Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate from Rice University and Longitude fellow.

Our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope connected us with scientists, engineers, and program managers. Along the way we discovered there are public outreach positions at NASA. We were curious about these roles and what their day-to-day activities entailed, like how they managed communicating complex engineering missions to lay audiences.

I had an opportunity to speak with Peter Sooy, Public Outreach Director at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. It was fascinating to hear about the NASA public events around the world and discovering that Peter was the outreach lead for both the Webb Telescope and the Roman Telescope that is next in line. His interesting insights and engaging stories made this episode a must to include into the JWST series as a Sound Bytes Extra.

We started our conversation with Peter telling me what a typical day looks like for him in his role.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Peter Sooy
My job is to lead the public outreach for two missions at Goddard. So, it’s the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman space telescope. On a typical day, I’m finding new events for these telescopes to participate in, to connect with the wider public. So, there’s a lot of planning that goes into that, emailing, planning out events leading up to them and then actually running the event. I was just in Baltimore on Friday, running an event at the library there to celebrate the Webb first anniversary of science. First anniversary was July 12th. I had the event on July 14. I planned it for a few months. We took over this whole three storey library, had five different activities, two talks. The library was great. We talked all about Webb to folks in inner city, downtown Baltimore. It was great.

Louis
That’s fascinating. Sounds like a really rewarding, sort of a lot of work, but ultimately pays off in these sorts of fun events.

Peter
There’s just like a lot of office jobs. I do a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of Zooms, but it is cool to see an event go from start to finish in two months and see the work that goes into it, and then actually have the product of the event at the end. So, it is rewarding in that way. You’re right.

Louis
Great. Well, I’d like you to walk us through your journey to your current position as public outreach lead. What key experiences played a significant role in guiding you to the role?

Peter
So, I’ll start, I’ll go all the way back. I went to the University of Maryland College Park, got a degree in journalism, and I was interested in sports. So, I was like, oh, I’ll do sports writing. My degree is in print journalism, so it tells you how old I am, I guess. And then when I graduated, I went into the Navy, where the Navy needed nuclear submarine officers. I did that for about 18 months. It was not a tremendous fit, but I was able to try my hand at engineering. It didn’t go so well. I didn’t love it. I got out of the Navy. And I got into engineering, again, working in natural gas drilling. I worked in rural Pennsylvania, the mountains of Pennsylvania, drilling for natural gas, again, engineering. I did better this time, but again, wasn’t best fit for me. Then I took a job at NASA Goddard in an administrative role. And then kind of parlayed that into working on the communication side on the outreach side, connecting with the public about NASA, what NASA was up to at Goddard in Maryland. And fast forward, now I work for these two flagship NASA astrophysics missions. It’s kind of the best crossover, where I have a background in writing, about talking about things with the general public. And then I tried my hand, like I said, in engineering, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds where I talk about engineering, but don’t have to actually roll my sleeves up and do the engineering. So, it’s a nice compromise of what I enjoy and what I enjoy talking about. And I’ve really enjoyed sharing the successes and accomplishments of Webb and more recently Roman, with the public.

Louis
Yeah, really looking forward to the Roman Space Telescope. What are the main goals of NASA’s public outreach programs? And how do they align with the broader mission of NASA?

Peter
This is a great question. Simply put, the goal of NASA public outreach is to share and inform the public, share with the public about what NASA is doing. That’s the simplest way. And the broader mission of NASA is, you know, different depending on who you ask, but to explore, to learn, to understand our place in the universe. In some way of saying that, so it kind of fit a little bit hand in glove where a lot of times, the scientists and engineers at NASA are doing this mission of exploring, of developing of getting us into space and outreach is part of the whole communications goal of sharing with the public in a clear and concise manner. What they’re doing is really out of this world, cheesy to say, but out of this world engineering and science, how to explain it and communicate it as broadly as possible to the eighth grade reading level.

Louis
Yeah, that was a great answer to a very broad question. What are other types of communications or outreach programs at NASA? How are they similar and different to your role?

Peter
There’s a whole office of like, general communication, news stories, you put out help run, like our social media presence, like the NASA Goddard, or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages, which is a ton of work. There are millions of followers there. So those are some of the communications programs at Goddard. And then a lot of missions have outreach as well. So, it’s a sliding scale, like if a mission is kind of just getting off the ground and just getting started, they really don’t have a robust outreach presence, because they’re just trying to get the mission started.

Step one is to have the plan for what you’re going to build, what it’s going to study how it’s going to get into space. And then once that’s kind of established, and there’s a good schedule, and everything’s moving along, then you can say, oh, we want the public to learn about this, let’s get a outreach team organized. A lot of times, there’s not a dedicated person whose full-time job is to work on outreach for this mission. Like I said, I work pretty much half on Roman half on Webb. So, these two really large missions have half of me. A lot of times, there’s like an average person that does like handle all Heliophysics, like everything about the sun, everything about the moon. So that’s a lot of different missions under their portfolio, and they come up with outreach plans to support those missions as best they can.

Louis
I see, yeah, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected.

Peter
It’s nice to meet people and talk to them, and them be friendly and open and receptive to what NASA is up to. So, it’s kind of like a morale booster for me. And it lets me know that this it’s being well received.

Louis
Yeah. And I think it’s especially important for children or young adults, because these are the people that are going to be inspired to work on, hopefully this next generation of science. When you’re designing these outreach programs, do you generally try to skew any of the content or language towards a younger audience? Or do you? Is it for the adult population?

Peter
If I have a specific event, as I’m planning the presence, I will keep in mind the audience. So I’m trying to think off the top of my head, just saying in general, I’ve been on Webb for five years now. And one of the initiatives that I’ve kind of bulked up, if you will, is Webb going to dark sky events at national parks. National parks around the country are in different locations, which is what we try to do. It’s doesn’t cost money to go for us. It’s, you know, another government entity, so it’s welcoming to us, and it gets a lot of people. So that’s where we’ll go and when I go to these events, I’m typically aiming towards elementary schoolers, so young kids, and then their family that’s there will also learn from it. And a lot of the times that’s what I aim the talking points at. We have really extensive talking points for all our missions that kind of cover every topic that could come up. So, in a media interview with a large network, you could have a complicated question and some of the talking points will cover that and all the way down to just top level. If you have 20 seconds to talk to an eight-year-old, what are you going to hit on? We try to share that information so people can be ready when they do their outreach, but the style of how you interact with somebody is kind of different for everybody. Like I said, I have a journalism background. So, I kind of just try to do like the lead of a story like who, what, when, where, why is what I try to tell people. But I schedule engineers and scientists to work the outreach as well. I always tell them like talk what you know. So, if you’re building this telescope, talk to a kid about what you’re working on? How do you build something for space? Make it something you’re passionate about.

Louis
Interesting. Sounds like you have engineers and scientists that help staff these. Could you tell me a little bit about maybe some of the materials that you bring to some of these programs?

Peter
We have kind of like the go to popular materials that we create. So it’s like, stickers like decals, what it’s called, like a sticker, a bookmark, a poster, and a lithograph. And most of these, most of these have information on the back of them. It’s like an eye-catching sticker. But on the back of it, it says, you know, Webb is a joint mission with 14 countries and 29 states. It teaches you something and then it gives you something you want to take home. Like if you just give someone an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, they might not want to keep it or show it off or tell their buddy about it. And each one of these products has different amounts of information. The litho is the one that’s like the deeper dive where it’s a sheet of paper with four paragraphs about the mission. So, if someone’s really interested, they can read and then at the bottom, it has our website, or social media just so they can keep diving deeper and deeper. So those are kind of like the usual suspects of materials to create for missions to share what they’re up to, why they matter, what their goals are. But a lot of times, we can get creative as well once we have kind of the basics handled.

Some of the cool things we’ve done with Webb, because Webb has been around and fully established, like we came up with paper models that we can share with people so they could print at home to make their own Webb. A lot of times Webb, it’s so big, it had to fold it into its rocket and then in space it deployed. So, the analogy, it’s like origami, so we worked with the origami master to make the primary mirror so you can fold it to make this primary mirror that looks pretty cool. You have to have a certain amount [talent]… I tried to make it. It doesn’t look as good as the origami masters. But it’s like if someone out there is really into origami, it’s kind of like the cool crossing of art and engineering and technology. We try to share our material to bring in new audiences, bringing new people that might not have normally or off the bat be interested in it. But then they see that connection. They’re like, oh, wow, I want to learn more about this.

