Surge 2016 - Adam Steltzner - The Right Kind of Crazy

good morning this is Mars ris mode 150 meters per second video is surface of Mars that some friends of mine and I made it was actually a really hard video to make truth be told we didn't make the camera we just held it this video is made by a camera called the Marty imager made by Malin Space Systems in San Diego California and it's strapped to the world's largest extra-terrestrial rover and as this video is shot that rover is hanging underneath the world's largest supersonic parachute two and a half miles above the surface of Mars now I want to share with you that story the story of making this video some lessons that I learned from my team that we learned together about overcoming challenges about keeping people motivated this this effort took ten years how do you keep a team motivated and focused for 10 years we we faced a lot of challenges and we've we had a lot of setbacks how do we overcome some of those so I want to share with you some stories and some insights that I think I garnered from that experience but perhaps most importantly I want to leave you with the understanding that our curiosity our human curiosity is perhaps one of the greatest tools that we have to overcome challenges that are put in front of us now curiosity is a personal thing right we're all sitting here and all of our curiosity's have slightly different flavors so the story of Mars doesn't start for me at Mars it starts here this is the San Francisco Bay Area actually this image is taken not far from the house that I grew up in and it's apropos because although it's slightly difficult to see in the upper left hand side of this image you can see some stars that's actually the constellation of Orion and that has meaning because I was a 20 year old listless wannabe rock star a bass player gigging in in the San Francisco Bay Area waiting to become famous and rich that would have been a really long wait and one night as I returned home from playing show I looked up at the night sky and I noticed that the stars were in a different place than they had bateman when I went out to load into the show now I had been a very poor student in high school evidently I'd missed that whole earth spinning on its axis thing so I was think I thought that the stars were moving and it was that constellation of Orion in fact I didn't know it was a Ryan at the time but I'd gone out to play it bent over the East Bay I came home and it was over the Marin Headlands and I got curious and I decided to follow my curiosity I decided to explore a little bit I went down to the local community college to take it astronomy course to tell me why the stars were moving it had a prerequisite of a conceptual physics course like physics I don't think so but then the the subtitle of the course said physics without math Michael maybe that would work joke was on me the astronomy course got cancelled because it didn't have enough people and there I am in the physics course but it actually changed my life that spark of curiosity wondering about the night sky following that curiosity led me to after a little bit of work maybe a lot of work a bachelor's and master's a PhD Landing Rovers on Mars if old Adam had been told what Adam of today's job is my head would have exploded but thank God we don't really know where our curiosity is gonna take us so now let's talk about Mars for eons Mars has captivated our attention from before we could have aids to our vision we'd look up in the night sky and we'd see a light a little redder a little brighter and moved differently than the other lights in the celestial sphere when we got our first telescopes we looked out and we saw life we saw roadways and canals we saw civilization and then we got better telescopes and we realized that those are actually just natural features but we never lost that idea that maybe Mars was alive and that's understandable it's a profound question right are we alone are we alone in our universe are we alone in our solar system could our nearest neighbor Harbor life NASA's gone to Mars a few times to try and answer that question of life here's a family portrait of the Rovers we put on the surface of Mars starting in 97 with a little Sojourner Rover very important because we were able to explore it much reduced costs than we'd been in the past we actually vowed to go back again again and again every 26 months we had some failures there's more than 26 months between 97 and o4 but at l4 we put down twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on the opposite sides of the planet and they were kind of important they taught us that Mars had once had liquid water on its surface and we know from here on earth where there's liquid water there's life no liquid water no life but they couldn't tell us some important things about the water was it salty or sweet was it acidic or basic in short was that ancient wet environment habitable well in comes curiosity she's 900 kilograms chock full of all the science instruments we would need to add or that question of life but she's hard to land really hard to land now if you want to get to the surface of Mars and you're gonna take anything bigger than a breadbox or smaller than a house you have to do these four things two orders of magnitude powers of 10 you hit the atmosphere going about 10,000 miles down on landing night for curiosity we hit the atmosphere going thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty-seven miles an hour that's fast in fact that's fast enough that the energy of motion the kinetic energy can melt or vaporize the entire spacecraft now that is considered poor form so we wrapped the spacecraft in a special shell what we call in an aeroshell we coat it with the material that will smolder and it won't burn and we shed that that energy to this to the atmosphere of Mars we kind of burn a hole in the sky of Mars and that process slows us down to about a thousand miles an hour still not slow enough to land on the surface of Mars so we open up a parachute the world's largest supersonic parachute opened up just shy of twice the speed of sound gives us the neck snapping 12 G's of deceleration if the parachute were unfurled here it would be a little bit wider than this room is long that slows us down more to powers of 10 100 miles an hour in actuality about 180 miles now and for us still not slow enough to land on the surface of Mars so we have to let go of