STEVE SANDFORD: Okay, good
morning. Welcome back. It's great to see everybody.
I missed last week but I heard it was...
I heard all about it. They are good,
aren't they? Wait till you hear Jeremy.
So the first week we covered sort of the plan and
last week and this week are about what we are doing now. Of
course last week the theme was sort of the astronauts' home
away from home. How are we going to keep them alive as we go into
deep space? This morning you are going to hear about, how do we
get out into deep space? And in particular, how do you get out
of this gravity well that we live in? We live at the
bottom of a really deep, and steep gravity well. And so,
if you want to get off the Earth it takes a lot of energy to
climb out. And so, Jeremy Pinier is here
this morning. He is the technical
lead at Langley for all the work that we are
doing at Langley in order to make the next
generation rocket fly. And it is a lot of work. As
you can imagine, we get that much energy into one
place and try to fly it through the atmosphere, a lot of fun
things start to happen. And he is in the middle of trying to
figure out how to make it safe. And how to make it stable as it
goes up out of the atmosphere. Next week of course we are going
to start to talk about problems that we haven't actually figured
out how to solve. We think we know how to solve
this rocket problem, it is a lot of work. We think
we know how to solve this space craft problem. And again, it is
a lot of work. It's taken some time but we have the solutions
for the next two lectures after today, we're going to be
talking about things that we are still...we're still
working on the solutions for, frankly. So, in any case that
sets the stage for next week. But at this time I'm going to
turn it over to Jeremy and let him tell you about the SLS
and Langley's role in that. (applause) JEREMY PINIER: Thanks, Steve. Can you guys hear me in
the back, pretty well? All right, thanks. So again
I'm Jeremy Pinier and I work at NASA Langley Research
Center about eight miles from here. And we are going to talk
today about rockets. So this should be fun. And in particular
we are going to talk about the Space Launch System that you see
right there. That's our nation's future heavy lift launch vehicle
to carry humans back to Mars, or back to the Moon and
even further to Mars. So, I really have my dream
job. I'm not going to lie, I love my job. But nothing that
we do at NASA could be done by any single one
person. It takes teams, very large teams of amazing
people to do what we do. And I have to give credit to the
wonderful people I work with. These are some of the team
pictures we take when we are running WinTel tests. We are
going to talk more about that. And our team is not just here
at Langley. It's in Alabama, at the other NASA centers. It's
in Houston. It's in California. And we all work together to
make this rocket work. So, first of all, I'm going to
give you right off the bat four take-aways for today. I'm going
to show a lot of pictures. I'm only going to show four
equations and if you don't understand them that's just
fine. We can't talk about rockets and not have equations.
But I want you to have four take-aways and the first is:
going into space is really hard. Just like Steve mentioned, we are fighting two
very strong forces. One of them is gravity,
and the other one is drag when we are shooting out of the
atmosphere. And that is hard to do. The second take-away is
exploring space. It benefits our society as a whole. We're not
just exploring to discover new worlds. I mean, that's amazing
and fantastic but we do it because of all the benefits and
the spin offs that we get in our society here on Earth. The
technologies that is developed to go to space, we have to push
the envelope of knowledge and all of that benefits all of
us here. So that is really important. The third one is;
today is really an exciting time for exploration. Humans haven't
really explored for forty years. Last time humans explored was
when we were going to the Moon. Obviously, we have done
fantastic things like the space station. And develop new
technologies. But today, now we're developing
a new rocket, to do some more explorations
even further than where we've been. Did I mention that going
to space is really hard? Well that's another takeaway here.
And will see why it is. So as an outline, four things. Actually
it looks like two number ones a number two and a three. Mac
versus PC issues here. First of all I'm going to give a brief
history of spaceflight. So we're going to talk about how do we
get out out of the atmosphere? And I'm going to give a
brief very brief history of how spaceflight is today. Second,
I'm going to talk about the space launch system. SLS, I
am going to say that word many times, SLS. So hopefully you'll
remember it and you can talk to your neighbors about that SLS
when you get back home. That's America's next rocket for
deep space exploration. Third, we'll see what NASA Langley is
doing here in our backyard to contribute to the space
launch system. And forth, will go full-circle back to some
history about how Hampton Roads is really the birthplace of US
manned spaceflight. And that's pretty amazing that that
happened here in our backyard. So, like I say going to space
and escaping Earth's gravity field requires piercing through
our atmosphere at great speeds. That's a beautiful picture of
our atmosphere taken from space station. You can see how
fragile it looks and beautiful, yet it is so hard to pierce
through it because were going so fast. And, here's equation
number one. All you have to worry about is the
circled term there, that's velocity. That's how fast
we have to go. Or that's how drag, the force of
the air on the rocket, that's how drag is
proportional to velocity. So, that's the square of velocity.
That means if I'm going 50 mph on the highway, I stick my hand
out the window and I'm going to get a force of maybe 30 pounds
on my hand. If I go twice the velocity, if I
accelerate to 100 mph, which we shouldn't do, that's a
little fast. Let's just have a thought experiment. My hand is
now going to see a force that is not double, it's quadrupled. So
it's 120 pounds. So that's one of the issues.
The other issue is; if you look at the
power requirement, equation number two, the power
requirement to overcome drag is proportional to the cube of
velocity. That means that your car, when you double
your speed on the highway, you now have to use eight times
the power. So that's why your gas mileage goes down really
fast when you start going the speed limit compared to say 40
mph. So that's the really hard part. That nature gave to us,
that equation nature gave to us there's nothing we
can do about it. Okay, so we know we have to go fast,
but how fast we have to go? Alright? Well, it depends on
where we want to go. That's the whole issue. We can go close to
the earth or we can go really far. And that is going to
determine how fast you need to go. This is equation number
three. And that is the escape velocity that is needed to go to
a certain point. So capital M, that's the Earth's
mass. And little r, that's the radius of the earth.
