Jade McAdams
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jade McAdams Longitude fellow from Rice University. Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that are helping advance understanding! We spoke with the members of NASA’s Gateway program, which is working on building a small space station that will be in orbit around the Moon. It will come together with the international partnerships that have been established on the International Space Station.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Jon Olansen the HALO Manager for the Gateway program at NASA.

As a mechanical engineering major, I was interested to hear about the integration of the different components of the Gateway project, and the decision making process behind certain design components, especially in a project with such an impact. We started our conversation with an explanation of the Gateway project and its take home significance.
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Jon Olansen
Most people are familiar with the International Space Station. The ISS is in low Earth orbit. It’s been crewed for over 20 straight years. Gateway is taking lessons learned from that and moving NASA and our international partners out into cislunar space. So we’re actually building a small space station that will be in orbit around the moon. We’ll put that in place with participation, like I said, from NASA, from our partners here within the US, as well as international partners. The first elements we’re launching include a power and propulsion element that is being run out of Glenn Research Center as part of NASA, and Maxar is the prime contractor to develop that. The habitation and logistics outpost, the HALO, is the proximate module that we have responsibility for here at JSC. That’s the first habitable module that will have crew enter in this space station and it’s being built by Northrop Grumman. And then those two elements are actually being integrated on the ground. They’re being put together, and they’ll be launched together on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket here in three years or so. Those will be the first elements of that Gateway Station. After that, we’ll add elements, from ESA for example. ESA is providing a second habitat with some components on the environmental control system provided by JAXA. So we have multinational participation there. The Canadian Space Agency is providing the components for a robotic arm, similar to what they’ve done for the International Space Station. And we have some of those components from all of those partners that also fly on our HALO module, and on the power and propulsion element. So we have a lot of that participation around the world to put this station in orbit.

Our purpose for putting this station in orbit around the moon is really to enable a sustained presence for exploration of cislunar space. It allows for the opportunity for crews to access orbit around the moon, and then from there be able to get to points on the surface of the moon for exploration. It also advances our knowledge of operating away from low earth orbit. That is all things we need to learn in order to move out even beyond cislunar space.

Jade
Awesome. That was a great answer. So I have a few follow up questions just based on that. One question is, with your experiences building this in collaboration with ESA, CSA, JAXA, stuff like that, what do you find to be some of the challenges with working internationally in terms of cooperation and deciding who’s going to do what part of the project, just making sure everything runs smoothly? Do you have experience on that end?

Jon
Absolutely, that’s a great question. I will have to say, really, for decades, there’s been a strong push to have international cooperation and participation in civil space exploration. And so we get to benefit from a lot of that effort. There are still negotiations that have to happen. There’s still the decisions of who’s providing what, who’s developing which parts, who’s operating which parts, but the ability to actually have those conversations, the relationships have now existed for years. And the International Space Station is really a great example of international cooperation for something significantly complex. But it’s a great endeavor, right? And it really brings those countries together. So we really- I know you’re asking for what are the challenges associated with it. There are still challenges in working with any other entity and making sure that the communication is proper and well understood, there’s a common understanding of what people are doing. That’s regardless of whether it’s international or not that you have to go do those things. But because of the partnerships that we’ve built and curated over the years with the ISS, we really are starting in a very good place. And it’s been relatively straightforward for us to build on those relationships and get Gateway in good stead.

Jade
Awesome, well I’m glad to hear that it’s been going smoothly so far. So now moving in a little bit more about your current role. You work as the HALO manager, so I’d love to just hear a little bit more about what that entails, and unique challenges with that position, but also your favorite parts about it.

Jon
Absolutely, and there are a lot of favorite parts so this might take a while. First I’ll give you the scope of the office and what we do. Part of what we’re trying to do with Gateway is be a relatively lean organization and really rely on the developers to bring their experience base, their expertise, and put the effort in needed to get the elements, the modules that we need for Gateway to be successful. There still is a lot of insight and oversight required as a government employee, right, to ensure that we’re getting the right things and that we’re giving them the right requirements. So we have a lot of that work to do. But we’re doing it with a relatively small, nimble, agile team to make sure that we can really grow and adapt to what the Gateway outpost really needs to be. So that sets the framework. We have multiple specific jobs that we’re responsible for. I talked about the initial element launch here in a few years, right, the integrated HALO and PPE. But within our office here, we have responsibility for the development of the module itself, the HALO module. That’s the habitable element that crews will enter, and that’s Northrop Grumman. Like I said, the design and development aspects of it are heavily influenced, though, by what we need for an overall space station. And that’s where we have the office here to make sure that we’re getting what we need. And Northrop is doing a really great job in doing the design and development work there. We’re also responsible for integrating the two elements, the HALO and the PPE. We have the responsibility for integrating those two things together on the ground, making sure that they’re compatible with each other, that we demonstrate that they work together before we launch. And then we have responsibility for actually integrating those with the launch vehicle. So we’ll work with our partners out at the Launch Services Program in Florida and SpaceX to make sure we can then integrate that stacked spacecraft onto the SpaceX Falcon Heavy for launch. So it’ll take us about a year after we launch before we actually get on station around the moon. That’s all part of the plan. So we have that responsibility. The other responsibility that we have beyond those even, is in order to operate the Gateway Station we need an overall software architecture that has increasing levels of autonomy within it to be able to operate the station. One of the differences with the Gateway versus ISS is it’s not going to be crewed year round. ISS had people living on it for over 20 years. For Gateway, it’s going to be a mission at a time. That mission could be up to 30 days, 60 days, possibly. But a large portion of the year is going to be un-crewed. We’re still going to be doing science, we’re still going to have those activities going on, but it’s all going to be autonomous. And so we have an overarching software that basically maintains the whole vehicle and operates the vehicle. We still have ground control that will do some stuff, but that’s part of what we’re balancing. And my office is responsible for the design and development of that software suite as well for that first launch. So we have that breadth of capacity that we’re working to at this point in time.

So if you think about that breadth, there are a lot of challenges that go into pulling all that together. One of the tough things is how we work things on a schedule. Spaceflight takes time to develop items. There’s definitely a balance to strike between rushing and making poor decisions versus making good decisions, but maintaining some urgency to make progress. And that’s one of the biggest challenges, is trying to balance those aspects of design and development, to have the right risk posture to make the right amount of progress and make sure you’re making good decisions along the way.

Favorite things. I got to start with just fabulous people that we have across the country that work on this. You pick any of the contractors that are supporting, the vendors that are supporting, the NASA centers where people are working, and then all the international companies providing too, it’s fabulous to be able to work with such competent, passionate people about what they do, and that makes me enjoy coming to work every day.

Jade
A common thread I’ve noticed, because I’ve done a few of these Longitude interviews for the podcast now, is that everybody who is involved in a project of- not similar magnitude, but just something new and creative, in a sense really likes the people they’re working with and values their team more than anything. So it’s nice to hear that.

One of the things that you mentioned was the autonomous aspect of making sure that software will allow Gateway to operate without people on it 24/7. So what’s the unique design challenge that’s associated with creating something that has that capability?

Jon
So that’s a great question. Just from the technology itself there are challenges. There’s advances in that technology that try to make sure that the breadth of capability can be incorporated into that software, and it can become more and more autonomous. We’ve had software operating things for a long time, and within that, pieces of it will be automated. That’s not the same as autonomous, right? When you add in some of the decision-making aspects associated with that, it becomes significantly more complex as you go. So the technology piece by itself is challenging. And part of the reason we’re doing it the way we’re doing it, and the balance between the onboard capabilities and the ground capabilities, is really the opportunity to evolve those over time with the Gateway so that we can launch in one state, and we can update as we go. We can make Gateway more and more autonomous as we learn more about it and its operations. So we have that capability. And we’re doing that on purpose. So that we can take advantage of advancing the technology while minimizing the actual risks that we’re taking at any point in time for the station itself. So we’re working that balance, but that technology itself is a challenge. But now take that and operate it or try to implement it with so many different entities doing their own design and development with their own fundamental software capabilities for each different element that’s showing up. You’ve got Maxar providing their element with their capabilities, and Northrop’s providing the HALO with their capabilities, and then the international partners and their contractors are providing their elements. And all of it has to end up talking together and having a consistent flow down of management philosophy, fault response, all of those things have to be integrated across those multiple entities. So it really takes that technological challenge and extrapolates it quite a bit, not quite exponentially, but quite a bit in order to really address the multiple parties then that have to participate in it.

Jade
Awesome. Following up on that, it seems like there are quite a few challenges or things that you need to account for when you’re doing something with this much breadth. What is your general problem-solving process? If you face a hurdle and you’re not exactly sure how to get over it right away, what is the first thing that you do? And then everything after that, just curious to know a little bit more about your process.

