With scholarship in place, Cornelius '01 plans year in Asia

Recently, Craig Cornelius '01 was announced as one of 18 national winners of the prestigious Luce Scholarship. This week, he spoke with 'Prince' Contributor Fan Liang. Wearing a pair of comfortable, pale red jean-like khakis and an equally light turquoise shirt, Cornelius began talking about the Luce Scholarship and his plans for next year.

'Prince': Tell me a bit about the scholarship — what it entails and how it was founded.

Cornelius: I'll give you the Luce Scholarship definition of what it is. Henry Luce founded Time Magazine. He was born in China as the child of Christian missionaries who were working in China. He came to the conclusion while making Time that his experience growing up in Asia was an integral part in his becoming a leader in the Western World.

After his death, the foundation that was set up in his name — this was 27 years ago — started a program where they funded one year fellowships for Americans to go visit Asia, to go work in Asia in their area of professional interest, in keeping with Henry Luce's understanding that his experience in Asia was a very important formative influence on him.

P: Who applies and how does the application process work?

C: There are 180 schools that are allowed to submit applicants. [The Luce program] chooses 18 people. Many of the people who go on the program are journalists who work for newspapers from the area, others are dance people who are working in dance troops. There are even people who are lawyers who are working in agrarian legal defense.

The Luce will fund my being there from September until July of [2002].

P: What had inspired you to apply for the Luce Scholarship in the first place?

C: I guess you could say a sense that I wanted to get outside the malaise of contemporary American industrial existence, or at least to be able to look back on it from a different perspective. Also, partly, that I wasn't ready to grow up and take on the jobs around here that would probably be next in my career track.

The other part of this is that my mom comes from a family where her dad was a World Health Organization worker. So my mom's part of the family, and even my dad's, both have the sense that what you do with your life needs to have some broad social utility, particularly for people who are less fortunate. Since I've always been interested in space technology and space exploration, it's always been hard for me to justify that interest to them because it doesn't seem to have direct utility for poor people in Nicaragua.

But, as it turns out, there are many, many, many ways that space technology is particularly useful [to] people in developing countries. The places where that utility is being demonstrated, or pioneered, is largely in Asia.

Luce is the perfect thing for me. They'll foot the bill for me to go justify to my mom or my dad that building spaceships can be as useful for figuring out what Mars looks like as it is for figuring out how to grow more shrimp on your farm in Thailand.

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P: What specifically are you going to be working with? How will you be applying satellite technology?

C: I'm going to be working in part for the Thai National Research Council, which is part of the government, and for a company called Shin Satellite Corporation.

What Shin does is that it builds telecommunication satellites. There are certain parts of the satellite that are designed for relaying signals that are devoted to public use. So there are virtual libraries, which are accessible to people in remote regions of Thailand. Obviously, you're not going to be able to ship a whole library of books to people in some little village. But if you can give them a means of receiving a signal from that satellite, they can download all kinds of information. The same public use transponders are used to link rural health clinics to national hospitals.

The Thai National Council uses remote sensing satellites that look down on the ground and take pictures of the ground to monitor the way shrimp farming along the coast of Thailand is affecting the coastal ecosystem, to monitor if people are farming within the areas that they are supposed to be farming in and to monitor crop health.

My hope is to be more observing really than working for any infrastructure — to see the way they're doing the work [and] to see how that model that's being developed there can be expanded upon. The reason that the telecommunications satellite is particularly useful is that it doesn't make sense in Asia, where you have concentrated urban populations and then a lot of rural area, to lay fiber optic cables for transmitting data or telephone calls.

The way it works here in the U.S. is that you have sufficient populations of users to build cables between them and have that be economically feasible. Since you have people in rural villages, it doesn't make sense to make fiber optic cables. So what you can do is use a satellite to relay the data.

Shin Satellite is going to be launching a satellite called iPSTAR in 2003 that will be delivering broadband internet service to people throughout southeast Asia — wireless internet service at 64 megabytes per second, which is immense.

Already, in the Philippines, they have a disaster-warning network so that people who are the local leaders of different municipalities have a satellite telephone hooked up so that, if there is a typhoon coming in, or if satellite data expects a volcano eruption, they can notify the local leaders of those districts.

P: Exactly how accessible is this to the general populace? How much of this technology will be available to rural sectors?

C: I don't know the answer to that question — that's part of what's going to be interesting to find out. They haven't really outlined in the documentation that they've released what the hierarchy of this is. So far, I don't know how the farmers' activities will be changed because of the satellite information he gets.

Part of what is interesting to me is to find out how much does someone, like on the shrimp farm in Thailand, understand about what a satellite is or believe that something like a satellite should have an effect on his farming activities? And to what extent would any of his claims against using his satellite be valid?

Part of all this is my interest in space, which I see as a fundamentally empowering and evolutionary tool for man. But part of using that kind of tool is making yourself make the qualitative evaluations, to say: Is the experience of people in a country like Thailand made better for having satellites for these range of applications that I've explained? Or really does that open them up to all kinds of American media that has negative effects?

We have the tendency to assume, I think, that once technologies like this are available, that the improvements they can offer are better — period. Certainly they have useful benefits, but what if the price of getting [them] is destroying their traditions? So that's what I'm going to try to find out, on a personal level.