that parachute and go to Rockets now every expedition to the surface of Mars has used these approaches but then depending on the particular x' how good your Rockets are do they have throttles do you have a good sensor that looks at the ground can you tell your speed relative the ground you need some last landing or touchdown system to take out that last little bit of energy for us even though we landed at one-and-a-half miles an hour that's about like a brisk Manhattan walk a gentle kiss with the Martian surface the engineering of that touchdown system gave us some of the greatest challenges and we weren't going just any place we were going here this is the Gale Crater it sits in the middle of Mars on the equator it's massive ninety miles across you can see the crater rim in the edge of these images and in the center of the crater the mammoth Mount sharp 15,000 feet above the crater floor higher than anything in the continental US anything in the Rockies anything in Sears and NASA wanted us to put this rover right there between the proverbial rock and a hard place you know this is a digital elevation map it's made from orbit or over flight data stereo images that are taken from successive orbital passes and then reconstructed to an elevation correct digital rendering of the surface it's rendered for a perspective of about 40,000 feet like you're flying at a high altitude yet images like this used to keep me up at night they would wake me up actually for some weird reason at 2:30 in the morning every night I'd wake up all anxious about how we were gonna get our Rover down there in the safe flats and I would go through my list of concerns which really amounts to like a list of ways to die on the surface of Mars and I'd walk down them and slowly I would fall back to sleep some people count cheap I was counting ways to die on the way to Mars not quite as fun here's another way of understanding that challenge this is a shaded relief orange is high blue is low you can see the crater rim and Mount sharp coming out of the center and I've overlaying all of miss distances the 99 percentile ellipses for all of the expeditions to the surface of Mars and you can see as time has gone on we've got better at understanding where Mars is what its atmospheres like sort of ranging those ellipses down but to make it on to the flat safe blue spot we were going to have to get a whole quantum better with curiosity and when we got to the surface we weren't just landing any old Rover we were landing a rover big compared to other Rovers a rover big compared to human artifacts right this is beside a mini if the rover were sitting down here on the floor I couldn't reach the top of her mast with the top of my hand here she was big and that touchdown system that touchdown system really challenged us in fact we suffered a lot of setbacks associated with that touchdown system we started with an airbag approach to take up that final impact that's what we'd use to put the twin Spirit and Opportunity and the little tiny Sojourner Rover on the surface of Mars years earlier now unfortunately at 900 kilos there are no fibers known to humankind no poly air meds no PB OS no spectra Vectren Kevlar you name it there's nothing we don't have it that we can make a fabric out of that's strong enough to make bags that could survive landing we tried that for a few years we had to abandon it we thought about using a leg of Lander approach you know viking had had landed in the 70s with a legged Lander Apollo used legged Landers well between Pathfinder and the twins there was a failure and that failure was a legged Lander and as we went back through the failure analysis which is perhaps the most uncomfortable experience but the most productive as far as learning when you look at your failures weary familiarize ourselves with exactly how tippy and unstable a legged Lander is in rough uneven an uncertain terrain you put a 900 kilo Rover on the top of it tip ears so that was out for a while we looked at trying to solve the stability problem by adding legs splaying them out flat and letting the Lander belly flop now the propulsion tanks are in the belly of the beast and our fuel is annoyingly toxic and explosive exploding on touchdown also considered super poor form and so we are armored the belly of the beast to protect ourselves against that impact and will by the time we got done with that she was basically too heavy to launch so eventually we gathered all the principle folks who had ever had anything to do with landing something on the surface of Mars that went ranged from wizened gray-haired generals of the first Mars expeditions all the way down to wet-behind-the-ears young whippersnappers and we got in a room not very well air-conditioned room room 201 of building 158 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and we spent two sweaty days in that room trying to brainstorm a new way of getting to the surface of Mars we had this big huge Rover we knew we needed to put this big Rover on the Mars we didn't know how we would do that final touchdown system when we came out of that day the first day we had this we called it direct placement but people immediately called it the sky crane and I learned some very important lessons during those two days perhaps the most important of which the first and the primary was how we went about the process of that brain storming and that investigation I I awoke in during those two days to a to a feature of the culture of JPL that had been there for years that I just recognized it's a culture that takes ideas and the people who bring them into play and it separates them the essence of the cultural attribute is the separation of ideas from the people who hold them and why why would you do that you do that so that you would a personalize the idea you you don't have your personal investment in an idea that you bring into play so that the ideas can engage in brutal actually mortal combat with one another unaltered unprotected by their sponsor these ideas do battle that happened in that room the other attribute of separating ideas from the people who hold them is you want to love the people you want to respect the people you want to care for the people and you want to be able to beat the bejesus out of the ideas and so you don't want people to feel that they're being beaten on because you're beaten on their idea and to do that you have to have the ideas and the people separated