Apr 11
As Rivers pointed out in his previous post, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, became the first man to orbit the Earth. The United States launched the first space shuttle on April 12, 1981. This year actually marks the 50th anniversary of NASA! This Saturday marks the 47th anniversary of Gagarin’s 108-minute flight and his one orbit mission that ended as he parachuted from the Vostok 1 capsule onto the plains of Central Asia. I see this as a reason to celebrate and I’m not the only one! With the recent confirmation of a Yuri’s Night party planned for Antarctica’s South Pole Station there are now 176 celebrations in 49 countries in 7 continents on 2 worlds!
For the second straight year, the crew on the International Space Station has released a video greeting to all Yuri’s Night parties. Commander Peggy Whitson, Garrett Reisman and Yuri Malenchenko of Expedition 16 say hello “to everyone down on Planet Earth celebrating Yuri’s Night”, and talk about the beauty of Earth and the importance of April 12th in astronomical history. If you haven’t had a chance to see the greeting yet, check it out here.
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Apr 10
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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Apr 08
I woke up at 3:00 am this morning and couldn’t sleep. So I caught up on a couple of online videos I’d been meaning to watch instead.
The first was Sunday’s 60 Minutes segment entitled “The Next Giant Leap for Mankind.” I heard several months ago that they were at Goddard filming because they were doing a segment on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Naturally, I was pretty excited, as I thought it would be cool to see “my” mission on display for the world.
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Apr 08
There is no shortage of research studies and publications describing the “wage gap” between men and women. There is no question that the gap exists - the question is, what can we do to close the gap?
At JSC, there seems to be equality in the “top” jobs that women and men hold. Take a look at MCC - you are just as likely to find a female flight director as a male.
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Apr 07
NASA has been working toward increasing public understanding of what it does and why it is relevant to the public. NASA has created a message which intends to bring this understanding home and succinctly encapsulate everything that it does. While I am a large advocate for creating a guiding coalition, creating vision, communicating the vision, encourage action and celebrating short-term wins for internal change (see Kotter’s Harvard Business Review Article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail“), externally, I believe NASA should focus on output.
I recall seeing historic television clips of Apollo astronauts in parades rolling through the streets in convertibles. These were heroes accomplishing extraordinary tasks. While I was not involved in this program, it seems to have been a celebration of feats performed and needed no script. The voice of the Apollo program was not the NASA spokesperson, it was Walter Cronkite. NASA focused on achieving its mandate and let everyone else do the talking.
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Apr 01
Interesting item pointed out to me today is Project Virgle. Though in many cases, this appears to be an April Fools joke, there are some items that spur much debate.
I have taken the liberty of posting to that group the fact that we, here at Open Nasa, do truly believe in the importance of engagement. The benefits associated with working across many generational, educational, and industrial lines are astounding and I hope that those who read through Project Virgle’s group discussion will visit this site and provide the feedback/opinions/dreams that we hope to integrate into NASA’s Mission.
Mar 30
On April 12th, 1961, some Russian dude named Yuri became the first man in the history of the world to go into space.
47 years later, haven’t we moved on? Isn’t this old news? Why are we still celebrating? Does this explain 120 parties in 40 countries on 7 continents around the world?
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Mar 25
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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Mar 22
I have a friend who was recently identified as a NASA Future Leader in some publication that is supposed to be arriving in my mailbox soon. I’m horrified… the agency should be ashamed that it is trying to make such an allegation!
Why am I so upset?
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Mar 22
I was in the Space Technology-5 (ST5) Mission Operations Center (MOC) at Goddard Space Flight Center. I’d been preparing for that day for two years, ever since we found out that someone was crazy enough to actually pay to launch this mission after all. Although I had other roles, my primary responsibility had been to develop the software tools that we would use to maneuver the three spacecraft into particular formations over the 90 day mission.
Of course, what you don’t know is that ST5 had always been the mission where if something could go wrong, it would. Launch day was no different in that regard. The state vector that we received indicated that our initial formation was all screwed up: the spacecraft were in the wrong order, were separating more quickly than expected, and the rocket body was in the middle of it all! The sun sensors were telling us that ST5 had managed to discover a second sun! Oh, and all the tracking data were either in an unexpected format or completely unusable, and radar passes couldn’t distinguish one spacecraft from another!
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