March 31, 2026 • 41 mins
Bobak Ferdowsi is more than just the NASA Mohawk guy. He's a Systems Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with an incredible aptitude for studying spacecraft failures so we can learn from them. Kal breaks down Bobak's career through the spacecrafts that defined them, from the Mars Curiosity Rover to a brand new satellite. Plus, why our failures aren't always bad and how to keep the worst ones from happening again.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
About a decade ago, I had the chance to see
a Space Shuttle launch in person. It's insane and it
makes your dick shiver from the sound waves. All of you,
all of you. I'm just letting you including like everything,
just everything. Sonic boom. It's a sonic boom. In Cape Canaveral, Florida,
residents have grown accustomed to the sounds and feeling of
(00:24):
sonic booms at Steve's Diner at Titusville High School. In
condos lining the Indian River, the rumble usually means lift
off progress, something to talk to their neighbors about when
they get home. But on the morning of September one,
twenty sixteen, their buildings shook in a way that made
them question what was happening. It felt like an earthquake.
(00:45):
I mean, coffee cups rattled, people held their breath, Smoke
stretched into the sky. What happened was this? An Elon
Musk owned SpaceX rocket had exploded on the launch pad,
destroying what it was carrying, which was a communications satellite
owned by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Thankfully, no one was hurt,
(01:06):
but man billionaires were pissed as space engineers around the
country watched this video over and over again. They were
reminded of the fragility of their work.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I'm learning a lot more from the failures than I
am from the successes. You get fortunate with success and
you don't know what about what you did got you there.
But the failure is like, you know pretty quickly which
things you didn't do that can lead to a failure.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Bobbigfordousi is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL.
You might know him as the NASA mohawk guy who
became a cultural icon during the twenty twelve Mars Curiosity landing.
Despite becoming a meme and making huge headlines, Bobbik's job
is actually much quieter. His true passion is spacecraft failures,
(01:55):
kind of like the one in the story I just
told you, and then figuring out how we can learn
from them. Today, I'm talking to Bobbik about the spacecrafts
that have helped define his career, from the Mars Curiosity
rover to launching a brand new satellite, and I want
to know why he's devoted his life to studying what
happens when these things fail. Also why our failures aren't
(02:17):
always bad and how to keep the worst ones from
happening again.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Here we go again, again again.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Hey, I'm Cal Penn and this is Here we Go Again,
a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we go?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Hey? Hello? Are you doing?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
How are you I?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I'm Bob Pren currently palea manager for Nicerar Mission, which
is a joint mission between NASA and Israel. It's been
or twenty years of working on spacecraft to help understand
our own planet and a few other planets as well.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Before I jump into my conversation, I just want to
note that Bobbic's opinions are his own and he is
not speaking on behalf of NASA. The entry point that
was also sort of around the time when you and
I met, you became this like insane cultural icon known
as the NASA Mohawk Guy, which was a nickname given
(03:33):
to you by President Obama, and then things kind of
blew up from there. Did the blow up that followed
did that come from like him anointing you with this
nickname or was it already on that trajectory with people's
interest in your appearance and how much that differed from
their preconceived notions about who works at NASA.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I think things started definitely the night of landing.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
There was like a twitter you know, I don't know, dialogue,
and a few folks were, you know, texting about it.
And then we were at a party after the landing
on a local bar.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I got a call.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
At the time, I had all my calls just routed
from my landline here at work to my my cell
phone because I was just never in my office, and
it was from like a reporter, and I was like,
this is strange. But then the next morning when I
show up, the media folks at JPL are like, hey,
so you have a lot of requests for interviews, and
that's kind of when I was like, oh, this is
(04:35):
a this is not just another day at the office.
Kind of like oh, hey, it's really cool that you
were there and tell us about the mission. It was
like you bob ack, tell us about you, and.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
So I think that was that's kind of what I know.
But then yeah, you're actually right.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Right when when when Obama called the team to congratulate us,
and you know, make comments about wanting to have a
similar hairstyle, I think that's definitely kind of exponential growth there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Since you had these interview requests and it sounds like
they wanted to talk about you versus the mission. What
was your role in this mission? And then how did
you thread that needle? Because a lot of time, especially
for TV, like you do a morning show and you
know you've got like four and a half to seven minutes,
it's I have still I find it very difficult to
try to reroute the conversation towards what I want to
(05:20):
talk about if the question is leading about something else.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Trial by fire for sure. I mean I didn't do
any of the formal media training. I wasn't really prepared
for it. The good news is I think I knew
the mission really well. I had spent a lot of
time not just on my part of the mission, but
also one of my earlier roles was helping develop what
we call the mission Plan, which is kind of this
outline of the life cycle from launch all the way
(05:45):
to the end of the mission, including the traverse from
Earth to Mars and landing, and then of course also
the science mission that was going to happen on the service.
So I knew the mission really well in and out.
Certainly at the level right where I'm not a scientific expert,
but at the level where I could communicate hopefully affect
to a larger audience. So that really gave me some
confidence at least to go into those things. I think
(06:06):
if it had just been about me, or it had
just been about you know, tell us all the I
don't know specific details of this thing, I would have
felt really intimidated. But I think at that point it
was like, tell us what we should be excited about,
which was just relating my personal excitement.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And that initial planning role led.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
To a role that's specifically why I was kind of
on console that evening was launched through approach system engineer,
and so during the landing I was there monitoring the
health of the spacecraft as we kind of started at
the top of the atmosphere and made our way down
to the surface. And yeah, I mean, like everyone else,
including the public, I mean, we're along for the ride, right,
(06:42):
we're checking boxes, but the whole system was happening on
its own, like all the work had been done and
we're just waiting for the signal to come back to Earth.
And to me, that's kind of both really good in
the sense that it's nice to just sort of not
feel like you have a choice, but it's also terrifying
because you took the tests, you know, maybe eight years ago,
and you're waiting for the results now.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh man, yeah, okay, so this all happens and then
you and I have previously talked about my love for
space movies. Yeah, so I just let my selfish question
on this is, how does the jump happen from landing
to Sharknado three?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I really don't know how the Sharknado three thing happened entirely.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
The costume designer was a fan and was like, look,
I mean this guy Merrits at least a cameo. Like
at the time, it was still you know, there's still
some some stuff there, and I am such a sucker
for life experience, Like I think one of the things
where I love.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
This is is that.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
But also yeah, just I mean, you know, you imagine
that you're you think your box is going to be
going down the office every day, right, you know, talking
to your team about designing a space crout and someone's like, hey,
would you like to come pretend that there are sharks
attacking the Earth, and I was like, obviously, yes, and
it was great. Right, It's we're sitting in a shuttle replica,
(08:06):
which I think is the same shuttle replica that was
used for the movie Space Camp.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Which you know is my favorite space movie.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I was so in right, So this is like all
all the nerd like boxes are being tacked by this experience.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, I mean it's it was. It was awesome and
everybody was really fun about it.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
For those of you who did not know with the
movie Space Camp, like you should really do yourself a
favor and watch Space Camp today, which I wanted to
chat with you about failures in in what you do.
Your website says you're very passionate about spacecraft failures in particular,
and I thought that framing was very interesting for the
types of conversations that we have. Was it space Camp
(08:48):
that gave you that area of interest or was like,
what what made you interested in the idea of spacecraft failures?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I think it was part part of was starting here
at JPL. I joined a time and the kind of
had a string of successes, but so much of what
we were doing and the way we approached our design
and the way we approached reviewing our design and everything
else was about the lessons that have come out of
a decade before a series of failures, right, I mean,
(09:16):
until kind of the Mari's Spirit and Opportunity missions, we
didn't have that.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Great a success rate overall on Mars.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so you're you're really trying to understand why why
do we make these thissge why are we deciding to
have this kind of review wire, Why do I need
to do this product? Why is if that someone says
software should be designed this way? And the answer is
there was this big lesson from a project before us
that said, look, you know, if you don't do this
(09:48):
level review or if you don't get this level of insight,
the chances are that you're going to find a similar
problem to what this other mission had. And some of
them are you know, the larger ones that folks know about, right,
the unit thing between you know, imperial emetric units, and
that's which is a whole ripe topic because it's it's
really much deeper than that at some level too. But
(10:09):
those kinds of cultural mismatches as well as things you know,
like I said, where we say, oh, of course, right,
if you look at how a particular sensor can work,
it can give you a false positive. Are you sure
that your design accommodates a temporary false positive?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
If you're looking for a great example, right that you're
on the surface, you want to make sure that that
contact sensor has to be touching the surface long enough
to say I'm confidently on the surface. Not I get
a blip on the sensor that says it's, you know,
been depressed, and then I kill my engines, because if
that sensor triggers for the wrong reason, even for a second,
and I kill my engines, I'm right, I'm dropping to
(10:48):
the surface of Mars. And so those kinds of things
are the reason why we do so much of what
we do. And I think at that point I realized
so much of what I was getting out of our
project in the past campaigns and everything else is I'm
learning a lot more from the failures than I am
from the successes. You kind of right, you stumble in.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I don't want to sa stumble is the wrong word.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
But you you get fortunate with success and you don't
know what about you what you did got you there.