Jon
That’s great. Decision-making is a key in working in this arena. I am a firm believer in really pushing the authority for making decisions down to the same level of the responsibility for doing the work. So that’s the first thing, is to try to have those things balanced so that decisions are getting made at the right place at the right time. That to me is a really important part of maintaining a pace of progress, is having decision-making at the right place by the right people, the right level within the organization. So that’s the first step. You have to create that culture. You have to create that environment that enables people to be the decision makers at every level, own their responsibility and understand that they have the authority to make those decisions. So that’s step one. It’s all about the culture there.

Step two is a very straightforward start in talking about decisions. It starts with risk posture. It starts with, what is my expectation for risk overall? Spaceflight will never be zero risk. So that’s one of the things that’s understood when you fly in space, but that doesn’t mean, well, there’s going to be risks anyway, what’s one more? You can’t have that attitude. It’s really got to be an understanding of what is your risk posture, and then figuring out how- whatever the issue is that’s being brought, how it fits within that risk posture. And the decision-making process you follow really depends on where that calculus comes out, right? Where is that risk posture relative to the problem that you’re dealing with? Do you need to take time and do more analysis to better understand that problem, or is this something that regardless of which decision you make, it’s not going to change your risk posture? Both are acceptable decisions, and you simply need to make a decision and move on. So all of those are- in my mind, it really boils down to starting with risk posture, and then addressing the individual item within that perspective.

Jade
Yeah, that was a great answer. I loved hearing that you empower the people who have the responsibility to actually make those decisions for themselves, Obviously I’m going to be a fresh grad, and it’s nice to know that maybe I’ll be able to make some decisions in my own career early on. So I loved that. I have so many more questions, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time. One question that I actually have to get answered is, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your journey to- what has led you to be the HALO manager and your career path, projects you’ve worked on, things that have inspired you along the way, and, how you ended up here?

Jon
So my story is, I moved around a lot because that’s what I wanted to do. I had an interest in space from a very early age. Yes, I was one of those who said, I want to be an astronaut when I grow up. To me, I set that as a goal…as a guide. It provided a path. I had a lot of interest in engineering. I specifically chose a school that had aerospace engineering. I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s at Notre Dame. Bachelor’s in aerospace, Master’s then in mechanical, and then I was fortunate enough to be able to come down here to the Johnson Space Center and I started off working in Mission Control. So I was a flight controller for the space shuttle program for seven years. And then I left, took a leave of absence and went to Rice. That’s where I got my PhD, and that was in biomechanical engineering, and then came back to work here at JSC. I worked in the crew office. Because of the bio background I had gotten there, I actually worked on biomedical payloads that were going up to the space station early on when it was first flying. So I was in the astronaut office, working on those as an engineer. At that time, I was actually a contractor working for United Space Alliance, and I had the opportunity to switch to NASA. I worked in the Safety and Mission Assurance area. I worked that for a couple of years, then I worked at headquarters on how to transition assets from space shuttle to the future constellation and Orion programs and what that would look like. And after doing all of those things, I came back to JSC and I worked in our engineering department. And there I was also very fortunate. I had the opportunity to lead a project called Morpheus. That was the Morpheus lander project. It was a research and development project where we used lean development practices to very quickly and cheaply build a flight capability that we could use [to test] technologies that we wanted to advance for future human spaceflight. So we were all about advancing technologies, but we were able to build our own vehicle. I was able to lead that team to put the vehicle together. We flew that vehicle 63 times, and we crashed one and we got that on videos that are out there, and we turned that story into one of perseverance, learning, of growth, and here’s how lean development can actually help you rapidly design, develop and build. We parlayed that into building the crew module for Orion’s ascent abort 2 flight test. So a bunch of that same team moved into that project. And we actually built a replica of the Orion crew module, but with our own avionics, our own software, our own control schemes, to demonstrate that the launch abort system would work to fly crew. We really needed that test to be successful in order for Orion to move forward with putting crew on board. So that actually launched successfully, executed successfully. I was the test director for the launch. And so it was those experiences, it’s all that background that brought me to this point.

Jade
It sounds like you’ve done a little bit of everything. I’m going to finish out by asking, since you have done so much, if there is one thing that you would give as a piece of advice to college students, or fresh out of grad school, young professionals, what would that piece of advice be?

Jon
For me, the biggest thing in my own career, and looking back what I got out of college, was learning how to learn. There’s a basis, absolutely, the engineering basis is really important. There are so many experts in so many different areas trying to run larger projects and programs, I simply can’t know everything in all of those avenues. But I’ve got to be able to learn enough to make smart decisions and be able to balance risk. That’s today’s job. But every job along the way has all been about learning. So that’s the fundamental piece of advice…is enjoy learning, figure out how to make that your path going forward so that you learn how to learn and you put your emphasis on that. You listen to other people. And that’s where your confidence really should come from is, as you gain experience and you’ve learned from others, that you’re confident in making your own decisions and moving forward…but never feel like you know it all. There’s always more to learn.

Jade
That is definitely something that I will be taking with me as I graduate. And I do feel that college has taught me how- more so than engineering itself, problem solving, learning how to adapt. So what do you foresee as being the direction and forward progress that we can make after Gateway, after Artemis? What is your next vision for space exploration?

Jon
So that’s also a good question. A number of folks from the agency- I know Pam Melroy, our deputy administrator, gave a presentation last week at the National Space Symposium about the the blueprint for the future. And that’s a key message right there, the blueprint, Gateway is a way for us to advance technologies and to learn how to operate, as I was describing earlier, out in cislunar space, but it serves as that blueprint for future exploration. So if you’re going to go to Mars, you’re going to think about what orbiting station do I need to have that I can then from there gain access to the surface, right? Those are opportunities then for you to think about, and everything you’ve learned here on Gateway, and how then from Gateway, you’ve had the human landing system and been able to get down to the surface and what the crews have learned from those experiences. You can take those lessons, and you continue to advance that blueprint every step of the way. So Mars is then that next piece, and then beyond from there, but it’s all about- you’re creating a blueprint that you’re able to replicate and advance.
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Jade
Something that stuck out to me during my conversation with Jon was how much he empowers those around him to take on responsibility and grow as individuals and engineers. Throughout his career, Jon has been a part of many important and difficult projects, such as Morpheus, and yet he has always made sure to grow and learn from his team’s challenges to ultimately find success. Now, as HALO manager, Jon tries to create the culture where people feel as though they can make their own decisions and take the responsibility for them.

He also emphasizes learning to learn. Jon believes that adapting, listening to others, and being a problem solver is where your confidence as a leader should come from. I think hearing from Jon that it is important to never feel like you know it all and always continue to learn is a valuable piece of advice that we can all take to heart.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Quint Smits
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Quint Smits Longitude fellow from Tilburg university. Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding!

We spoke with the members of NASA’s Gateway program, which is working on building a small space station that will be in orbit around the Moon. It will come together with the international partnerships that have been established on the International Space Station.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Julia Badger. She is the Systems Manager for the Vehicle Systems Manager function on the spacecraft. That is VSM for short, which is the highest-level command and control software system that will be on board the Gateway spacecraft.      

We started our conversation about her education first.

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Julia Badger
I have three degrees in mechanical engineering. I got my bachelor’s degree at Purdue University and my masters and PhD at California Institute of Technology.

Quint
When did you first develop interest in the field of mechanical engineering and aerospace?

Julia
I think I was in I think seventh grade when I saw the movie Apollo 13. I thought that that was just a really cool thing to devote your career to, so that made me want to work in in space. But then I did a project with robotics, I think when I was in 10^th grade or so. And at that point, I knew that automation and robotics is where I wanted to go next, and so that is what shaped my decisions,. I decided mechanical engineering because mechanical engineers can pretty much do anything.

Quint
Could you summarize the Gateway project in a few sentences for the lay audience?

Julia
Gateway is going to be a space station that will be in orbit around the moon. It’s meant to be, if you will, a gateway to further human exploration, both assisting human operations on the moon surface as well as future exploration of Mars.

Quint
And why is it so important to get a presence on and around the moon?

Julia
We think that the moon is a really great opportunity to learn how humans can live in places that are very hostile to them, that aren’t Earth. So the space station is is great, it’s definitely pushed our knowledge on how to have humans constantly be living in space. But because it’s so close, we basically can talk to it all the time. And we do. And the logistics types of flights, like being able to make sure the supplies are there. It’s not easy, but relatively easily. If you have to plan for a much bigger rocket and a lot less mass much further away, it takes a lot longer to get there. As you get further out, it’s harder to have real time communications. It’s harder to have any communication in some ways. So as we do that, the moon is kind of the next safest place to do that in the sense that it’s a bit further away. But it’s kind of that next step in understanding how we would do the comm, how we would do operations, how would we would do logistics management. And then our real goal is to go see Mars. There could have been life there. There are formations there. There was obviously a much different place a long time ago. The robots that are on Mars are great, but they’re a lot slower than a human would be if they were there to do that science, so the moon is a really important step to be able to get to our ultimate goal.