it's a powerful powerful tool and I'll talk a little bit about about that more later so we emerge from the room with this sky crane and it looked a little nutty we felt it looked a little nutty we we knew two things when we left the room one sound engineering principles and drove driven us to that solution and to every time we spoke of it we lost credibility we do we go yeah this guy's drink German people like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what is up with that you are nuts I'm not even listening in fact it was my job to do a lot of the talking and so I developed this little statement I'd make before I even open my mouth about the sky crane it goes like this great works and great folly may be indistinguishable at the outset I love statements like this because they are both true and meaningless the truth of it is of course that if something's really really new you guys get this it's gonna look weird right people might not adopt it they might even even understand how to relate to it they might even think it's crazy the meaninglessness of this statement is of course that crazy also looks crazy so just because you say this doesn't mean that the next words out of your mouth represent a great work although I'll tell you a little secret you say those words to a room and then no matter what comes out of your mouth they're like oh maybe that's a great work now unfortunately the team also labored under this conundrum this paradox we didn't know whether what we had done was a great work or great folly you know we couldn't test our landing system we we live here on earth the earth is the third Rock from the Sun not the fourth bigger planet more gravity more atmosphere different speed of sound different temperature we can't test our landing system we can do analysis and we did pen and paper analysis computer simulation this is an example of one of millions of computer simulations that we did here we're landing the rover on a slope so slippery that she cannot Rove and yet we can still land her computer simulations like this buoyed our confidence that maybe we were doing the right thing that maybe what we were engaged with was not great folly but perhaps great work now unfortunately you guys might be familiar with this simulation models and simulation don't protect you against everything in fact they do not specifically protect you against sins of omission the AI for God's I built a model of the universe in ones and zeroes inside the computer if I forget an important physical law let's say the second law of thermodynamics and that's important which by the way I don't think that the second law of thermodynamics is important for this landing and it's not in this model but let's say I was wrong all that the space all that the computer will do is just turn the crank on this universe that I've created and ones and zeros inside its bowels and pop out an answer for me and I might like the answer but it made me not related at all to what's gonna happen at Mars so that question great work great folly hung large over the team and really we had only one way to prove it it was a test at two and a half billion dollar test and it occurred on the 5th of August 2012 we gathered thousands of people together who had worked on this for over a decade and collectively we held our breaths to see if what we were doing was a great work or great folly I'm gonna poetry it will record entry interface at this time it'll be it pressurizing the compulsion system to increase the thrust of the system they'll use that for all the veneer in the atmosphere we're about to do vehicles just reported via tones that it has started guided entry peak deceleration we just have parachute deploy around 1.7 the parachute is deployed we are decelerating details has separated where we found the ground expand we're down to 90 meters per second at an altitude of 6.5 kilometers from setting standing by for backshell separation we are in power flight or an altitude of 1/5 or descending standing by perspective saccharina started Hinkel know if you remain strong touchdown confirmed that was a good night infinitely preferable to the night that might have awaited us if the things had gone just a little bit differently a lot of stuff had to go right for that to come together now I know for myself and I know for many of the members of our team that the ones and zeros that come down the numbers that tell you that the spacecraft done its job they take the front of my brain to figure out they don't have the rear brain visceral connection to our work as these these are the first images of a new place in our solar system brought to you by the frankly blood sweat and tears of over 3,000 women and men scattered over 37 states and seven nations they are from the right to the left the first image of Mount sharp seen from the surface of Mars this is taken the day after landing from a camera on the front of the rover its dust cover has been removed so the image is quite clear you can see the shadow of the rover it looks a little bit like a transformer and you can see Mount sharp looming high in the background and in the mid you can see a beautiful black sand dune that separates us from Mount sharp in the middle here the first color image of the surface Gale Crater this is taken by the Mali imager on the robotic arm we have a robotic arm on the front of the rover and on the in its hand it holds a camera this has taken a few days after landing but we have not yet removed the clear plastic dust cover that covers the lens and the red iron oxide rich dust that gives Mars its red hue gives this image a particularly ghostly red color but my favorite image on this slide my favorite image from the mission is in the far left this is the very first image taken from the surface of Gale Crater we had a science orbiter in orbit around Mars as we descended through the atmosphere in fact all the data all the telemetry you saw us reacting to in the control room came through that communication link we were just about to lose that link we had time for maybe one image maybe enough bandwidth to get an image down and we chose this image it's from the rear hazard cameras these are fisheye lens cameras on the glow on the back end of the rover they're really there to protect us when we drive around so we don't bump into rocks we took that image moments after touchdown because we were hoping kind of against hope like unbelievably that we might see that now