You know, you did a lot of things. You did
one hundred different things, and maybe eight of them were
really helpful. But the failure is like you know, you
know pretty quickly in which things you didn't do that
can lead to a failure. And so I think it's
like a really great way of approaching this world in
which right ninety nine percent isn't good enough? Unfortunately in that.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
World, is there a specific process for turning a failure
into a positive? Both scientifically and then also like, this
is a public agency, right, so I assume there's also
a ton of political pressure when there's a failure, and
probably harder to explain to politicians how to turn that
into a positive. So what can you walk us through
like what happens both scientifically and in terms of the
(11:54):
public policy part of it?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I mean the first thing, of course is you know,
when we have anomaly, and it can be all sorts
of ranges, right, I mean, failures can range from mission
ending of course, which are the ones that right make
it to Congress know things to oh, hey we had
a failure of this thing and we have to swap
over to a redundant part, or we have to update
our software on board or do something else, right, and
(12:17):
so those those scale really differently. Fortunately, we don't have
that many of the ones where we're talking to Congress,
so when they arise, you know, the first thing we're
doing is obviously trying to triage.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
The immediate thing, which is you know why the quota
of sort of failure is not an option exists is
because of right art.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
We are very much in a triage at the beginning
of this.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And you know, it's like it's like healthcare, right, you know,
you go into the doctor, you have an issue with yourself.
The first thing is not like, well, let's go and
try to do a deep dive on why you weren't
eating the right amount of fiber every day or whatever. Right,
you're going to try to be like, Okay, the first
thing is we need to get you on this medication
or we need to operate or do whatever else right
to get you through the immediate kind of danger. And
(12:58):
that part we know we do effectively. I think that's
what everybody is sort of used to. The next thing, though,
is really for us to take a step back and say, Okay, well,
how did.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
We end uth here? Right?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Was was the miss because we didn't test something correctly?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
Was the miss?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Because you know, we decided to operate it differently than
we had tested it, or did we not have a
you know, understanding of how this part can fail in space?
Are there other people who have had that experience? So
we start kind of taking a step back and saying,
what are the lessons effectively right that I can learn
from this experience? So doesn't have to be a Part
A fails. Therefore everybody should be worried about Part A,
(13:33):
which is definitely true, but it also can be Part
A failed.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
If part AY can fail, what other parts could fail?
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Because you know, if Part A is susceptible, you know,
what's what's common with that way?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
What what did we do about Part A versus Part B?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
It might be that we test a Part B differently,
or it might be that they both use a similar
you know, manufacturing process, and you.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Have to go stre looking at that.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
So those lessons get captured and you know, get it
within as.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They scale, right, we sort of share different levels.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Right, So within JPL, we certainly want to keep our
own database of failures and have you used this part?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
How could that part you know fail in your in
your spacecraft?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And that happens a lot, right, we use these parts
we learned something about their behavior, and then someone says, ah, okay,
I'm using the same part. I haven't seen that issue,
but I'm going to write my code so that it
can work around this issue if it happens in the future.
And then again it's the get really big, you know,
like the huge cultural ones. Right, we start saying, okay,
we're going to share those with all of NASA or
(14:33):
put them. There's a lessons Learned website that NASA also
shares publicly where we're we're there to kind of disseminate
our lessons learned with the greater industry and things. And
of course you get through the extreme cases where you're
testifying in front of Congress right about how did Challenger happen?
How did you know we lose an orbiter in Mars?
And those ones, right, those tend to have not just
(14:54):
the JPL reviewers, but we bring in all these experts
from industry to help us go through that process to
really try to you know, think about every different aspect
of it so it can be really different. Again, I mean,
I'm very fortunate that so far I've not worked on
anything I would that has had to have a major thing.
But I hope that, you know, I deal with it
the same way, right, Like, I hope emotionally I'm here
(15:14):
to go into this because I'm doing, I want to
be doing things that are inherently at some risk of
having this cop you know, this problem.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Are there pressures like that that come from people who
are not scientists? And how then, how to scientists account
for that? Because I assume, like I'm just putting the
the in a very different world, right, like putting an
art window on something. Is this idea of like, oh,
the script's not ready, I need another month, and if
I'm writing it for myself, you know, maybe eight months
(15:44):
later it's done. But if I've already sold an option
to it or something, that ship better be done in
thirty days or there's a real problem and that's not
a life and death thing. That's just making like a
bunch of jokes in the script. So I'm just thinking,
is there a version of that in your world?
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Well, I mean, I think the classic example is probably
a Challenger right Challenger early Shuttle right launch, there was
a known risk that these O rings that sealed the
solid rocket boosters will deform when they're cold, and that
you know, you could see these blowback, right, essentially hot
gases escaping out the side of it. There's a mix,
I think. I mean, I'm not certainly not here to
(16:22):
lay judgment or just to say that I'm an expert
in this ory. Theres people who've obviously done a lot
far deeper dives. But there's a mix of things there. Right,
there is a presentation that the engineers give in that
case that says, hey, here, look at these historical launches temperatures,
what do we see. Are we're seeing you know, possible
events and you can see a correlation there between the
temperature and the event. But you also then have right
(16:44):
mounting pressure. Right, the shuttle is expensive, it's early. We
promised that we'd be launching I don't know, ten times
a year on the Shuttle, and so NASA's trying to
also protect its longer term thing. And I think there's
pressure right on both ends of that. Right, the engineer
is saying, hey, you know, we're not quite ready, it's
too coold hold out to launch versus Right, there's pressure,
and then the question is how effective was that communication
(17:05):
between the engineering and the management. Right, And the same
thing is true for you, Right, you might say, hey,
I'm a script. It's so close. You know, if we
can delay a week, that would be amazing. I'd really
be able to get it in a place that's great.
And you may also have some right financial pressures incentives
to start that week earlier. And I think in our
case there's a little bit of what goes into it
is you know, we all have experience with kind of
(17:29):
real and not real pressure. And you know, I'm trying
to think of a great example, but you know, like,
for example, I know that there are many times where
we go into a test and it's not like the
procedure is not one hundred percent locked in. Could be
similar to a script, right, if you take that script
or that procedure, there's an amount that you know you're
(17:50):
going to edit every day, right that you might tweak
a little bit as you kind of go and you
learn a little bit and you're justin.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
And so I might be someone let's.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Say, you know, ten years from no, I'm a manager
and I'm looking at that and I'm like, yeah, you
guys said you're not ready, but I think this is
business as usual. I think your procedure is good enough
and you're going to do the usual amount of last
minute kind of tweaking of a parameter or write editing
a script. But if you know, if you think I'm
really actually much farther away from that, and I and
we don't have that dialogue where I can get a
(18:19):
sense of Okay, you're not just the usual amount of unreadiness,
you are pretty far behind. Then it's in my interest
to say we got to postpone the test, right. I
don't want to sit there, you know, a test that
costs I don't know, a million dollars a day, or
write a movie production that costs a million dollars a
day and sit there and you know, twiddle my thumbs
while you guys come off this. It's better for us
to just push everything off by three days and start that. Yeah,
(18:42):
that's gonna cost a little bit. And I think that
is the hard part about this job, right, because all
of us have some level of experience that we're drawing
on to judge whether your assessment of the script or
my assessment of the procedure is good. And I think
that's kind of the challenge there. So challenger is in
that boat, right in the extreme case, and there's other case,
is right, I think where we don't necessarily have that knowledge, right,
(19:04):
we haven't done that exploration, or we didn't even foresee
that possibility.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Take me back to Mars and the Curiosity Mission for
listeners who maybe are less familiar, What was your role
on the mission? Why was it important to you? And
you worked on it for eight years? Right?
Speaker 3 (19:28):
I worked on almost also until almost ten years.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Ten years. So how do you maintain a drive while
you're doing.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
That a lot?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, I mean Curiosity was the very first thing I
started on when I came to JPL. Like, I didn't
know when I got hirghed that that was immediately what
I was going to work on.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
But like, what a thrill, right?
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And I also I think two things that really helped.
One was you know that months after I last so
I got here in November two thousand and three. January
two thousand and four, we start landing rovers on Mars.