Quint
And what part of the Gateway project are you exactly involved in?

Julia
So the idea with Gateway is that people are going to live on Gateway probably one or two months per year. It will be corresponding with the lunar surface missions in support of that. And when Gateway is flying, there’s going to be probably four or five other things in space going on that need operations support. So the operational paradigm that we’re shifting to from ISS, which is 24/7 – 365 operational support on the ground and crew living on board, to the periodic crew, and about eight hours a week of ground support time, through its lifetime. So all of the commands and things that the ground support have to do with the International Space Station right now still have to happen on the Gateway, it’s not a terribly different system overall, and what it needs to do. But now all those commands need to be generated and executed onboard. And so the vehicle system manager, which is the system I’m responsible for, is going to be that system. It’s brand new in the way that we are building it and the types of functions that we’ll be doing. And my team is responsible for the requirements, the interface definitions and the overall- what’s it going to do, how’s it going to interface back in, and then verifying it at the end of the day before it flies.

Quint
What kinds of inter-vehicular robotics are needed at the station?

Julia
Inter-vehicular robotics are a very interesting thing to have on board. One, it could absolutely replace the human support for maintenance when humans are not there for doing logistics management and moving things from here and there. or from repair, from recovery types of options where you may have to switch out a board and that sort of thing. As of right now, we are planning on having systems that are redundant enough to be okay between crewed visits. But I think as the Gateway ages and we hit lifetimes of a lot of our operational avionics and other types of equipment on board, there’s going to be a strong need to have the ability to do some of these repair and recovery options when people are not there. And so right now we are scarring, if you will, the Gateway to support that, we’re making smart choices about our hatches, about bolt holes for a structure that the IVR can attach to to be able to impart loads on other parts of the structure. For example, putting in a processor, you need to be able to transfer those loads through the structure to put it in. So we’re doing that. We’re adding visual indicators to help an IVR system be able to navigate and understand its position in the Gateway. A lot of little things like that, that are not terribly mass intensive right now, but will go a very long way to helping us integrate those inter-vehicular robotic systems when we do get them there.

Quint
I also saw you worked on a project called Robonauts. Is that too mass intensive for this part of the project?

Julia
Robonaut was a lab experiment that we undertook with—Robonaut 2 in particular—with General Motors, I think it started back in 2008. The idea was to build a humanoid robot that could use the same sorts of tools as humans could, that could work safely in the same workspace as humans, but actually do some real work. GM wanted the Robonaut 2 for the same exact reasons, they wanted it to be on the line, to do things that were ergonomically hard for humans to do but needed a little bit more support, like pulling wires through a water deflector inside of a car door, which is a flexible material, it’s very hard with the rigid robots that they have on their lines now. And so that project was awesome. We did come up with a great robot that did that. It had a chance to fly into space and so we put it on the International Space Station for a few years and had it do experiments up there. We learned an awful lot about it, essentially, the fact that the mobile manipulation aspect of Robonaut as it gains legs and was able to do more of the move around types of tasks. We learned that this was a very important thing to have. We took away from the Robonaut project, essentially, was how many appendages would be a good number to have if you don’t want to have too many because of mass, but you do want to have enough for redundancy and load imparting and reduction of complexity. We had some thoughts about end effectors. We learned an awful lot integrating with ISS on what types of things- what we would want our space station to look like, in order to support something like a manipulator, like a Robonaut and that sort of thing. But to answer your first question, it is absolutely too big for the space that Gateway would have. And I think we all knew that even when it flew the first time. But since it was really built for the lab, and then kind of transferred into this experiment space, I think we all knew that and just kind of rolled with it, and learned from it anyway. So the next set of robots for Gateway will be much smaller.

Quint
What do you love so much about projects?

Julia
So I feel that what I do in particular is essentially bringing human spaceflight into a whole new era. So if we’re successful, what we’ve done with Gateway and allowing Gateway to largely handle itself- we do have a requirement for 21 days of autonomy from ground control for Gateway, which is based on Mars’ Concept of Operations in the sense that there’s a solar conjunction where the sun’s in between Mars and the earth. And so we physically can’t talk to Mars without much bigger support networks, to make that happen. And so Gateway is a step on that direction. So if we’re successful, we enable a huge part of what is needed to be able to send humans to Mars. And I think that’s a great goal for anyone to have for their career, to be able to say that they were part of that.

Quint
And what made you fall in love with NASA?

Julia
NASA has big problems. I like the big problems. The other thing I really like is that there’s almost no small problems. We do have small problems in the sense of, you know, we need to get this system in there. But that system has to integrate from a much bigger perspective of how we would put that in a spacecraft, and the complexities of the interactions of all of that takes a systems engineer. It’s more than one, more than what can fit in one person’s brain. That’s very interesting to me, too, is that it’s a very integrated, difficult, worldwide type of a project that we typically undertake. Particularly for the human spaceflight part of NASA.

Quint
When you do approach some issues, how do you come up with a solution?

Julia
That’s a great question. There’s no one way to go about doing that. From my standpoint, I’ve always thought that it takes it takes a team, it takes a village to make these things happen. But you don’t want to have necessarily too many cooks in the kitchen, if you will. You don’t want all the hands to be on deck for every problem. And so it takes a good team leader to organize a work plan. I’m a big fan of Tiger Teams, where you pick a select group of folks to spend some time diving deep into what that problem is and trying to figure out the ways to solve it. You obviously need to be involved in integrating and understanding the requirements, the interfaces, the constraints you have, and those are all things that you have to get straight in your head upfront. And then after that has happened, the designs are things that kind of fall out from that, from my perspective. It takes work, but that’s the fun part, is that once you’ve got all of that in there, and then you start coming up with the ideas and banging them against your constraints and requirements and making sure that it fits in the right box that you formed for yourself with all of those things. And then you have to implement, I think that’s a main part for me is that no design is complete until we’ve tried it out, we’ve tested it. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or perfect. I like to tell my kids that cardboard’s good enough. You might have a grand plan and you want us to cut all this wood and plastic and screw it together. But if you can’t show me out of cardboard first, it’s not going to fly. So that’s one of the things we do even from a software perspective, is that we don’t have to do it perfectly. But let’s get it in there and test it out. And after that, then I think you can really start solving that problem and getting it done the right way.

Quint
When it comes to the International cooperation. How does this all come together? Because I know the Canada Arm three is going to be on the ESA, is providing some communication. How does that come about?

Julia
It’s a really valuable part of Gateway in that we do have a lot of international cooperation. Even when we’re talking about the International habitat, or i-hab, there’s parts that are being delivered for the i-hab that are coming from Japan, from the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. Obviously, the Gateway external robotics—we call it GERS system from Canada—is also a really cool part of it in the sense that they’re taking what they’ve learned over the last couple of big robots in space that they’ve had. And they said, you know, we’ve got to make this a lot more autonomous to fit what Gateway wants. And so their robots are going to have a tremendous more capabilities from an autonomy standpoint than they’ve had in the past. And then, from my standpoint, because my system is kind of in charge of the command and control and the fault management and resource management across the vehicle, when, for example, the robotic arm is stepping from our HALO module to the i-hab module VSM is the thing that’s coordinating all of that happening across those three modules. And so we are very active in working with the folks, the international module providers, to make sure that all of this is going to fit in. So how we do that is we have in our requirements document essentially an overall architecture of how this autonomy is formed. And while the VSM sits at the top of that, each one of these modules coming from all over the US, Europe, and Canada, all of those places, they all have to fit to the same architectural requirements. And so it’s very neat to me to see the things that we’ve come up with, these requirements being implemented all around the world and all of these different places. We have incredibly smart and dedicated people in ESA and CSA that we’ve been working with, that they get it and they get in there, they ask amazing questions and their perspectives are different than ours here. I get different questions from ESA every single time I put a document out for review than I would get here, and I expect it from them, right, I know that they’re going to look at it a different way. So I think it’s very valuable overall to the program, and I know personally has made my system better in having them there.

Quint
What does your day-to-day look like working on these projects?

Julia
There’s a lot of meetings. I have about a 20 person team that works just on my side. But we work with a lot of other teams as part of Gateway and international teams. Essentially, for each week we try to push coordination or a section of an ICD document or something down the road. And so it’s a very agile process that we’re trying to basically iterate on the design as much as possible. Obviously we have to freeze requirements at some point. We did that earlier. But now it’s kind of, as we’ve done that, pushing the design down the road again and trying to come back to issues as they arise and make that happen. And so there’s a lot of meetings, but from my standpoint, I do a lot of coordinating on these tiger teams, and then deep dives for designs. I have I think four of those going right now. And I’m trying to make sure I keep pushing people forward on the work that they do on that.