I know that that is impressive to you as it is to me that actually is the impact plume of the descent stage so we separated from our jet backpack which we call the descent stage we lowered ourselves to the surface of Mars and then once Mars had taken up the weight of the rover we cut free and flew to the rear of the rover a safe distance and impacted the surface we took that image just after the descent stage it impacted the surface and that is the ejecta plume of the crater of that impact so we it was a really good night right we got things we kind of expected or hope for a successful landing and we got things we never even dreamed we would really get an action selfie of the landing all the numbers it was a good night the green the red and the black are variously where we thought the rover would have landed when it touched down or the rover thought it had landed and where it actually did land and they're separated by Oh a few hundred meters which isn't good if you're playing golf but if your golf shot is 352 million miles that's pretty darn good so how'd it go so well of course the answer sits here an incredibly gifted team of individual contributors yes but perhaps even more importantly an incredibly gifted team of collaborators you know my deputy and good friend Miguel san martín and I really started to recognize how important this idea of team collaboration was for us to make breakthrough innovations for us to really solve the tough challenges and we ran into a story from from history the story of Enrico ferme a one of the fathers of nuclear physics and the first controlled fission reaction as the story goes firme is about to do a the first controlled nuclear fission reaction in a underneath the squash courts at the University of Chicago in a homemade fission reactor by the way I never want to be anywhere near a homemade fission reactor that sounds like a bad idea and as the story goes a technician is removing some of the three control rods that are going to make this this fission reaction sort of self-sustaining and the technician removes the first rod removes the second and Faramir looks at his pocket watch stop he says it's lunchtime they put the rods back and they sit down at a big table and enjoy a moment of fellowship a chance to commune with one another talk about work or family or whatever make those connections those human connections the bonds of respect and and love really that would allow them to work as vigorously as intellectually vigorously as they needed and then after civilized lunch they'd revolutionize our understanding of the universe forever we so liked that idea that story that we put on everybody's calendar electronic calendar was meeting maker at the time a an invitation to a meeting called lunch with Enrico between 12:00 and 1:00 it was there to protect that lunch hour from other people throwing in meetings during lunch because everybody knows you're free during lunch hour so let's schedule the meeting in the lunch hour let's to protect it so that the team could get together sometimes in ones and twos down to the local cafeteria on lab sometimes on mass down to Nicole's French deli in South Pasadena with a couple of bottles of wine those moments together to build the bonds of trust and mutual respect allowed us to play very rough intellectually without with one another and collaborate in a way that was extremely fruitful I came to the conclusion that the strength or the or the quality of a product of a team is a direct reflection of the teamwork within that team and I'm I hope and I believe that that our Rover on Mars stands as a testament to the to our capacity to collaborate so some specific lessons I want to want to help you with specific observations one this idea of separating the ideas from the people who hold them you love and respect the people you you get those bonds of trust that creates a culture of collaboration and by allowing the ideas to engage in unfettered unprotected MORTAL KOMBAT you get a culture of innovation where only the strongest ideas survive hold on to the doubt which is a way of not selling your decision making or solution finding short this is a weird set of words when I was a student I was a later student right I'd been playing rock and roll I was returning late the euphemism that I think people call just now uses a returning student I was this returning student at the Community College I was returning student at university and grad school and I noticed one of the greatest ways that I made mistakes was by being scared about whether I knew the answer you know my college exams has a little paragraph at the top that says something like a man leaves Chicago heading 500 miles due west and you know some big word problem and then you're supposed to answer in the vast openness of white space below showing your work answer that question and that big blank space below would terrify me I would sit at the threshold wondering do I have it do I have it in me to answer this question will I get it right and that anxiety would ball up and I would just jump and start answering and frequently I'd find that I'd answered the question wrong or more commonly answered the wrong question that hadn't really spent time pondering it now my university they allowed you to take cheat sheets in and so all my friends would take a trip a lot repeat a graph and they write every single example problem down and they come in with this sort of almost black colored cheat sheet and I being some crazy hippie from Northern California would take colored marker and write hold on to the doubt on my sheet because all I really needed to do to get it as right as I could was not rush into the answer but really sit contemplating the question for a few moments that's all fine and good for college but I noted later in life when I was working professionally that people would do it teams would do it whole groups would be faced with an open question and the group itself would be anxious enough that they would leap to the quickest answer they could they wanted to know that they had an answer so badly that they would accept the first answer that they could get when you do that you you sell yourself short you sell your solution sort I have found that if you allow yourself to sit there with that open question turn it over in your mind really understand it perhaps for all of its profoundness profundity that the solutions you get to that the answers you come up with are