So that determines your escape velocity. So we calculate that
very easily. So if we want to go to Mars, which is what we're
going to try to do by the 2030s. That is the velocity that we
need to attain to get there, 25,000 mph. There's no way
around it. If we want to go to
another solar system, if we want to escape the
suns gravity now, that's 95,000 mph. And that's
been done before. I'll show you the first spacecraft that did
that. Yeah? AUDIENCE: What it
be easier to go from the Moon, than from the Earth,
to go to Mars? JEREMY: It is.
It is. This is just assuming, this is just assuming that the
rocket go straight there. To simplify things a little bit,
but yeah. AUDIENCE: That's
my question too. All those assume we're
starting from the earth. JEREMY: Yeah, you're absolutely
right. I'm simplifying things, and this is just so you get the
concept of escape velocity. We would do that if we had to go. International space
station, 18,000 mph. And for the space station,
we have to go directly. There is no stop along the
way. And for the moon, that's about the escape
velocity to get to Mars. It's pretty similar.
Once you are on the moon, escaping the Earth's
gravity is not that hard. So, obviously this is
not to scale. So, I think scale is important
because I describe how fast we need to go. Now how far we need
to go? So to explain how far we need to go, I brought this
globe. And let's just imagine that it is 3 feet wide instead
of 1 foot wide. I couldn't find a 3 foot wide globe.
This is planet Earth, okay? If this is
Earth, the size of Earth, the Sun would be 6 miles down
the road. About at Newport News Park. And it would be 330 feet
wide. That's the size of the sun compared to this
globe here. Mars, and obviously the earth
is going around in orbit, a 6 mile orbit around the sun.
Mars is 3 miles that way. Okay, that's where we're going to
try to go. Now the moon would be about at the end of this room
down there. It be about 3 yards, about 9 feet wide. No, I'm
sorry. It's about a third the size of Earth. Okay, so the
Moon's over there. Mars is 3 miles down the road.
International Space Station, it's an inch away.
That's where we been going, that's where we've been taking
humans for the past 15 years, is an inch away from Earth. And
that's what we call low Earth orbit. We have vehicles today,
they can go to low Earth orbit. An inch away from the Earth. We
don't have a vehicle yet to go 3 miles down the road. And that's
what we're going to talk about is the space launch system, this
big rocket that's going to take us there. Here are some of
the first man-made objects that attained these very
high velocities. Sputnik, in 1957, you all know about
sputnik. That was the first satellite to get into
low Earth orbit. Right, an inch away from
earth. Luna One, that was the first spacecraft to
escape earth orbit. It ended up in orbit around the sun, but
that was by accident. You know the saying, shoot for the moon
and if you don't you can always hit the stars. That's
exactly what happened. They were shooting for the moon, and
missed it. There was an issue. It's complicated, it's hard. And
this was a long time ago. They missed the moon, and now the
satellite is still in orbit around the sun. Somewhere
in between Earth and Mars. AUDIENCE: That's Soviet
Union right? JEREMY: Yeah. Both
of those, sir, yeah. Both of those are Soviet
Union. And then we have a first from the
US. That's Voyager 1, 1977. First to escape solar
orbit. That's space craft just recently made the news because
it is now outside of the solar system. It took 37 years to
get there at that velocity. That gives you an idea of the size
of the solar system. So that's a tremendous feat. Now many people
have contributed to spaceflight but I'm only going to talk about
three because we only have one hour. So, these
are three giants, really, that we all stand on
their shoulders as far as our knowledge and where we are
today. This is Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Born in 1857.
Died in 1935. A Russian. He is considered the father of space
flight. He conceptualized all kinds of technologies we are now
still only developing. Back in the beginning of the 20th
century he was probably 30 or 40 years ahead of his time. People
didn't understand what he was talking about, But he published
about 400 articles 90 of those are related to spaceflight. One
of those is the exploration of cosmic space by means of
reaction devices, in 1903. He developed in
that article much of the theory behind space travel and
rocket propulsion. So he was a theoretician. He
didn't develop any rockets, you didn't build them or
launch them or anything. He just thought you know in his head
that we could do that. He came up with multistage rockets,
space stations and all concepts that we now are
all familiar with, but back then was just
imagination. And this is one of his drafts of what a spacecraft
looks like. You've heard about Orion spacecraft probably,
that's today's spacecraft, we've come a long way as you can
see. But he had a lot of ideas on what a spacecraft should
look like. AUDIENCE: But he was Russian? JEREMY: He was Russian,
that's right. AUDIENCE: It's like
Leonardo was for Aeronautics. JEREMY: It is. Absolutely.
That's a great comparison. And he came up with
our last equation for today, the rocket equation. Can't go
without the rocket equation. And it relates what
speed you need to, or what mass of fuel
you need in your rocket, depending on how efficient your
rocket is to that velocity that you need to get to. It's an
equation that everyone uses today, of course. The second
person that I would like to talk about is Robert Goddard. You
may know about him. He's an American, lived in
Massachusetts his whole life, 1882 to 1945. He took that
theory that Tsiolkovsky came up with and made it happen. So
this is the picture from 1926, this is the first liquid
fueled rocket in the world, in 1926. And that's Robert
Goddard standing there. And he had a lot of team members
that would help him. He was an engineer, a physicist, an
amazing person. And so, let's think about this, this is
1926. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. That's four years after
that picture was taken. And he ended up flying on Saturn Five,
and walking on the moon. So that's how fast we evolved with
spacecraft. It's amazing. The third person is Werner von
Braun. 1912 to 1977. Came from Germany after the war and
without Dr. von Braun we would have probably not been to the
moon that fast. He had developed technologies with his large team
of engineers that enabled us to really get to the moon as fast
as we got there in that decade. He played a crucial role in
the early development of large rockets, missiles and was really
instrumental in scaling up the designs to allow for travel. He
ended up being the director of the NASA Marshall Space
Flight Center but was really an engineer and he was involved
deeply in the development of these rockets. That gives you an
idea of the scale of the Saturn V rocket. Those are
the main engines; there is five of them
on the Saturn V. I mean, it's just humongous. And thanks
to all the people that worked on the Apollo program,
Saturn V and Apollo program, we have thirteen successful
Saturn V launches. And you might say, well Apollo 13, was
that successful? Well, maybe it wasn't a completely
successful mission but it was a successful launch. The launch
of the rocket was successful, so thirteen successful flights.
