In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo travels to the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) to explore one of the only facilities in the country capable of simulating deep-space radiation conditions on Earth. Marrujo sits down with Trevor Olsen, a nuclear engineer and physicist who has worked at the facility for over seven years, to break down how NSRL bombards electronic components with high-energy, heavy ions to prepare them for use in space, national security, and commercial applications.

The conversation dives into the mechanics behind the facility’s synchrotron, where a chaotic, naturally occurring beam must be precisely shaped using a series of dipole, quadrupole, and octupole electromagnets. Olsen walks through how the beam evolves from an unpredictable circular shape into the controlled square form required for testing, and how engineers manage magnet strength and RF cavities throughout the acceleration cycle to keep the beam confined and on target.

The solution lies in real-time control: thousands of dynamic systems work simultaneously to deliver a precisely tuned beam, at the exact ion type and energy level requested, ensuring every test replicates space conditions with scientific accuracy.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Jason Conrad, who leads Arizona State University’s Southwest Advanced Prototyping Hub (SWAP Hub), to examine how the United States is working to rebuild its advanced semiconductor packaging capabilities. The conversation covers Conrad’s path from a 23-year career in the semiconductor industry into standing up a national microelectronics initiative, the mechanics of the CHIPS Act and the Microelectronics Commons, and why advanced packaging — not just chip fabrication — is central to the future of AI, drones, and national defense.

The episode dives into a core challenge facing the domestic semiconductor ecosystem: how to reconnect research and manufacturing so that innovations developed in university and national labs can actually reach production at scale. Conrad explains the difference between traditional and advanced packaging, walks through the six technology focus areas driving the SWAP Hub’s work, and lays out why closing the “lab-to-fab” gap matters for workforce development and long-term national security.

In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Lieutenant Colonel Jim Lawson, product manager for the Long Range Precision Munition program, live at African Lion 2026. Lawson walks through the medium-range lethal variant of the Army’s launched effects ecosystem, a tube-launched, rocket-boosted munition designed to fold into a compact form factor before deploying sweeping wings and telescoping flight surfaces mid-launch. The conversation covers the system’s live-fire success at the exercise, its sensor and warhead payload, and how it fits into the Army’s broader vision for networked, collaborative strike capability.

The discussion goes deeper into how the munition operates as part of a “wolf pack” of autonomous and semi-autonomous payloads working together to penetrate contested airspace and strike strategic targets such as integrated air defense systems. Lawson explains the targeting process in detail — how an operator assigns an image with metadata to designate a target, and how that target can be tracked and even changed mid-flight. He also addresses the practical realities of fielding the system, from vehicle integration options to the direct feedback loop between soldiers using the controls and the engineers refining the program.

The episode frames the Long Range Precision Munition as a flexible, networkable answer to modern strike challenges — a system built to launch from multiple platforms, retarget in real time, and incorporate battlefield feedback directly into its ongoing development.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Benjamin Fowl, Head of Growth for Wild West Systems, at African Lion 2026 to examine a compact drone weapons platform designed to be small, fast, and difficult to detect or shoot down. The conversation covers the system’s platform-agnostic design, its field-tested integration with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the mechanics of how the drone fires, aims, and returns to base for reuse.

The episode dives into a core challenge facing forces operating in complex terrain: how to deliver a kinetic capability that is lightweight, reusable, and adaptable to the platform a unit already has on hand, without requiring heavy logistics to get the system into and out of theater. Fowl explains how a 3D-printed mounting rail allowed the 173rd to adapt the weapon system to a drone they brought from Italy, going from a modified CAD file to a field-ready mount in under 24 hours.

The solution centers on a platform-agnostic weapons payload, built around a Picatinny rail, that can be swapped between reconnaissance and kinetic missions and refined directly through feedback from the soldiers using it in the field.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Lieutenant Colonel Ramon Leonguerrero, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa | Advanced Capabilities Directorate at African Lion 2026 in Morocco, to unpack the command and control technology powering the largest exercise AFRICOM hosts on the African continent. The conversation traces how a multilanguage translation tool, moving fluidly between English, Arabic, and French, has compressed a twenty-second communication delay down to just three or four seconds, giving soldiers from more than 40 partner nations the ability to coordinate almost instantly at the tactical edge.

