Working at NASA was a childhood dream of mine. At some level it was probably the common desire of a child growing up in the 1980s to be an astronaut, but for me I'd say it went further than that - I wanted to be a part of humanity's future; I wanted to be an explorer, an enabler, a part of the team that brought humanity up from the trenches and into a new era of enlightenment, exploration, and existence. I saw NASA as the embodiment of this notion - they achieved the impossible as a matter of routine and their mission was to explore the universe, starting at the edge of our planet and working outwards.
That was 20 years ago.
This is now.
I did, through the convoluted maze of life, end up working at NASA. Not as an astronaut, of course; I'm no test pilot, no highly-decorated military hero, certainly not a member of the caste of uniformed elites which gets chosen for that line of work. I'm merely a contractor; a Project Engineer, that lowest form of life whose heroic deeds go unnoticed and unappreciated, but are vital for the success of nations - one pair of the feet on the ground that enable humanity to keep its head in the clouds. I am young and hopeful; creative and open-minded; practical and productive; scorned and dismissed.
I write this as a member of a perpetual, self-renewing underclass: the future. When politicians complain about saddling their children and grandchildren with debt, social problems, extremism, wars, pollution, and so on - that's my generation they're talking about, and the generations that will follow.
That is a profound problem: my future is being shaped by people who will not be around to take part in it. My future will be a product of a past generation's needs, wants, and aspirations; their greed, corruption, and broken structure. Today's politicians are better representatives of our world's checkered past than its potential future.
So when surveying the warped and broken future I've been given, it's tempting to blame today's politicians, but that's neither productive nor correct. The blame rests squarely at the feet of my generation, those who are 25-35 years old: we are old enough to have a significant impact on the direction of our future, and young enough to care what happens in 50 years. But we are also too vain, apathetic, self-absorbed, shortsighted, and unaware to affect positive changes. We have care little for dogma unless it gets us something for free. We don't educate ourselves; we don't vote; we don't write our elected officials; we don't participate in the process. Instead we wait for work to be done, then complain that we don't like the results. As it stands, our only hope for our own future is that the current generation of decision makers blunders onto a path that is not irreversibly destructive.
I work at NASA because I hope my children live in a time where the night sky is not an empty, foreboding vacuum, but a place of wonder and excitement and discovery; where universe is an unexplored country teeming with opportunity, not a pretty bit of custom-made scenery. I want a future for them that is beyond my imagination, and today I freely give my heart and mind and body and soul in the hope, against all reason, of creating that future for them, out of the present. There is still a small, undernourished part of me that views NASA as an integral part of that bright future; an organization of extraordinary people who can invent the impossible.
There is a lot of talk these days about the future of NASA; where do we go, how do we get there, what is the shape of our vehicle, and ... just who is this "we," anyway? The fact that there is so much discussion is great. The problem is that the wrong people are talking, and the structure of our future spacecraft and exploration missions are being decided by politicians, whose only stakes in the issue relate to their political careers. They lack the competence (and interest) to specify the revolutionary hardware that will take humanity beyond the next threshold. That lack is not the problem - our government is designed to account for this by encouraging competent people to counsel their elected officials. The problem is that our politicians don't let their lack of competence or motivation stop them from making the sorts of decisions that should be made by engineers and scientists, because there is no positive force to guide them.
So we - the future - are about to be left with an architecture for space exploration that is provisional and limited; grafted together out of parts specified because of campaign contributions and aspirations for re-election, rather than efficiency or reliability or appropriateness. We are sent on missions chosen out of misdirected national pride and fond memories of the past, rather than rational calculation and the needs of the future.
As this happens, my generation sits and watches - wallowing in self-pity, taking "no" for an answer. If we take the initiative for our own future instead of waiting passively for it to happen, we have the tools and the knowledge to achieve great things. Our children should be born in a world that is the cradle of humanity - not the container of it. They should never remember a time when they were the tenants of a single, crowded, strained planet.
This is my call to my generation. We will live in a future of our own making. It is our responsibility, to ourselves and our posterity, to design that future to be better than the present. Now is the time to make hard choices - to invest in our own future. Now is the time to move out of the proverbial basement; to stop living off the glory and accomplishments of our parents and grandparents and start solving our own problems. We are the richest and best-educated generation in the history of this world - and there are plenty of us at NASA. We need to make our voices heard within the organization - to speak up and take the risks that our managers don't want to take, and not fear failure. We need to rid ourselves of the tyranny of evaluation, and know that we are not beholden to the past. Never accept that "it can't be done" - that notion is the sanctuary of fools, who seek the ease of well-worn paths instead of the challenge of creating new ones. This is NASA - the response to "it can't be done" should be a chuckle and a solution, not a demoralized hunt for a well-used alternative.