Louis
Definitely. That sounds really effective. And like a perfect example of a way that an outreach initiative is successful. Can you discuss any upcoming projects or missions that you’re particularly excited to share with the public? Maybe, you know, JWST is at the one year, but Nancy Grace has yet to launch.

Peter
Yeah, so the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is sure, that’s 100%. That’s kind of the next big thing. So Webb is doing incredible work. I’m excited to introduce people to Roman. Most people I meet at events will just have not heard of Roman yet, which is fine. It’s hard. There’s like I said, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. At NASA. It’s hard to keep up with all the missions. But yeah, Roman is being built currently at Goddard. And it’s going to launch by May 2027. And it’s going to have a lot of similarities to Webb, but a lot of differences that will complement each other to further astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. So, it’ll be at the same orbit as Webb. So, it’s going to be a million miles away orbiting the Sun at L2 as the orbit is called. A similar wavelength. It’ll be near infrared, where Webb is near and mid infrared. So similar wavelength, same orbit. But where Webb and Hubble look at a very narrow field of view look very deep, Roman is going to have a field of view that’s between 100 to 200 times wider than Hubble and Webb. So, it’s gonna look very wide, and at the same resolution as Hubble, so it will be able to, to map the universe like we never had before, in a way that would take, you know, Hubble and Webb 1000s of years to take all those images and stick stitch them together. So, it’s a, you know, fisheye lens on the universe to learn more about dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. Roman will help us see more rogue Earth’s than we ever would have been able to if we use ground-based observatories. Those are exoplanets that are more close to Earth size, so there might be chances to find some signs of life there.

Louis
That’s so cool. What advice would you give to someone interested in a career in science and engineering communications? Maybe particularly in space and astronomy?

Peter
Sure, I get this question a ton because it is rather an interesting job. I would say if they’re younger, to try anyway they can to get their foot in the door. So, it’d be an internship or talking to people in that career just to learn as much knowledge as they can, and then try to do it. So, the practical thing I always tell people is that if you’re looking for jobs, try and major in something that will help you get there. So, science, technology, but if you want to work in communications, journalism, communications, public relations, are all good ideas, and then taking internships throughout college. And then once you get out, you really have to look. This little tidbit I tell people is that a lot of the workforce at the federal government are contractors, so it’s not civil servants. It’s about like 30% 25% are civil servants, the rest are contractors. So, you have to kind of dig and find where the communications contracts are and apply and get your foot in the door and apply, apply, apply. It’s not a straight path. It’s not an easy quest. You just have to keep plugging away.

Louis
That’s great advice. What’s something surprising and unexpected that you’ve experienced as a public outreach lead?

Peter
I’ve definitely been surprised. The interest in space kind of goes beyond languages. So, like, I’ve had the chance to work events where it’s an international audience of kids and they don’t speak English, but they still enjoy. And they connect with the content, so much so that it is very surprising.

Like I connected with a classroom outside Venice, Italy. These kids were in first grade, so they’re still learning. They don’t really know much English. They all drew pictures about what Webb saw and they were learning in their school about Webb. And I just connected with the teacher. And as luck would have it, one of our scientists is Italian. He talked to them and just seeing the kids light up and hearing like, oh, this guy is like us who speaks Italian, he works on this incredible mission. It kind of like you could see the connections in their eyes like, oh, wow, this is something I could do. It’s not NASA is, you know, unattainable thing that no Italian has ever worked at. It’s like, no, I could do this if I really want to do it. So that was a recent one that just warmed my heart to see these kids just they sat there and they were really locked in. And they loved hearing about Webb in Italian. So that was a good one.

And a funny one that I’ll end on is you never know who you’ll meet at these conferences, like I assume, and it’s a good assumption that you’ll run into, like scientists, engineers at these science and engineering conferences. But one of my first events for Webb, I was at a Space Research Conference in Pasadena, California so just outside LA. And this guy walks up. I told my coworker, oh, that looks like Billy Zane, the guy from Titanic. And he walked up, and his dad said Billy Zane and I was like, oh, it is Billy Zane. I was just like, hey, like, what are you doing here?  He owns some small company and he’s interested in tech, and he lives in Pasadena. So, he’s like, oh, I saw it was here so I bought a badge and I came. Tell me about your mission. And he was just really interested in space stuff. He took us to lunch. We hung out with him for an afternoon. Yeah, it was just surprising connection that came out of nowhere.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

Also, we are getting ready to release a library exhibit to accompany this series. Any campus library can have access to our slides for display. Check out our website Longitude.site for more details soon.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Zehra Karakilic
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of scientists for helping us understand our universe better.

I am Zehra, a student at Tilburg University pursing a degree in neuroscience.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Jeyhan Kartaltepe from Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Jeyhan studies the distant universe, and she also conducts research on how galaxies first form and evolve over time using telescopes on the ground and in space. Furthermore, she is a leading member in several large collaborative multiwavelength surveys, including COSMOS.

Her COSMOS-Webb project team received one of the first grants to study the initial images from the James Webb Telescope, so I wanted to speak with her about her work and the unexpected findings she has encountered.

We started our conversation with her pathway to astronomy. Enjoy listening!

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Jeyhan Kartaltepe
I always liked astronomy, even when I was a little kid, because I partly liked the weird stuff. I always liked learning about space and I would ask my dad, you know, random questions about planets and other things. So, I think it was always fun for me and interesting and so far, removed from what we do and see, on a day to day basis. It seemed for me a natural direction to go in, to read and learn more about. So, it seemed natural to start to study in school. And then of course in school, you see the kinds of jobs that people around you do. They’re teaching classes and they are professors. And it seemed like that would be a fun job to do.

My work is all observational. So, it’s all done using data using telescopes. I’ve been involved with projects involving Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope and other telescopes. And so, JWST is kind of a natural extension. It’s something that the whole community has looked forward to for many, many years, and through its development and all the delays and just kind of the exciting next step in terms of having capabilities that we haven’t had before. And so being able to study things we haven’t been able to study before.

Zehra
I find it really fascinating to see what we can actually find out about the galaxy and about space, and that there’s actually just more than beyond our little world.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And it’s hard to believe we can learn about things that are so far away, or about the beginning of the universe. It sounds like science fiction, right? So, it’s one of the fun things to talk about, when teaching a class, like how do we actually learn about these things that are so far away that we can’t actually touch but what can we learn from their light?

Zehra
Could you maybe explain in a few sentences, the mechanism that makes up the telescope like the JWST?

Jeyhan
The most important part of a telescope is the mirror. So JWST has a large, about 6.5 meter in diameter mirror. It’s segmented. So, it was put together in pieces to make it easier to assemble, fold up and put on a spacecraft to launch so it’s a bit unusual that way. It also has a secondary mirror. So, there’s a big mirror, and then there’s a smaller mirror that, you know, the light reflects off the big mirror and then on the smaller mirror and then gets sent down to the cameras.

The other most important piece of a telescope is the cameras. You have to collect that light, somehow. The different cameras have different functions. They can collect data at different parts of the spectrum. JWST is optimized for the infrared part of the spectrum, but the infrared is a pretty wide range. And so, there’s instruments that are suited for the near infrared, so closer to the visible part of the spectrum that we see. And there’s others that are designed to work in the mid-infrared. And then there’s some that take images that just take pictures. And there’s others that take spectra.

Zehra
Yeah, so I also wanted to know a bit more how the whole infrared observing works.

Jeyhan
There’s a lot of reasons why the infrared is really important for astronomy, especially for what I do, it’s really important because our universe is expanding. So that means everything’s moving away from everything else. So, it has a motion. And anytime something moves, the light that it emits, is actually moved to a different part of the spectrum. So, for galaxies in the very distant universe, the light that they would emit in the visible part of the spectrum that we would see is actually moved all the way to the infrared. So, we need the infrared to be able to see their sort of normal, the invisible light that we see.

There’s also a lot of processes that emit in the infrared. One of the biggest is dust. Dust seems like it wouldn’t be important but it’s very important in space. Dust is particles in space that eventually form planets. And so, things like wanting to study planets or planet formation around stars, you need to be able to see that in the infrared dust in galaxies, regions that are forming new stars. You can see that in the infrared.