Quint
And when did you transition from being an engineer to the more manager type?

Julia
I wrote code up until I think 2018 – 2019. So it was fairly recently.

Quint
Do you want to do a lightning round?

Julia
Oh, what’s a lightning round?

Quint
It’s gonna be a few easy [questions]. You’ll see, you’ll see. What is the favorite project you worked on?

Julia
All of my projects are my favorite.

Quint
Okay, what is your favorite space project of all time?

Julia
Right now Gateway, I think we’re taking this to the next level. It’s awesome.

Quint
What is your favorite place on Earth?

Julia
My house?

Quint
And do you have a piece of life advice? Advice for students?

Julia
Work hard, have a growth mentality. Don’t ever think that something is beyond your reach. It’s just something you need to figure out the right way to work hard for.

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Quint
Thanks to Julia for agreeing to the interview. In six or seven years I will be looking up to the Moon and be reminded of the conversation I had with her, and heard about putting boots on the Moon again.
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We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hello listeners! Welcome to our latest episode in Series 4 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of NASA’s Gateway program to share their experience and contributions of empowering humans to become an interplanetary species. From international relations and policy to engineering and operations, you’ll learn how NASA has teamed up with its international partners — the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, and Japanese Space Agency to set the stage for deep space exploration.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Sean Fuller, the international partner manager for the Gateway program. Having built a 24-year career at NASA, Sean now manages the programmatic and technical integration of Gateway’s international partnerships.

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Sean Fuller
My current role, I’m the international partner manager for the Gateway program. And so what that means is both the technical and programmatic integration of our international partners on Gateway. And so those are the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.

We’re taking a partnership that started with ISS and moving that ahead into what we call Cislunar space with a Gateway, a small station around the Moon. And so my job is those partner elements, as they’re contributing different elements, both modules, in Canada’s case, a robotic arm. ESA has a couple of modules with Japanese components within it for life support and a Japanese resupply vehicle. So it’s both the technical integration of it, how do we get these modules all working together across the Gateway as they meet up in space—very similar to ISS, you attach them in space—but then also the programmatic side of it. The agreements that get into that, how are we going to operate on a day-to-day basis? How do we make our engineering decisions when it’s an integrated vehicle, so everybody has their pieces to it, but they all have to work together and tie together. And so that integration across the deck all falls under my purview and the job I’m doing today.

Tony
I had a chance to read some of the work that you’ve done on this agreement that you talked about, so one of the questions that I had is on collaboration, and working with teams of this size, because you’re also mediating nations as well. How do you go about coming to agreements? Because I’m sure everybody wants a little bit of piece of the pie? And so how do you negotiate in a way where everyone comes out a winner?

Sean
Yeah, absolutely, and I’ll tell you one of the great advantages, I think, of Gateway in our partnership, is it’s not a new partnership. If I go back and look at the Canada case, it actually started with a robotic arm on the shuttle. We started some of our European collaboration as well as Japanese collaboration, in the shuttle program and they grew into the ISS program. And that now 24-year history of ISS, it will be October this year 24 years since the first piece was put into orbit. And so we’ve been working hand in hand with these teams for that amount of timeframe. In fact, a lot of my colleagues from around the world, we started in ISS partnerships and built beyond that. So I say that to say we’ve come to a very common vernacular and understanding of the capabilities and the desires and the goals of each. And that’s really into the foundation of what are our goals are at NASA in the US, in Europe with ESA, in Canada with the Canadian Space Agency, and then in Japan, and how do we dove tail all those together, as we look at human exploration and going beyond low Earth orbit, there’s a lot of similarities there.

There’s a lot of interest in going back to the Moon in the NASA case, or going to the Moon for the first time in our partners’ cases. What we can do there, but then also looking at that not as a destination, but as part of the journey on to Mars.

And so if we all take a step back and look at it, one of the ways you do that is you look at the common goals. We have a lot of common goals, or maybe different ways to get to it. I always try to boil it down to the technical or best answer—many times there’s more than one answer, but the best answer—and then drive it from that direction. I find working with our colleagues around the world through all these years, we know each other very well. There absolutely is – sometimes there’s give and take, but I think that happens in any kind of relationship that you have. But we all know what we’re achieving for at the end, and that’s expanding human exploration. That’s the operations we’re going to do on and near the Moon and also expanding it to Mars. So we always keep that as our focus and understand it is not always a direct path to get there. There’s zigs and zags in the road. We each have not only our technical capabilities and challenges, but in a venture of this size, you have budgetary and political challenges that come along as well, and so we look to really capitalize off each other. You know, Gateway and even ISS was born out of that capability. Certainly, could any one nation probably do this on their own? Maybe not all, but a lot of them could. But is that the best route to go? And is there the funding to do that? And of course, that’s not the case. How do we maximize our resources so that the benefits in the end, each one invests some, but you all gain the benefits and the research at the end.

Tony
Yeah, I mean, it’s really wonderful to hear you say that, because in one of your previous articles that I’ve read, you actually touch on this where you say—and I’m just going to quickly quote you here—is just because someone has a different way of doing things, it doesn’t make them wrong. And there’s more than one path to do things. You just touched on that, and you know, there’s probably much more detail to that. You also touched on the cost of things, and having watched some videos, correct me if I’m wrong, the space shuttle that will shoot into space is going to cost around 2.5 billion because it might be disposable, rather than continuing to reuse the rocket.

Sean
Yeah, it’s different. We’re seeing that SpaceX is in the industry work on the reusability in low Earth orbit made tremendous, great strides in that. As we look at going to the Moon, it takes a significant more amount of energy to do that. When you return something and land it, you’re using some of that rocket fuel literally to bring it back down to earth and not being used to put a mass in orbit.

We look to fly Orion along with, as we call it, co-manifested payloads, which is the Gateway elements. So that one rocket is not only launching a crew, but it’s also launching a 10 metric ton module, take it out to and build up Gateway. And so it’s different environments to do that. So again, there’s different paths to it. But as we look at that and look at the way to maximize it, we really need to focus on that. You know, we flew expendable, I’ll say rockets, for low Earth orbit for many, many decades. And really it’s coming to maturity here in the last less than a decade of that reusability that we see today. I certainly envision that as we continue the exploration and continue developments in those areas that in the future, there will be more components of deep space rockets that will end up being reusable as well. Just today, we’re not at that efficiency level for it, and then so for a large part, you’re getting the maximum use out of it to get the most mass you can out to, in our case, in Moon orbit.

Tony
Yeah. So from your long tenure with NASA, and you are a part of, I believe the Expedition One. What are some lessons that you’ve learned just from starting right immediately, having graduated college, until working now, and the input that you give in each new project?

Sean
Yeah, with each new project I say bring your history and knowledge base for it, but don’t let that pollute the future as well in looking at it. So you’ve got a great background, a great knowledge from it, but you can apply the new lessons and the new ways into a future project. I had the fortunate advantage, I’ll say, when I started working at the Johnson Space Center in ’96, that a year later, because we were learning how to do ISS, ISS hadn’t started flying yet, we had to think on the Shuttle Mir program, we had US astronauts on Mir and saw that as our learning ground to get that base of knowledge into ISS. I was very early exposed into that international partnership and working with them. And so from each one of those, you take those lessons.

The early days of ISS, it was a partnership across the board that we had not operated in that realm on a day-to-day basis with each other. So one of the things I talk about is a comparison, as we evolve ISS and that partnership to Gateway, we have a volume. It’s about 11 volumes of what we call the implementation for ISS, how all the pieces are going to work together between our partners. It’s not just the hardware on orbit, but how, for example, we’re going to do scheduling of the crew day, how we’re going to plan logistics on a logistics flight. In the Gateway, now we’ve got 20-24 years, like I said, of experience. Took all those lessons learned and said, we’re going to take nine volumes of I’m sure well over 1000 pages, we could condense it down to one very concise 50-60 page type document, because we all built on that history we had in the past. We’ve taken a lot of lessons learned, you know, things that we did on ISS that we said, golly, if we had the opportunity to do it again, we might do this a little different. Well, fortunately we have the opportunity to do it again. And in the early days of the Gateway partnership, before we actually formalized our agreements, that’s one of the things we all sat down and said, Okay, we know what the ISS agreements are. If we could do it differently, which we now can, how would we do that differently? And again, we found talking of partnership, some very common things in here that we can maximize. Again, building on those lessons learned for the future. So myself personally, kind of as you go through it, each time you get new opportunities, you certainly don’t forget the past, you build upon the past. And I also tell folks, if you’re going to change something, it behooves you to know why you’re going to change. Change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. But learn from the past, learn from the histories, and if there’s a better way to go try to address something, certainly do that. And I’ve had a lot of those opportunities for better or worse over the years because of my continued involvement in different aspects of the international partnership.