Spirit of an opportunity. I think when you see that
happening within the first couple of months of your job,
(20:07):
it's sort of it gives you a false sense of like, well,
this is going to what it's going to be like.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
And I think it at some level like I was
sold by this.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's not real, right, it's I mean, it was still
another ten years almost away from my own experience doing that,
but you know, you just kind of get in that
whole like, oh my god, it's amazing. I mean, the
people are excited. I'm excited, and we're going to watch
this thing. So I knew kind of a little bit
what to look for, right. I think I joined a
few years later, I wouldn't have necessarily known what the
end maybe looks like.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
So that helps motivate me a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And the other thing is, I think it's just you know,
it's a guy here and I My life has been
ap I hope everybody's life is like this, but my
life has certainly been a series of like incrementally approaching
or asymptotically approaching.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
My my, my, my people.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
You know, like you start in general school and you're like, hey,
I have some interests with these friends or whatever. But
I was like, like, you know, as I started going
to like more engineering classes and science classes, right, I
found like more and more of a sort of a
tribe that I felt, you know, a similar approach to
like looking at life and you know, understanding the world
and now as I've got to you know, now send JPL,
I really was, like, I really feel like I'm in
(21:12):
a community of people who are like me and have
a lot like get me. And I think that sort
of level of team camaraderie and understanding is really what
helped me hugely, right, Like, I felt very much in
an element that I had not necessarily felt kind of
getting to that point in my life and sitting there
right with amazing folks who were willing to kind of
(21:34):
mentor me and you know, help me understand what to
think about in what it falls to avoid. And it's
that level of like people willing to invest in you.
I think it makes you want to respond in kind, right,
You want to merit that sort of investment and have
that like feel like you are, oh, yeah, this person
is investing you. I also want to give back at
that level, and I think that's what got.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Me through that first ten years A long time.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, I had no context for anything that took ten
years in my life when I was you know, twenty two,
twenty three, and then right doing it all the way
till I was thirty two.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
For somebody who only knows that you worked on the
Curiosity mission. What's the how do you describe in like
two or three sentences what the Curiosity mission was?
Speaker 3 (22:19):
So, yeah, Curiosity.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
We were attempting to land a rover on the surface
of Mars that could help prove what we believed that
the ancient Mars environment was habitable. And to that we
brought a suite of you know, ten instruments to help
us characterize that environment, both at the surface layer and
then even to write drill into the rock and help
(22:43):
understand maybe what was preserved inside that rock. We were
never going to look for a direct evidence of life,
but if we felt like we could prove that there
was a time where Mars could have had life, you know,
that's that's right, the segue into well.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Maybe we should start looking for that life.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And the answer was yes, right, we found an ample
evidence Mars could of support life at its past. So
I think we're that's really exciting. I said it just
like that. Yeah, that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
I say it again, but more exciting.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Towards the end of that mission, you were working martian hours, right, yeah,
Like what can you describe what that was and how
that affected your real life?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
I don't think about that very out there anywhere. But
that's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
So when we landed on the surface, one of the
challenges was we were trying to get as much out.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Of this mission as possible.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
And you know, you don't know, you don't know if
the game maybe a part is kind of fail. You
don't know if you're going to get everything done. So
one of the ways we did that was we wanted
the rover to be able to operate during the daylight
hours on Mars. That's the key, right, we need sunlight
right effectively to be warm enough to operate a lot
of the motors and things like that, but also then
to drive right, you need to be able to take
camera images and unfortunately, right it's just two energy intensitive
(23:56):
to bring floodlights with you to highlight so you drive
during the day, you drill during the day, do everything
basically during the day. To do that, the rest of
us had to work efectively overnight Martian time to give
the rover its daily instruction set right that it can
run through during the Martian day and then report back
to us in the afternoon when it can downloak the
(24:18):
data and you send new pictures of word.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Know, the Martian day is forty minutes longer than the
Earth day.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So we end up with this cycle where in order
to work the Martian night time, we are slowly moving
forty minutes later every day.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
On Earth as our start of day. Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
And that means that over the course of about a
month you are kind of cycling through this full day
night cycle on Earth where my day might start at
eight eight am, you know today, and then eight forty tomorrow,
nine twenty and so on and so forth, so that
you know, there were times where my normal daytime was.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
You know, three in the morning to you know, ten
in the morning.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Or something like that, and the whole team was doing it,
which that was the saving grace, right. I think if
one person would be really sad, but the whole team
doing it. I meant, you know, like we were going
to find twenty four hour bowling in la or going
to each other's houses to play video games at two
in the morning.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
We just found a community of people.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Basically right who were on the same time zone as
us in this case, just a time zone that was
never fixed in place.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
It's a great experience.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
It's exhausting it think of permanent jet lag, but you're so,
I think you're just so excited to sort of be
in the energy of that moment, right, because everything is
fresh and new. You're turning this on for the first time,
you're seeing the results from the laser for the first time,
you're you know, touching a rock for the first time.
I don't know, So everything feels kind of just fresh
and exciting, and you're like, Okay, I'll drink some more
(25:42):
coffee and let's keep going.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah, I mean that sounds awesome when you're describing it.
So after curiosity, you moved on to perseverance, right, was
that the order of.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
No, what I moved on to europe A Clipper? Oh? Right,
So Europe Clipper.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Is a mission that we launched in twenty twenty four.
It's headed to Jupiter's moon Europe. And the reason why
we're doing that is when the galley emissions and voyager
missions pass by, we detected a magnetic field around Europa
that wasn't coming from Europe itself.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
It was interacting with the magnetic field from Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
But that gives us a strong clue or evidence that
it could have a liquid ocean below this ice surface.
With a liquid ocean that means you have warmth, means
you have the opportunity for chemistry to interact, which also
means right then you have a potential for, again, like Curiosity,
life to exist. So the Clipper emissions there to sort
(26:35):
of help us understand is Europa a habitable environment. It
won't necessarily look for evidence of life, but it can
at the very least help us understand is it a
place where.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Life could have existed or could it exist?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
And that will inform whether, you know, we would send
more missions back there to understand more about it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
The real question was when you think about Mars, what
are the things that you feel most excited about having answered?
And then what are the unanswered things that are still
that still need to be done?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
For sure being part of the journey from seeing you know,
the missions that first landed and said, hey, here's we
have really strong evidence of water on Mars to curiosity
where we could say we have really strong evidence that
that water could have supported life. Now to write with perseverance.
With that in mind, right, we can gather sample that
we want to bring home and say, look, let's let's
(27:25):
really get into the details of that and potentially start
looking for any evidence of that past life. To me,
that's that's an amazing kind of right middle chapter to
be a part of of that arc. I'm really optimistic
obviously still that we're going to bring sample home from
Mars and right and bring it home to what is right,
unfair level of comparison in terms of the laboratories that
(27:47):
we can have here on Earth compared to what we
can take with us to Mars. And I really want
the science community to be able to get that and
see that. So I think that part of the story
to me, right, that chapter we need to finish. There's
a couple of different ways to dobviously, right. I mean,
it's it's possible that will send humans there, of course,
you know, I'm so optimistic that we'll get a sample
return mission before humans get there, because it could still
(28:08):
be a little bit before humans are safely able to
travel to Mars and land safely. So I think that
would be to me, sort of the good conclusion to
that book.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Right. And then there's maybe the future.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Book of Mars, right, which is what does it look
like if humans can start going to Mars? You know,
is there something that we want to be accomplishing with
footsteps on Mars that lead to a greater human civilization
or you know, is it resources, is it whatnot? And
I don't know where that story starts start. I don't
know where that story goes. But for me, I think
this kind of the robotic journey of Mars is right.
(28:40):
Pictures as we passed by it for the first time,
seeing these deltas where there's like, oh, there's definitely water flow,
Like you could see these deltas and channels and things
that where water must have flowed at one point to hey,
we were on the surface. We can verify that that
was right. Chemicals form the presence of water. Now we
can verify that arc of life. And I think that
would be a great story, right to be able to
(29:02):
put into that. So I want to see that happen.
I am biased and that I'd like to see that
before humans get there, because I think once we are there,
we obviously introduce a little bit of a wildcard into
the thing. Right, we are full of life, not mean
not just our existence ourselves, but we have microbiomes.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
We have we're carrying all sorts of life with us.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
So you know, if there is the question of whether
our life can exist on Mars today, part of me
thinks that you are almost obligated to try to answer
that question even before humans can get there, because I
don't know how effective we can be to answer that
question once humans are there.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
We will definitely find life on Mars once we're there.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
With so many countries working on these things, that that
concept makes me think a lot about cooperation. After working
on missions to Mars Jupiter, your focus is now Earth.
Twenty FOURTEENS assigned its first partnership with the Indian Space
Research Organization also known as this ROW. Can you tell
me about the partnership, how it works and why NASA
decided a partner with Israel?
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:06):
I think you know a couple of these One is
isn't really demonstrated. I think there are spaces where, you know,
not that they hadn't been doing things for a long time,
but kind of really I don't know. The arriving on
the scene, right, was they did a Mars orbiting mission
shortly after Curiosity, right, and they demonstrated on their first try,
which is really impressive, right, that they could put a
(30:27):
satellite in orbit around Mars. And I think that kind
of opened a lot of folks eyes as to what
might be possible working with Israel in the future, including
NASA's and that was the twenty fourteen agreement, you know,
that kind of said hey, we should we should start
doing this stuff. In the meantime, JPL was sort of
in a place where we were trying to work on
this Earth's orbiting radar mission and we had, you know,
(30:50):
a good design for radar, but finding somebody who can say, hey,
we can build that for you in this case was
kind of the ideal partner. So Israel right offered to
build the spacecraft bus and another radar that's complementary to ours,
and so we could house all of that in that
structure and effectively, right for Nasasen, that's a cheaper option,
(31:10):
right because it's being provided by Israel. And then from
Israe's end and our end, where you both get to
learn from each other about this whole experience of building
radars and collaborating on a mission, and so that's kind
of like the mutually beneficial part of that.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
How do you describe that mission? And then like what
was your role in the project.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So it'll kind of take us back, right and say,
radar kind of an interesting way of observing the earth.
