Mf19 Sander

So I hope, out of today you'll walk away with a couple a couple of stories, a couple of threads. One of them is a little bit about the history of space lab. How it got going. What the expectations were, what the realities were. So that's one major story. The other story is one that is about innovation. We're now in the new era. Suddenly turn the key, and we're going left instead of right, and innovation, breakthrough, et cetera you know our language and terms that show up. Um, I thought it would be useful to try to use the story of SIR-C a little bit to talk about an instance of innovation as an example. So you know there is, there is this ongoing I would say legend that's science and human space flight don't don't somehow interact at all, and if there's anything that has strong opinions about it is that. There is a community and you've heard from members of that community who have learned how to harvest you know tremendous value out of the opportunities that human space flight places in front of the science community. There are also those who feel very very uncomfortable with the sort of environment and the infrastructure, and it's not like being in the lab and you know everything is completely is not under your control, and I think that there are members of the community that feel very uncomfortable in an environment like that. But, the clever ones the ones who are innovative and can see opportunity, and there are many in the science community, and I think have learned how to how to take advantage of the capabilities that human space flight puts on the table. It's not the universal answer for all your ills by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly does open up some, some doors that haven't been opened before and and I think what you'll hear in the next few minutes is is an instance of that. So you might recall that the Nixon administration was approached at the end of Apollo with some ideas for for a combination of something like a shuttle and a space station, and the agency had to go through a great deal of pain and bargaining and interacting with OMB. Does this sound familiar? [ Laughter ] To to find a permission to get a go-ahead to build what is now coming to unfortunately an end, the shuttle program. So there was, however, a little 'but' attached to it that permission. You say "ok, you want the shuttle? Fine. You can have the shuttle. want it so much. You got it. Uh, but by the way, you can't have any other launch vehicles to go with it. If that's the machine you want NASA, that's fine, but all these other rockets have got to be put in the barn and forget about those." And so the agency actually agreed, and Lou Allen who passed away not too long ago, one of my bosses and boss of many people in the Air Force for many years, was actually the person who signed on behalf of the Air Force that that yes the Air Force would be using the shuttle for its launches. So there was now an expectation set that this very capable system, the shuttle, you know, would be literally the universal answer for all your ills. All of those of you who are interested in expendables would be going up in the shuttle, and then of course the shuttle opens up doors to those who really wouldn't have an opportunity in an expendable flight system environment. Um, European Space Agency signed on board, and their contribution was the space lab, and they had two agendas. Agenda number one was to learn about human space flight. And I'd say they accomplished that, you know, very, very well. We have dramatic evidence in the space station today. And agenda number two is they wanted to sell space labs because of the illusion, delusion, we can only say that in retrospect, that there was going to be about a shuttle launched every week. If you miss the 1:47, I can get you on the 3:52 that next Wednesday. Fifty flights a week. That was sort of a year. That was sort of the basis, the flight model, and it was in that spirit that Office of Space Science went ahead and sent out a solicitation. AO78-1 I think was the number, and got a huge response, many many ideas about how to use the shuttle and to use the space labs. Well now Europe I believe at that time was the biggest single international contribution any engineering undertaking. It was really groundbreaking. So, space lab shows up. Shuttle shows up. The flight rate. I came to NASA headquarters late 1979. At that point, projections on the flight rate had begun to slope down fairly rapidly. Um, by the time the shuttle actually started flying regularly instead of roughly twenty space flights a year based on the fifty flights per year model. We ended up right around six, and that number held, five or six, that number held for a number of years. So flight rate versus the later realities was one of those lessons. It's not unique to the human space flight program. If you sit down with any group of folks planning a robotic mission there's always this burst of excitement and enthusiasm, and we can do this, and then as the mission realities become apparent, and the costs begin to climb, you know, that scope begins to shrink until finally isotonically approaches what eventually ends up getting built and launched. So this isn't about a, you know, a problem