Zehra
That’s really interesting to hear about all of this. I wanted to ask also just generally, how this whole concept started with your project, and how long would you say it took to develop it?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a long answer and a short answer. So, this project that we’re leading, it’s called COSMOS-Webb, it’s observing a portion of the sky, that’s known as the cosmos field. And it’s something that I’ve worked on this particular field of the sky for almost all of my career. I started in graduate school when the first Hubble data of this area was taken. And so, over the years, you know, people have taken more and more data, because ideally, you’d like to have data across the entire spectrum to study all kinds of different objects and all kinds of different physical processes. When there was a call for proposals for JWST this was kind of a natural extension, like, Hey, we should really have the infrared data here too, because that would be fabulous but it took a while to work on it. Because of COVID, everything got delayed, which in a way sort of helped because it gave us more time to work on the proposals, to kind of hash out what we wanted to do. We had meetings like this one on Zoom every week, where we kind of talked about different ideas and different strategies, and what could we do if we did it this way or that way. And so, it really did take a long time to flesh out what we wanted to do. I think we were, in a way, kind of lucky to have that extra time to put it all together.

Zehra
It sounds such a complex project, what does your work environment look like? Like with who do you work with? Other astronomers, or maybe engineers?

Jeyhan
We have collaborators that are all over the world. So, we’ve been using zoom for many years, before it even became popular. A lot of people based in Europe, a lot of people based in the US, quite a few in Japan. Those are kind of the main places, and that includes people like me, or faculty that includes students. There’s a lot of graduate students that are involved, that includes postdocs. So, it’s a pretty broad range of people but for the most part, all scientists.

Zehra
What would you say is a typical day at your work? Like, how would you describe it?

Jeyhan
I guess it depends. Generally, my time is kind of split between teaching, which is kind of 20 – 30% of my time, something like that. Doing other universities support work, being on committees, evaluating student applications, you know, those kinds of things. And then about half of my time is devoted to research, but my research is really split into my own research where we’re working on things and working with my students. And so, I have a group of students and postdocs here that all have their own projects. And so, a good chunk of my time is spent working with them and meeting with them and talking through things. And ideally, when I have some focus time, and it’s spent writing, or programming. Those are kind of the two sides of things, you know, analyzing the data, which involves us a lot of coding and making plots and things like that. And then writing. Either writing the papers or writing proposals to obtain other data or obtain funding, things like that. So, you know, 90% of my day is in front of the computer.

Zehra
Do you also have like a student team that’s like helping out with the project?

Jeyhan
Yeah, I have several students here working with me on different projects. A couple of them are working on the COSMOS data and I have a couple of postdocs as well that are working on it.

Zehra
It’s really nice. I think it’s so important as a student to gain some research experience, which is quite hard sometimes. Especially working on such a big project and I think it’s probably very valuable in general.

Jeyhan
And it’s, it’s perfect timing for students right now. Because this is all new and exciting. So, I think it’s potentially grabbing the interest of students that might do something else, but then they see this cool thing and like, Oh, I could work on that. So hopefully fun for them.

Zehra
Could you also speak about so when you look at the universe through like a space telescope, how is it different than, I don’t know, like the telescopes on Earth? How is it more advanced? Or what would you say are the main differences or the similarities maybe also?

Jeyhan
The big difference of going to space versus being on the ground is to not have the atmosphere in the way. So, Earth’s atmosphere causes a lot of problems for observing. I mean, we need it so it’s great that we have it, but you know, if it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy. You can’t do anything about that the light is blocked. The atmosphere is very turbulent, right. There’s always stuff moving around. So that impacts how well you can see things because it kind of bounces light, you know, through the atmosphere on its way to the detector. So, by going to space, you can have much more detailed images and much more sensitive images. So, you can look at things that are much fainter, that you couldn’t see otherwise. And it’s especially true in the infrared because our atmosphere emits a lot in the infrared. And so, it, kind of, can block out certain parts of the spectrum, just because it’s already really bright there. So, you can’t see things that are faint behind it. So that’s really the biggest thing. Of course, the negative is that it’s expensive to put anything in space. And it’s difficult. So, you know, putting a big telescope is just technologically challenging. To get everything, kind of like JWST had to fold up, you know, to fit in the spacecraft, whereas on the ground, you can build bigger things, and it’s a little bit easier.

The other thing about going to space is temperature. Things can be kept really, really cold, which is again, important for the infrared. Things that are warm, emit light in the infrared, right, that’s how like infrared goggles and stuff work by looking at heat. So, you need to be away from Earth’s heat source to be able to do much in the infrared.

Zehra
Could you also talk about the COSMOS-Webb survey and what your whole role there is or your position?

Jeyhan
I’m one of the PI’s. I have a collaborator, Caitlin Casey, who’s at UT Austin, who’s the other PI, so we’re leading the survey together and the goal of this survey is to cover a relatively large area of the sky.

So, there’s kind of two different ways people go about surveys of galaxies. You can either look at one part of the sky, just take like one image, but sit there for a really long time so that you can collect more and more light, like a really long exposure and look at really faint things. So, then you don’t cover a large area, that’s a small area, but you look really faint.

The other strategy is to not expose for as long, so not to look as faint, but then to kind of map out a larger area. So instead, you’re covering many more galaxies, but more of the brighter ones and less of the fainter ones. In reality, people do both. The COSMOS-Webb survey is sort of that wide area. So, it’s wider than any of the surveys that are going to be done. Which means the huge benefit of that is statistics in some way. So, we’re going to observe, you know, hundreds of 1000s of galaxies, rather than, you know, 10,000, or something like that, like other surveys might have. And that also allows us to study sort of large-scale effects, large scale environments. So, if it matters, you know, whether something is really isolated, or whether something lives in a really dense environment, it’s like comparing things that happen in cities versus things that happened out in the suburbs, or in the rural area, you need kind of like a wide map really to be able to, to cover everything to see how things change.

Zehra
So how do you determine, like, the specific focus with the area, like, which wide range of the galaxies to pick?

Jeyhan
The area we picked is an area of the sky that people have studied for a long time. So, we already had data from other telescopes. So, you already have information in other parts of the spectrum. That’s really useful. So, you don’t have to go back and try to collect that after the fact. We want to study areas that are relatively free of like nearby stars, and things that are gonna get in the way. There’s gonna be stars everywhere but there’s certain parts of the sky where all you see your stars and certain parts that are more empty. And so, you have to choose an area that’s a bit more empty. It’s also in a part of the sky that we can observe from the ground from both hemispheres. You know, there are some parts of the sky you only see from the north or only from the south, this field is kind of on the equator. So, you can see it from anywhere, which is good for using other telescopes.

Zehra
Could you talk about if you already have some findings, such as achieved with the COSMOS-Webb survey, or how you think this could improve our current knowledge about the previously done studies, maybe?

Jeyhan
So, the biggest thing that we are trying to do is study the very, very early universe. So, the most distant galaxies. We just got a big chunk of data at the end of April that we’re kind of analyzing right now. But we already have sort of candidate objects that are very distant. And so, we want to study not only how many of them there are and what their properties are, but how they’re spatially distributed. If they’re kind of grouped together, or if they’re more kind of spread out. And so that’s, I think, something unique we’ll be able to do, we’ll be able to have so many of them. The other thing, that’s a huge benefit there is that if anything is really rare, you know, like, it’s extremely bright. And there might only be, you know, one and a certain patch of the sky, we’re more likely to find those rare things, because we’re covering a large area.

Zehra
And also because it’s different from the previously done studies and like different telescopes?

Jeyhan
Right, exactly. So, we can see things that are much fainter, and therefore, much further away. We can also see things in more detail. So, you know, from Hubble, sort of the extreme things that were found that are very distant, they’re just tiny little smudges, you know, like, you can’t see any detail there. You just like, oh, there’s something there. It’s like a tiny dot. But now we can see structure. And that tells us more information about what’s happening in the galaxies.