Six lunar landings. We didn't go to the moon just once, we
went six times. Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17. Landed
twenty-four humans on the moon. More recently, since that time
the world has developed multiple rockets that you have heard
about. This is the Soyuz rocket, the Russian rocket that we
are still using today to get to Space Station. Space shuttle
obviously. Without the space shuttle we wouldn't have a space
station today. We've got a Delta IV heavy. That's
a Boeing rocket, a US rocket. Atlas V, that's a
US rocket as well. Sea Launch, that's a rocket that launches
from anywhere on the ocean. So it can launch from an optimal
location. We've got Ariane V rocket, that's the European
rocket that's currently in use. And then we have these two
rockets that are the first two commercially developed
rockets. On the right, that's the Space-X Falcon
rocket. And then that's the Orbital Science' Antares rocket.
Both of those were developed by private companies. And they have
been doing an amazing job to get to low Earth orbit. And then I
can't give a history of space flight without showing a
picture of the space station, that's a marvel of technology.
The size of a football field and it took many space shuttle
flights and a huge amount of effort to do that, but we are
now doing some amazing science on the space station.
Learning a lot about health, about physics, chemistry and all
kinds of radiation. And things that we want to know more about
if we want to go to Mars. So here is where it gets
exciting for today is, the next frontier for
human exploration is Mars, an asteroid or some type
of equilibrium point in the Earth/Moon system; you might
have heard about those. Anyone of those locations
down there; an asteroid, Mars. But all of those, that is
the next frontier. All of those are beyond low Earth
orbit. So remember, one inch away from this globe,
that is low Earth orbit. We're letting commercial companies
do that now. We know to do it, let us let them develop that
technology. Let's focus on trying to get to Mars. All of
those destinations require high escape velocities that humans
haven't really reached since Apollo 17. That was the last
lunar mission. Long term human exploration requires very large
and heavy payloads. Very large. And you will see, from 70 to 130
metric tons is the capability that we are developing with the
Space Launch System. And I'll give you an idea of what that
means. None of the existing rocket architectures that I
showed previously come close to the required power to get to
those velocities. Enters the Space Launch System. This is
another picture of it. It is 322 feet tall. Very close to the
size of the Saturn V rocket. It has a payload capacity of
seventy metric tons. That is fifteen elephants; full size
adult elephants. That's a lot of weight you can take with that
rocket to low earth orbit. It has 8.4 million pounds of
thrust. I'll give you an idea of how that compares to other
vehicles. But basically you have heard about the Orion
vehicle? That Orion vehicle, it's that part right
here. That's the space craft, that is where the astronauts
sit. And you have a launch abort system in case
something bad happens, they can get out of there and
be safe. So that's the Orion up top, we are going to talk today
about the rocket. What allows Orion to get out of the
atmosphere. I'm not going to give too many details, but
you've got a liquid fuel core, and solid fuel boosters on
the side there. This is how it compares to something you
are more familiar with; the Statue of Liberty is 305
feet tall. The Space Launch System is 322 feet tall. There
you have the Space Shuttle, and Saturn V on the right. Now
when we are looking at thrust now, SLS is the most powerful
rocket that has ever been built. Saturn V was 7.5
million pounds, 7.8, 8.4 million pounds now for
Space Launch System. So we keep pushing that envelope and
getting better and better. AUDIENCE: What do you mean by
the term 'payload'? That's over and above the rocket
itself? JEREMY: So, the
payload in this case right here is all of Orion. So it is,
it is the crew compartment. It's what is useful to
us. So if it is a cargo vehicle
like a satellite, satellites, that's the
payload. So it's everything, the important part of it.
It's everything else. AUDIENCE: Baggage compartment. JEREMY: Yeah, there
you go. Baggage compartment. Thanks. We're not only
developing one rocket, we are developing a
family of rockets. There are right now five
different configurations of the Space Launch System. That's,
I'm showing you the smallest one and the biggest one. We're
starting here and we are moving toward that bigger one.
That bigger one has a payload capacity of 130 metric tons.
That's twenty five elephants that you can take in your
payload. That is a lot of weight. But that is what
we need to get to these far destinations, to get to Mars we
need multiple of these to get that hardware on the surface of
planets that are that far away. So, designing, building, testing
and flying the largest rocket in the world takes exceptional work
from thousands to come together. There are, we have a lot of
people working on this at NASA. With space station, that is
our second most important focus right now. Launch vehicles are
complex. There are a system of systems. It is not a simple
system. I'm showing you six different systems here, and all
of these each have sub-systems. And so it gets really
complicated. I work in the structures environment
system there and I am an aerodynamicist. I do wind tunnel
testing and computational fluid dynamics. So I am in that
top right box there so we have propulsion, we have avionics and
software. That is the brains of the vehicle, that's the computer
that allows it to keep pointing forward and getting it to where
we really need it to go. We have the payload. Which
we just talked about, that's the precious part. That
is the crew or the cargo and that is what we are going to
protect at all means. We have the Launch Abort System. Which
you have probably heard about. That protects the crew in
case of an accident. And we have ground systems. We can't
launch without a launch pad, without a tower that allows us
to take the cargo up in the, or the astronauts up in the
crew module. Propellant storage, obviously we use a lot of
propellant so you have to store it before you load it up in the
vehicle. All kinds of systems, very complex. What is NASA
Langley contributing to SLS? Well, when NASA
Langley was founded, it initially was
NACA, and it was, that was in 1917. We're getting
close to the one hundred year anniversary of NASA Langley by
the way. That's what we started doing, was aerodynamics,
was wind tunnel testing, with the Wright brothers.