Tony
And so how would you gauge? Because it seems like you’re also talking about elements of decision making. And so are there components or times where maybe you would lean to more risk taking, or are there times where your decision making is a bit more conservative? And so how do you gauge how you handle decision making at a level where I think there’s a lot on the line?

Sean
Yeah, you are right. There’s a lot on the line, there’s not a lot on the line just for myself or for NASA. Well, NASA may be the largest partner in Gateway, for example, all of our other partners have a very vested interest as well. And they have risk involved in it too. And so leveraging on that, everybody in each area, each person brings in a different perspective. And so when you’re balancing all that, not only am I pulling upon our team, our broad team, but also our international team to it as well. Let’s make sure we understand all the different elements that are out there because sometimes I may not see, for example, a decision made on the NASA side and how it impacts my European colleagues. So let’s make sure we have that information out on the table, and then balance that risk amongst us. I’ll tell you, I think you’ll find that doing that, having a very open conversation with everybody, really helps the whole team to understand the different aspects to it, and understand the decision that’s made to get there. Understanding everybody’s pros and cons, that kind of helps you look at it from a big picture. Sometimes I may make a decision that in my silo, just the NASA part, is different than one if I look at the whole partnership and what’s best for the partnership. So pulling in all those pieces is very key. It’s also key to understand the major levers on our partner side because we find that they have similar ones to us from a risk and also from a financial standpoint, but understanding that because you can get wrapped up into the politics, if you will, it’s gonna cost me more than you and whatnot. If you boil it down to the best technical decision, that usually helps lead you to the best answer as well.

Tony
Right. Yeah. That’s very insightful. You know how you said there is a lot of different partners that are vested and interested in this. I think recently UCLA announced their first space medicine fellowship. So there are also a lot of different fields now wanting and becoming more interested in space. How would you give advice to students that may be not necessarily coming from an engineering background, but want to be involved in space? And how to navigate into this field?

Sean
Yeah, there’s a lot of great opportunities out there in that research community. You know, we’ve learned a lot of things on ISS in different areas that we had no idea about. And a lot of fields that are finding the advantage when you take away gravity into things you can do. Medicine is certainly one of them. Structures on materials, in the chemistry realm, that’s another area of things that we’re learning every day on ISS, and we’re learning about future vehicles as well as the things you can do in space. And so I would just say, open your horizons to it. You know, I would imagine, I know myself, when I went through my degree program in engineering. I was an engineering physics major. The thought of eliminating gravity from the equation probably didn’t cross our mind very much. That’s a very powerful thing, when you can eliminate gravity from it, and now what can you do with that, and so I would tell folks in in multiple fields just have a very broad and open mind. It can really, really open up opportunities here, operating in space, we’re seeing it on a daily basis. In fact, right now we have a four crew from the Axiom one mission on ISS. Nonprofessional, if you will, astronauts from the astronaut corps, operating on ISS, doing research that’s opening up a commercial field there for it. So I think you’re gonna see a great expanse in that of opportunities there, and a lot of great returns from it as well, in the future.

Tony
Based on the research, do you think research that’s done in space will impact and advance research done on earth? Or the other way around? Or do you think both will try to complement one another?

Sean
Yeah, I think it feeds both, right. We’ve done some tremendous research, especially in the realm of life sciences research, DNA sequencing on orbit, again, different aspects that we couldn’t do in a lab on the earth, and then that feeds into – so you close that knowledge gap there. And it feeds into the next level of research or manufacturing or development down on the earth, but then it can iterate back up into the on orbit phase, as well as the next step. So I really think that those two feed off of each other. Sometimes you learn the lessons in space, because let’s face it, it’s not cheap, it’s getting cheaper, but it’s not cheap to put stuff into space. And so you kind of learn, and we’ve learned new manufacturing methods by doing that, sure, you could manufacture it in space, but you’ve actually learned it. And now you can apply it on Earth and produce that medicine or the manufacturing on Earth. So I really think that they feed off of each other. And we’ll see that continue in the future.

Tony
With the Gateway program, there are two questions that I have. One is what are some goals and objectives that you want to accomplish over the next course of the while to further the success of the Gateway program, and then two, throughout this program, what are some unexpected things that have caught you by surprise?

Sean
So in terms of, where do I want to see, we’re building hardware now. We’re manufacturing it in Torino, Italy, and out in California with our first two elements are coming together, the pieces to the initial structure and then the pressurized shell. That’s what’s happening out in Italy. It’ll be shipped to the US the latter part of this year. We’ll continue that outfitting, getting the hardware on orbit, assembling an operating Gateway obviously that there is a big milestone for it. We’ll have the first elements in the latter portion of 2024. That will launch in orbit and then adding on beyond that. So I’m very much looking forward to that. It’s going to bring us a different realm of space exploration. Of course, we had the Apollo program in the late 60s and 70s which did great, that showed, hey, we can get to the Moon, we know a lot more about the Moon from that. We get the crew back home. That was really a scouting mission, if you will. Now that we’ve got that, our technologies have matured, our capabilities have matured. Now we’re going out to, if you will, settle in and have a more sustained, as we call it, presence, and so Gateway doing that, enabling the landers to come to Gateway, pick up the crew go down to the surface, bring the crew back to Gateway and use it later again, to go down to the surface for the next group. You know, that’s going to be a great moment, when you really see that, that human exploration now in space has expanded beyond low Earth orbit. And now our cutting edge is out in the Moon vicinity. And we’re using that to get ready for the future. And so I’m going to relish the day when a first crew enters Gateway, you know, that’s going to be a great accomplishment. And then when the next crew comes, and they go down to the lunar surface, and they’re coming back from the lunar surface, that’s gonna be a great thing that’s really taking all these pieces and building that sustainability. And we see that for that repeatability, affordability and sustainability that is going to provide.

So, things along the way that surprised me, one of the great things that I do see in Gateway, in this partnership and with even within NASAs, is you come across a challenge, a block, if you will, but you open it up and a team comes in and attacks it. And before you know it, you’ve got a great solution. And next thing you know, it was that was just a small speed bump in the road, it wasn’t a block along the way.

You know, as we look at things, and one thing comes to mind is refueling and how we’re going to do refueling for Gateway. Well our European partners stepped up on that and said, Hey, we got some things here we’ve been working on that we didn’t know about, that they’ve been working on, and kind of put our technical capabilities together, closed that gap. Okay, that’s great, we got that solved, now let’s move on to the next one. And so we’ve been doing a lot of great things with that.

I’ve seen a lot of interest grow around the world, in potential new partners in the future. And that’s always good to see. Because that again, it shows not only our initial partnership, but it’s expanding it to more than the overall fever, if you will, around the globe of doing this, of doing the expansion and humans returning to the Moon. Being a part of that as not we as one nation, but we as a humanity expand to the Moon, but also like I’ve said, many different nations certainly have their sights on how can we work this together, expand beyond the Moon and get to Mars. And so I think you’ll see a lot of interest in that and seeing nations from around the world that enthusiasm and interest of being a piece of this, being a piece of Artemis, and expanding beyond is always very refreshing.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there definitely is a very human element to this. And there is this heightened sense of, I would say, more importance or urgency around the world. I think a lot of – like we previously talked about, a lot of industries even from fashion, I think that Netflix just like released the recent documentary for a return to space to kind of get more public attention. How do you, when you’re not working, when you’re done with work, bring yourself back down to earth and just enjoy the human parts of non-work?

Sean
They say, you’re fortunate if you have a job that you go to work and enjoy and I certainly do have that. You know, you come home, and there’s pieces of that that come with you too. That is part of that joy. I’ll tell you as a family, we enjoy seeing the space station flyover. I’ve got pictures of my daughters, I’ve got two younger daughters – well, they’re high school now, but when they were much younger, holding them in my arms and pointing to the sky and seeing the space station fly over. So seeing that, our partnership, it expands beyond that to friendship as well. I have travels over to Europe and the folks that we work hard with during the days, but then the nice chance and evenings just to share our family stories and enjoy the time. It’s a lot of fun, you find yourself walking through an airport and you don’t realize it, but your backpack has got your NASA tag on it, because that’s what you use in your travel, and people stop you and ask about it. So you see that all the time. And I don’t think it’s something you ever turn off. But it’s partly because you enjoy it and enjoy being a part of it.

Tony
That’s really incredible. And I think that’s part of why space is such an interesting field for everyone. Because it’s not only advancing tech, but we’re talking about a lot of different issues of humanity, how we can unite as one in a way, and not be in conflict with one another. I think this was super interesting, and really grateful. And thank you for your time.

