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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