unique to human space flight. I think it's the character of all of us. We're engineers. We're scientists. We want to build things. We want to be successful. We want to show how we can make some changes on this planet, and I think that energy is really a huge huge asset for the agency. But this whole process of focusing on what eventually becomes real is an important thing to keep in mind. As the flight rate expectations and projections began shrinking suddenly every mission became more and more precious. There's a supply and demand issue, and then as it became clear that the agency itself was learning. It was learning how to build the shuttle. It was learning how to fly the shuttle. It was learning, you know, what good practices were. It was learning about the complexities of building payloads inside that environment. What was safe, what was not safe. So there was a whole body of experience and knowledge that was building up. That eventually began surrounding, um, the instruments and experiments that were flying, so that what was once advertised as that we have standard nineteen inch racks just pull it out of your lab. Bolt it in. Plug it in, and you're good to go. That story changed pretty dramatically with time. And that wasn't, I think you know in any ill-will. I think that was a process of people just learning how this amazing system really worked as opposed to the hopes and dreams in the early to mid 1970s. So there was this whole gradual emergence of what is the reality of doing science inside the space lab environment. We also space science put up three put together, the notion of three test flights. Space labs one, two and three. And the principle behind those flights was to push the shuttle and space lab's system to the maximum. So let's see. What's wrong with this picture? The first time you go up you fly fifty experiments on seven different disciplines just to test the boundary conditions on the first flight. Anything, any problems with that approach? Well of course, so space lab one, while it became actually a landmark event because it accompanied, you know, it was the first flight major contribution by the European Space Agency, and it represented essentially heralding a new era in science, it was overly complicated. It should have been, perhaps, executed a little bit more of the way an aircraft is tested. You know, you start by just taxiing down the runway. Taxiing a little faster. Then maybe lift off a little bit, and you gradually expand the envelope. I think one lesson here was that there was too much built in to the program too early. We executed the flights. They were in fact very successful. All of the experiments got useful data but, um, the pain of integrating fifty-two experiments both in a timeline, as well as physically and testing them and validating them through the flow down in the ONC building that was a major learning experience, and perhaps pushing the system too hard, too early. Um, there's also the notion early in the program that since everyone's expectation was this was the universal answer to all your ills that all sorts of experiments needed to fly, and in fact, on one of the space labs Marshalls, I recall, put together a small cryogenic telescope to test what was it like to do infrared astronomy from the shuttle. It turns out it wasn't that expensive of an experiment, but it was a very important experiment to fly because it showed that the shuttle had around it a cloud of water vapor that basically blocked out infrared radiation up to around a hundred microns. So that in fact was a successful experiment in the sense that it showed one of the limitations and certainly didn't have to, you know, continue thinking about doing infrared astronomy from the shuttle. So that's an example, I think, of trying to force a science into an environment where simply in retrospect wasn't appropriate. But there are other sciences, and you've heard a couple of examples. I'm going to give you one more. Where you can actually exploit the human space flight system by simply respecting what it can do and paying careful attention to what it cannot do, and you can do absolutely amazing things. Another important lesson I think that we learned as the number of opportunities reduced, each flight became more and more precious, and more and more time and energy was spent to make sure that every experiment would be optimized. And as a result, there was sort of an ongoing push pull between the community whose job was to a was to protect the infrastructure, and the infrastructure in this case is the shuttle and the space lab system, and those flying experiments. So there was always a tension, I think between those, between those communities, and it was only, I think, as experience built up in the science community that that become less of a problem as the agency began to understand what really what made sense to do in the shuttle and what didn't. There's also, however, an attitudinal shift that eventually broke its way, you know, into this, and that was those who were integrating the experiments had to take the attitude that their job was to help the PIs be successful instead of protecting the system from the PIs. And that was, you know, perhaps a little subtle, but it was very, very