Zehra
Like generally, with your whole work and research, have you encountered something that was really surprising or maybe unexpected?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a few things that have been surprising. One is that so far, people have been finding more galaxies at these great distances than was expected. Like we all made predictions. Because we hadn’t seen them yet. And there’s theoretical predictions for what there might be. And so far, it seems like we’re seeing more things than people predicted, which is kind of fun, because that gives us more to work with. And it’s it was kind of unexpected. And now people are trying to figure out why that is. And so that kind of goes back to the theorists to figure out, you know, what is different about the universe, that there’s more things. So that’s been one surprise.

I guess another surprise, you know, from other surveys I’ve been working with is that there’s a lot of active black holes in these galaxies, like more and more of them than we might have. And maybe we should have known that, I don’t know. But to find so many of them, it’s been kind of exciting. So, it’s been an interesting thing that I think we weren’t really expecting to spend so much time on but it’s been popping up.

Zehra
What would you say is your expectation of the coming years when it comes to this field?

Jeyhan
We’re gonna learn so much. It’s still been less than a year since we started getting data. And there’s already been so much work, and so many papers, and so many discoveries. And it’s like, we only just scratching the surface. So, it’s going to be really exciting to see what comes out.

Zehra
Since you started working for JWST, what would you say was the most exciting thing that you were looking forward to in the beginning and what would you say is it now? Or how did that change their expectation, or your motivation also?

Jeyhan
I think we all kind of had an idea of what to expect based on simulations and what things would look like, but seeing the reality was just kind of mind blowing. Right? And the fact that everything worked. You know, just whenever you have such a big project, so many moving parts, so many things could go wrong, I think, of course, we all hoped nothing catastrophic would go wrong, but little things, little things can go wrong, like, oh, this particular thing doesn’t work, or oh, this instrument is not as sensitive as we thought it would be. But everything was so smooth and went so well. And that just almost never happened. So that was a huge shock.

Zehra
That was a lot of hard work and also good luck, I guess.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And, and because of the delays, the delays helped. Because you test something, it doesn’t work, you’re like, okay, we’re not gonna launch. Well, it doesn’t work, we need to keep testing and fix all the things. So that’s a good thing about the process, even though it made it take longer.

Zehra
So basically, there was like an extra six months to improve on the things and make it work better than I guess.

Jeyhan
And then of course, seeing the data was pretty amazing. Especially the spectra I think most people see images in pictures, and that I think people can relate to that. Spectra don’t mean anything to most people in the public. But, you know, for the scientists looking at spectra, that’s where you’re seeing, like the real physical information, and you can actually see your signatures of the different elements that you’re observing. And, and that’s really cool. And so, like when they did that big press event last summer, and they showed all the different things, they showed a spectrum of a galaxy, it was really far away. So, it’s just a bunch of lines. It probably looked really boring but that was the thing that kind of made me go, oh my God, that looks so cool. Because it’s still crazy to me that we can see that kind of detail at these at these crazy distances.

I think the biggest thing, to me is just the amount of awe and wonder about the universe that a telescope like this conveys. And I think that’s important for all of humanity, right? Even if you don’t know all the details about the science or how things work, just to see like the incredible wonders that are in our universe that we can actually learn about is like one of the biggest achievements of humanity, I think.

(music)

Zehra
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please 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.

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition. JWST or Webb, is a space observatory that is a million miles from earth, giving us a new look at the universe.

I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate of the master of engineering management and leadership program from Rice University.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Alison Nordt, director of space science and instrumentation at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

I was interested in the new innovations and the partnerships that made the Webb telescope a success.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Alison Nordt
There are four instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. And since it’s an international project, some of those instruments are actually from the international partners. There are two from the European Space Agency and one from the Canadian Space Agency. And, and the one that I worked on called the Near Infrared Camera is the one US instrument. It’s also the primary Near Infrared Imager on the observatory, and kind of serves two purposes, not just as a science instrument, but it’s also serves as the wavefront sensor, which means it does the sensing for how the images are coming from the telescope and how they’re, for lack of a better term, how are they messed up? Because the James Webb Telescope has 18 segments in its primary mirror. So, there are 18 segments that are all adjustable on orbit, and you have to change the shape of them, and their position and orientations, to get it to act like a perfect mirror after it unfolds in space and then cools down to cryogenic temperatures. So that sensing of how to correct the primary mirror is all done was in NIRcam, so if NIRCam doesn’t work or if it didn’t work, it does now, but if it hadn’t worked, then the James Webb telescope would not have worked.

Louis
Yeah, that’s quite the mechanisms and actuation problem for all 18 segments moving. I remember that was a very pivotal part of the launch when it was in orbit and then had to adjust it to make sure we got everything in focus and working. Let’s step a bit down on the in terms of technical level just for this next question. Um, could you describe how an infrared camera is different than other cameras? And why that may be important to James Webb Space Telescope?

Alison
Oh, absolutely. Okay. So, the light that our eyes can see, it’s just in the visible spectrum. And that’s a very small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. That includes X-rays, and microwaves, and all of these different types of electromagnetic radiation. The infrared spectrum is just a bit longer than red. So, the ultraviolet is a bit shorter than blue. And the infrared is a bit longer than red. Everything at the observatory starts with the science. You know, why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we looking in the infrared starts with the science?

The science goals for the Webb telescope are to look at the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. And these galaxies formed a long time ago, you know, approximately 13.7 billion years ago. So how do we look back in time like that? Well, the light takes a long time to get to us because the universe is expanding. And of course, we’ve learned over the last several decades that not only is it expanding, but it’s accelerating in its expansion, which means that the objects that are very far away from us are traveling away from us and accelerating in their speed. So, if we want to look back in time and see these very first galaxies, we’re looking a long time away at objects that are moving far away from us. Well, light is shifted similar to sound. When you hear a train go by, you know, you hear the Doppler effect, in motion where the train is at a higher pitch when it’s coming toward you and then a lower pitch is it’s going away from you. The same thing happens with light that happens with sound. So, if we’re looking at an object that’s coming toward us, it looks bluer than it actually is. And if you’re looking at an object that is moving away from you, is looks redder than it actually is. But if it’s moving really, really fast away from you, then the light can be shifted into a very different spectrum than it originally. So, these galaxies started with light that our eyes can see even blue light. And as it evolved over time, and is now moving so far away from us, that lights all been stretched out by the effective the speed of the light, and it stretched into the infrared. So, we need to look at these longer wavelengths that are stretched out. So that’s what drives the need for an infrared camera. And it enables us also to see within a nebula, the property of infrared light is that it can detect heat. And so, if we’re looking for how are stars galaxies born, there’s a big cloud like a nebula of gas and dust that the visible light can’t get through. But infrared light detects heat. It can see through that and see to the birthplace of the stars. What’s different about an infrared camera it can detect those longer wavelengths that the detectors are optimized to see infrared light as opposed to visible light, or even ultraviolet, there are certain detectors that can see ultraviolet light or see infrared light. But infrared light, again, is a detection of heat. So, if you’re building a telescope to detect heat, you have to make it really cold or the heat will blind it effectively. So, our instrument operates at 37 Kelvin, or 37 degrees above absolute zero. So that enables us to be very sensitive to the faint infrared light that’s coming from infant galaxies billions of years ago.

Louis
And that detection at such a low temperature, I understand that was partly what made that possible is the large sunshield. Is that correct? And was that something you worked on?

Alison
I did not work on that. There were many, many people who worked on all aspects of Webb. But yes, one of the unique features of Webb is that it is passively cooled. Most of it. There is one cryocooler, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. But most of the observatory is cooled down to a roughly 40 Kelvin, due to this giant sunshield this the size of a tennis court, and it has five layers in it. And they separate these layers so that there is a vacuum or a space between them. So you don’t get conduction through those layers. And they basically shield the light from the earth, the Sun and the Moon at the same time, which dictates where we are.  The Webb telescope is a million miles from Earth. And it’s away from the Sun in the opposite direction of the Sun at a unique orbital point called L2 or Lagrange point 2 where it can orbit this point, and use this giant sunshield to block the heat of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. And so that allows the telescope to cool down to roughly 37 – 40 Kelvin and keep us very cold. So yes, that sunshield enables us to do that but that I did not work on that I just worked on the instrument, the camera. But there’s lots of people worked on all different aspects of Webb.

Louis
Speaking of which, it’s a very complex and large project spanning multiple countries and continents and organizations. Do you know how many people were involved in the JWST project? And maybe how many of those were from Lockheed Martin?