You know, you can think about the visual images of
course of what you get from the surface, but then
they're limited, Right, you can't do that overnight, for example,
and tell you can't. I can't tell you a lot
about the surface overnight, except for hey, there's a lot
of cities where there's lights, and of course if it's
cloudy or things like that, I also lose that data.
So radar are really phenomenal at giving you this sort
(31:48):
of time domain data that you can really use to
let's say, look at forestation, look at coastal processes, right,
like how how maybe the ocean is interacting with a
certain you know, the solid earth and eroding things like
that or adding sand certain places or whatever. Right, we
can look for things like volcanoes, We can look for
(32:09):
things like biomass and crops and all those things. And
because you can do this day in day out constantly,
you're able to see these sort of small shifts in
these patterns emerge seasonal patterns as well as you know,
longer term patterns with things like the volcanoes and earthquakes
and stuff like that. So the radars to have a
specific approach to that problem that allows us to do this.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
In our case, nicer, we get to map the Earth
every twelve days.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
In fact, when we see the same place on Earth
effectively alreay six days, and that data is now very useful, right,
if you're looking for soil moisture, or you're looking for
things like that, right, and you're working agriculture, those things
are immediately valuable. If you're looking for things like you know,
predicting maybe how various weather events can interact with the
land mass when it makes them rise, right, how much
(32:53):
water is they're already in the in the ground, and
are you going to pick up water for example, if
you're a hurricane or typhoon, will that look like right?
Those are the kinds of things that we can immediately inform.
If there's post earthquake things we can write. We can
quickly create maps of those areas and say here's how
this area is affected by this earthquake. So that's why
that time is so valuable for us. And so the
radars kind of contribute that in a couple of different ways.
(33:16):
But the mission there is really, like I said, is
to citize all this information and a really quick turnaround
basis that people can use for understanding how the globe
is changing right, dynamic in nature.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
In working with engineers and your partners at Israel, what's
been the most rewarding and then what are some of
the unexpected challenges that you have to work through.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I have two things that I think are probably one
is the team has been amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I really loved, truly.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Loved the experience of working with I think, people who
are similar to me, but also really how a different
kind of background, right, It's really cool in my mind,
I think like we are engineers, and I definitely think
we think like engineers. However, right, arriving at that from
different angles is kind of a really neat thing, And
so I think about a lot of the relationships now
(34:08):
right where even though I have nothing to say about
the spacecraft anymore, I'm still you know what's happening, you know,
my colleagues and asking how things are going and how
we know if their daughters, you know, made her applications
and everything else. Right, So it's kind of fun to
have that relationship with a group of people that you know,
I didn't get to know before the other way. The
other part of it, I think as an engineer and
(34:29):
the kind of the experience of growth. Right, there were
things where we talked about I mean, we'll go back
to the failure point together. Right, I was saying, how
much of I think the way we do business A, NASA, JPL,
and in industry is informed by the failures we've had
of our past is for us had a different set
of failures. Right, they have not had They've had failures too,
(34:49):
of course we all have, but they've learned different lessons
sometimes from those failures, sometimes even similar failures, and they've
learned they've taken a different you know, solution to that problem.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
And to me, that's really fun, Like.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That's super fun because you know, often I think if
I like sci fi, right, sci fi is about changing
a variable and.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Saying maybe how the outcome will change.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
To me, this is like I get a free experiment, right,
Like I had failure A, and I did you know
option X to solve it? And here is where I
have failure A, but they did option why to solve it.
And how do those two worlds play out? Like what
does that look like?
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Now?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
And I get not just like to hypath you know,
do hypothetical, but I actually got to see real world
evidence of what that is so to me, I think
that was.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Really fun and it really did.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
It really informed a lot of my own experience or
thoughts about risk and how do we manage those hard things?
And if Israel, you know, or anybody can see it
from different perspectives, why shouldn't we be taking that kind
of holistic approach. So I think with some of the
lessons that we've had in the past, even right, it's
it's always smart to say, don't let these things always
pile up, right, infinitely high level of don't do this,
(35:50):
don't do that, do this, do this, and say like, well,
how many of these have changed?
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Israe's a younger space program that is definitely more willing
to take risk, and I love that, you.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Know, there's moments where I'm super jealous of that.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
But there's also they're also, you know, doing this at
a time where electronics have gotten better, software has gotten better,
our ability to test these things has gotten better, and
so some of the lessons that JPL learned the hard way,
you know, maybe in the sixties aren't necessarily right the same.
You wouldn't necessarily take that same approach to that problem today,
given that electronics are more robust given that you know,
(36:24):
you might be able to test it differently than you
did in the past, and you should revisit those things.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
And Israel kind of said, hey, well, we we already were.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Doing this when the technology was better, so we decided
this is going to be the way we solve this problem.
And I think that was fun. I am looking at
a quisite person, I will always ask more questions. That
doesn't necessarily mean to say that I am asking you
or challenging you about how you did something. It's just
that I want to know more. And I think that
both of us were guilty of doing that sometimes, right.
(36:53):
I think both parties are like, oh, well you learned something,
tell me more about that thing you learned. And it's
not like, oh, I'm here to judge whether you're solving
it the right way or anything else.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
I'm just like I want to know.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
But it comes off right when you're sort of you
can be a little defense there it because you're like, well, no,
I solved it, Like I mean you should trust me
on this, like I know what I'm doing versus right,
Maybe it's just a level of inquisition.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
I think that finding that line is always.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Hard, right because I think, yeah, there are there always
regulations and rules about how much you share and how
much you can't share and everything and all these things,
and so you kind of worry that, like, are we
are we just asking questions for the sake of questions,
or are we asking them because you know we are
really not we are concerned about something and knowing that
is hard to navigate.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
I think do you have a sense of how that
works with the private space companies? So like NASA is
contracted with SpaceX in the past. Obviously you have experience
with NASA and isroehen when they tackle failures or communicate
about those failures and learn from them. Are commercial motivations
different in any way? Do you know or is it
(37:56):
similar regardless of who runs the space Agency?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I think you're hard differences, right, I mean, I definitely
think that being a private organization to some degree affords
you a little bit of a different risk posture. I
hope it does, right, because you know, for sure there's
a level of everything that right we need to You're
trying to make sure that you know, we're doing a bespoke.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Mission to Europa.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
It's one of a kind, right, and for many people
will be you know, twenty years of their lives that
they'll invest in trying to get the mission to come
to reality and then operate it, right or more than
twenty years, and so write that risk associated with that,
we want to be really super vigilant about everything that
we do. Whereas I, you know, I also hope that, yes,
I want space to continue to be pushing into new
(38:44):
ground and challenging itself. And sometimes it's really hard to
challenge yourself in certain ways. Right when you're talking about
I get one opportunity to do a Europa clipper, you
know in twenty years, you.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Really got to make account.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Whereas industry, right, I'm hoping that they're going to get
the chance to launch Wi tens. It's not hundreds of
this rocket model, right, or you know they're going to
send fleets of satellites to you know, to places and
those things should I think afford us a chance to
experiment a little bit more and try different things and
be willing to evolve more. The process on an early
space program I think was like that, right, you saw
(39:17):
a little bit more of the like everything we were
doing was the first time, and you were like, well,
I'm there's going to be a Mariners one through you know,
eleven or whatever.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
It is.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Great takes, take some chances, and that's again that's changed
a little bit, and I think that's kind of the
good balancing heart. So I hope that there are I
think there are good avenues for sharing that knowledge.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
It's not perfect obviously.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
One of the great things about having a bigger industry, though,
is there's a little bit more movement, right, and so
people are moving around from NASA to private industry back
to NASA and so forth, and so you are getting
the lessons from each of these places that are kind
of getting disseminated. But I really would love to see,
you know, places like JPL and NASA and everybody else
right be even more partnered, because I do think there's
a lot of lessons that we've learned that we should
(39:57):
definitely be infusing into the industry.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Visors I want the industry to sort of infuse.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
The you know that like willingness to take some different
risks into us and say like, yeah, this isn't as
scary as you think it is. Right, We've tried this,
and you know, it actually kind of works. So I'd
like to see more of that.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Bobbick, thank you so much. Thanks for being here. I
feel like I could do this for a long time,
so we'll have to continue over a drink in a minute. A.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
I love that great. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Bobbik Fredosi is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and is also known as the NASA Mohawk Guy.
Here we go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Snap Foo Media in association with New Metric Media.
Our executive producers are me kalpen ed Helms, Mike Falbo,
(40:50):
Alyssa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan.