Orville Wright was involved. And we are still doing that today.
We're still doing wind tunnel testing, that is one of our
fortes is aerodynamics. So here you got a picture of a
NASA Langley 14 x 22, it is a low speed wind tunnel.
It's huge. The test section where we put the articles is
about the size of this room, it's very large. And you can
see it if you are driving on Commander Shepard Blvd. This is
a picture of the space launch system vehicles that we
tested last summer. You can see, I'll give you a better picture
right here. We tested the launch vehicle environments, the flow
of the air around the vehicle. So right there you've
got, this is a rendition, an artists rendition of launch
of the space launch system. On the right you've got an actual
picture of our wind tunnel model so you can see the similarities.
Obviously it is scaled down. This model is about six feet
tall. And it's made of aluminum. And what are trying to do is
measure wind forces on the vehicle so when it is sitting
there on the launch pad it doesn't start
vibrating or it doesn't, it is able to take the wind
loads. So we're going to start at the low speed and we're going
to go to all the way to high speeds through some pictures
here. This is some more pictures of the low speed wind tunnel
testing that we did on the lift off configuration. And we
do things like smoke flow visualization on the top right
there. By introducing smoke in the flow, you've probably
seen those types of pictures, we can see what the flow is
doing and how it is impacting the vehicle. Some more pictures.
This is now going through the speed of sound. This is called
transonic testing. This is a very large wind tunnel called
the NASA Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. And this allow
us to fly the vehicles at the speed of sound. And around
the speed of sound and really understand the aerodynamic
forces there. It gets really complicated there once you
are trying to break that sound barrier. Back in the days of
Bell-X 1 we had no clue what would happen when they were
going to fly through that sound barrier. And now we
really understand that better, and it's mainly due to wind
tunnel testing. And then we have supersonic testing so as you're
flying through the atmosphere at some point the atmosphere is
going to get really thin and you're going to enter space.
Right around that point we're going about five
times the speed of sound, that's what is called supersonic
flight. So in this tunnel, that's the Unitary Wind Tunnel,
still here at Langley we are testing in that tunnel, we can
go to five times the speed of sound. At a much smaller scale,
it's at 4' x 4' test sections, so this is a pretty small model,
it's about thirty-five inches long, but we can get to those
speeds and then we can scale everything to full scale flight
and we can figure out what the aerodynamic forces are going to
be. Some more pictures of the testing throughout the whole
mach range. And here are some, here is a flow visualization
of supersonic flight. This is a launch vehicle that was
designed five or six years ago, and we did a lot of research at
Langley. On that vehicle you can see some shock waves there when
you go past the speed of sound you'll have some really, really
high compression pressure waves that are going to form, and so
the flow is coming left to right here on the vehicle and you can
see these shocks. With the naked eye you cannot see it
so we use an instrument, a special instrument to see
that. But it gives you an idea of the really harsh environment
we are flying through. And so we do testing in the wind tunnels.
In the wind tunnels we let nature tell us what
answer is. Right? We have a model.
We measure forces, aerodynamic forces on the model
but we're letting the flow tell us what that force is. Well,
with large computers today, we can, we know what the
equations are to describe the flow. So we can try to solve
them numerically in a computer. And so that's what
this is showing here, you've got the Space Launch
System in the center here. And we're looking at variations
of pressure on the vehicle, so variations of air flow
velocities on the vehicle. And all around there you've got
different cuts along the vehicle and this is lift off
configuration. The flow is coming from the bottom, let's
take the bottom left picture there. The flow is coming from
the bottom and you can see the wake of the flow around the
space launch system here. Wake, wake flows are extremely hard
to predict and understand from a fluid dynamics
standpoint. In 2009, NASA Langley led this effort,
which was a full scale flight test of the Ares 1-X rocket.
These are actual pictures, not artist renditions and
we launched at Kennedy Space Center, October 2009. You can
see there the left picture, you can see the air condensating
around the vehicle because of those transonic shocks. Pretty
cool picture and you can see the amount of thrust there, that's a
pretty big flame. Don't want to be nowhere near that. That
was really an amazing feat and really got us back into the
business of developing rockets and now we're, we are getting
pretty good at it. This is another contribution that is
ongoing. This is going to be the first flight test of the
full scale Space Launch System, in 2017. Look forward to it.
It's going to be launching from Kennedy Space Center and we're
going back to the Moon. This one won't have any astronauts
because it's the first flight we want to make sure everything
works well before we put astronauts in it. But we are
going back to the Moon. So, it's going to launch. It's going
to go around an Earth orbit and then it's going to fire
some thrusters and go into a translunar injection orbit out
around the Moon and back to the Earth. That's going to an
exciting, exciting launch. AUDIENCE: How
long a trip? JEREMY: It is several
days. I don't know exactly, but I think it's
around three days. QUESTION: Sound like,
what two hours. JEREMY: Yeah, I know, yeah. Couple hours is what it
takes to get to space station. To get to the Moon it takes
several days. And then to get to Mars it's several
months. It's six months, six to eight months. Okay,
so back full circle around, back to history a
little bit here with, let's talk about the birthplace
of US manned space flight. In Hampton Roads we had the NASA
Langley Research Center. And this is where everything
started. The space task group in 1958 was started. It was a group
of around forty-five engineers and they were all working here
at NASA Langley. They were led by a person by the name of
Robert Gilruth who is now a pretty famous guy. AUDIENCE: He
died last year. JEREMY: Yeah, he did. And he was tasked with managing
America's manned space flight program, including
project Mercury. That was before Kennedy made his speech. So it
started out pretty slow but they knew what they
needed to get going. So, uh, so from 1959 to 1962 the Mercury Seven all
trained here at Langley. Those are the first seven US
astronauts. And they are all there and we're lucky to
still have John Glenn with us. But these were really pioneers.