far more capable or far better than if you rush if you roll the open question in your mind your decision-making is curiosity based if you don't if you leap if you let anxiety dominate you're really making what I call fear-based decision-making and you might get away with it but the products not going to be as good as it could some particular practical tips you know you can't get a team cannot display behavior that the leader doesn't model that's the first rule of parenting by the way you can't tell your kids to do something that you're you know that hypocrisy children recognize hypocrisy starting at about like eight months old they're like whatever I can't even talk and I know you're full of it so you have to model at separation and I would do that I would bring up my own ideas I would hold them out and then I would beat the bejesus out of them I would offer taunt challenge welcome bet beers on whether people could do a better job beating up the ideas in fact there were times when I would ask team members if they brought a new change when we wanted to make a change to our landing system bring in that change I totally want you to do that and here's what I want you to do when you when you share it with the team I want you talked to talk about the three virtues of your proposal but much more importantly I want you to tell us the three central deficits the three warts the three biggest warts I would never criticize anybody about how well they characterized the virtues of their idea but I I would be a little vicious if they didn't seriously consider the deficits that sort of forces us into sort of an objective separation between our ideas and ourselves and that allows us to feel unthreatened when our ideas are challenged and you always want your ideas to be challenged you know leadership is not a crown it's not a throne you're not there because you're the smartest guy in the room or the best guy in the room or if you are I pity you because you haven't constructed a great team you should be looking to build a team that is better than you somebody's got a lead it's kind of a service function someone's got to do it your job is really there to facilitate to to maybe steer the efforts of a very capable team and maybe upon occasion when push comes to shove to make hard decisions but it's not because you're above everybody and if you put yourself above everybody you put a ceiling of where people can go but if you don't if you encourage them to be better and smarter than you you don't limit where they can top out and finally a little hippie love I'm a selfish man or so my lovely wife tells me and I want to have a good time when I'm working I don't know if any of you have ever done this calculation it's slightly disheartening to do the helmet what fraction of my waking life am i at work it's a lot and I wanna have a good time at work so I discovered a long time ago that I have a few choices I can go to work and work with this group of people and I can look for stuff to dislike within my team members like God the way that guy clicks his teeth when he's just thinking or why is he always putting his feet up on the desk what is up with that or I could look for something to love in everybody look for something to appreciate something to connect with something to enjoy so I choose that I choose that not because it's a management technique I choose it not because the world's a better place by the way both those are true I choose it for selfish purposes I choose it so that I'll have a better time that means it's authentic I'm really there I'm really loving those people because that's what I want to do and it feels good to me now as a side effect they notice they respond they like it they try it back on me and they try it on each other and pretty soon the whole team is having this gargantuan love fest we were doing something that many people think is one of the hardest aerospace challenges of this decade certainly and we were having a blast 10 years of a blast doing the hardest job than anybody could think of mostly because we were really enjoying each other while we did it now NASA is not all hugs and kisses and butterflies and rainbows no pony no Rainbow Brite or - and so 30 days after we landed we took this panorama this is a mosaic underneath the rover to make sure that we had not landed her on a rock if we had landed on a rock I probably would not be here speaking to you today and then NASA patted us on the back and said thank you very much landing team go find more work because you're fired you're out here's your pink slip and they brought a whole new crew of people in because it ends up being that the mission was not all about the landing it's actually about the roving of the rover we were really just the movers we just got it there and we got back in the truck and drove off so the team that the science team of 400 and a very gifted group of rover drivers and surface engineers showed up they took look at the goal let me blow that up these layered terrain that you see there on the foothills of mount sharp that's why we came to the Gale Crater we had seen from orbit signatures of clay minerals we know that clays are formed in water here on earth we wanted to go interrogate those minerals to see if it could give us signs of the ancient wet environment on Mars those minerals are found if this is a aerial picture of our landing we named Bradbury landing Ray Bradbury passed a few days after we landed and those clay minerals and the foothills of Mount sharp would be seen straight down due south in this image so our plan was to go there but what are the what are the scientists decide to do as soon as we got to the surface of Mars they decided to go 90 degrees to the plan orthogonal to the plan I love that that brings up the great classic Dwight D Eisenhower quote which is planning is everything the plan is nothing the plan is a model of the future universe you think you're going to run into and how you will respond to it the plan is this idea you have what you'll find in the future if you're a reasonably minded person it's easy to agree that the only thing we know about the plan is that it is absolutely not the actual universe will run into but sometimes we put so much energy into creating that plan that we don't want let go of it and even though the universe is telling us it's not that place that we thought we were going to be in the plan we sort of exist in this cognizant dissonance and