Meghan tan Is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is
our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham,
(41:14):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. Thanks for listening, everybody,
tell your friends, write a review. All of this helps.
I appreciate you listening, and until we go again, I'm Kelpenn.
About a decade ago, I had the chance to see
a Space Shuttle launch in person. It's insane and it
makes your dick shiver from the sound waves. All of you,
all of you. I'm just letting you including like everything,
just everything. Sonic boom. It's a sonic boom. In Cape Canaveral, Florida,
residents have grown accustomed to the sounds and feeling of
(00:24):
sonic booms at Steve's Diner at Titusville High School. In
condos lining the Indian River, the rumble usually means lift
off progress, something to talk to their neighbors about when
they get home. But on the morning of September one,
twenty sixteen, their buildings shook in a way that made
them question what was happening. It felt like an earthquake.
(00:45):
I mean, coffee cups rattled, people held their breath, Smoke
stretched into the sky. What happened was this? An Elon
Musk owned SpaceX rocket had exploded on the launch pad,
destroying what it was carrying, which was a communications satellite
owned by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Thankfully, no one was hurt,
(01:06):
but man billionaires were pissed as space engineers around the
country watched this video over and over again. They were
reminded of the fragility of their work.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I'm learning a lot more from the failures than I
am from the successes. You get fortunate with success and
you don't know what about what you did got you there.
But the failure is like, you know pretty quickly which
things you didn't do that can lead to a failure.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Bobbigfordousi is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL.
You might know him as the NASA mohawk guy who
became a cultural icon during the twenty twelve Mars Curiosity landing.
Despite becoming a meme and making huge headlines, Bobbik's job
is actually much quieter. His true passion is spacecraft failures,
(01:55):
kind of like the one in the story I just
told you, and then figuring out how we can learn
from them. Today, I'm talking to Bobbik about the spacecrafts
that have helped define his career, from the Mars Curiosity
rover to launching a brand new satellite, and I want
to know why he's devoted his life to studying what
happens when these things fail. Also why our failures aren't
(02:17):
always bad and how to keep the worst ones from
happening again.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Here we go again, again again.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Hey, I'm Cal Penn and this is Here we Go Again,
a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we go?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Hey? Hello? Are you doing?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
How are you I?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I'm Bob Pren currently palea manager for Nicerar Mission, which
is a joint mission between NASA and Israel. It's been
or twenty years of working on spacecraft to help understand
our own planet and a few other planets as well.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Before I jump into my conversation, I just want to
note that Bobbic's opinions are his own and he is
not speaking on behalf of NASA. The entry point that
was also sort of around the time when you and
I met, you became this like insane cultural icon known
as the NASA Mohawk Guy, which was a nickname given
(03:33):
to you by President Obama, and then things kind of
blew up from there. Did the blow up that followed
did that come from like him anointing you with this
nickname or was it already on that trajectory with people's
interest in your appearance and how much that differed from
their preconceived notions about who works at NASA.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I think things started definitely the night of landing.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
There was like a twitter you know, I don't know, dialogue,
and a few folks were, you know, texting about it.
And then we were at a party after the landing
on a local bar.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I got a call.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
At the time, I had all my calls just routed
from my landline here at work to my my cell
phone because I was just never in my office, and
it was from like a reporter, and I was like,
this is strange. But then the next morning when I
show up, the media folks at JPL are like, hey,
so you have a lot of requests for interviews, and
that's kind of when I was like, oh, this is
(04:35):
a this is not just another day at the office.
Kind of like oh, hey, it's really cool that you
were there and tell us about the mission. It was
like you bob ack, tell us about you, and.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
So I think that was that's kind of what I know.
But then yeah, you're actually right.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Right when when when Obama called the team to congratulate us,
and you know, make comments about wanting to have a
similar hairstyle, I think that's definitely kind of exponential growth there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Since you had these interview requests and it sounds like
they wanted to talk about you versus the mission. What
was your role in this mission? And then how did
you thread that needle? Because a lot of time, especially
for TV, like you do a morning show and you
know you've got like four and a half to seven minutes,
it's I have still I find it very difficult to
try to reroute the conversation towards what I want to
(05:20):
talk about if the question is leading about something else.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Trial by fire for sure. I mean I didn't do
any of the formal media training. I wasn't really prepared
for it. The good news is I think I knew
the mission really well. I had spent a lot of
time not just on my part of the mission, but
also one of my earlier roles was helping develop what
we call the mission Plan, which is kind of this
outline of the life cycle from launch all the way
(05:45):
to the end of the mission, including the traverse from
Earth to Mars and landing, and then of course also
the science mission that was going to happen on the service.
So I knew the mission really well in and out.
Certainly at the level right where I'm not a scientific expert,
but at the level where I could communicate hopefully affect
to a larger audience. So that really gave me some
confidence at least to go into those things. I think
(06:06):
if it had just been about me, or it had
just been about you know, tell us all the I
don't know specific details of this thing, I would have
felt really intimidated. But I think at that point it
was like, tell us what we should be excited about,
which was just relating my personal excitement.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And that initial planning role led.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
To a role that's specifically why I was kind of
on console that evening was launched through approach system engineer,
and so during the landing I was there monitoring the
health of the spacecraft as we kind of started at
the top of the atmosphere and made our way down
to the surface. And yeah, I mean, like everyone else,
including the public, I mean, we're along for the ride, right,
(06:42):
we're checking boxes, but the whole system was happening on
its own, like all the work had been done and
we're just waiting for the signal to come back to Earth.
And to me, that's kind of both really good in
the sense that it's nice to just sort of not
feel like you have a choice, but it's also terrifying
because you took the tests, you know, maybe eight years ago,
and you're waiting for the results now.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh man, yeah, okay, so this all happens and then
you and I have previously talked about my love for
space movies. Yeah, so I just let my selfish question
on this is, how does the jump happen from landing
to Sharknado three?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I really don't know how the Sharknado three thing happened entirely.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
The costume designer was a fan and was like, look,
I mean this guy Merrits at least a cameo. Like
at the time, it was still you know, there's still
some some stuff there, and I am such a sucker
for life experience, Like I think one of the things
where I love.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
This is is that.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
But also yeah, just I mean, you know, you imagine
that you're you think your box is going to be
going down the office every day, right, you know, talking
to your team about designing a space crout and someone's like, hey,
would you like to come pretend that there are sharks
attacking the Earth, and I was like, obviously, yes, and
it was great. Right, It's we're sitting in a shuttle replica,
(08:06):
which I think is the same shuttle replica that was
used for the movie Space Camp.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Which you know is my favorite space movie.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I was so in right, So this is like all
all the nerd like boxes are being tacked by this experience.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, I mean it's it was. It was awesome and
everybody was really fun about it.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
For those of you who did not know with the
movie Space Camp, like you should really do yourself a
favor and watch Space Camp today, which I wanted to
chat with you about failures in in what you do.
Your website says you're very passionate about spacecraft failures in particular,
and I thought that framing was very interesting for the
types of conversations that we have. Was it space Camp
(08:48):
that gave you that area of interest or was like,
what what made you interested in the idea of spacecraft failures?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I think it was part part of was starting here
at JPL. I joined a time and the kind of
had a string of successes, but so much of what
we were doing and the way we approached our design
and the way we approached reviewing our design and everything
else was about the lessons that have come out of
a decade before a series of failures, right, I mean,
(09:16):
until kind of the Mari's Spirit and Opportunity missions, we
didn't have that.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Great a success rate overall on Mars.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so you're you're really trying to understand why why
do we make these thissge why are we deciding to
have this kind of review wire, Why do I need
to do this product? Why is if that someone says
software should be designed this way? And the answer is
there was this big lesson from a project before us
that said, look, you know, if you don't do this
(09:48):
level review or if you don't get this level of insight,
the chances are that you're going to find a similar
problem to what this other mission had. And some of
them are you know, the larger ones that folks know about, right,
the unit thing between you know, imperial emetric units, and
that's which is a whole ripe topic because it's it's
really much deeper than that at some level too. But
(10:09):
those kinds of cultural mismatches as well as things you know,
like I said, where we say, oh, of course, right,
if you look at how a particular sensor can work,
it can give you a false positive. Are you sure
that your design accommodates a temporary false positive?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
If you're looking for a great example, right that you're
on the surface, you want to make sure that that
contact sensor has to be touching the surface long enough
to say I'm confidently on the surface. Not I get
a blip on the sensor that says it's, you know,
been depressed, and then I kill my engines, because if
that sensor triggers for the wrong reason, even for a second,
and I kill my engines, I'm right, I'm dropping to
(10:48):
the surface of Mars. And so those kinds of things
are the reason why we do so much of what
we do. And I think at that point I realized
so much of what I was getting out of our
project in the past campaigns and everything else is I'm
learning a lot more from the failures than I am
from the successes. You kind of right, you stumble in.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I don't want to sa stumble is the wrong word.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
But you you get fortunate with success and you don't
know what about you what you did got you there.
