One Year on the Job

Whew-I made it!

One full year on the job.

(NASA, I’m writing you this blog entry as a combined present for our anniversary and your 50^th birthday. Even though I’m technically late on both and you might have been hoping for a more substantial present like a bouquet of tulips or a nice dinner at that fancy French restaurant in town or a pearl necklace-yeah right on my salary!-I hope you won’t use that in future arguments over which TV show we’ll watch on Tuesday nights. I’m still voting for House, for the record).

I started full-time at NASA back in August 2007, having graduated the previous May after spending five co-op tours at JSC over the previous four years. They say you usually don’t start talking to yourself or addressing the agency as your significant other for at least 10 years, so I’m thrilled to be ahead of the curve on this one.

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Suspended Operations for Tropical Storm Edouard

I thought it was interesting that JSC decided to suspend operations for Tropical Storm Edouard. Yesterday was a blue-sky day, perfectly clear night. Then we had steady but light rain all day today.

How has the 1.5 day hiatus affected your work? Will you be able to accomplish everything you needed to get done this week?

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Vision Forum with JSC Interns & Co-ops (7/22/08)

Last night (7/22/08), the JSC 20 Year Vision Team held a forum for all the JSC co-ops and interns (CS and contractors).

For those who were able to make it…Thanks for coming!  We really enjoyed sharing the Vision with you and hearing all of your thoughts, comments, feedback, and concerns.

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Importance of Dissenting Opinions

Following Justin’s post today about the JSC Vision Forum, I wanted to bring up a point based off a question that was asked at the forum:

The JSC Vision Forum concluded with a debrief on the activities that had transpired that evening.  During that time, a young lady asked a very important question regarding dissenting opinions and how they tend not to travel as far as the popular opinion.  I answered her question in a quick and simple fashion but for the sake of time, I did not voice all facets of this topic.

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Thoughts From the JSC Vision Forum

I had the opportunity to participate in the first JSC Vision forum this evening. It opened with a brief introduction to the 20-Year Vision for Johnson Space Center, how it was derived, and the five big ideas for implementation. We then split off into breakout groups to discuss the Vision as a whole and the implementation concepts. Lots of people went straight for the implementation groups, so I decided to split off with the smaller group that was analyzing the Vision itself.

I was easily the youngest person in my breakout group. Including the moderators, the only civil servant was the guy taking the notes (which will be distilled and passed on to JSC management in an anonymous format). There were six of us, plus two moderators and our notetaker. I’d say the big theme that kept coming up was that we need to figure out a way to communicate with and get buy-in from people who aren’t necessarily sold on high-level collaboration and integration… and that we desperately need “public input” to help make what we do at JSC relevant to people’s lives.

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Innovation, Not Serendipity

I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker today about Nathan Myhrvold, former director of research at Microsoft, and his “Intellectual Ventures” endeavor. Their whole idea is to be a company that comes up with good ideas, patent them, and license to interested companies that have the technical expertise. As I was reading about what Intellectual Ventures has gotten itself into, I couldn’t help but think that this is precisely the sort of thing we’re looking to foster here at NASA with the innovation and collaboration initiatives.

Intellectual Ventures sponsors huge brainstorming sessions where the key people in the company bring in subject matter experts who can help them figure out which ideas will work and which won’t. Importantly, though, they understand that the vast majority of their ideas probably won’t go anywhere, but that’s okay because it will help them learn and eventually get them to an idea that will work.
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Sharing Our Innovations

A lot of thought and discussion has occurred lately concerning how to improve our internal communications in NASA. Here at JSC, this discussion has culminated with the release of the 20 Year Vision proposal. I am both honored and fortunate to have met with some of the people who made it happen and look forward to working with them on the implementation of those ideas.

With that in mind, I think that some of my professional experiences elsewhere can be brought to bear on this topic. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked in the intelligence community (IC) for a few years as a missile analyst. If you think the NASA community is results-oriented, the IC takes it to a whole new level.

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The NASA $20,000 Award at the Rice Business Plan Competition

I’m continually inspired by River’s posts about his career and experience at Goddard. I’ve been meaning to post for quite some time about the experience I’ve had within the Space Life Sciences Directorate at Johnson Space Center. We have some amazing leaders within the directorate who are definitely innovative, outside-of-the-box thinkers. I’d like to share with you a recent example of how NASA, particularly Space Life Sciences at Johnson Space Center in Texas, is using partnerships with academia to help with research and development related to spaceflight.

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The Future of NASA Centers

Yesterday, I had a very interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the future of JSC and how we’re going to get there.  (I’m trying to be careful about name-dropping, so as to keep the focus here on the ideas more so than personalities.)  One of the subjects we broached was how JSC is famous for its mission operations work, but that a lot of the good engineering work we’re doing here is going unnoticed by the public-at-large.  I’ll actually be meeting with someone tomorrow who is heading up the Engineering Directorate’s efforts to share their innovations both internally and externally.  However, that effort is inexorably tied to the larger question of what our focus should be as an organization.  That central question that has preoccupied my thoughts lately.

Successful organizations tend to be those that focus on a particular area and do that extremely well, as I was reminded yesterday.  In our case here at JSC, that would clearly be mission operations and support.  If that is going to be our focus, then we might need to be prepared to offload projects in the same vein as the now-defunct X-38 to other NASA centers and stay centered on our area of excellence.  When asked where I see JSC being in 20 years, I said that I would like to see JSC essentially serving as the staging area for lunar outpost and Mars sortie missions and support.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for “the other stuff,” especially in an era where we must be prepared to expect static budgets.  However, I also believe that we must remember that operations are not an end unto themselves.  As the Global Exploration Architecture clearly shows, we must have achievable, relevant scientific goals to be working towards.  Our operations must be the means to accomplishing specific ends in science and exploration.

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The Amazing VASMIR

For those who don’t know, VASMIR is an acronym that stands for VAriable Specific Impulse Rocket.  For those still a bit confused, it’s a plasma rocket.  The design of this rocket started with research in the 1960′s and 1970′s.  The research was focused on creating and sustaining a “sun-like plasma substance here on earth”.  To create this sun-like substance, material has to be heated to sun-like temperatures, which is in the neighborhood of 5,800 Kelvin (or 9,980 degrees Fahrenheit).  Of course, there’s not a container on earth that can hold this substance, so work was done on constructing massive electromagnetic fields to hold it.

Fast-forward a few years, a Ph.D. and the start of an astronaut career, and you have one Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz, taking this idea of massive electromagnetic fields and transforming it into the next-gen space propulsion system.  The unique thing about VASMIR is it’s simplicity in concept (of course, the physics and mathematics behind it are a bit more complicated). Essentially, Dr. Chang-Diaz is taking some inert gas, using strong magnetic fields to transform this gas into a plasma by stripping away electrons and allowing nature to follow its course.  This course includes some electrons and ions swirling at various angles, gaining momentum, and finally transferring that circular motion into axial (or longitudinal) motion.  At this point, Sir Isaac Newton takes over with basic laws of motion (“equal and opposite reactions and such), and the bigger, heavier ions produce small amounts of moment on the engine, thus propelling it forward.

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