The discussion moves beyond the hardware to the structure behind it: a “three pillars” model of military, industry, and academia working in tandem, and a network-first, platform-agnostic approach the Lieutenant Colonel compares to NASCAR, prioritizing the driver over the car. That structure, paired with a top-down culture change from senior leadership, has cut fielding timelines for new capabilities from months or years down to hours or days. But faster fielding and wider international connectivity also raise the stakes on the security side, since more allies sharing data means more surface area for adversaries to target.

The solution the Lieutenant Colonel describes is layered: AI-driven cyber protection tools that monitor, block, and learn from threats in real time, combined with a deliberate effort to keep academia and industry out of the lab and in direct contact with soldiers on the battlefield, so lessons learned translate immediately into usable technology.

In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Captain Ronan Sefton at the African Forces Summit to discuss the rapid evolution of unmanned systems on the modern battlefield. A military intelligence officer by trade, Sefton has spent the last several years focused almost entirely on drone warfare, drawing lessons directly from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as part of a Ukrainian lessons-learned task force under U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The conversation traces his path from hobbyist drone builder and Russian-Ukrainian linguist to one of the U.S. military’s leading voices on unmanned systems integration.

The discussion digs into what actually makes a drone program effective — and it isn’t the hardware. Sefton explains that early efforts to teach American soldiers hands-on skills like soldering and drone assembly, modeled on Ukraine’s wartime necessity, missed the bigger picture. Ukraine’s most effective drone units succeed not because of advanced AI, but because of superior pilot expertise, tight data architecture, and a reconnaissance-to-strike pipeline that gets accurate targeting information to a crew in seconds. Sefton also pushes back on the growing “obsession with autonomy,” arguing that human judgment remains essential even as automation advances.

The solution, according to Sefton, lies in investing in the ecosystem around the technology — data flow, reconnaissance integration, and pilot expertise — rather than chasing autonomy for its own sake, much like a driver still needs a license even when the car can drive itself.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo steps inside the Joint Operations Center at the Royal Armed Forces base in Agadir, Morocco, the nerve center of African Lion 2026, to explore how government, industry, and academia converge to support both the multinational exercise and a live, real-world search-and-rescue mission. He’s joined by Seth Henderson, lead planner for Morocco’s African Lion exercises, who breaks down how this year’s iteration differs from years past.

The conversation digs into how 42 partner nations, alongside academic institutions like Colorado State University and industry players including Palantir, are working side by side to close technology gaps for warfighters, particularly in AI, drone systems, and counter-UAS capabilities. Henderson explains how lessons learned from the war in Ukraine have directly shaped this year’s exercise design, and how the team is navigating the reality that not every technology brought into the field is mature enough for real-world deployment.

The episode frames this layered collaboration, spanning classified and unclassified information sharing, cross-border communication protocols, and rapidly evolving battlefield technology, as the connective tissue that turns disparate national and industrial efforts into a single, coordinated mission capable of adapting in real time.

Lieutenant Colonel Nick Dubaz, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa| Advanced Capabilities Directorate, leads the Advanced Capabilities Directorate at the United States Army Southern European Task Force, the Army’s headquarters for Africa. In this conversation, he walks through how his team identifies capability gaps across a continent of 54 countries and more than two billion people with a fraction of the resources available elsewhere in the Army, and how emerging technology, from AI-enabled sensors to autonomous vehicles, is being used to close those gaps faster than traditional defense procurement typically allows.

Two of the biggest constraints Dubaz’s team faces are speed and survival: promising technologies from small startups often die in the “valley of death” between early development and a fielded capability, a process that has historically taken 10 to 20 years through federal acquisition regulation-based contracting. At the same time, threats ranging from hybrid adversaries to emerging pathogens like H5N1 require the Army to detect and respond to changes faster than legacy systems allow.

To address both problems, Dubaz’s directorate partners with the Army’s Global Technology Acquisition Directorate to fast-track promising startups into live testing environments like the African Lion exercise, compressing fielding timelines from decades into months while using AI-driven biosurveillance tools to flag disease and security threats before they escalate.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo gets hands-on with Overland AI’s Ultra platform at African Lion 2026 in Tantan, Morocco, walking through the autonomous ground vehicle that soldiers in the field have nicknamed “Mufasa” and “Simba.” Built on a commercial Polaris Razor chassis and outfitted with LiDAR, cameras, GNSS receivers, and onboard compute, the vehicle maps its own environment and calculates thousands of potential routes per second, all without needing a constant communications link back to base.