try very hard to imagine that the world is that world we thought it would be thank god the scientists didn't do this they got on the ground they said oh that's cool down there I understand if we we picked out of all the places on Mars we picked to come here because of that place down straight down south but right now we like this place Yellowknife Bay more and I'm very happy they did because it was a two-year mission two-year prime mission and within the first six months over at Yellowknife Bay we deployed our arm drilled with our powdering drill into the surface of Mars taking this grey blue material which does not look like that highly oxidized red color that powder we'd distribute it to science instruments in the belly of the rover and come back with the data that gave the scientists the answer curiosity had been set to look for the answer is yes the ancient aqueous environment of Mars was habitable for life was Mars alive back then that question stays out in front of us but three and a half billion years ago when earth life was first forming the environment on Mars was conducive to life did life start on Earth and get ejected from asteroid impact on to Mars did Mars did life start on Mars and get ejected by asteroid impact onto earth and were all Martians that'd be weird could happen those questions hang in our future but we do know that back when life was starting on Earth Mars was conducive to life so here she is curiosity 2,000 pounds of American ingenuity according to the president's science adviser Stephen Holdren and she's on Mars doing our curiosity's bidding but this image gives me a question why did I do that why did I spend 10 years of my life building a robot to root around on the dirt on another planet is that a particularly practical thing to do sometimes when I think about human behavior in practicality I get a little confused but some things I know to be practical like this is practical not the selfie but the 737-700 in the background I'm at Burbank Bob Hope Airport I'm going to get on that plane that's gonna take me down to Houston Hobby Airport outside the gates of the Johnson Space Center I make that trip a few times a year actually several times a year it takes three hours and 15 minutes for me to make that trip when my mother was my age that trip would have taken three days when her mother was my age were taken three weeks air travel has revolutionized the way we think our world the way we move goods and services the way we do business and yet if you look at the early exploration of flight the the foreshadowing of the practical importance is not obvious early exploration of flight looks a little bit um ridiculous actually it looks like it could possibly be in Juris early explorers probably should have been a little embarrassed maybe some of them should have been downright humiliated I don't know what this guy was thinking and unfortunately all too frequently early explorers paid with the greatest of prices and yet we kept at it we kept doing it despite it being in jurist despite of being impractical we kept at it and we eventually tame the skies even though for years air travel would be a risky proposition so we do not explore because it is practical in fact we explore despite it being impractical do we do it for the science do we do it for the pure science of it here's an image of Times Square on Monday morning the 6th of August at 1:30 a.m. we landed at 10:30 at night Pacific 1:30 a.m. Eastern Time squares Chuck a book full with people I'm told it was a lightning storm and they're there to watch the landing on the big jumbo screen now are they there because they are just so dying to know about the pH and salinity of the ancient aqueous environment on the surface of Mars but they has got to get it no I don't think so I think it's a lot more like when tens of thousands of people come together to watch to see if an athlete can cross a set distance and a fraction of an eighth of a second faster than another athlete I think what we're exploring we're asking questions about ourselves as individuals as groups as teams as a nation as people were we're searching for the edge of us what can we do I think Neil Armstrong Under that when he chose the words he'd say when he'd first stepped foot on the moon one small step for a man one giant leap for mankind he was hinting that he was carrying us with him that his exploration was our exploration and that is he became more by that tiny footprint juxtaposed against the vast emptiness of space we all became a little bit more when we explore were really asking questions of humanity who are we how grand are we how great is our reach what questions might we dare ask and believe we can get the answers so I've been thinking a bit about exploration and curiosity and the power of it since landing mostly since landing I had a great job I was doing this job we landed people kind of freaked out I was moved by how many people so far from the project were responded to us landing that I started to recognize we were doing something that was sort of a fundamental gesture of our humanity you know we are the curious Apes we are weirdos okay born through hips too narrow to pass a fully baked human brain we come into this world naked and incapable almost completely unproven stinks we don't know where to go in the winter we don't move south we don't build nests we do we don't come in knowing how to do almost anything we come in almost completely unproductive the most paramount of which is be curious every single one of you in this room before you could talk built a fairly accurate model of the universe through your curiosity you Justin tasted things you poured sand and water and put your hands and feet in things you experimented and explored and through that process wordlessly you constructed a model of the universe that differentiated between solids and liquids that understood gravity and time and mass you even understood Newton's second law even though you hadn't been able to articulate it or decompose it in your mind all of us have that curiosity yet now something strange happens as we get older we use that curiosity a little bit less and less we get a reliable model of the universe and we just go back to that model but again that model is doomed to be outdated or large pieces of it if you're in the tech world that model has a very short shelf life its freshest date is not very long so you've got to stay curious a curious mind