important, and it makes a huge difference, I think, to the individual investigators to be able to interact with someone whose job is to help them be successful instead of the job is to protect the system from the principal investigator. The other problem, and I think we see this today in the station is that the agency put stunning amounts of money into building the shuttle, building the infrastructure to support the shuttle, keeping the shuttle going. All appropriate. Same thing with the space lab. And then you compare that to the money that the country put into actually using them. I mean, it's hardly a balance at all. And here we see the same thing today with the space station. We have this incredible machine a hundred billion dollar machine orbiting and the uses, it's hardly used as compared to what its capability actually is. Just recently, Mark Urand sent out an opportunity to, you know, to the NASA centers to provide some ideas. I think he got eighty-nine responses in the matter of a few weeks. There are plenty of ideas how to use the space station, but again, the resources that are available across agency to put experiments into the space station are relatively are extremely small, almost invisible by comparison to the resources available that, you know, are necessary to keep the infrastructure going. So I happened to go by the Air and Space Museum by the Dulles Airport and found there the space lab. Those are my pictures, so there it is. Unfortunately, resting in a museum rather than being actively used in the shuttle, but it's an important step I think in a learning step in the use of matching science undertakings with human space flight. So now let me talk a little bit about one adventure we've all had in using the shuttle. My boss Charles Elachi has a background as a radar scientist. In fact, he and a few folks were some of the first people to actually shine a radar from a rocket and look at the back scatter of the earth, and that was done by a community of folks who thought radar could actually be useful as an earth observing instrument. There are very, very few people who actually believe that. But, you know, like many investigators you start with a rocket and radar, and you get a minute of two of data, and you take another step and another step, and that's the story I want to tell a little bit because it slides right into what the shuttle and eventually what was done with the shuttle. So on the second flight you recall that there were four test flights of the shuttle. After which, it was declared operational and ready to rock, and on the second test flight Charles, being a reasonably assertive man, found that the cargo bay of the shuttle was actually underutilized. It had in the back a very large fairly complicated instrumentation the vehicle had a lot of sensors built into it right at the beginning just to understand how it responded in those first during that engineering test flight period. So Charles was allowed to put together a radar made out of spare parts from SeaSAT, which was actually the first civilian radar in space. And we flew a SIR-A in the cargo bay of the shuttle in '81, and then in '84 and they flew twice in 1994. The idea being to look at the earth at two different seasons. Originally, we actually had three flights to look at three different seasons, but again economic pressures suggested the two was pretty good. I think this may be one of the few things that has, you know, flown twice in one year. And out of that was a mission that's actually a milestone mission. Not too many people really appreciate how profoundly the shuttle radar topography mission has affected all of our lives. So we went from, um, a series of rocket launches back here in the mid '60s up into some aircraft. We flew SeaSAT. Then SIR-A on the shuttle. SIR-B on the shuttle. There was then the more advanced radar that was put into a DC-8 that actually the aircraft burned, as I recall, and the radar went with it, and then it got rebuilt, and it was sort of a laboratory testbed. In the meantime, right after 1985, right after the first shuttle accident, we we had started talking to the Europeans about a very elegant mission that is what became the SIRC/XSAR joint mission. The Italians, the Germans combined to build the XSAR. The US built the SIRC, which was actually four radars, and flew in a twice in 1995. One of the interesting discoveries out of the early SARs you might recall discovering a lost city in the Saudi Arabian peninsula Ubar was actually discovered by looking at imagery from the SIR-B, I believe it was. Ubar happened to be noticed because the radar's very sensitive to texture. And in looking at the images of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, it was noted that there were many trails, many lines that seemed to converge on one spot, and that turned out to actually be The Lost City of Ubar. The lines were camel paths that had been stomped over the millennia, flattened, and the texture was very different from the surrounding texture of the terrain. And it turns out that frankincense is the sap, dried sap of a very unusual scrubby looking bush that is almost unique to that part of Saudi Arabia, and, you know, is an incense. Very, very, I mean, far more valuable