The risk that they took to get on those rockets there was huge
back in that day. There was no doubt about it, it
was a huge risk, and thanks to them we are where
we are today. And we can do things a lot more, a lot
more safely today. This is the Mercury capsule that was tested
here at the Langley full size wind tunnel. It's uh, you can
see the scale of that vehicle with the man standing on
the ladder there. And, that tunnel is, has tested so
many airplanes and so many space craft. So it was low speed wind
tunnel but still back in the day that's what they did here at
Langley. And in 1962 after President Kennedy's announcement
of the Apollo program with the goal to land on the Moon
by the end of the decade, the manned spacecraft center was
created in Houston. We needed a lot of land for that so they
went to Houston. It's now called the NASA Johnson
Space Flight Center, and all of the space flight test
engineers from Langley moved to Houston, including these three
people. I already mentioned Robert Gilruth. He was the
first NASA Johnson director. Um, we have Max Faget, who was the
inventor of the space capsule which we are still using today.
You saw the Orion space capsule, it's kind of a cone shape with a
heat shield. That was his idea, and he did a lot of that work
here at Langley. And then we have Chris Kraft. Born in
1924, he was NASA's first flight director at the Houston, NASA
Johnson Space Flight Center. And he was NASA Johnson's second
director. AUDIENCE: Chris Kraft,
wasn't he born in Phoebus, VA? JEREMY: You beat me
to it! Ah, man! Chris Kraft, Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., he was born in Phoebus VA.
That's not too far from here. Mission Control Center in
Houston was renamed Christopher C Kraft Mission Control
Center in his honor in 2011, and that's him accepting that
honor down there in Houston. That's a pretty cool thing. He
was the first flight director. So, astronauts are
pretty cool people and we, our nation has had, you know,
several hundred astronauts. Flight directors, they are even
more rare than astronauts. You don't mess around with
flight directors. Yeah, they are pretty cool. And this
is a time capsule at the Air Power Park in Hampton on Mercury
Blvd. that was interred in
1963, 1965, sorry, by the city of Hampton in honor
of Chris Kraft and it will be opened one
hundred years later in 2065. So I've already got that date on my
calendar to make sure I'm going to show up there, and
good, let's all go see that, it should be cool.
This pretty much, towards the conclusion of my
talk. With the Space Launch System, NASA Langley is
again contributing to one of the agency's highest
priorities right now, today is to develop a deep space
exploration capability that will land humans on Mars in
the 2030s. So please, you know, tell your
friends and your neighbors, that's what NASA is doing. We're
going back to Mars and we're going to get there in the 2030s.
Hopefully in the early 2030s so I can try to get on one of those
space craft and walk on Mars. One thing to look forward to
that is happening this year, in a couple of months, in
December and you may have heard about it from the other talks,
that's Exploration Flight Test 1. December 4th launch from
Kennedy Space Center. We are carrying the Orion space craft
with a different launch vehicle because the space launch system
is not quite ready yet. And we are going to ride in an
orbit around the Earth, firing some more thrusters
getting even higher and re-entering the
atmosphere at 20,000 miles per hour as if we're
coming back from Mars or the Moon. So that's going to be a
really cool thing. You will certainly hear about it on
the news. Tell people to try to catch it. And hopefully
it'll be successful. So, this concludes my talk. Thank
you so much for paying attention and asking questions. I'll take,
it'll be my pleasure to take more questions if
you have any. So, thanks again for your time. Yup?
AUDIENCE: Do you know of any reason other than political ones
why the space center would move to Houston? JEREMY: I think they
looked at a lot of places... oh I'm sorry. The question was
why did we move the manned space center to Houston, from Langley
to Houston. So you may know the answer. AUDIENCE: President
Johnson. JEREMY: All right,
well there you go. AUDIENCE: The question was
do you know of any reason why we moved to Houston
other than political? JEREMY: Oh, other
than political. I don't know. Maybe
the land, but you know I, you probably, yeah, your
answer is probably as good as mine on that one. I'm going
to take that one over there. AUDIENCE: With
computer simulation today, why should someone use
wind tunnels? JEREMY: Okay. The question is,
we have computer simulations today. Why do we still need wind
tunnels? Great question. If you ask that question
in a hundred years, maybe I'll tell you we don't
need wind tunnels any more, maybe. But the reality
of things is that flows, the fluid dynamics of flow is so
complex that even today with the most powerful computers in the
world we are not able to do what we can do in a wind tunnel. And
even though we're progressing really fast with
technology and computers, it's a consensus, there is no
debate about this that we will not be able to do everything
with computers for a long, long time. But, you know, today
we use both of these. We use computers a lot more than we did
even ten years ago. We use those two as very complimentary
tools. We learn things from the computer simulations and we
learn other things from the wind tunnel, so we could not do
anything without both. AUDIENCE: What
contractors are filling the various parts of the rocket? JEREMY: So the core is Boeing.