Sean
Appreciate it, Tony. As you could tell, I am always happy to talk about it. And you know, it’s gonna give us a lot of great opportunities out there. I think it really tells you that humans have a curiosity, what’s beyond the next hill, what’s beyond that next mountain, that was part of our exploration in the US and discovering the new lands to the west, and we’re doing it now. But it’s not on Earth. It’s above Earth. And it’s going farther. It’s going to go to Mars and really expanding human knowledge. And, as you said, it really is bringing folks together for that. And that’s what’s so key.

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Tony
We hope you enjoyed these highlights as much as we did! Personally, I’m incredibly excited for Gateway and NASA’s future projects. With its many international & commercial contributors, Gateway has evolved into a global effort to expand humanity to the moon, and beyond. We humans are innately curious creatures, and to echo what Sean said earlier, “deep space is this opportunity to see what’s beyond the next hill, the next mountain.” Gateway’s success will be a significant moment in history demonstrating how nations united to find solutions for aerospace engineering, habitation, and logistics.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and in the comments, or write to us at podcast@Longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jaena Kim
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes bringing innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jaena Kim, Longitude Fellow and law student from the University of Ottawa. You’re just in time to embark on the 4^th series of Longitudes of Imagination with some of the most incredible masterminds behind the NASA Gateway Program. The Gateway is building a space station that provides vital support for long-term human presence on the Moon and as a staging point for future deep space exploration, such as sending the first astronauts to Mars.

Keep launching in to this episode for conversation highlights with Emma Lehnhardt, the Program Planning and Control Manager for NASA’s Gateway Program, and her expert insight on how pursuing outer space missions beyond our planet has actually unified in many ways, humanity on Earth.

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Emma Lehnhardt
My name is Emma Lehnhardt. I work at the NASA Johnson Space Center on the Gateway program, which will be a small human tended Space Station in orbit around the moon. My job is basically the Business Operations Manager of the program. I directly support our program manager, Dan Hartman, and provide all the business services across the program that keep the trains on the tracks. Everything that’s not engineering or developing the systems necessary for spaceflight kind of falls into my shop. And technically, my title is program planning and control manager.

Jaena
Could you summarize- I know you just summarized the Gateway project, but the Gateway project is also part of a bigger project, the Artemis project. Would you mind summarizing that in a couple sentences for our audience?

Emma
Absolutely. So the Artemis campaign is an initiative of NASA to return to the moon, to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon, and also to establish all of the capabilities that we need to explore the moon and set us up for further exploration beyond. Artemis is in Greek mythology, the twin sister of Apollo. So it seemed very poetic and a great name for our return to the moon in this generation.

Jaena
Before I dive a bit into the details of what you do on a day to day basis, could you just explain to us what the significance of space exploration is, and how helpful that space research and everything that happens in space can actually be transferred down to help the people down on Earth?

Emma
Absolutely. So space is and has always been inspirational across the world. And particularly with everything that NASA has been doing over the past 20 plus years in low Earth orbit. It symbolizes the way humanity can come together with the international partnerships that we’ve established on the International Space Station. It encourages and inspires students around the world to pursue STEM degrees, science, technology, engineering, and math. And it also expands our human reach and our economic sphere of influence outside of the earth. So that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about Gateway. I see it as some of those first steps towards kind of a Star Trek future or what we can envision in the TV show The Expanse.

Jaena
I love that you talked about the science fiction, I think it was a TV series, but also your expanse within NASA. So your journey with NASA has been really incredible. I believe you interned there during your studies. And then later on in your career, you quickly advanced into your role today. Were there any integral or memorable moments that really got you to the position, notably one of leadership, a woman in leadership, which we’re still fighting to see on a more equal platform, especially in STEM and in STEAM? If there were, is there any advice that you could share with all of our listeners, regardless of gender? And one memorable moment?

Emma
So yeah, let me start a little bit with my story. So I’ve always been a space nerd, have always loved space. And I originally thought that I wanted to study astronomy. But honestly, the math for me was very challenging. And I ended up unfortunately believing that I was just bad at it. And I changed my field of study. I still maintained a minor in astronomy when I was in undergrad, but I majored in politics. And that combination of politics and astronomy really set me up well for a space policy degree, which is what I got my master’s in. And then I was able to go to the International Space University, where I learned even more about the International Space community and what it means to do truly international interdisciplinary work in our space fields. I ended up, after those two programs of study, as a consultant to NASA, to the Air Force, to DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Sci-Fi branch of the Department of Defense in the United States, and also consulting to private industry. And then I ended up becoming a direct employee of the government, a civil servant at NASA headquarters. I was there for about 10 years working on strategic planning, and also the budget of NASA. When I was at NASA headquarters, I had felt this whole time that I could contribute to the mission. But, you know, when I introduce myself to people, I often say, Yes, Hi, I’m Emma, I work at NASA, but I’m not an astronaut. I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not an engineer. So you’re almost introducing yourself in the negative, right. But my contributions really were important. And one of my key memories, which is what you asked me for, was, I was doing some work implementing a law at NASA, which wasn’t the sexiest or most fun thing to do. It’s called the Government Performance Results Act Modernization Act, or GPRAMA. I was going through the results of our implementation of a strategic assessment of all of our objectives at the agency, and our Associate Administrator at the time—and I actually presented that work to the White House—he pulled out of his pocket a slide that I had prepared for him with the results of the analysis. And I looked over at him in the meeting, and he had handwritten notes all over it, which were very apparently written over multiple periods of time and useful for him as a cheat sheet. This felt like something that we were doing in DC to just take care of it and let real people do the real work out there, but here is the Associate Administrator of NASA really using this work to understand the work of the agency and to communicate our work to the White House. That was such a cool moment for me. And I ended up talking to him about that a little bit later on. And he said, Emma, you have to understand that essentially what you are doing when you are implementing policies, when you’re working on budget or the PP and C work of the agency, really is systems engineering in another vein. And that was a transformational moment for me and the way I think about my work today.

Jaena
I love that. I can really resonate with that because prior to my law degree, I majored in classical flute performance. And as a musician, I knew that I always wanted to do something that created a social impact and social change, as I am a child of immigrants where, you know, my parents really sacrificed a lot. And I saw the Canadian society really embrace us and help us integrate. And so I knew I wanted to give back. But as a musician, I kind of felt confined to the stage. And it felt like a one sided relationship with my audience. And so when I looked around to see what else I could share, maybe that also had kind of a performance aspect, I naturally inclined towards law. And so I really see the parallel there where we’re able to really help with something that we’re passionate about. But it may not be what people necessarily think, what artists do or what NASA does, and I think really highlights, which is a great segue, I know that you really helped in the program’s implementation and approach under agency space flight policies. And that was something that stood out to me as a last unit. Could I ask you for a brief explanation on it, and the importance of taking policy into consideration when doing really, really big missions, especially something such as long-term space exploration?

Emma
Absolutely. So yes, that in particular is a document at NASA called NPR 71 20.5. NPR stands for NASA Procedural Requirements. And this book can be thought of as the Bible at NASA for how you implement spaceflight programs and projects, particularly human spaceflight programs and projects at NASA. One of the interesting things about my job is that we are building a next generation space station, right? The Gateway is a successor in a way, it will be much smaller than the International Space Station, but leverages a lot of the work and processes and program implementation that we’ve done on the International Space Station, but the International Space Station predated this NPR 71 20.5. So when that program was initially established, they did not have to comply or really even think about these higher level NASA procedures. I’m a little bit jealous in a way because they didn’t have to go through the pain that we did. But that was the interesting thing about starting up Gateway as a program, was okay, now we have to think about a large program with lots of pieces and individual projects underneath it that are tightly coupled, that will be developed and deployed incrementally, one at a time or over time. And how does that type of a program fit within a NASA procedural requirement that is in many ways written for individual missions? So that that was what we wrestled with. And I think we came up with some good, maybe not ingenious, but effective and streamlining measures to implement those high level policies and procedures for Gateway.

Jaena
So I know at the beginning you explained what you do. And I can’t remember if it was in this interview or another one, you explained that your role was kind of like the CFO and the COO. So I also know that the Gateway Project is an international project. Do you work with international partners? If so, have you faced differing cultural or language barriers? And how do you unite such a diverse group?