than gold in, you know, in the years before Christ. So there was a trade routes established, and the city of Ubar happened to be sitting on a water cistern, and therefore, was a stop off for the camel caravans. They eventually, Charles and some of his colleagues went, found Ubar. Turns out it had been missing because so much water had been taken out of the cistern that it collapsed, and half the city collapsed into, into this well. So this was one of the discoveries, one of the first discoveries, and one of the first signs that the radar is really a powerful tool. So, um, these are just some images This is SIR-A being loaded in the cargo bay, and the other interesting discovery here was that people noticed all these drainage channels in North Africa. And again people trying to get some ground truth went there and said, "There are sand dunes here. There's no stinking drainage channels. What's going on?" Well it turns out there were drainage channels. They were buried underneath the sand. And that's when people came to the realization that under certain conditions, mainly very, very dry soils, the radar actually penetrates, and eventually on SIR-C, they put together a map of North Africa. They had enough data to put together a fairly thorough map, and there was a general sense that many of these drainage channels went east-west instead of north-south suggesting maybe North Africa at one point had a tilt to it that it doesn't have today. Alright, so now here's just some imagery taken from SIR-C. Um, the radar is about the size of a Greyhound bus. Here is the X-band radar, which was produced by Germany and Italy. It was actually moved mechanically like they were on a wing and SIR-C was a C-band and L-band radar. Here are the big L-band panels and the C-band panels. And so we were flying basically three different frequencies. X-band steered mechanically, and and the SIR-C radar steered electronically, so we could sweep the beam by just adjusting the phase of the various amplifiers on the radar. Just to give you a sense of the scale, this is what was in the cargo bay of the shuttle up here on SIR-C. And now let me spend a few minutes talking about an a-ha. So SIR-C flew. It flew very well. In fact, it flew well enough, so that some of the mission team were starting to get a little bit bored and wandering, and one of them, an engineer named Ed Karo, one of the engineers who helped Charles with the first rocket radars, was wandering around the halls of Building 30, and he saw a model of the space station, and he started looking at the model and said, you know, he noticed the mast that was now used to fly the solar rays on the station. And he asked around, "Who's in charge of those masts?" And some people mentioned and pointed him to someone, and he asked, "Gee, are there any spares of those masts around?" And the gentleman said, "Yeah, we built eleven of them. A couple have been tested to death, but yeah, if you promise to return it, we could probably make one available. We only need so many for the station construction." So Ed's idea was to convert the SIR-C radar into a radar interferometer. What that means is you basically send a radar pulse out from the main radar here, and then you receive that pulse by that radar. That's just the way SIR-C worked. But then you build another antenna out here that also receives the pulse, and between the two you basically have a radar interferometer. With a radar interferometer, you can then do topography of the earth. So Ed's idea was to take the X-band radar and stick it out here at the end of a mast and he found the mast from the station that he could use, so he was thinking during the course of the mission so here's this kit. This is the next flight of this hardware. So we get back to the lab Radar returns, and a we start looking at what one could do with such a radar, and the answer was well the X-band radar is high frequency and has a very narrow beam, so you could in the course of a shuttle mission wind sort of a spiral pattern. The ground track would be sort of a spiral pattern around the Earth, but you couldn't get global coverage. And the science community said, "Well, fun thing to do, but what's really important is global coverage." So idea number two. One of the team members, a scientist named Mike Kobrick, said, "You know instead of using the X-band, let's use the C-band radar," and he had done this simple little bit of geometry and discovered that operating in one of the particular modes electronic scanning modes of the radar at an altitude of 233 kilometers you would just cover the entire globe from the 57 north to 60 south with the C-band, and so that's, wow, that was a gift from heaven. That was a great idea. Now we needed a customer. [ Audience laughter ] So a gentlemen named Nevin Bryant had been working for one of the other government agencies at JPL called the Defense Mapping Agency. And the Defense Mapping Agency had been for decades been trying to get a topographic map. You can imagine the Department of Defense has to be able to find a war anytime, anyplace and was having a lot of difficulty getting a good topographic map of the Earth. So Nevin called some of his friends in the Defense Mapping Agency and said, "Hey would you guys