The core stage is Boeing. And that was the middle section of
it. The boosters is ATK. They built the shuttle boosters. It's
the same boosters except a bit longer. And the space craft
Orion is Lockheed-Martin. AUDIENCE: Is there any
international cooperation? JEREMY: There is and it's
growing. We are working with the Europeans to potentially use
this launch vehicle to launch one of their payloads, one of
their space craft. They have a furring that we're going to
try to use on the space craft, on this launch vehicle and
launch it very soon. So there is some. We're trying to do
the most we can here with our capabilities here in the
states, but at some point, you know, international
cooperation is very important. AUDIENCE: What is the mechanism
for bringing the data from the wind tunnels, is one
question. And the other is, wasn't one of the wind tunnels
recently destroyed? And if so, why? JEREMY: Okay. So, I love
that topic. Or the two topics there. But the first one is what
I do so I could talk about it all day. But, how do we gather
data from the wind tunnel? We have, you know when
you step on the scale, that gives you your weight and
that is a one component scale. It gives you your
weight and nothing else, right? We have what's called
six-component scales and they're like a very small,
what we call balance, a six-component scale. And we
mount those scales inside the wind tunnel models.
Um, I don't know, well there we go. Inside that
model there is a six-component scale, and when you blow wind
on that model that scale is measuring the forces in all
directions. Not just gravity, it's measuring all of those
aerodynamic forces and therefore out of that we can
know what the air is, what the force of air is on
the vehicle. Second question is, is a complicated one because of
the multiple constraints that we have. Recently, you may be
thinking of full scale tunnel which is actually this one that
was demolished several years ago. And uh, some of
those tunnels are old. Uh, and uh, funding is
always an issue. Um, these capabilities are really
national assets and we're trying hard to protect
them. Like I said, we're going to need them for a
long time so we better take care of them. It just happens that
some of them we haven't been able to take care of them as
well as we should and so we had to demolish some of them.
Um, thankfully we have got capabilities in other places
but we're really at a point here where we don't have duplicate
capabilities around the nation, so as soon as we start
demolishing new facilities we're going to have some problems.
AUDIENCE: About seven or eight years ago one of the
NASA engineers spoke of the technology that he
was in charge of. He, I believe, applied the paint to
simple planes in the wind tunnel and then they observed the
stress changes of the paint itself. Did it change color or
pattern showing stress on the bodies? Is this technique
still used in our space testing? JEREMY: Yeah, it is. It's called
pressure sensitive paint. We also have temperature sensitive
paint. It's called pressure sensitive paint. And we
have a different paint, it's called temperature
sensitive paint so we can see the temperature
changes on the models, but you basically
spray, very carefully, the paint over your entire
model. And the reason you do it very carefully is the
because the cost of that paint, it's so hard to
make, it's $4,000 for a hundred millimeter,
milliliter container. So, you don't want to drip too much.
There goes a hundred dollars. Um, but we spray carefully the
paint on the models. And what we do is we shine it with
a very intense light, and we have cameras looking at
it and we can see the pressure of the air changing on it.
And that's a technology that's really become mature in the last
couple of years. We're using it more and more, and we want to
use it more. But that's in the forefront of the measurements
in the wind tunnel. AUDIENCE: Can you say a little
bit more about the benefits to society as a whole
from your work? JEREMY: Sure. Um, and
so, the benefit, oh yeah. The benefit, the question is, can I tell more about the
benefits to society of the work we're doing
here. Uh, so those are, it's a broad question but
it's a great one because, and it's broad in many ways
because the impacts are in multiple areas but they're also
extended in time. Some of the technologies we develop might
have an immediate application in today's society. Some of
them it might take ten years, twenty years to find an
application and then it'll be revolutionary. So we're
constantly pushing the envelope just because of the extremely
harsh constraints that we have to try to get into
space. Temperature, harsh temperatures,
pressures and forces, they force us to build the
best materials. They force us to really have The best instruments
to measure those environments. And so you end up
with technologies that, and many patents that been end
up or licensed by companies to develop, you know, cell phone,
technologies in the cell phone, miniaturizing
things. So for example, you saw that taking weight into
space costs a lot of money. The heavier it is the more costly
it is. So we try to miniaturize things. We try to make them
as small as possible. Right, we uh, the space station has, I
can't remember how many laptops it has. 150 laptops I think.
But if those were desktops that would be a lot more weight. So
we have to miniaturize things because of that. And so in your
cell phones you have technology that is, that comes from what
we've developed over the last 20 years because of
miniaturizing constraints. Um, there's probably a lot of other
things I could talk about. The medical field of course, I mean,
so we're doing research now on the space station to try
and understand health. Some biological processes act in
the absence of a gravity force, right? We call it
Zero-G. I'm always, it's not really Zero-G because
really it's 1-G. You're falling towards the Earth constantly.
It's just that you don't have enough speed to get out of earth
orbit. So were really always in 1-G environments
but it's weightless, it feels weightless
because you're falling, constantly falling. The moon is
falling towards earth all the time, it's just going at that
perfect speed that it staying in orbit. But when you're in Zero-G
you don't have the force of gravity, and so you can
understand biological processes much better. And so
health is another one. AUDIENCE: How long before
you're going to be able to use the SLS itself? JEREMY: So first flight test
is 2017. That's the first flight test without
astronauts. We are looking at 20, currently 2021 for the first
astronauts to ride on SLS. We hope we can get something
sooner. But again, that's all depending on
funding. The, you know it doesn't take a lot
more funding for us to do great things. And you know as well
as anyone else when you spend a dollar at NASA over the next 20
years you're going to get much more than a dollar
back. So it's really, it's really depends on that.
The basically right now we're looking at 2021 for the
first. Yup. Let's go here first. AUDIENCE: What is the future,
the ultimate future of the International Space Station?