Alison
There’s been estimates that roughly 20,000 people have worked on Webb, which is a large number of people but it took a huge team to do that. At Lockheed Martin, there were about 130 to 150 people over the course of the time. We never had that many at one point working on it, but remember, we worked on it for quite a long time and supported it. We basically worked on it from the time we first proposed it until we delivered it was just over 10 years. The project started in 2002. It launched in 2021. So, a lot of that time was at higher levels of testing. We weren’t working on the camera for 20 years but there was a lot of different layers of testing. And so, some aspects of the program had to start earlier than others. But over that time, they had something like 20,000 people work on it. And these are people from all over the world. I mean, there’s people from Europe, from Canada, from the United States from even French Guiana where the rocket launched from, so several continents of people working on the telescope.

Louis
So cool. And was there ever a point in the project where they needed to put a lot more personnel on it? Like, you know, it wasn’t maybe like a team of, you know, 20 to 40 at Lockheed Martin then did it ever ramp up? Like a particularly, you know, critical moment, or one where you needed a lot of personnel?

Alison
Yeah, the most number of people that were working on, it was probably during testing of all of the components and starting integration. Because we had a lot of different assemblies that would have to come together to be put into the camera. NIRCam had over 130 optics, and each optic needed to be individually tested and then assembled with its next higher level of assembly and, and tested again and tested again, and make sure that everything works at every level. Again, everything has to be tested at cryogenic temperatures. So, it takes a lot of work to do that all the electronics boards were going through testing. You are trying to do a lot of testing in parallel. That’s what adds up to a lot of people to get that done.

Louis
I see, that’s very interesting. So, what was your approach to problems or maintaining motivation on this long-term project? And was that approach similar to that of your team members?

Alison
Well, yeah. I think that a lot of team members had a lot of motivation to get this done. What drove us was getting, you know, this mission accomplished. You know, the science in the end. But you know, there are some long days when things don’t go well. A lot of the things that we had to develop for NIRCam for Webb as a whole, were new. That hadn’t been done before, hadn’t been applied this way. So not just new technologies that had to be developed, but better ways of doing things that have never been done before. I mean, manufacturing of optics, for instance, you think, oh well, optics had been manufactured since Galileo was grinding lenses. For sure, but if you’re going to do them in orders of magnitude more precisely than has ever been done before, you have to develop new processes. You have to figure out ways to do this at 37 Kelvin. And then the end mission to accomplish this world class observatory that is better than any observatory has ever been built before. So that’s just motivation to work on such a great project that can change the fundamental understanding of the universe. That’s a lot of motivation.

Louis
Yeah, but when it boils down to it, that is quite an impactful sort of overarching mission. So, one question we always like to ask is, did you experience anything surprising that you did not expect while working on this project?

Alison
About every day! You know, you think, oh well, it’s the same but different, we’ll just do it again. And then it’s not. You know, there’s lots of challenges and you go into test, and you put something together the way that, you know, a textbook could tell you the best it could be done, and you find out that’s not good enough. And then you have to do an order of magnitude better. So yeah, sometimes things are surprising. And sometimes they surprise you in a good way. Even if you’re the only one that thinks that it can be done and accomplished, there is a lot of people are telling you it can’t. And then you sometimes get pleasantly surprised and go see, it worked the way I planned. Occasionally that happens. But you know, this is the process of invention and discoveries.

Louis
How did partnerships with NASA, ESA, and the CSA or other organizations influenced decision making and project timelines? And more broadly, I guess, what would what do you consider best practices for long term collaborations with multiple organizations?

Alison
Okay, yeah, a couple of different parts of that question. The instruments were individually split up into different contributions from different countries. So, they were separate. Until we all got together at the same time, at the end, when we delivered our instruments, what the European Space Agency was doing didn’t really affect what we were doing or what Canada was doing. We’re kind of working in parallel, so we were not affecting each other on a daily basis. There were some decisions made early by NASA that said, originally, we were going to have Canadian contributions inside of NIRCam, and we were going to work with the Europeans and the NASA management said, you know, I think that that’s a recipe for possible delays. Because we have a lot of restrictions in spaceflight. We were at that point, governed by the ITAR rules. And a lot has gone under the Department of Commerce now that the Department of State has rules on International Traffic and Arms Regulations. So, a lot of spaceflight hardware falls under those rules. And so it makes it a bit more challenging to share information internationally. And so, NASA decided that NIRCam would be an all US instrument, and that we wouldn’t have to get contributions from Canada or Europe, which, for better or for worse, it simplified interfaces but we didn’t. We kind of worked in parallel separately.

So as for best practices on a large mission like this, I think it’s, you know, check your egos at the door, and work for the mission together. You know, an example of this was when we when we got to finally put all of the instruments together into what’s called the integrated science instrument module. So, it’s the structure that holds all the science instruments, and now we’re, we are literally millimeters from each other when we put our instruments in, and there’s not a lot of extra space in there and put us all into one structure. And then we had to go to test that structure. Go to the vibration test. And it’s the first time that that the different teams were all in the same room. The test was executed at NASA. So we had the NASA team there that was executing the test, and we had the NIRCam team there from Lockheed, and the US team. And then we had the Europeans from the MIRI and NIRSpec teams. We had the Canadians there from for their instrument, FTS NIRISS. And we are all literally sitting shoulder to shoulder at different consoles watching the data coming in from those tests. And you’re looking at all of the different channels from the accelerometers that are all over the instruments. And of course, first you look at your own results, for your instrument, but then you’ve got access to everybody else’s results. And so, you are kind of cross checking each other and, and if anybody had any sort of anomaly, we were all kind of rolling up our sleeves and getting together. There wasn’t any finger pointing. There wasn’t any “Hahaha, we’re done and we’re gonna go out to eat, you guys solve your problem and stay till midnight.” Everybody was working together in that environment. And that kind of collaboration, I think is essential for a project like this. We saw it at different levels of testing. You know, it’s really refreshing environment to be in.

Louis
Yeah, that’s really fun you know. Sometimes you have to compartmentalize when dealing with things like ITAR but it engineering really shines, I think when you get in that teamwork setting, and you get to collaborate and build something amazing, which you clearly have done. How do you think James Webb Space Telescope is changing the way we see the universe?

Alison
Have you looked at any of the pictures yet? Take a look at some of the images and the descriptions of them. And some of them are absolutely gorgeous. And some of them may just be a smudge of light and yet we learn more from that smudge of light than you could ever imagine. What’s been most exciting is seeing really the deep fields looking at the very early galaxies. And I was talking to one of the scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute last week, and she’s looking at galaxies, and looking at very, very old galaxies and trying to compare them to newer galaxies and seeing if you can understand what’s going on in in a very old galaxy, by comparing it to something maybe a little bit closer and you get more light from and understand better, but making the Galaxy comparisons of what was a galaxy looking like that was formed, you know, 13.5 billion years ago. And one of the big shocks that came out recently was that some of those very early galaxies are extremely massive, and very mature. And that wasn’t the hypothesis. The hypothesis was that those galaxies would be much smaller than maybe short lived, they wouldn’t look like this. Why? We don’t know. You know, I’m now relying on the scientists and the astrophysicist to tell me what they’re learning from these pictures but they’re gonna fundamentally change what we know about the evolution of the universe, which I think is mind blowing. And it’s, it’s answering the questions of, you know, what makes us human.

As an advanced society to really ask and probe science questions to understand our world or universe or nature, we’re really fundamentally changing human knowledge for the future. Go fast forward 500 years, and what are the people 500 years from now going to think about what happened in the year, you know, 2020, or, you know, 2000s. I think that what we’re learning with Webb will be as profound as anything that is going on anywhere in our world right now. And I think it will be remembered and looked back as a great accomplishment, even 500 years from now.

Louis
I agree, it really is remarkable. And I think the work that you and many other people have been putting into this is really given a lot of hope and inspiration for a lot of people out there, you know, looking up to the stars, like there’s more to see. And there’s certainly a lot more science to be done. So we’re looking forward to it. Are you working on anything fun right now that you’re excited about?