stays agile innovative and competitive you can make a culture within a team that that puts a premium on that curiosity and if you can keep that culture a curious mind and a culture of collaboration inside your team really there's not much that a group of human beings cannot do if the laws of physics allow it you can do it so what is next for NASA well our scientists tell us that to really unlock the mysteries that Mars has we have to bring a piece of Mars back to earth the effort is called Mars sample return it's a lot of work it takes three missions a mission to grab the samples and seal them a mission to take the sealed samples and put them on orbit around Mars and in another mission to scoop them up from orbit and bring them back to earth but we're working on that first mission something that could be that first mission called Mars 2020 on the chief engineer and I look forward to putting some sealed samples on the surface of Mars to be returned for a later but Mars is not the only place to explore Europa the ice moon of Jupiter an ice crust the a kilometer to 1040 kilometers thick we don't know the thickness of the ice but we do know that underneath that ice there's a liquid water ocean more than twice the volume of all the seas on earth now I'm not a exobiologist but I drink beer with XO biologists and they tell me that Europa is their number one bet for a place to find life existing today in our solar system I hope to put a lander on the surface of that ice and see what signs of life have bubbled up from below so now when I look at this image it doesn't wake me up at night my six month old son Ansel wakes me up at night at 2:30 in the morning now I look at this and I'm mostly humbled humbled by the fact that I was able to participate in a project that was kind of a gesture of our collective humanity that gets to change the the history books change the science books but this image also gives me a question it opens a question for me it's a good question it asks me you know what's next for me you know a decade or so ago when I followed my curiosity when I let it take me astray some pretty incredible things happened my curiosity all of our curiosities can really be the key to unlocking new solutions change and sort of creating a new future so it's an interesting question to ask for each of you to ask yourselves perhaps it's best ask and not answered left hanging open the doubt held onto rotating it and again in your minds where will your curiosity next take you thank you very much for your attention we've got some time for questions if you'd like to ask a couple questions you can raise your hands you can walk to the mics either way or neither way don't be bashful it's okay going once yes yeah it can't really do a good job of singing happy birthday to itself because there's not a lot of atmosphere on the surface of Mars it sounds very wheezy no we have we do we do all sorts of things with the vehicle the folks who operate the vehicle get license every day they get to pick a wake-up song for the day's efforts we got to pick a wake-up sign for landing we chose Frank Sinatra all or nothing at all and it sings itself happy birthday but really all we do is we put happy birthday you know transmission and it transmits back to us happy birthday other questions hey so one thing I was wondering about when you guys sort of launch this thing you have a fair bit of time between launch and the actual landing yes I'm curious about the work that goes on there or if you found like Oh somebody forgot like a zero in some program and we need to like shift that and you know make last-minute changes how do you do that right in the middle of space yeah yes so we're perhaps like you guys we're constantly working on the thing on our product all the way up to the release date and past the release date we're looking at working on updates for us the thing that happens when you launch it you can no longer change the hardware that's done it's really hard to reach the hardware so but we can continue to work the software and we did we do well we do a lot of testing right we really worried especially during entry descent and landing that the soft a software Gork a fault that would precipitate a fault response or reset could be the end of the mission and so we exercised that software for years before we we landed and including the nine months that we were in crews we were constantly checking the software and in fact three days before landing we discovered an error in a parameter set worse an error in a parameter set that wasn't we built our parameters in three families stuff were never going to touch deep bowels of the earth parameters stuff that if things go poorly we will we might have to touch and things that we plan to touch and retouch like targeting the targeting of the Rovers entry was sort of a function of the marsh and weather and so we were getting weathered updates every morning as we approached and so targeting parameters were in a set of files that we regularly exercise the process of touching naturally the air we found was in the bowels of the beast and so we really sweated bullets you know we couldn't find proof that that error would have caused us to fail but I feared that the models that we we knew that the models that we had of the spacecraft were really low fidelity models they didn't they didn't resolve a lot of the behaviors or functions of the spacecraft and so we argued to make the change even though we didn't have proof we needed to and even though it was in the bowels of the beast and we did and we survived and yay yes a lot of cultures encourage people to defend their ideas and you talked about about you know separating the ideas from the people and you talked about modeling it yourself but I'm curious what else you do to sort of bring someone in and sort of get them in this culture of write-ins actually letting go of their ideas and yeah great question do you hear like what you know many cultures encourage people to defend their ideas and so how what does this team culture look like where you offer your ideas up for sacrifice as it were we try and I tried we try the lab has this culture that's relatively flat I accentuate that I am in general irreverent to all things and myself and so I model the in that process models you know people walk in and they're like oh my god you're saying you're calling Adam steltzner a dumbass because they because those silly people think I don't