You know, you did a lot of things. You did
one hundred different things, and maybe eight of them were
really helpful. But the failure is like you know, you
know pretty quickly in which things you didn't do that
can lead to a failure. And so I think it's
like a really great way of approaching this world in
which right ninety nine percent isn't good enough? Unfortunately in that.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
World, is there a specific process for turning a failure
into a positive? Both scientifically and then also like, this
is a public agency, right, so I assume there's also
a ton of political pressure when there's a failure, and
probably harder to explain to politicians how to turn that
into a positive. So what can you walk us through
like what happens both scientifically and in terms of the
(11:54):
public policy part of it?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I mean the first thing, of course is you know,
when we have anomaly, and it can be all sorts
of ranges, right, I mean, failures can range from mission
ending of course, which are the ones that right make
it to Congress know things to oh, hey we had
a failure of this thing and we have to swap
over to a redundant part, or we have to update
our software on board or do something else, right, and
(12:17):
so those those scale really differently. Fortunately, we don't have
that many of the ones where we're talking to Congress,
so when they arise, you know, the first thing we're
doing is obviously trying to triage.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
The immediate thing, which is you know why the quota
of sort of failure is not an option exists is
because of right art.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
We are very much in a triage at the beginning
of this.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And you know, it's like it's like healthcare, right, you know,
you go into the doctor, you have an issue with yourself.
The first thing is not like, well, let's go and
try to do a deep dive on why you weren't
eating the right amount of fiber every day or whatever. Right,
you're going to try to be like, Okay, the first
thing is we need to get you on this medication
or we need to operate or do whatever else right
to get you through the immediate kind of danger. And
(12:58):
that part we know we do effectively. I think that's
what everybody is sort of used to. The next thing, though,
is really for us to take a step back and say, Okay, well,
how did.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
We end uth here? Right?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Was was the miss because we didn't test something correctly?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
Was the miss?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Because you know, we decided to operate it differently than
we had tested it, or did we not have a
you know, understanding of how this part can fail in space?
Are there other people who have had that experience? So
we start kind of taking a step back and saying,
what are the lessons effectively right that I can learn
from this experience? So doesn't have to be a Part
A fails. Therefore everybody should be worried about Part A,
(13:33):
which is definitely true, but it also can be Part
A failed.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
If part AY can fail, what other parts could fail?
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Because you know, if Part A is susceptible, you know,
what's what's common with that way?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
What what did we do about Part A versus Part B?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
It might be that we test a Part B differently,
or it might be that they both use a similar
you know, manufacturing process, and you.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Have to go stre looking at that.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
So those lessons get captured and you know, get it
within as.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They scale, right, we sort of share different levels.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Right, So within JPL, we certainly want to keep our
own database of failures and have you used this part?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
How could that part you know fail in your in
your spacecraft?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And that happens a lot, right, we use these parts
we learned something about their behavior, and then someone says, ah, okay,
I'm using the same part. I haven't seen that issue,
but I'm going to write my code so that it
can work around this issue if it happens in the future.
And then again it's the get really big, you know,
like the huge cultural ones. Right, we start saying, okay,
we're going to share those with all of NASA or
(14:33):
put them. There's a lessons Learned website that NASA also
shares publicly where we're we're there to kind of disseminate
our lessons learned with the greater industry and things. And
of course you get through the extreme cases where you're
testifying in front of Congress right about how did Challenger happen?
How did you know we lose an orbiter in Mars?
And those ones, right, those tend to have not just
(14:54):
the JPL reviewers, but we bring in all these experts
from industry to help us go through that process to
really try to you know, think about every different aspect
of it so it can be really different. Again, I mean,
I'm very fortunate that so far I've not worked on
anything I would that has had to have a major thing.
But I hope that, you know, I deal with it
the same way, right, Like, I hope emotionally I'm here
(15:14):
to go into this because I'm doing, I want to
be doing things that are inherently at some risk of
having this cop you know, this problem.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Are there pressures like that that come from people who
are not scientists? And how then, how to scientists account
for that? Because I assume, like I'm just putting the
the in a very different world, right, like putting an
art window on something. Is this idea of like, oh,
the script's not ready, I need another month, and if
I'm writing it for myself, you know, maybe eight months
(15:44):
later it's done. But if I've already sold an option
to it or something, that ship better be done in
thirty days or there's a real problem and that's not
a life and death thing. That's just making like a
bunch of jokes in the script. So I'm just thinking,
is there a version of that in your world?
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Well, I mean, I think the classic example is probably
a Challenger right Challenger early Shuttle right launch, there was
a known risk that these O rings that sealed the
solid rocket boosters will deform when they're cold, and that
you know, you could see these blowback, right, essentially hot
gases escaping out the side of it. There's a mix,
I think. I mean, I'm not certainly not here to
(16:22):
lay judgment or just to say that I'm an expert
in this ory. Theres people who've obviously done a lot
far deeper dives. But there's a mix of things there. Right,
there is a presentation that the engineers give in that
case that says, hey, here, look at these historical launches temperatures,
what do we see. Are we're seeing you know, possible
events and you can see a correlation there between the
temperature and the event. But you also then have right
(16:44):
mounting pressure. Right, the shuttle is expensive, it's early. We
promised that we'd be launching I don't know, ten times
a year on the Shuttle, and so NASA's trying to
also protect its longer term thing. And I think there's
pressure right on both ends of that. Right, the engineer
is saying, hey, you know, we're not quite ready, it's
too coold hold out to launch versus Right, there's pressure,
and then the question is how effective was that communication
(17:05):
between the engineering and the management. Right, And the same
thing is true for you, Right, you might say, hey,
I'm a script. It's so close. You know, if we
can delay a week, that would be amazing. I'd really
be able to get it in a place that's great.
And you may also have some right financial pressures incentives
to start that week earlier. And I think in our
case there's a little bit of what goes into it
is you know, we all have experience with kind of
(17:29):
real and not real pressure. And you know, I'm trying
to think of a great example, but you know, like,
for example, I know that there are many times where
we go into a test and it's not like the
procedure is not one hundred percent locked in. Could be
similar to a script, right, if you take that script
or that procedure, there's an amount that you know you're
(17:50):
going to edit every day, right that you might tweak
a little bit as you kind of go and you
learn a little bit and you're justin.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
And so I might be someone let's.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Say, you know, ten years from no, I'm a manager
and I'm looking at that and I'm like, yeah, you
guys said you're not ready, but I think this is
business as usual. I think your procedure is good enough
and you're going to do the usual amount of last
minute kind of tweaking of a parameter or write editing
a script. But if you know, if you think I'm
really actually much farther away from that, and I and
we don't have that dialogue where I can get a
(18:19):
sense of Okay, you're not just the usual amount of unreadiness,
you are pretty far behind. Then it's in my interest
to say we got to postpone the test, right. I
don't want to sit there, you know, a test that
costs I don't know, a million dollars a day, or
write a movie production that costs a million dollars a
day and sit there and you know, twiddle my thumbs
while you guys come off this. It's better for us
to just push everything off by three days and start that. Yeah,
(18:42):
that's gonna cost a little bit. And I think that
is the hard part about this job, right, because all
of us have some level of experience that we're drawing
on to judge whether your assessment of the script or
my assessment of the procedure is good. And I think
that's kind of the challenge there. So challenger is in
that boat, right in the extreme case, and there's other case,
is right, I think where we don't necessarily have that knowledge, right,
(19:04):
we haven't done that exploration, or we didn't even foresee
that possibility.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Take me back to Mars and the Curiosity Mission for
listeners who maybe are less familiar, What was your role
on the mission? Why was it important to you? And
you worked on it for eight years? Right?
Speaker 3 (19:28):
I worked on almost also until almost ten years.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Ten years. So how do you maintain a drive while
you're doing.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
That a lot?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, I mean Curiosity was the very first thing I
started on when I came to JPL. Like, I didn't
know when I got hirghed that that was immediately what
I was going to work on.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
But like, what a thrill, right?
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And I also I think two things that really helped.
One was you know that months after I last so
I got here in November two thousand and three. January
two thousand and four, we start landing rovers on Mars.
Spirit of an opportunity. I think when you see that
happening within the first couple of months of your job,
(20:07):
it's sort of it gives you a false sense of like, well,
this is going to what it's going to be like.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
And I think it at some level like I was
sold by this.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's not real, right, it's I mean, it was still
another ten years almost away from my own experience doing that,
but you know, you just kind of get in that
whole like, oh my god, it's amazing. I mean, the
people are excited. I'm excited, and we're going to watch
this thing. So I knew kind of a little bit
what to look for, right. I think I joined a
few years later, I wouldn't have necessarily known what the
end maybe looks like.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
So that helps motivate me a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And the other thing is, I think it's just you know,
it's a guy here and I My life has been
ap I hope everybody's life is like this, but my
life has certainly been a series of like incrementally approaching
or asymptotically approaching.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
My my, my, my people.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
You know, like you start in general school and you're like, hey,
I have some interests with these friends or whatever. But
I was like, like, you know, as I started going
to like more engineering classes and science classes, right, I
found like more and more of a sort of a
tribe that I felt, you know, a similar approach to
like looking at life and you know, understanding the world
and now as I've got to you know, now send JPL,
I really was, like, I really feel like I'm in
(21:12):
a community of people who are like me and have
a lot like get me. And I think that sort
of level of team camaraderie and understanding is really what
helped me hugely, right, Like, I felt very much in
an element that I had not necessarily felt kind of
getting to that point in my life and sitting there
right with amazing folks who were willing to kind of
(21:34):
mentor me and you know, help me understand what to
think about in what it falls to avoid. And it's
that level of like people willing to invest in you.