Alison
Absolutely. I mean, Webb was fantastic to build and now the scientists are getting their time to use it, but I think what’s really exciting now is what’s next. And we’re working on formulating the Habitable Worlds Observatory. And if I look, you know, over the past 30 years, we’ve discovered all of these exoplanets, but the ones that we’ve been able to see are very large planets, Jupiter size or greater, large distances from their central star. And their central star is usually not as bright. We’re trying to build an observatory that can observe an Earth like planet around a sunlight star at about a one au kind of distance and get it spectrum and see what kind of characterize those planets. I mean, if you go back in human history, how many times have people looked up even a caveman and wondered whether there’s another world like ours out there, and we’ve never seen it and within our lifetime we might be able to. And so, we’re working on those technologies right now. And that’s what’s really exciting.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Ali Kazmaz
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of organizations and the people.

I am Ali Kazmaz, a student at Rice University pursuing a degree in architecture.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Mei-Li Hey from Northrop Grumman.

Mei-Li is a mechanical design engineer who worked on the James Webb project. I wanted to speak to her about her role as a test engineer intern when she first started at Northrop Grumman and how this led to her working on the project full-time, and also to understand the collaborations of different engineers that brought their projects to fruition.

We began our conversation with her telling us about the internship first. Enjoy listening!

(music)

Mei-Li Hey
I started as an intern the summer of 2016. I didn’t know what role I was going to play, let alone the program. I think I really lucked out with getting put on James Webb. Test engineers, they’re in charge of reading the drawings, and then writing procedures that will help the technicians who are the ones actually performing the work in, you know, exactly how they’re going to do it. I mean, these procedures, say down to like, take this nut, and this bolt and this washer, put them together to attach these two pieces, right? So, test engineers write those directions.

Ali
Sort of like Lego prescriptions. Very specific.

Mei-Li
Yes, exactly. Right. Test engineers are the ones who are doing the authoring. So, they do a lot of technical writing. And I thought that was cool. But as I was doing it, I liked the drawings. When I was reading the drawings, I was like, who’s making these drawings, because that seems like fun. They’re the ones who actually have some freedom, and they have some, you know, creative outlet, I guess, and how they’re going to design this whole thing. I was able to meet one of the managers of the mechanical design engineers, said, Hey, I’m a test engineer. But I would love to learn a little bit more about your group. And he was the manager of mechanical ground systems engineering. So, I spent the last maybe couple of weeks at my internship, learning just a little bit about that. And so, then when I got hired full-time, they knew that I liked the design aspect better so they put me straight into design engineering, where then I had a whole another world to learn. And it takes a little bit longer to learn that design part, but I like it a lot better.

Ali
When you were an intern, they were working on the Webb, and when you got hired, they were still working on the Webb, right?

Mei-Li
Yeah, absolutely. So, Webb was a very long program. We started, by we, I would say the company started proposing Webb in 1996. And my company officially won Webb in 2001. The original launch date was 2011. And we were exactly 10 years late. We doubled schedule. So, I did not join until like I said, 2016 was my internship. And then 2017 is when I started full-time. And so, I was on the program full time for the last 25% of the program, only. There were a few people on the program that had been there for the entirety of their career, they’d been there for 25 years, working on just this program. But for the most part, people’s lives change, and you have people cycle through I think, on average, this program’s retention was much better than most because it was a very exciting program. I joined at the very tail end.

Ali
You said, you were very interested in the creative process and how they were actually making the drawings instead of like the assembly of them. Could you maybe talk about how you merge this creativity, science and engineering?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. I think that design engineering is really the best way to do that. You do need to lean on creative skills, but you also need to have very strong quantitative skills to do the engineering portion of it. But I guess another unique part of joining the program when I did was that at this point, we were pretty much only addressing things that had gone wrong. So unplanned events. Like we had lots of parts that didn’t fit or things that broke, and we needed to go fix and they weren’t in the plan to go do these things. So, you needed to come up with pretty creative solutions. I mean, like one example is the bus of the James Webb.

There’s three main sub-assemblies for the Webb. And you mentioned one of them. It’s the sunshield. I feel like that’s the most iconic, just because it’s giant and shiny, and there’s nothing like it. And then of course, there’s the telescope part, which is the shiny gold mirrored telescope. And then under the sunshield on the other side of the sunshield is the least exciting subsystems called the bus and it’s just the big box that has all of the electrical components inside it. It’s really what runs the entire telescope is this big box. It’s called the bus.

There’s a ton of electrical components inside and one of them broke very late in the game. And we had to basically pull off the panels of the bus, taking apart the cube. So, taking up off one side of the cube, and going in there to try and fix the electrical component that broke. But obviously, none of that work is planned. So, figuring out how you’re going to take apart something that was never meant to be taken apart, and then put it back together, it takes a whole lot of creativity and equipment. And we needed to end up making a slew of pieces of equipment to take off this panel. And like access is really small. So, we had to make specialized tools that’s going to go in and reach and just fix this little component, come out and like thread the needle through these things, right. So that’s where creativity comes in. Because you have to think outside of the box. The only solutions that are going to work are going to be ones that are outside the box. But I mean, luckily, it’s not just you, it’s going to be you along with a bunch of other engineers, and you will stand on the floor and look at the problem. You have to come up with a solution, or plans.

Ali
How does that collaborative process work, like when working with a bunch of people that have different ideas of how to solve this, you know, how does that work?

Mei-Li
Yeah, it’s sometimes difficult, and especially in those very, very tense moments, it can get heated because like something just broke. So, tensions are already high. I think that what was very cool about the James Webb is that everybody who was working on it, we all had a shared mission, we want to get this thing off the ground. And I think that, you know, that is a very united feeling. Everybody’s doing what they’re doing or saying what they’re saying, because they have the same goal in mind. So, kind of have to keep that in mind if you start disagreeing on something. But the engineering process helps a lot, if you follow it.

You have systems engineers that will help you define requirements. Requirements are a very big deal. And, you know, if you say, well, this electrical component broke, you’ll have somebody that says, well, like, what do you mean, it broke? Like, what doesn’t work about it? And you have to then go to the requirements about what working means, is it meeting a certain threshold and meeting a certain requirement? So similar if like, okay, it breaks, it’s not meeting a certain requirement so how do you go and fix that requirement? And so, some people might offer a solution? You know, I might have an idea and say, well, I think, you know, I think we should rip apart the bus and take off this part and replace it with a brand-new part. Somebody else might say, well, okay, we don’t need a new part. We just need to fix this one piece, and then it meets the requirements again. Okay, well, technically, they’re right. As long as the requirements are met, you move on.

I think like the process to come to a solution is defining your requirements, brainstorming ideas, and then choosing the path of least resistance. Those are the three steps, I would say. And then everybody understands that that’s the engineering process. So, there could be debate about details and everything, but you define your requirements, you brainstorm ideas, and then you choose the path of least resistance.

Ali
And those three things that you said, are all engineers on the team, focusing on all three aspects, or I think you’ve said, some of them focus on defining the criteria, and some of them focus on solving problems, right.

Mei-Li
They’re all involved. You need many different disciplines to be involved in this decision-making process but each one has their responsibility or their expertise I should say. Like systems engineers, they’re experts in requirements definition. So, they’ll be giving a lot of input when we’re defining requirements. And then when we’re brainstorming solutions, design engineers are the ones who are really good at that. Their expertise is design. So, as we’re brainstorming or roughly designing different solutions, they’re heavily involved, but of course, they can only do that with the input of a test engineer who understands in depth, what the procedure is going to look like. Because I’ve made a made a wonderful tool that’s really really cool, you know, robot arm that’s going to go in and grab the piece, but the test engineer is the one with the information like, well, no, because we need to do steps A, B and C first. They’re more looking at it and like its sequential order and your robot arm won’t fit. Because C hasn’t been done yet when you’re trying to use the arm. So, like, I don’t think that any of these problems could be solved with just one discipline. It’s a collaborative effort, certainly. And I think, depending on what the problem is, and what phase you’re at, there’s going to be people who are, you know, have more responsibility to get things moving or less, but it’s, you know, it’s only going to occur successfully if you have participation of all disciplines there.

Ali
So, did you sort of figure out that you wanted to be more on the design side, as you were interning or did you have sort of an idea before that as well, that you’re wanting to be more on the design side of engineering?

