Though no longer eligible for spaceflight assignments, Cagle is now designated a management astronaut. She retired from the Air Force with the rank of colonel, and serves on the faculty at Singularity University in the Bay Area. But, noting that July 20 will be the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, Cagle still has dreams of traveling into space, and is working to help develop technologies that could be used on a mission to Mars.
“Mark your calendars, set your watches. We are taking it to the next level. We are going to Mars [in] 2035, but we’re no longer going direct to Mars,” Cagle said. “We are going to Mars by way of returning back to the Moon. In 2024, we will see the first of two 30-day missions that will allow us to test vehicle systems, the human body, communications, surface operations, so many things that will prepare us as we go on to Mars.”
“That’s our Moonshot. What’s your Moonshot?”
To aim for Mars, Cagle argued, you must first aim for Pluto. Back on Earth, the technologies and operational concepts developed with the objective of reaching Mars, or even just the Moon, might have significant impact on far more mundane missions.
Put in a sports industry context, the time and energy invested in winning the Stanley Cup or the NBA Finals can have a much broader impact. The most interesting sports technologies are those that may have been developed with the narrow goal of simply winning a championship, but which have the potential to revolutionize the lives of millions of consumers.
This content is part of our coverage of the San Francisco 49ers and SportTechie Horizon Summit. SportTechie organizes regular events that bring together innovators, investors, and key decision makers from across the world of sports technology. Find out more about future events here.