Emma
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. Similar to the International Space Station Program, yes, we are a multilateral program, we established Memoranda of Understanding with the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the space agency of the government of Japan. We established those at the end of calendar year 2020, but really our international partners have been a part of our program from the beginning, even some of the very initial ideas of what a Gateway could be. And today, with the establishment of those MOUs and how we operate the program, the partners are integral members of our program. So they are with us every step of the way, in all of our program level boards, which are the meetings where we make technical and programmatic decisions. There have not been, in my experience, any cultural barriers to overcome. I think we are all coming into this understanding that we and our governments believe that this is an important mission to accomplish, and something that we can do together with both international and commercial partners. But there have been some interesting logistical issues to work out when you are working with NASA centers all across the country, contractors all across the country, and partners all over the world, honestly, just setting up meetings with perfect time zones, and understanding what happens when daylight savings occurs in United States, for example, one of those interesting logistical challenges to overcome and just something you always have to have in the forefront of your mind. Thinking in multiple time zones all the time. The other one possibly of interest for you from a legal perspective is export control. So export control for us is definitely a challenge in the program. Because our international partners are, like I said, with us every step of the way. That means they’re with us when we’re having technical conversations all the time. So everything is an export and needs to be export controlled. Within the program, we are looking for efficiencies and ways that this won’t bog us down too much so we can continue moving an agile pace. But it is something that just has to be accommodated.

Jaena
So I know you mentioned an aggressive timeline. And I know that was a big part of the push to get people on the moon by 2024. And I believe you also talked about somewhere else that you really had to change the architecture of how the team worked to meet this timeline. Does this mean that if you’re working with fewer people, did this result in a heavier workload, and how do you balance something that’s pressing and so important, but also not burning out so that you’re able to deliver the finest quality of work right to the end?

Emma
That is the exact question that’s been on my mind quite a bit, particularly during the pandemic. We are indeed a much smaller team than many traditional program and project sizes of teams at NASA. Within my own team, for example, we are pretty lean. And that means you have people wearing multiple hats, doing two or in some cases three jobs, that may be the same type of job at the program level and the project level, or that may be entirely different jobs. Our export control lead for the program, for example, who works for me, is also the resources and risk integrator for one of our control account managers, a systems engineering and integration office. So she is constantly overloaded. And that’s true for almost every member of our team. On the one hand, there are benefits there with so many people taking on critical roles and not having too many cooks in the kitchen, we’re able to move very quickly and drive to decisions quickly. But burnout is absolutely a concern. So right now it’s all about trying to find the right amount of balance across the team, and where do we really need to add resources to offload people before they get burned out. But it’s a difficult thing, honestly, even for myself, because we pour our hearts and souls into these programs and projects because we believe in them so much. And it is easy to find yourself just continuing to work nights and weekends because you want to accomplish this amazing thing. So you also have to- every individual is responsible for monitoring what they’re doing and raising your hand when they need help.

Jaena
Do you think with a pandemic, you know, a lot of us have to quarantine oftentimes in our own rooms, in periods of time we’ve never been confined to before. And I can’t imagine that would be much more different than traveling on a spacecraft for six to nine months to get to Mars. Did the pandemic serve any helpful learning opportunities for the people at NASA or maybe even individually that really brought in this extra layer of imagination that you could implement and make the Gateway project better out of such an unfortunate global event?

Emma
Absolutely, there were some distinct benefits that we saw internal to the Gateway program. So I mentioned that we are a multicenter program. The program office resides at the Johnson Space Center. Our power propulsion element is managed out of the Glenn Research Center in Ohio. Our Deep Space logistics project is managed by the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We have team members at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, for example. And we saw pretty quickly that when you move from a center of gravity of many of the program leadership members in a conference room at JSC face-to-face, and all of the other center members on the phone without video connectivity, that once we were in the pandemic environment, and everybody was on equal footing virtually with cameras, we actually developed better relationships across the center teams. And you know, we’re all in the same virtual room as opposed to some of us being in the room and everyone else being on the phone. So now that we’re moving back into a hybrid environment, it’s going to be all about maintaining that frame of mind, because we want to maintain those connections that we built as a virtual team. And I think that’s going to be all about just keeping that forefront in your mind and pursuing information technology solutions that will help us just like cameras and conference rooms. It sounds simple. It’s something that we have not had previously at NASA really across the board. And we’ll be pursuing that for our program.

Jaena
Yay. Something I know that you do on your free time is you’re an advanced open water scuba diver. And our last Longitude of Imagination series was with the Schmidt Ocean Institute. With this back and forth between ocean and space, I think us, Longitude fellows, are learning that there is some sort of connection there. The same sort of people who are interested in space often have an interest in the ocean. People who work at NASA as are open water scuba divers. Was there any particular reason that drew you to this hobby? Do you think it helps you become a better leader in the workplace that you have something that’s- not that I’m tying you down to space all day, every day-

Emma
All day every day. [laughter] I am a little tied to space all day every day, especially being married to a fellow space nerd. But yes, there was a specific reason. So I have pretty significant motion sickness issue. So I personally never had the thought in my head that I could be a scuba diver. My husband is an emergency physician by training, and he is someone who has always wanted to be an astronaut. So he pursued multiple things like becoming a private pilot, joining the Canadian military, and scuba diving in the pursuit of developing himself to be a better potential candidate to be an astronaut someday. When he started his scuba diving training, I decided to join him because we decided to try motion sickness medication that comes in the form of a patch that you wear behind your ear. And luckily for me, that worked, and I was able to complete the training. And it’s now something that we try to do when we travel all over the world. I very much love it. But more on a day to day basis, the thing that I find that grounds me and helps me in my day to day work and balancing in my life is exercise. So running, spinning, weightlifting, yoga, I do a little bit of everything and try to do at least something every day. And that has been very helpful.

Jaena
Just being mindful of our time. I have two wrap up questions. The first I would like to start with, I almost think there was this myth, which I think is slowly being dispelled, that science was not a very creative field, it was very square and rigid, and that maybe science and creativity, being imaginative in science, did not mesh. But arguably, I would say science is inherently creative. Someone would have imagined themselves flying out to the moon one day, which is what you guys at NASA made happen. And so could you speak a little bit about the role of imagination in in science?

Emma
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s not cut and dry at all. The most important thing in my opinion for anyone pursuing or working in scientific and mathematical fields is a curious mind. “What if” is the driving question to so much that we do, and I think you’re right, it is helpful to be able to imagine this future so that you can execute it and bring it to life. And for me, okay, so I have terrible motion sickness, I am never going to be an astronaut. But it is helpful in my daily life to think about what it would be like to live on the Gateway Space Station in microgravity in a deep space environment for a two-week period with only one other fellow crew member, for example. Being able to picture that so clearly in your mind helps you to bring it to life.

Jaena
That was really beautiful. The last question I have for you, kind of broad and maybe cheesy, but as someone who works, that’s such big budgets and such amazing people, and you being an inspirational female leader that I even look up to, how do you define success?

Emma
All right, I’m gonna get real personal with you here. As you can see on the video, here I am, I’m blushing pretty significantly today. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been under the weather this week. But it’s something that I’ve dealt with my entire life and that I have always been ashamed of, to be honest with you. But I am in this moment defining success in that I have been able to stay connected with you, I have been able to answer your questions from my heart and from my head without a trigger of a fight or flight response, knowing seeing in the camera that I am turning red, that that for me is very much a significant successful moment. And something that I’ve been trying to celebrate every time I see it happening that I’m able to just get past it. Just keep going. No one’s gonna judge you because you’re blushing, right? So, but you know, here I am. I’ve achieved quite a bit in my career so far. I’m almost 40 years old. And I think it’s important for women in leadership positions to acknowledge that even when you have achieved your bar of success, however you measure that, there is still a tendency for negative self-talk. And you have to confront that and work on it every single day. And I think it’s important for us all to acknowledge that that occurs and it’s a challenge and something you have to work at.

Jaena
If it helps, the podcast is video free. So they have to believe you when you say you blush, I would say you look very beautiful and very normal. Thank you for sharing such an intimate story. I think it really is important and I think a great takeaway for our listeners, that success is really personal. And I really love that you kept us grounded with your piece of advice and I will definitely be taking that forward.

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Jaena
Preparing to interview Emma who has not only led NASA Headquarters’ $20 billion dollar budget formulation process but helped implement history-worthy space policy that will protect both this generation and the innumerable ones to come, had me more nervous than when I performed for 15,000 people!

I hope this episode inspires our listeners who’ve struggled to transform their passions into a career. Emma’s dream of working in astronomy wasn’t realized by becoming a NASA astronaut or rocket scientist. Instead, she forged her own path by imagining ways to imbue her strengths into the field of astronomy and becoming an irreplaceable team member of NASA.

For me? Litigation has become my alternative to performing – the court stage and common law repertoire allows me to still pursue what I love and help those around me.

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Does space exploration strike you with awe? Or its infinite possibilities instil you with wonder? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and visit Longitude.site for this episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Jaena Kim
Welcome back to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you. Prepare to launch into our 2nd space series of Longitudes of Imagination with key players of the NASA Gateway Program. I’m Jaena Kim, Longitude Fellow and law student at the University of Ottawa. Today’s innovative insights are truly brought to you from across the globe – right from an English Castle from the 15th century. Technically, in the eyes of the law, that makes me an alien in the United Kingdom. But that just means I’m not a citizen of the country – definitely not E.T. or from outer space!