Mei-Li
I think I had a little bit of an idea before, but being a test engineer, and then seeing what design engineers actually did verified it, for sure. So yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, I loved art. And I was a sculptor. And if I didn’t go into engineering, in college, I was gonna go into fine arts. So, I knew I really liked the artistic side of, you know, I had a, I like exercising the creative part of my brain as well. And so, a lot of what I focused on in college had to do with design, engineering, also. And I liked that. It’s a very good bridge for somebody who enjoys being creative, and especially sculpting you know, that I love ceramics. And that was my outlet in high school and in college. And so, design engineering is like computer animated sculpting. A lot of the times you’re just using software to help you make something instead of clay.

Ali
Could we talk about why the sunshield was essential for the James Webb telescope? And were you involved more in the sunshield design or more in the bus? And solving that problem that you described with the bus?

Mei-Li
Yeah, so even within design engineering, there are different types. So, the design of the sunshield was done by flight design engineers. They are experts in designing the parts that go to space. I was a mechanical grounds systems designer. When something needed to be tested, or integrated, or even something goes wrong, and they need special tools, you know, robot arms or whatever, you know, to fix the problem. That’s what I designed. So I’m not designing the stuff that actually goes to space. I’m designing all like a slew of equipment that’s needed in the integration and test. So, like, in terms of the sun shield, I had heavy involvement, but not from like designing, you know, the design of the sun shield happened in the early 2000s. So, I was like, 10, you know,

Ali
Has this technology evolved from then, or don’t they change anything since 2000?

Mei-Li
That’s a really good point. And that was like an electrical problem that I mentioned earlier. That happened because of software obsolescence. Because, you know, we were 10 years late in launching. So the parts that were in there were good, but it had been a long time. And so, you know, the, yes, we designed something that’s the first of its kind, and it’s brand new, but it’s not really brand new, it’s 20 years old, at the rate in which technology changes. The design of the sunshield was still, you know, was done 20 years ago, but nobody’s ever done anything like it, so it was still brand new, and the first of its kind.

When I joined, they had just finished putting it together. They had just finished, like actually fabricating it and so now it was time to test. There was a ton of mechanical ground systems, pieces that went into the testing of it. So, when we’re testing the sunshield to be able to operate in space, obviously, we want it to operate in zero G, but here there’s gravity. So how are we going to do that to make sure it works? Well, we have to design a slew of zero gravity simulators and weight off-loaders, things like that. And that’s what my team designed. So, I designed one zero gravity simulator for the deployment of the telescope upwards. Like there’s one point and the deployment sequence if you like, I know that there’s a YouTube video online where you can watch the entire James Webb. First it comes down, right and then the sunshield spreads out. And then, at one point that telescope starts moving upwards into its final position. That test, we needed it to like create a zero gravity simulator to offload the weight of the telescope. And that thing on top, I helped design. So, that’s an example of the sort of work that we do.

But if you’re interested in like the design of flight hardware, the stuff that actually goes to space, that’s a whole another design position. They have different sets of requirements. Their process to design, something that goes to space is much more rigorous, because it’s going to space, it’s less rapid. A lot of the designs I do are very rapid. And the design flight design engineers, it’s as much it’s a slower process, because they have to be very meticulous, you know, every single design decision.

Ali
What’s the new project that you guys are working on?

Mei-Li
There’s so much going on at Northrop all the time, but I am manager of cryocooler manufacturing. Basically, what it is, is just it works the same way a refrigerator does, fancy space refrigerator. And the point of having a cryocooler is to cool down all of the electronic components. James Webb has the most sophisticated cryocooler ever made. It really is an impressive piece of technology. What it does is it keeps all of the electronic components very, very cold so that if you have anything like Infrared, or X rays, or anything that’s trying to pick up light waves, you need to be able to keep everything very cold so that the sensors and the cameras on the telescope that read heat, or light can pick up, you know, the faint signals of those.

We fabricate cryocoolers here and then we include them in some of our own vertical integration. We also sell them to other companies like Lockheed and Raytheon. Other companies who also make satellites and might need a cryocooler.

Ali
How does the technology benefit the Webb and all these satellites?

Mei-Li
It makes the infrared and X ray possible. So, since Webb is an infrared telescope, without the cryocooler, these images wouldn’t be possible. What would happen is the electronics would be too hot and then that would mean that the infrared pictures that the telescope is taking, it wouldn’t be able to take those. Instead, it would just be muddled by the heat signatures coming from the electronic components.

Ali
How would you describe the infrared technology? What’s the advantage that it offers, compared to what they have on the Hubble?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. Visible light is what the Hubble takes pictures of. When you just take a picture of visible light, you can only see what is there right now, whereas infrared light, I mean, think of it like heat graph. You might have seen like in movies, sometimes when they have like cops that are looking into rooms, but you can see through doors, because you’re looking for a heat signature sort of thing. And it’s basically like the Webb has a camera so we can see through clouds. We can see through dust. We can see through rocks, meteors. We can see through all of that to see the infrared that’s many, many, many, many more miles away. Similarly, if I if I put my hand down on my desk here, and then I pick up my hand, if I looked at that spot on my desk with an infrared light, my handprint would still be there, right? Because heat has transferred from my hand to the desk. So visible light, it would just be a blank spot on my desk, but infrared light, it would say Oh, well, like there’s a hand that was here, right? Because there’s heat there. That was transferred from my hands to the desk.

Similarly, what we think happened with the Big Bang, and the first light is that those stars, galaxies, they don’t exist anymore. What happened with the Big Bang, that doesn’t exist anymore. But if we point the Webb towards that place where that did happen, there should be a heat signature from when it occurred because it was an event of universal size, right? So, like the biggest heat signature ever. And so there should be some remnants of that. So, the James Webb’s, part of its mission was to see if we see what we expect to see, to prove that the Big Bang actually did happen. If we don’t see that the heat signature that we expect to see, then maybe something else happened. We have found some images that suggest that that the Big Bang happened far before when we thought it happened. The universe is a lot older than we think it is. And so, I don’t think anything officially has been released yet like no new theories, but it’s not what we expected.

(music)

Ali
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Keegan Leibrock
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition.

I am Keegan Leibrock, a student at Rice University pursing degrees in economics and political science.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Matthew Greenhouse, an infrared astronomer from NASA. He has been working on the Webb telescope since 1997.

Prior to 1997, Dr. Greenhouse worked for the Smithsonian as an astrophysicist. We began our conversation about his work there and what it was like transitioning into working at NASA.

Please enjoy listening!

(music)

Matthew Greenhouse
I’ll give you a little bit of my background. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. My undergraduate degree was in geology. I became a geologist. And then I decided that I wanted to go into planetary geology and then shortly after that, I decided I wanted to just go into astrophysics. And so, I went off to the University of Wyoming to get my PhD in astrophysics. I went to Wyoming because at the time, they had just built what was the world’s largest infrared telescope. They needed people to help build instrumentation and things like that. So, I thought it was a good place for me to go, and it turned out to be.

The first job that one gets after getting a PhD, it’s called a postdoctoral fellowship, or postdoc. And I did my postdoc at Smithsonian in Washington, where the primary project that I worked on was a European Space Agency project called the Infrared Space Observatory. Then, in 1996, I moved to Goddard Space Flight Center, because I’m the kind of astronomer that builds things and Goddard was just a better venue or place to be for building things than Smithsonian. In 1997, I joined the Webb mission, and I’ve been on that mission, ever since. It’s turned out to be my whole career.

Keegan
Honing in on the Webb Space Telescope, what sort of discoveries have been made using this new telescope? To me, it seems like new discoveries are being made every day, the capabilities are obviously immense. So, like, what is the processing like for these new discoveries?

Matthew
Well, Webb mission is just getting started. We’re a little over a year into the science mission. But as you say, every other day, there’s a there’s a discovery with the Webb. The Webb is giving humanity its first high-definition view of the infrared universe. So, it’s not a surprise that we’re having so many discoveries so quickly.  Much of it comes from the Webb’s ability to see fine detail like the Hubble Space Telescope does, and the Webb’s ability to detect incredibly faint light from the early universe and do all this in the infrared part of the spectrum. So, the Webb is showing us our first look at the first galaxies. A lot of surprises there. It’s enabling us to measure the chemistry in exoplanet atmospheres and all kinds of objects, revealing some phenomena that have never been seen before. It’s very exciting.