I think it makes you want to respond in kind, right,
You want to merit that sort of investment and have
that like feel like you are, oh, yeah, this person
is investing you. I also want to give back at
that level, and I think that's what got.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Me through that first ten years A long time.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, I had no context for anything that took ten
years in my life when I was you know, twenty two,
twenty three, and then right doing it all the way
till I was thirty two.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
For somebody who only knows that you worked on the
Curiosity mission. What's the how do you describe in like
two or three sentences what the Curiosity mission was?
Speaker 3 (22:19):
So, yeah, Curiosity.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
We were attempting to land a rover on the surface
of Mars that could help prove what we believed that
the ancient Mars environment was habitable. And to that we
brought a suite of you know, ten instruments to help
us characterize that environment, both at the surface layer and
then even to write drill into the rock and help
(22:43):
understand maybe what was preserved inside that rock. We were
never going to look for a direct evidence of life,
but if we felt like we could prove that there
was a time where Mars could have had life, you know,
that's that's right, the segue into well.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Maybe we should start looking for that life.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And the answer was yes, right, we found an ample
evidence Mars could of support life at its past. So
I think we're that's really exciting. I said it just
like that. Yeah, that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
I say it again, but more exciting.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Towards the end of that mission, you were working martian hours, right, yeah,
Like what can you describe what that was and how
that affected your real life?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
I don't think about that very out there anywhere. But
that's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
So when we landed on the surface, one of the
challenges was we were trying to get as much out.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Of this mission as possible.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
And you know, you don't know, you don't know if
the game maybe a part is kind of fail. You
don't know if you're going to get everything done. So
one of the ways we did that was we wanted
the rover to be able to operate during the daylight
hours on Mars. That's the key, right, we need sunlight
right effectively to be warm enough to operate a lot
of the motors and things like that, but also then
to drive right, you need to be able to take
camera images and unfortunately, right it's just two energy intensitive
(23:56):
to bring floodlights with you to highlight so you drive
during the day, you drill during the day, do everything
basically during the day. To do that, the rest of
us had to work efectively overnight Martian time to give
the rover its daily instruction set right that it can
run through during the Martian day and then report back
to us in the afternoon when it can downloak the
(24:18):
data and you send new pictures of word.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Know, the Martian day is forty minutes longer than the
Earth day.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So we end up with this cycle where in order
to work the Martian night time, we are slowly moving
forty minutes later every day.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
On Earth as our start of day. Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
And that means that over the course of about a
month you are kind of cycling through this full day
night cycle on Earth where my day might start at
eight eight am, you know today, and then eight forty tomorrow,
nine twenty and so on and so forth, so that
you know, there were times where my normal daytime was.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
You know, three in the morning to you know, ten
in the morning.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Or something like that, and the whole team was doing it,
which that was the saving grace, right. I think if
one person would be really sad, but the whole team
doing it. I meant, you know, like we were going
to find twenty four hour bowling in la or going
to each other's houses to play video games at two
in the morning.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
We just found a community of people.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Basically right who were on the same time zone as
us in this case, just a time zone that was
never fixed in place.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
It's a great experience.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
It's exhausting it think of permanent jet lag, but you're so,
I think you're just so excited to sort of be
in the energy of that moment, right, because everything is
fresh and new. You're turning this on for the first time,
you're seeing the results from the laser for the first time,
you're you know, touching a rock for the first time.
I don't know, So everything feels kind of just fresh
and exciting, and you're like, Okay, I'll drink some more
(25:42):
coffee and let's keep going.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah, I mean that sounds awesome when you're describing it.
So after curiosity, you moved on to perseverance, right, was
that the order of.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
No, what I moved on to europe A Clipper? Oh? Right,
So Europe Clipper.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Is a mission that we launched in twenty twenty four.
It's headed to Jupiter's moon Europe. And the reason why
we're doing that is when the galley emissions and voyager
missions pass by, we detected a magnetic field around Europa
that wasn't coming from Europe itself.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
It was interacting with the magnetic field from Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
But that gives us a strong clue or evidence that
it could have a liquid ocean below this ice surface.
With a liquid ocean that means you have warmth, means
you have the opportunity for chemistry to interact, which also
means right then you have a potential for, again, like Curiosity,
life to exist. So the Clipper emissions there to sort
(26:35):
of help us understand is Europa a habitable environment. It
won't necessarily look for evidence of life, but it can
at the very least help us understand is it a
place where.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Life could have existed or could it exist?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
And that will inform whether, you know, we would send
more missions back there to understand more about it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
The real question was when you think about Mars, what
are the things that you feel most excited about having answered?
And then what are the unanswered things that are still
that still need to be done?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
For sure being part of the journey from seeing you know,
the missions that first landed and said, hey, here's we
have really strong evidence of water on Mars to curiosity
where we could say we have really strong evidence that
that water could have supported life. Now to write with perseverance.
With that in mind, right, we can gather sample that
we want to bring home and say, look, let's let's
(27:25):
really get into the details of that and potentially start
looking for any evidence of that past life. To me,
that's that's an amazing kind of right middle chapter to
be a part of of that arc. I'm really optimistic
obviously still that we're going to bring sample home from
Mars and right and bring it home to what is right,
unfair level of comparison in terms of the laboratories that
(27:47):
we can have here on Earth compared to what we
can take with us to Mars. And I really want
the science community to be able to get that and
see that. So I think that part of the story
to me, right, that chapter we need to finish. There's
a couple of different ways to dobviously, right. I mean,
it's it's possible that will send humans there, of course,
you know, I'm so optimistic that we'll get a sample
return mission before humans get there, because it could still
(28:08):
be a little bit before humans are safely able to
travel to Mars and land safely. So I think that
would be to me, sort of the good conclusion to
that book.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Right. And then there's maybe the future.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Book of Mars, right, which is what does it look
like if humans can start going to Mars? You know,
is there something that we want to be accomplishing with
footsteps on Mars that lead to a greater human civilization
or you know, is it resources, is it whatnot? And
I don't know where that story starts start. I don't
know where that story goes. But for me, I think
this kind of the robotic journey of Mars is right.
(28:40):
Pictures as we passed by it for the first time,
seeing these deltas where there's like, oh, there's definitely water flow,
Like you could see these deltas and channels and things
that where water must have flowed at one point to hey,
we were on the surface. We can verify that that
was right. Chemicals form the presence of water. Now we
can verify that arc of life. And I think that
would be a great story, right to be able to
(29:02):
put into that. So I want to see that happen.
I am biased and that I'd like to see that
before humans get there, because I think once we are there,
we obviously introduce a little bit of a wildcard into
the thing. Right, we are full of life, not mean
not just our existence ourselves, but we have microbiomes.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
We have we're carrying all sorts of life with us.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
So you know, if there is the question of whether
our life can exist on Mars today, part of me
thinks that you are almost obligated to try to answer
that question even before humans can get there, because I
don't know how effective we can be to answer that
question once humans are there.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
We will definitely find life on Mars once we're there.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
With so many countries working on these things, that that
concept makes me think a lot about cooperation. After working
on missions to Mars Jupiter, your focus is now Earth.
Twenty FOURTEENS assigned its first partnership with the Indian Space
Research Organization also known as this ROW. Can you tell
me about the partnership, how it works and why NASA
decided a partner with Israel?
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:06):
I think you know a couple of these One is
isn't really demonstrated. I think there are spaces where, you know,
not that they hadn't been doing things for a long time,
but kind of really I don't know. The arriving on
the scene, right, was they did a Mars orbiting mission
shortly after Curiosity, right, and they demonstrated on their first try,
which is really impressive, right, that they could put a
(30:27):
satellite in orbit around Mars. And I think that kind
of opened a lot of folks eyes as to what
might be possible working with Israel in the future, including
NASA's and that was the twenty fourteen agreement, you know,
that kind of said hey, we should we should start
doing this stuff. In the meantime, JPL was sort of
in a place where we were trying to work on
this Earth's orbiting radar mission and we had, you know,
(30:50):
a good design for radar, but finding somebody who can say, hey,
we can build that for you in this case was
kind of the ideal partner. So Israel right offered to
build the spacecraft bus and another radar that's complementary to ours,
and so we could house all of that in that
structure and effectively, right for Nasasen, that's a cheaper option,
(31:10):
right because it's being provided by Israel. And then from
Israe's end and our end, where you both get to
learn from each other about this whole experience of building
radars and collaborating on a mission, and so that's kind
of like the mutually beneficial part of that.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
How do you describe that mission? And then like what
was your role in the project.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So it'll kind of take us back, right and say,
radar kind of an interesting way of observing the earth.