Alongside Longitude Fellows Jade McAdams, Quint Smits, and Tony Zhou, we were thrilled to interview Jon Olansen, Julia Badger, Sean Fuller and Emma Lehnhardt from the NASA Gateway Program. Are you ready for a sneak peek of the upcoming episodes? Julia and Quint start with a great introduction to Gateway:

Quint Smits
Could you summarize the Gateway project in a few sentences for the lay audience?

Julia Badger
Gateway is going to be a space station that will be in orbit around the moon. It’s meant to be, if you will, a gateway to further human exploration both assisting human operations on the moon surface, as well as future exploration of Mars.

Jaena
Half a billion people watched the first moon landing in 1969. The world population has doubled since then, I can’t imagine how many of us will be tuning in for the first mars landing in the future. The Gateway Program is also a vital component of NASA’s Artemis Campaign. Emma reveals an artistic connection between Artemis and a blast from NASA’s past:

Emma Lehnhardt
The Artemis campaign is an initiative of NASA to return to the moon, to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon, and also to establish all of the capabilities that we need to explore the moon and set us up for further exploration beyond. Artemis is in Greek mythology, the twin sister of Apollo. So it seemed very poetic and a great name for our return to the moon in this generation.

Jaena
Thousands of people worked together behind the scenes of Apollo 11 to land the first man on the moon, and NASA has only continued to accomplish numerous achievements since. Sean was the operations lead for Expedition One, which sent an international team of three to successfully work and live aboard the International Space Station for the very first time. Sean and Tony discuss the transferability of experience from one project to another, and the balance of applying just the right amount:

Tony Zhou
So from your long tenure with NASA, and you were a part of, I believe the Expedition One, what are some lessons that you’ve learned just from starting right immediately, you know, having graduated college, till working now, and the input that you give in each new project?

Sean Fuller
Yeah, it’s, you know, with each new project I say you bring your history and knowledge base for it, but don’t let that pollute the future as well in looking at it. And so you’ve got a great background, a great knowledge from it but you can apply the new lessons and the new ways into a future project.

… So myself personally, kind of as you go through it, each time you get new opportunities, you certainly don’t forget the past, you build upon the past. And I also tell folks, if you’re going to change something, it behooves you to know why you’re going to change. Change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. But learn from the past, learn from the histories and if there’s a better way to go try to address something, certainly do that. And I’ve had a lot of those opportunities for better or worse over the years because of my continued involvement in different aspects of the international partnership.

Jaena
The spirit of collaboration, particularly international cooperation, can be found right in American law. The National Aeronautics and Space Act is the US federal statute that created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – which we all know as NASA! Paraphrasing Section 404 of the National Aeronautics and Space Act, the administration shall make every effort to enlist the support and cooperation of other countries and international organizations. But Emma shares a personal example of how collaborative effort is rooted even simply within the different divisions at NASA:

Emma Lehnhardt
When I was at NASA headquarters, I had felt this whole time that I could contribute to the mission. But, you know, when I introduce myself to people, I often say, Yes, Hi, I’m Emma, I work at NASA, but I’m not an astronaut. I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not an engineer…

You know, I was doing some work implementing a law at NASA, which wasn’t the sexiest or most fun thing to do…and our Associate Administrator at the time—and I actually presented that work to the White House—he pulled out of his pocket a slide that I had prepared for him with the results of the analysis. I looked over at him in the meeting, and he had handwritten notes all over it, which were very apparently written over multiple periods of time and useful for him as a cheat sheet. That was such a cool moment for me. I ended up talking to him about that a little bit later on. And he said, Emma, you have to understand that essentially what you are doing when you are implementing policies, when you’re working on budget or the PP and C work of the agency, really is systems engineering in another vein.

Jaena
It sounds like teamwork really helps spacework glimmer and shine. But Jon and Jade talk about an addition of something more that truly makes a planet of a difference when working on any project:

Jade McAdams
You work as the HALO manager, so I’d love to just hear a little bit more about what that entails and kind of like unique challenges with that position, but also like your favorite parts about it.

Jon Olansen
Favorite things. I got to start with just fabulous people that that we have across the country that work on this. You pick any of the contractors that are supporting, the vendors that are supporting, the NASA centers where people are working, and then all the international companies providing too, it’s it really it’s fabulous to be able to work with such competent passionate people about what they do, and that that makes me enjoy coming to work every day.

Jade McAdams
A common thread I’ve noticed, because I’ve been, I’ve done a few of these Longitude interviews for the podcast now and everybody who is involved in a project of, you know, not similar magnitude but just something new and creative, in a sense really likes the people they’re working with, and values their team more than anything. So it’s nice to hear that.

Jaena
With a universe to explore beyond our comprehension, NASA’s projects are definitely one of different magnitude. So it’s not very surprising that there are bumps along the journey. Julia shares her take on problem solving with Quint:

Quint Smits
When you do approach some issues, how do you come up with a solution?

Julia Badger
There’s no one way to go about doing that. From my standpoint, I’ve always thought that, you know, it takes it takes a team, it takes a village to make these things happen. But you don’t want to have necessarily too many cooks in the kitchen, if you will. You don’t want all the hands to be on deck for every problem. And so it takes a good team leader to kind of organize a work plan. I’m a big fan of Tiger Teams, where you pick a select group of folks to spend some time diving deep into what that problem is and trying to figure out the ways to solve it…

… And then you have to implement, I think that’s a main part for me is that no design is complete until we’ve tried it out, we’ve tested it, it doesn’t have to be beautiful or perfect. You know, I like to tell my kids that cardboard is good enough for you might have a grand plan and you want us to like cut all this wood and plastic and screw it together. But if you can’t show me out of cardboard first, it’s not going to fly. So that’s, that’s one of the things we do even from a software perspective is that we don’t have to do it perfectly. But let’s get it in there and test it out. And after that, then I think you can really start solving that problem and getting it done the right way.

Jaena
The Gateway Program truly embodies limitless human potential when we come together. Something that began as a simple dream of identifying the shining light in the night sky to the first moon landing and now a return mission back, human curiosity fuels future space exploration.

Sean Fuller
…one of the great things that I do see in Gateway in this partnership and with even within NASAs, you come across a challenge, a block, if you will, but you open it up, and a team comes in and attacks it. And before you know it, you’ve got a great solution. And next thing you know, it was that was just a small speed bump in the road, it wasn’t a block along the way.

… I’ve seen a lot of interest grow around the world, in potential new partners on the future. And that’s always good to see. Because that again, it shows not only our initial partnership, but it’s expanding it to more than the the overall fever, if you will, around the globe of doing this of doing the expansion and humans returning to the moon. Being a part of that as not we as one nation, but we as a humanity expand to the moon but but also like I’ve said, you know, many different nations certainly have their sights on how can we work this together, expand beyond the moon and get to Mars.

Tony Zhou
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there definitely is a very human element to this…That’s really incredible. And I think that’s part of why I guess space is such an interesting field for everyone. Because it’s not only advancing tech, but you know, we’re talking about a lot of different sort of issues of humanity, how we can like unite as one in a way, and not be in conflict with one another.

Sean Fuller
… And you know, it’s gonna give us a lot of great opportunities out there. I think it really tells you, you know, that humans have a curiosity, what’s beyond the next hill, what’s beyond that next mountain that was part of our exploration in the US and discovering the new lands to the west, and we’re doing it now. But it’s not on Earth. It’s above Earth. And it’s going farther. It’s going to go to Mars and really expanding human knowledge. And, as you said, it really is bringing folks together for that. And that’s what’s so key.

Jaena
So what now? I’m glad I wasn’t the only one left curious about the future of space travel! Jade asks Jon:

Jade McAdams
What do you foresee as being the direction and like forward progress that we can make after Gateway after Artemis? What is like your next vision for space exploration?

Jon Olansen
…Gateway is a way for us to advance technologies and to learn how to operate as I was describing earlier out in cislunar space, but it serves as that blueprint for future exploration. So if you’re going to go to Mars, you’re going to think about what orbiting station do I need to have that that I can then from there, gain access to the surface, right? Those are opportunities then for you to think about, and everything you’ve learned here on Gateway, and how then from Gateway, you’ve had the human landing system and been able to get down to the surface and what the crews have learned from those experiences, right? You can take those lessons, and you continue to advance that blueprint every step of the way. So Mars is then that next piece, and then beyond from there, but it’s all about, you’re creating a blueprint that you’re able to replicate and advance.

Jaena
NASA’s space odyssey from the Earth to the Moon and eventually Mars serve as a great reminder of human collaboration and accomplishment.

This brings us to the end of our intro episode. You can follow Longitude on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss our next series with the Gateway team filled with the wisdom, experience, and stories. You can also visit our website at Longitude.Site, for more information and content.