know what they think but oh yeah I can't be a dumbass and and so we strive for a culture that was very flat where it didn't not very hierarchical where ideas were we encouraged people to move outside their domains of expertise you know sometimes the beginner's mind the eyeballs of a new of new insight can help an expert recognize something that they've they've lost track of you know sometimes people in a field a domain of expertise will lose track of finding the forest for the trees and they'll be in the trees and somebody who's outside their field can go Wow but those trees are in the wrong Valley and they go oh wow and so I encouraged the propulsion people to talk to the electronics people on the the flight software people to talk about hardware you know that all of that interchange was fair game and that sort of breaks down the barriers and makes people more comfortable putting putting their opinions forward yes I'm just curious how what the timeline was like for you to go from wannabe rock star to a chief engineer at NASA hmm 1985 start Community College start working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1999 no no 1991 so six years there's kind of intense six years like did high school over again and then undergraduate and then a masters then worked at the lab for a couple years I'd met the woman who would become my ex-wife and we decided to go back to graduate school together and finished our PhDs and then yeah and then so I've been at the lab since 91 in fact it's still September but next month in two weeks it'll be my 25th anniversary at JPL and so that was kind of a timeline it's a lot of what it was there was some work involved people when I when I say this um when I first talked about that story I don't talk about the you know all of the stuff that happened and I was giving this talk at Google and you know lots of of young kids these kids nowadays lots of folks who grew up watching like Zuckerberg make billions of dollars in two seconds have this expectation of oh yeah you just worry you know that's what you do you work for three years and then you're on top of the world you work for ten years in here on top of the world and so a whole bunch people after the Google Talk came out and said oh yeah so that's totally cool that NASA just like hires people who were like you know just playing rock and roll and then decide to learn a little bit about the Stars and then they hired you to be chief engineer I'm like no actually there was about eight or nine years of incredibly hard work at several academic institutions between rock and roll and PhD did that answer the question yeah I just I was also kind of wondering where you started at NASA because it obviously wasn't a cheap engineering no no no I started as a redshirt I started as like you know engineer 100 something's happening go figure that out yeah I started as you know whatever junior whatever we was member of the technical staff is how I started which is actually not the bottom there's an associate member of the technical staff those really do get to wearing the red shirts and and it's just because I had a master's degree when I started so I went through my masters and then applied to the lab because I'd met this woman who I was also at Caltech in grad school and I wanted to stay there and marry her eventually to divorce her and and and so I went and worked at the lab and and I started in as member of technical staff and naturally in the intervening 25 years they've changed all the names of all the little spots so now there's like six or eight levels that you may make your way through yes sir yes I was wondering you mentioned that you kept the team together for ten years I was kind of curious like did you have any turnover or how did you approach getting people up to speed with the culture that you're a building this yes I did separation right ideas so we did have some turnover but not much some of its cheating we are aerospace engineers building a massive Rover to go to Mars it doesn't really get any better than that right where you going to go what do you do but but I think that this flat culture this empowered culture where all of the team members are valued where we understand that good ideas can come from anybody doesn't have to come from the majordomo it can come from the you know floor sweeper that sense of empowerment gives each team member skin in the game and I didn't want the team members to be motivated I wanted them to be on fire I needed them to be on fire and so I'm on fire you're on fire we're having a blast we're loving each other we're empowering one another and we got this really really hard job to do we made it like an awesome fun game ish thing and it seemed to work I'm gonna take because that guy's standing behind you you are the last question no they're right you your it man make it good you mentioned fixing software issues in flights yes what software side issues if any would cause you to like abort the launch and go to the next launch window great question so we our launch opportunities happen every 26 months it's hard it's expensive to slip in fact we did slip we were scheduled for a 2011 2009 launch and we slipped to 2011 and we slipped because we weren't ready in many dimensions that's the cost six hundred million dollars so there is no software bug that would cause us to slip the launch we would because we can fix it in flight unless there was some error I mean really it would be a hardware error that would take us to to to not launch you know it's a little bit like a product debut write a product release date except you can kind of slip the product release date if things really don't go well you can go like it's gonna be in September not not August but for us celestial mechanics are kind of wicked and there's actually a moment each day depending on the rocket we use there's an instant one second a moment click each day where you can launch and if you don't take that they make it the next day and there's only like 21 days in a two-year cycle where those moments happen and so you have to get the job done by the time or it costs a lot of money and you get in big big trouble alright I'll leave it there thank you very much for your attention

Channel: OmniTI

Views: 795

Rating: 4.5555553 out of 5

Keywords: OmniTI, surge 2016, nasa, adam steltzner, crazy, mars, rover

Id: sUT96wTv7NE

Length: 67min 12sec (4032 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2016