You know, you can think about the visual images of
course of what you get from the surface, but then
they're limited, Right, you can't do that overnight, for example,
and tell you can't. I can't tell you a lot
about the surface overnight, except for hey, there's a lot
of cities where there's lights, and of course if it's
cloudy or things like that, I also lose that data.
So radar are really phenomenal at giving you this sort
(31:48):
of time domain data that you can really use to
let's say, look at forestation, look at coastal processes, right,
like how how maybe the ocean is interacting with a
certain you know, the solid earth and eroding things like
that or adding sand certain places or whatever. Right, we
can look for things like volcanoes, We can look for
(32:09):
things like biomass and crops and all those things. And
because you can do this day in day out constantly,
you're able to see these sort of small shifts in
these patterns emerge seasonal patterns as well as you know,
longer term patterns with things like the volcanoes and earthquakes
and stuff like that. So the radars to have a
specific approach to that problem that allows us to do this.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
In our case, nicer, we get to map the Earth
every twelve days.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
In fact, when we see the same place on Earth
effectively alreay six days, and that data is now very useful, right,
if you're looking for soil moisture, or you're looking for
things like that, right, and you're working agriculture, those things
are immediately valuable. If you're looking for things like you know,
predicting maybe how various weather events can interact with the
land mass when it makes them rise, right, how much
(32:53):
water is they're already in the in the ground, and
are you going to pick up water for example, if
you're a hurricane or typhoon, will that look like right?
Those are the kinds of things that we can immediately inform.
If there's post earthquake things we can write. We can
quickly create maps of those areas and say here's how
this area is affected by this earthquake. So that's why
that time is so valuable for us. And so the
radars kind of contribute that in a couple of different ways.
(33:16):
But the mission there is really, like I said, is
to citize all this information and a really quick turnaround
basis that people can use for understanding how the globe
is changing right, dynamic in nature.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
In working with engineers and your partners at Israel, what's
been the most rewarding and then what are some of
the unexpected challenges that you have to work through.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I have two things that I think are probably one
is the team has been amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I really loved, truly.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Loved the experience of working with I think, people who
are similar to me, but also really how a different
kind of background, right, It's really cool in my mind,
I think like we are engineers, and I definitely think
we think like engineers. However, right, arriving at that from
different angles is kind of a really neat thing, And
so I think about a lot of the relationships now
(34:08):
right where even though I have nothing to say about
the spacecraft anymore, I'm still you know what's happening, you know,
my colleagues and asking how things are going and how
we know if their daughters, you know, made her applications
and everything else. Right, So it's kind of fun to
have that relationship with a group of people that you know,
I didn't get to know before the other way. The
other part of it, I think as an engineer and
(34:29):
the kind of the experience of growth. Right, there were
things where we talked about I mean, we'll go back
to the failure point together. Right, I was saying, how
much of I think the way we do business A, NASA, JPL,
and in industry is informed by the failures we've had
of our past is for us had a different set
of failures. Right, they have not had They've had failures too,
(34:49):
of course we all have, but they've learned different lessons
sometimes from those failures, sometimes even similar failures, and they've
learned they've taken a different you know, solution to that problem.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
And to me, that's really fun, Like.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That's super fun because you know, often I think if
I like sci fi, right, sci fi is about changing
a variable and.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Saying maybe how the outcome will change.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
To me, this is like I get a free experiment, right,
Like I had failure A, and I did you know
option X to solve it? And here is where I
have failure A, but they did option why to solve it.
And how do those two worlds play out? Like what
does that look like?
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Now?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
And I get not just like to hypath you know,
do hypothetical, but I actually got to see real world
evidence of what that is so to me, I think
that was.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Really fun and it really did.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
It really informed a lot of my own experience or
thoughts about risk and how do we manage those hard things?
And if Israel, you know, or anybody can see it
from different perspectives, why shouldn't we be taking that kind
of holistic approach. So I think with some of the
lessons that we've had in the past, even right, it's
it's always smart to say, don't let these things always
pile up, right, infinitely high level of don't do this,
(35:50):
don't do that, do this, do this, and say like, well,
how many of these have changed?
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Israe's a younger space program that is definitely more willing
to take risk, and I love that, you.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Know, there's moments where I'm super jealous of that.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
But there's also they're also, you know, doing this at
a time where electronics have gotten better, software has gotten better,
our ability to test these things has gotten better, and
so some of the lessons that JPL learned the hard way,
you know, maybe in the sixties aren't necessarily right the same.
You wouldn't necessarily take that same approach to that problem today,
given that electronics are more robust given that you know,
(36:24):
you might be able to test it differently than you
did in the past, and you should revisit those things.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
And Israel kind of said, hey, well, we we already were.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Doing this when the technology was better, so we decided
this is going to be the way we solve this problem.
And I think that was fun. I am looking at
a quisite person, I will always ask more questions. That
doesn't necessarily mean to say that I am asking you
or challenging you about how you did something. It's just
that I want to know more. And I think that
both of us were guilty of doing that sometimes, right.
(36:53):
I think both parties are like, oh, well you learned something,
tell me more about that thing you learned. And it's
not like, oh, I'm here to judge whether you're solving
it the right way or anything else.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
I'm just like I want to know.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
But it comes off right when you're sort of you
can be a little defense there it because you're like, well, no,
I solved it, Like I mean you should trust me
on this, like I know what I'm doing versus right,
Maybe it's just a level of inquisition.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
I think that finding that line is always.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Hard, right because I think, yeah, there are there always
regulations and rules about how much you share and how
much you can't share and everything and all these things,
and so you kind of worry that, like, are we
are we just asking questions for the sake of questions,
or are we asking them because you know we are
really not we are concerned about something and knowing that
is hard to navigate.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
I think do you have a sense of how that
works with the private space companies? So like NASA is
contracted with SpaceX in the past. Obviously you have experience
with NASA and isroehen when they tackle failures or communicate
about those failures and learn from them. Are commercial motivations
different in any way? Do you know or is it
(37:56):
similar regardless of who runs the space Agency?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I think you're hard differences, right, I mean, I definitely
think that being a private organization to some degree affords
you a little bit of a different risk posture. I
hope it does, right, because you know, for sure there's
a level of everything that right we need to You're
trying to make sure that you know, we're doing a bespoke.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Mission to Europa.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
It's one of a kind, right, and for many people
will be you know, twenty years of their lives that
they'll invest in trying to get the mission to come
to reality and then operate it, right or more than
twenty years, and so write that risk associated with that,
we want to be really super vigilant about everything that
we do. Whereas I, you know, I also hope that, yes,
I want space to continue to be pushing into new
(38:44):
ground and challenging itself. And sometimes it's really hard to
challenge yourself in certain ways. Right when you're talking about
I get one opportunity to do a Europa clipper, you
know in twenty years, you.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Really got to make account.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Whereas industry, right, I'm hoping that they're going to get
the chance to launch Wi tens. It's not hundreds of
this rocket model, right, or you know they're going to
send fleets of satellites to you know, to places and
those things should I think afford us a chance to
experiment a little bit more and try different things and
be willing to evolve more. The process on an early
space program I think was like that, right, you saw
(39:17):
a little bit more of the like everything we were
doing was the first time, and you were like, well,
I'm there's going to be a Mariners one through you know,
eleven or whatever.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
It is.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Great takes, take some chances, and that's again that's changed
a little bit, and I think that's kind of the
good balancing heart. So I hope that there are I
think there are good avenues for sharing that knowledge.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
It's not perfect obviously.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
One of the great things about having a bigger industry, though,
is there's a little bit more movement, right, and so
people are moving around from NASA to private industry back
to NASA and so forth, and so you are getting
the lessons from each of these places that are kind
of getting disseminated. But I really would love to see,
you know, places like JPL and NASA and everybody else
right be even more partnered, because I do think there's
a lot of lessons that we've learned that we should
(39:57):
definitely be infusing into the industry.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Visors I want the industry to sort of infuse.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
The you know that like willingness to take some different
risks into us and say like, yeah, this isn't as
scary as you think it is. Right, We've tried this,
and you know, it actually kind of works. So I'd
like to see more of that.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Bobbick, thank you so much. Thanks for being here. I
feel like I could do this for a long time,
so we'll have to continue over a drink in a minute. A.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
I love that great. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Bobbik Fredosi is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and is also known as the NASA Mohawk Guy.
Here we go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Snap Foo Media in association with New Metric Media.
Our executive producers are me kalpen ed Helms, Mike Falbo,
(40:50):
Alyssa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan.
Meghan tan Is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is
our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham,
(41:14):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. Thanks for listening, everybody,
tell your friends, write a review. All of this helps.
I appreciate you listening, and until we go again, I'm Kelpenn.
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