JEREMY: I'm not sure. I don't want to give you a bad answer. I
know that we are committed until 2020 to... STEVE: Jeremy, you want me to
help with that? JEREMY: Yeah, that'd be great.
STEVE: Am I on? So the the space station was recently, we just
recently made a policy to extend the life of the station to 2024.
So now the United States is committed to maintaining it
through that time. We think that it's got a limit somewhere
in the late 2020's. And we're trying to get international, the
international community to help support it through 2024
at this point. The real, long term answer
is that we think, and we're supporting US industry
to be able to replace the International Space Station with
low Earth orbit stations. They won't look like the
International Space Station but they will provide a laboratory
for scientific instrumentation. Some companies think that their
market will be tourism. So they are going to take people on a
one week trip to Zero-G. So they can experience space themselves.
So there is a number of different things, and then of
course the government still needs to do research. So the
government would buy a ride, and a slot to do an experiment.
And so those are the kinds of business models people are
talking about. And there is a lot of, there's billions of
dollars of private money going into, uh, future, low Earth
stations. JEREMY: Great. Thanks a lot.
That was helpful. AUDIENCE: So, many
countries and companies are getting into thrust systems now. Rocket systems. Could you
give us in descending order the capability of who is on top
diminishing down to nothing? JEREMY: Okay, so
the question is, commercial companies are
developing technologies, engines and rockets. And
countries, yes. Although on the commerical, on the
commercial stack of things the US is leading the way. These
American companies who are developing these rockets are at
the forefront commercial rocket development. Are you asking
the capabilities in order, maybe yeah, so mostly at this
point for commerical companies it's all about low
Earth capability. So, it's that one inch away
from the Earth. STEVE: Or sub-orbital. JEREMY: Yeah, and
sub-orbital. So, sub-orbital you are not
achieving that velocity. So you are going to take off from one
side of the planet and you're not going fast enough and you
are going to re-enter from some other point. And so
we've got Richard Branson, who's developing a sub-orbital
Virgin Galactic sub-orbital space craft. You've got, uh,
you've got a company called Blue Origin, that is Jeff Bezos
who is the Amazon CEO. He's developing a capability for
low Earth orbit. And you've got Space-X, that's Elon Musk's
company. He developed PayPal and those things. So it's the
battle of the millionaires. STEVE: Billionaires.
JEREMY: Who can get there first? So it's exciting. So, uh, yeah,
so I mean of course we've got launch capabilities
in China, Russia, India. But those are mostly all
completely government run and funded. So, I don't think,
Europe has Ariane. STEVE: So I can add
a little bit on that. Cause I just answered
this question the other in another place.
So, like Virgin Galactic, so first of all everybody
should know there are three US companies
that are building vehicles to take people, tourists, rich
tourists. I think the cheapest ticket is $20,000, the most
expensive is $2 million. So all these companies have different
business models and they've done analysis based on the number
of millionaires that they think they can actually make
money. They're investing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
They are building space ports and vehicles just like NASA did
in the '60s. But their highest speed will be something
like 2,500 mph. Because they're going
to go up, they're going to get above the
atmosphere and they're going to have their tourists experience
weightlessness for a matter of minutes while they go over this
parabolic trajectory. And they are going to come back and
land. So just compare that to, if you want to go to the
Moon you want to be going 25,000 mph. And if you
recall the energy equation, it goes as V cubed. So the
power in these rockets that the commercial guys are developing
is on the order of a hundredth of what we're developing at NASA
now. It's a great development, it's very exciting that we've
created this new industry. We have a new industry in the
country that going to make money and create jobs and so forth,
but you have to keep in mind the scale difference between doing a
sub-orbital flight and doing a Moon shot. And that's, and
I think it's a great thing, it's one of the answers to your
question earlier about what are the social benefits of
what we do. You know, taken together over
the last fifty years, investments in NASA have
enabled the creation of this new industry. And in the end, it'll
actually be a new market with many, many other companies
besides just the vehicle. It's very similar to air
transportation at the beginning of the last century. So space
transportation I consider a market with, you know, vehicles
as one industry and ground systems as another industry.
And what you're doing up there, the payloads is another
industry. So if you think about the, if you think about it that
way instead in terms of just technologies the payoff is huge.
It's just longer term and it's much harder to put, it's much
harder for economics to actually calculate that value.
Just to give you a hint, you know the airline industry
today is a $150 billion dollar industry. The air frame industry
is also a $150 billion dollar industry. And those are paying
taxes back to the government so in one sense, if you
take a seventy year look, NASA is paid for many times over
by what's been created out of NACA and NASA. So, that's
sorta an answer to a couple of questions that are all
related. Guess that's, any
more questions? JEREMY: I think there's a
question? AUDIENCE: Are there any
plans to send our astronauts on other space craft, like
private ones? JEREMY: Yeah, that is... AUDIENCE:
To the space station, rather than in with Russia?
JEREMY: That is the plan. And so the question was,
is there a plan to, for commercial companies to take
our US astronauts to the space station? And that's
exactly the plan, that is why we are letting those
commercial companies develop those space craft so
that we don't have to buy, you know, seventy million dollar
tickets to space from Russia. So that is, that is exactly what
we are doing. AUDIENCE: Do you
anticipate having a time frame? JEREMY: So, I think
the goal is 2017? STEVE: So just last week, 2017,
just last week two contracts were awarded. One
to Boeing and one to Space-X, it was in the news.