like to have a topographic map all done in eleven days with the following kind of metrics on its quality?" And you could just about hear the cheers from California. They had been located near Washington So they were very, very excited of course when in eighteen months went from an idea to all the approvals through the entire Pentagon, and then the four-star commands to actually get the money set aside, so we then showed up to NASA with a check for $150 million [ laughter ] a radar that had already flown twice and a design for an extension of that radar that would turn it into this fairly amazing instrument. And a year and a half after that we actually got approval to fly it in the shuttle So this third kind of unexpected innovation driven flight of the radar has really given all of us now a data set that has been desired, sort of the dream data set for many, many years. When you go to Google and you ask for a topographic map of something, you're seeing actually SRTM data and you can go to the USGS data center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and download as much of it as you want. And the Department of Defense has been using it. I mean literally they were pulling data out of our hands because at that time there were several bad things happening in the Middle East, and they put that data set to use virtually instantly. So here's a confluence of some things that resulted in a in a product that was just enormously useful, and I frankly don't think that the shuttle has been given I think the kudos the shuttle system and the teams that support it, the appropriate kudos for enabling this marvelous achievement. So this is some of the imagery. This is the boom in the end of the canister that unfolded at the end of the radar. By the way, this as an example of I think, about how to go about doing something like this you look at a 200 foot mast sticking out the side of the shuttle, and you wonder what is what are these people thinking. I mean that is that will never get past the safety board, but as it turns out we had flown twice on the shuttle. We called down to JSC and said, "Hey could we have an informal double lot review of this? Just us boys around a table with this idea and if it's a crazy idea and you think it's nuts, we'll go home quietly. But if it isn't, could you give us some advice on how to make this a flyable system? You know a system you would feel comfortable flying." And that one meeting was I think a tide turner because they said, "Hey, no problem. This looks very, very cool. Just rig this so that if you push a button, it goes away." And that made sense, so we spent a lot of time and energy making sure that there was a button in the crew cabin and the right pry-roads so if this thing if for some reason, you know, didn't retract inside the mole line and save itself we could get rid of it, and that simple advice I think was almost enabling, was enabling for this mission. So you can see many of these scenes. Here's the San Andreas fault for example. Just very vivid, you know, when you look at it as a 3-D topographic projection. Many places around the globe here is the Chicaloo impact crater which is actually buried under 500 feet of sediment, but you can see an outline of it. A little bit distinct, but there is an outline and that outline is actually the result of springs that are adding up from sort of the lip of the crater because the lip of the crater's only about 500 feet below the surface of it's only got about 500 feet of sediment above it. This is all that remains of SRTM. It's also hanging in the Air and Space Museum. And this is the product of that mission, 1.5 tera points of topographic information. Each point being about the size of a baseball diamond. And the entire planet as you see here has been broken up into baseball diamond size patches and we know the altitude of each patch to an absolute accuracy of about three meters. It's a really remarkable data set. So just to wrap it up bottom line, early expectations can be misleading Again, it's not unique to human space flight. It's true also in robotic space flight, but in planning missions and in thinking one's got to get real fairly fast, or you're going to waste a lot of time and energy. There are folks I think who have been extremely successful in exploiting human space flight flight opportunities. They do so by understanding what they're flying in. They really need to understand the context in which the hybrid is flying. The systems they built are maximally self-reliant. Don't tax the space flight systems to do a lot of things that aren't absolutely necessary. Leverage the presence of human beings and then also respect the presence of human beings. Make sure that what you're building is a reasonable, reasonably built. And there are enormous capabilities that clever people can leverage. It also requires tenacity. Typically in space lab an investigator would spend about a year of his career or her career for every day they got in orbit. That's sort of a sobering number. Also the notion that really the systems need to mature before you exploit them. Take it a step at a time. And if you do things right, the potential is absolutely amazing. It just requires ingenuity. So, questions? [ Audience applause ]