The conversation goes deep on the engineer variant demonstrated at the event: a terrain-shaping configuration that can deploy up to four XM204 top-attack mines and launch APOBS dismounted breaching charges, removing soldiers from what is normally one of the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield. Overland AI’s team also details the platform’s modularity, swappable payloads ranging from counter-UAS systems and remote weapon stations to ISR camera packages, plus its growing footprint with the Army, Marine Corps, and SOCOM as the company transitions from R&D into procurement.

Overland AI’s approach is a case study in keeping the “human in the loop, but out of the danger zone,” using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and a flexible autonomy stack to get capability into soldiers’ hands faster than traditional defense acquisition typically allows.

Daniel Marrujo continues his tour of Brookhaven National Laboratory with a stop at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), where interim director Kevin Yager breaks down the science of building materials at the nanometer scale, from carbon nanotubes to self-assembling DNA structures. Yager also outlines CFN’s vision for an “exocortex,” a network of AI agents designed to accelerate scientific discovery by handling literature reviews, running instruments, and troubleshooting experiments alongside human researchers. The conversation then shifts to the Quantum Material Press, where Dr. Suji Park demonstrates how twisting stacked two-dimensional materials at precise angles can unlock entirely new properties, including superconductivity.

Scientists working at the frontier of nanoscience face a growing bottleneck: the sheer number of tools, datasets, and processes required to push research forward outpaces what any one person can manage alone. Yager describes this burden directly, explaining how researchers are pulled in every direction, reading publications, writing software, running physical instruments, even as the value of their work depends on deep, sustained focus. Meanwhile, at the QPress, Park’s team faces a parallel challenge: identifying which combinations of ultra-thin materials, stacked at which angles, will produce useful new properties out of a nearly infinite set of possibilities.

CFN’s answer is a layered system of specialized AI agents that take on individual pieces of the research process, from surfacing relevant publications to operating lab instruments via natural language, freeing scientists to focus on higher-level problems, while the QPress solves its own challenge by giving researchers a rapid, physical way to prototype and test new material combinations without waiting on large-scale production.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Mvemba Dizolele, Managing Director, Dizolele Advisory at the African Land Forces Summit to explore a continent often misunderstood by the outside world. Dizolele, a professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, former senior fellow and director of the Africa Program at CSIS, and host of his own Africa Program podcast, brings decades of expertise to a wide-ranging conversation covering cybersecurity, mobile money innovation, drone technology, and the geopolitics of critical minerals. The discussion moves fluidly between grassroots stories of African youth using technology to organize and connect, and high-level analysis of how global powers are competing for access to the continent’s resources.

At the center of the conversation is a tension between extraction and partnership. Dizolele traces a throughline from the colonial-era rubber trade in Congo to today’s race for rare earth minerals, cobalt, and lithium, resources critical to modern technology and clean energy. He points to historical examples, including the little-known fact that uranium used in the Manhattan Project came from Congo, to illustrate how the continent has long fueled global progress without receiving proportional benefit. The episode raises a pressing question: as the U.S. and other powers seek access to Africa’s critical minerals, will history repeat itself, or can a new model of mutual benefit emerge?

Dizolele points to a different model already proven elsewhere: the kind of technology transfer and capability-building the U.S. provided to South Korea and Taiwan, as a blueprint for how partnership, rather than pure extraction, can help African nations build their own industrial base while still meeting global demand.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo takes viewers behind the scenes of one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the United States — the National Synchrotron Light Source 2 (NSLS II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Joined by Denise Olds from the NSLS II communications team and a leading beamline scientist, Daniel walks the experimental floor of a facility that serves over 2,300 researchers from around the world annually, exploring how synchrotron light is being used to study everything from quantum materials to structural biology to next-generation energy storage.

The NSLS II sits at the intersection of national security, scientific discovery, and technological innovation — and most of the public has never heard of it. With 29 active beamlines and room for nearly 30 more, the facility is only halfway built out, yet already producing research that shapes medicine, defense, advanced manufacturing, and energy. For Daniel, the visit carries personal weight: his background in spectroscopy and semiconductor characterization at the Defense Microelectronics Activity gives him a firsthand understanding of just how critical these measurement tools are to protecting national interests.

The episode makes clear that the science happening inside NSLS II is not abstract — it is directly connected to the materials, batteries, and electronics that define modern life and national security.