Those contracts were for those companies to
build and certify as safe, human space craft, that will
ride on a commercial vehicle to the station. So the supply and
the transportation to the space station will now be a commercial
industry. Most of the, of course most of their business
is from the government right now. That's why I
mentioned earlier, when the space
station goes away, hopefully by then we'll have
commercial stations that look, will provide this continuous
market for these vehicle builders. Again, you
start talking about a, it's a whole new market, it's
not just a new industry. So that's 2017, those guys are on
the hook to fly their vehicles by 2017 with NASA oversight
and FAA oversight. By the way, the FAA is working with NASA
to put in place certification safety criteria that
they have to meet, just like airplane manufacturers
do. Yeah? AUDIENCE: Concerning
all these technologies developed by NASA,
what happens in the way of patents, who
gets them? Does anybody, or is it free knowledge?
JEREMY: So it, the patents, NASA does have a lot of
patents and we get patents for the technologies
that we develop. It's property of the government so
it's not, you know, individuals will not benefit
from those patents but the government does. So the
government can license those patents out and get some money
back. I believe that's the case. STEVE: We patent things, and
then we make them available to anybody who will commercialize
them. And the only reason we do licensing is so
that somebody doesn't; we're very careful about the
licensing because we don't want a company to come in and get an
exclusive license and sit on it. So we, we're very careful about
licensing just so that it gets broadly used.
Otherwise it's free. Yeah, and our inventors get a very
tiny piece of royalties if something sells a lot of copies
or something like that. You get a plaque mostly. Yeah. AUDIENCE: The Space Launch
System; what components are reusable?
JEREMY: So the question is, what components are reusable on
the Space Launch System? And, I'm going to say, it's only the
space craft. So only that Orion vehicle. We're planning
on launching once a year, once every two years.
Those are huge launches, expensive and we're
going far distances. So, you know it doesn't make sense
to reuse. There's a curve that could describe at what point,
if you fly so many times does it makes sense to try to reuse.
Because reusable technology costs a lot. Right? And so, if
we're only launching every year, it doesn't make sense to try
to make that reusable. So, and that's for beyond low Earth
orbit. For low Earth orbit it does makes a lot of sense
because we're going to try to fly a lot more often and
so Space-X for example, is really trying the reusable
thing. So they're trying to reuse as many of their stages
as they can. And we did that for Shuttle, right? We
had reusable boosters, reusable orbiter. External tank
was not reusable. But it was, it is doable. It's expensive, so
that's the trade off. It's how many times you fly. STEVE: And NASA's using
the investments made in use to help them
do that. I just saw a video yesterday of the launch from
last week. I don't know if you saw that Space-X launched
another mission to the station, but we video taped the
supersonic retro burn that they attempted. Which was successful
to slow down their first stage to bring it down and
land vertically. Now, it just dropped in
the ocean for now, but they're learning one step
at a time how to actually bring that entire first
stage back to be reused, and that's the goal for Space-X.
Unlike the other commerical launchers that are out there.
JEREMY: I want to see that video, I hadn't seen that, it
must be cool. AUDIENCE: Is it true that
some of the components and the hardware can only be
obtained from China or Japan? JEREMY: I don't know. Do
you know? I don't know if that's true.
STEVE: I seriously, I don't think so. Unless there
is something I don't know. JEREMY: We can pretty
much build anything in house, or within the United
States if it makes sense, so right now for Space Launch
System we're going to reuse, we're going to use
engines, they're called RS-25s, those were the same engines that
shuttle used. We already have a lot of those so we're
going to use those, we don't have rebuild
everything. AUDIENCE: Would that
include the computers? STEVE: Actually the computers, we have been prevented from
buying hardware from China, like chips.
Because they've been, we've found that they have
embedded software in chips that they sell back to PC makers and
so forth that can actually do bad things. So we don't use any
electronics from China. JEREMY: And in a
computer on a rocket, the avionics bay, that
is all completely custom made. Not an off the shelf
computer. You know it's, every component is selected
very carefully and so... AUDIENCE: If the life of the
Space Station ends at 2024, what will happen to it?
Will it stay there or will it be dismantled?
JEREMY: So, if we do abandon it in 2024, what
happens is, it's only that one inch away from the Earth so
the atmosphere is really, really thin but
you still have a little, little tiny bit of atmosphere
and it creates drag on the Space Station. And so what happens is,
slowly the Space Station loses altitude and so if you
don't push it back up which is, we do that very regularly we
push it back into its orbit. It'll just slowly come back and
it'll burn in the atmosphere as it re-enters. So yup, great
question. AUDIENCE: What is
the cost to use the Space-X vehicle to get the crew back to
the space station as compared to the seventy million
dollar Russian vehicle? JEREMY: Good question,
do you know that? And the question was, the
cost of Space-X, riding on Space-X instead of
riding on the Russian vehicle. That is a tough
question. STEVE: So, the vehicle hasn't
been fully developed. And so we don't know. Space-X
will tell you it's less. Today. Boeing has been in the business that they don't even
pretend that it'll be less. But we, you know, until they prove
they can actually build a safe vehicle they won't know
how much it costs. But, you know, it's a lot. It's a lot
that we're paying the Russians, but it's in the same order of
magnitude. But we don't know if it'll be more or less.
AUDIENCE: But the thing is, Russian vehicle pays money
to some other country. STEVE: Exactly, it's US
jobs. That's right, it's US jobs and US technology
development and it's all part of our economic transactions in
this country if we keep the money here. So, I'd just like to say,
please come back next week. I already mentioned what the topic
is. We'll be talking about EDL. Humans, human entry, descent
and landing at Mars. Very tough problem. And before I
ask for your applause, I like to give a special thanks
to Jeremy. He is in the middle. You saw that unitary plan wind
tunnel test. He is leading that for Langley. He is in the middle
of that and they are working third shift. We
try to save money, so we use energy when nobody
else is using it. So we run that tunnel, which
draws a lot of power, at night. And he's been working
nights for three weeks while he put this together. And he did a
great job. JEREMY: It's almost
time for bed. (Applause) STEVE: Thank you very
much. See you next week. macaroni