One of the things that seem unique about the Webb mission that we haven’t seen in the past, is the extent to which all the exciting results from the Webb, show up on social media and are all over the world within days, if not hours. So, the Webb is I think the first mission of its kind to fly in the era of social media. And so, it’s enabling all of humanity, really, not just not just the people in the US and Europe to share in the excitement of the web mission. I think it’s wonderful.

Keegan
And with that, can you explain how the Webb Space Telescope is sort of different from past telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s like the infrared capabilities and like being able to see new things that were previously not available.

Matthew
Sure. The Webb is designed to operate in the infrared part of the spectrum and that is what is most different about it from some of our other observatories. Hubble operates in the ultraviolet, visible part of the spectrum. Chandra operates in the X-ray part of the spectrum. One observes different phenomenon in these different parts of the spectrum.

Everything we know about the universe outside our solar system comes to us transmitted in starlight. What modern astronomers do primarily is extract physics information from starlight. And so, to get all the information about the universe, we need all the star light. And so that requires that we put telescopes in space because much of the light is blocked by our atmosphere. And it also requires that we build a number of different observatories that can operate concurrently with each one focused on a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum of light. Because one needs different types of equipment and methods to observe in different parts of the spectrum. So, we require several different observatories.

We built the Webb as an infrared telescope, in order to see the light from the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Galaxies emit most of their light in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. But as that light travels to us, through the expanding space of the universe, for these primeval galaxies, the wavelength of the light is stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space. So, to observe it today, we have to build an infrared telescope. And that comes with all kinds of technical problems and unique challenges but it’s one of the things that sets the Webb most apart from, say, the Hubble. The Hubble cannot see the first galaxies, because it doesn’t have sufficient infrared capability. Also, its primary mirror is too small to be able to detect the faint light from those first galaxies.

Keegan
What is the role of NASA and sort of coordinating different partnerships with other organizations as well as like funding for Webb Space Telescope projects?

Matthew
Well, the Webb project was much too large a project for NASA to do by itself. So, it was a partnership with the European Space Agency and also the Canadian Space Agency. You know, we had to invite those agencies to be partners, and then we had to negotiate those partnerships.

Keegan
And with that, what sort of ongoing projects are there currently, regarding the telescope? And I was also curious, like how use of the telescope may be divided, because I’m sure a lot of different astronomers want to use it.

Matthew
How does it all work? Well, once a year, NASA solicits observing proposals. Proposals on where to point the telescope, from the worldwide astronomical community. Not anyone can submit such a proposal. Then the proposals are peer reviewed. They’re reviewed by other astronomers in a double-blind fashion. Then a subset of all those proposals are selected to be uploaded to the Webb telescope. That’s how it works. So, after each one of those proposal cycles, we have about a year’s worth of observing projects queued up.

Keegan
So is that a pretty competitive procedure? Are there people who maybe don’t get to go through their projects for some time?

Matthew
Yeah, it’s an enormously competitive procedure. Each proposal is typically authored by a large team of astronomers. It’s very competitive but it’s also very fair. The double-blind aspect makes it possible for very young astronomers and basically anyone with a good idea to get that idea evaluated on a level playing field.

Keegan
Awesome, and what does your day-to-day work look like with regard to the Webb Space Telescope and other NASA projects? I’m sure you have all sorts of things going on.

Matthew
Right now, my focus is actually on missions that are in development now that haven’t flown yet. So, my Webb work is basically finished. It’s up and flying and working great. So, we have occasional anomaly resolutions and things like that but my focus is on very much on what comes next in the infrared.

Keegan
Yeah, and building on infrared I know you discussed this earlier but what specifically can the Webb telescope offer into the origins of life into the universe that previous telescopes couldn’t? I know you said, they can see further into the origins?

Matthew
Yeah, when I was a graduate student, there were no planets known outside our solar system. Today, we’ve identified more than five thousand, with the implication that all stars have planets. I mean, most astronomers would agree that all stars have planets with very few exceptions. And that gives us the implication that there are billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy. We don’t know that they’re inhabited but we know that they’re habitable. And we have learned how to search for life on them by studying the chemistry of their atmospheres. With missions like the Webb and even Hubble, we have developed techniques for doing spectroscopy on exoplanet atmospheres. Spectroscopy is a process by which we spread light out into its component colors, with special optics to allow us to see the emission and absorption of light by individual atoms and molecules in the atmospheres of these exoplanets. And what we’re looking for is chemistry that would be indicative of life. Chemistry that would be hard to explain with a biotic processes alone. And this is really just getting underway at NASA. The search for life is no longer a stuff of science fiction, it is very much a major objective of NASA Space Science. And we’re well into it now. So, the Webb will be the first major strategic mission to really work on this hard, and many more will follow.

Keegan
Sure, and with that, how do you think how else do you think the telescope will continue to shape the field of astronomy moving forward?

Matthew
It’s raising lots of questions about how galaxies form and evolve. It’s going to show us star formation in our own galaxy in detail that we’ve never seen before. It’s shown us unusual phenomena that we’ve never seen before. We have seen how, in one particular example, a late type star is seen to periodically emit pulses of dust formation that have produced an incredible display of a concentric rings of emission around the star. The Webb is just a fantastic machine, one that we’ve never had anything like it before. Whenever we take an image with the Webb, the background of the image is in effect, a deep field image like the Hubble deep field image. So the data is just incredibly rich. The system’s working perfectly. And we’re all very excited. And it should be just continuous excitement for as long as the Webb lasts.

Keegan
How long is the lifecycle typically of a telescope like this? Obviously, there has never been one like the Webb Space Telescope, but do you anticipate that 20 years down the line, maybe 30 years, there’ll be an even bigger telescope developed?

Matthew
Well, there definitely will be. The formal engineering life of the Webb is five years. But the consumables on board are, we have apparently 20 years of fuel. And that doesn’t mean the Webb will last 20 years, but it can last that long. If it doesn’t last that long, it won’t be due to lack of propellant. So, we’ll have to wait and see. Hubble of course, has lasted way, way, way beyond this design life, but by virtue of servicing. The Webb cannot be serviced the way Hubble was. The astronauts can’t go to the Sun-Earth L2 point where the Webb resides. We built lots and lots of redundancy into the Webb adjustability and we’ve designed it for graceful degradation. So, we’re very optimistic that it’s going to last a long, long time.

Now, the successor mission to the Webb, the one that NASA will launch right after it, in 2027, is called the Roman Space Telescope. It’s a completely different machine that’s designed primarily to study dark energy. But one of the things on board the Roman Space Telescope is a technology development instrument that will prove out the technology that we need to observe Earth like exoplanets. And ahead of the true successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is something called the Habitable Worlds Observer, the National Academy of Sciences last year gave NASA permission to go off and work on this Habitable Worlds Observer mission as their highest priority for the next mission, and it will be an optical UV telescope, like Hubble, only of size similar to the Webb. That’ll be the next thing up after the Romans Space Telescope, in the very large category of things. It should really, really be able to make a way on exoplanets as small as the Earth and really extend the Hubble UV optical science into the future.

Keegan
So are these projects deep into development? Are they being made? Are they in the approval process?

Matthew
Well, on the Roman Space Telescope is close to launch. So, it’s very much being built now. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is just starting in the planning process, and it will launch most likely toward the end of the 2030s.

Keegan
And as one final question, what advice you would have for those students seeking a career in astrophysics or related fields?

Matthew
Oh, well, that’s easy. If you want to work, well, first of all, the people that work in this field come from all walks of life, from all backgrounds. And a great way to… to work in this field, go to college, study whatever you love. But if that happens to include science, engineering, and math, then working in this aspect of aerospace is a very, very realistic career objective. You don’t need to be anyone special. You don’t have to have any special genius. You just need to be willing to work hard and be enthusiastic about it. And one way to test the waters is to do an internship at NASA. NASA has internships for every level from a high school to senior faculty. And if you’d like to work on data from missions like the Webb, but you don’t want to become a scientist, you can do that, too. NASA has a program called Citizen Science. And if you go to the Citizen Science website, there are all kinds of projects that you can get involved with just by being an interested person. And that’s another way to sort of see what it’s like and rub elbows with the folks who do this for a living.

(music)

Keegan
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

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.