When Virtual Incision tested its miniature robotic surgeon on the International Space Station in 2024, it was a victory for the Nebraska startup, which was able to remotely operate the robot from Lincoln. It also showed the impact that support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can make in the state

“We’re not taking credit for all the work that Shane (Farritor, a Virtual Incision co-founder) and his folks have done,” said Scott Tarry, co-director of the NASA Nebraska Space Grant and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) initiatives.

But the NASA Nebraska Space Grant has funded students working in Farritor’s lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And Virtual Incision’s trip to space came through a NASA Nebraska EPSCoR grant awarded to Farritor and doctoral student Rachael Wagner.

That success speaks to the kind of matchmaking Tarry tries to do: connecting NASA priorities with Nebraska research. In the process, Nebraska gets support for its science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce and a boost to local innovation.

“As much as NASA … (is) interested in, ‘What can our institutions and our researchers do to help the agency?’ Part of the idea is, ‘What can those researchers and institutions do to help their own states?’” Tarry said.

Mission driven

The space grant grew in part out of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, when an engineering failure — known to and ignored by NASA leadership — killed seven astronauts.

“There were, obviously, a lot of reviews and investigations about what happened,” Tarry said. “Why did we have this shuttle disaster, and what should we be doing about it? This was really the beginning of the whole idea that we’re not doing enough as a nation to fill the pipeline in our STEM fields.”

Congress created the space grant program shortly after to work with community colleges and universities across the country to support STEM students. Meanwhile, EPSCoR, created by Congress in 1979, is meant to bring federal research dollars to states that have typically seen less federal support.

Several federal agencies have EPSCoR programs, including NASA. Tarry initially came to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2000 on a NASA EPSCoR grant researching a small aircraft transportation system.

Tarry is now a professor at UNO and was the director of the university’s Aviation Institute. He has directed NASA’s space grant and EPSCoR programs for Nebraska since 2007, working with 11 colleges and universities across the state.

Tarry sees the two programs as dovetailing. Space grants are a beginning, designed to fund scholarships and internships for students to do research or work in industry. About $800,000 is available every year for space grants and student support.

“We require the students to work with faculty members (on research) so that they’re not sort of freelancing,” he said. As the relationship develops and the research looks to fit NASA’s priorities, students and faculty might become eligible for further mini-grants.

Later on, they can apply for more robust EPSCoR grants, including an opportunity to do research on the International Space Station. NASA Nebraska EPSCoR includes $250,000 for research infrastructure development funds and a larger grant of $750,000 over three years for national NASA EPSCoR grant winners.

But developing Nebraska’s STEM workforce starts before college and university. So the NASA Nebraska Space Grant program also takes K-12 teachers to NASA centers and trainings.

“It’s a much better ‘train the trainer’ kind of thing,” Tarry said. “It’s a much more efficient way to do it than us trying to go out and reach individual students or individual classrooms or even schools.”

Getting creative

Across his roles, Tarry has seen a kind of dilemma with NASA work in the state: There is no aerospace engineering program or much of an aerospace industry in Nebraska.

“So we’ve had to be a little more creative” about how to use NASA’s support, Tarry said. 

“A lot of the work that we’ve done, both with faculty and with students, has been in biomechanical, biomedical, robotics, cancer research — things some people don’t think of as being space related,” he said. “But these are all the things that have to happen in space, especially if you’re talking about long-term space flight.”

Among the projects that NASA Nebraska’s programs have helped support include a project led by Gloria Borgstahl, a researcher at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, to grow protein crystals. The kind of protein being studied has anti-cancer properties, and space is a great environment to grow these protein crystals.

Another project on the International Space Station is from UNO biomechanics researcher Jorge Zuniga. Zuniga is working with a Chilean company to develop antimicrobial materials that can also be recycled in space. 

While both projects can be helpful to NASA — cancer-causing radiation is common in space, as are viruses and bacteria — Tarry also sees them as a way to leverage NASA’s resources to help Nebraska research.

The NASA Nebraska programs can be about a more informal relationship-building across NASA and local industry, including startups. Tarry wants to support students to intern at Grain Weevil, for example, the agtech robotics company. Even if that’s not explicitly in the aerospace industry, many of the skills students might develop can prepare them for working on NASA projects.

But Tarry is always looking out for ways to use NASA support to bolster Nebraska innovation. “A lot of times, we find that researchers are doing something that is of value, or potentially of value, for NASA, and they don’t think about it as such,” he said. 

“We’re part of an ecosystem that’s both supposed to support national level goals and missions but also provides value, we hope, to the state.”

Lev Gringauz is a Report for America corps member who writes about corporate innovation and workforce development for Silicon Prairie News.