Stop twittering, start speaking. Stop waiting for direction, make your own direction. It's up to us to decide what possibilities our futures hold, then to act and make those possibilities happen. For all of our sake: start thinking, start acting!
Historical note: Throughout my entire career I've had a pattern of sending strongly-worded e-mails to people I shouldn't. This continues today. Also: man, this post brings back good and bad memories. Also: most of the e-mails I'm thinking of were a lot more caustic.
Note: as noted in a previous post, this is a lightly edited copy of an e-mail that I sent to co-workers recently. The lab I work in is meant to explore advanced human interface methods for future crewed spacecraft. As it is, a great deal of my time is spent trying desperately to wring funding and other resources (such as lab space) out of our organization so that we can actually perform some of this R&D work. This message reflects my take on the process and why it's important to continue trying.
We are extremists; what we pursue is radical. We recognize that the status quo is not acceptable going forward. When others gush about the NASA that they've seen in movies, we exchange knowing glances of derision and bemusement. As NASA looks to the future and wonders how to move forward, we ask for nothing less than the fabled paradigm shift - not in the self-destructive Kuhnian sense, nor the cliché MBA sense, but an acknowledgment that our current ways are holding us back, and we need to shed the shackles of the previous generation before we can truly extend our reach to the stars.
We are beholden to preferences of the heroes of a bygone era. The explorers of our youth - test pilots and athletes, Buzz Aldrin and Sonny Carter - these are not the heroes of the future. They are pilots and athletes, those with the "right stuff" in a physical and experiential sense that holds little relevance in a post-LEO NASA.
The explorers of the future will not be test pilots, sports heroes, or other mythical creatures. They will be engineers and scientists; practical people who have capabilities well-suited to the mundane life of research, observation, and maintenance. They may be occasionally called on to fly, maneuver, and meet daunting challenges, but they will not revel in these experiences - their heroism will be in the manipulation of data, the solving of practical problems, and the other details that make the life of an engineer or researcher so unique.
To support this new breed of hero, NASA needs to reform its notion of space travel and spacecraft. The notion of a cockpit is no longer relevant. Nor is the notion of Mission Control. Realtime monitoring and control of a spacecraft that is on or around Mars is not an option from Earth - the roundtrip time for data transmission makes fine-grained control of a crewed spacecraft impractical and dangerous. Control must be relinquished to the astronauts, which means they must be trusted as creative, informed problem solvers. Beyond LEO, the astronauts won't be flying - they will be passengers on a vehicle that is taking them to faraway places, mimicking the most vital aspects of Earth and ignoring all others. For the first few months of their journey, they will be sending messages back home, performing science experiments, and maintaining this vehicle, the first of its kind, as it carries them to their destination. Once there, it will deposit them safely in a place where no human has gone before, and these ambassadors of humanity will take our first steps onto another celestial body - a planet, asteroid, or moon - not as the romanticized heroes of our youth, but as ordinary humans who have accomplished extraordinary feats through the labors of their peers.
NASA cannot support humanity's next steps beyond Earth's gentle clutches with our current attitude toward space travel. We live in an artificial reality created by the Cold War - fighter jets; hand controllers and heads-down cockpits; pilots and commanders and civilians. "Mission Specialist" is still an official term of disdain bestowed upon those civil servants who may make it in to space but will never sit in the "captain's chair," commanding a craft as it valiantly thrusts away from the planet. In the future, the Mission Specialist must be held paramount, and "piloting" duties left to computers and automated systems.
This is the backdrop upon which our lab begins. The traditional spacecraft that we all recognize: Apollo, STS/Shuttle, Orion, or even the Starship Enterprise - these craft are based on notions that no longer apply. To breach the new frontier we require a craft whose design acknowledges that life and success depend on data, and human effort centers around understanding and manipulating this æther or Cyberspace; not limited by a predefined structure but free to navigate through it as the mission drives it to evolve and grow.
To accomplish this, we must abandon our current structure. The Unified User Interface is not just an interesting concept, but a necessity. Any compromise that secures the power, authority, or ego for any person or group at the expense of flexibility and autonomy will doom our explorers to an uncertain fate. If data rule, then data must be available in all places and at all times, in whatever form is appropriate, to whoever needs them. Making that possible is the mission of our lab. To achieve it, we must start with our own rules:
The work we are seeking is not only interesting, exciting, and fun - it is vital for the success of future NASA missions. To pursue it, we need to overcome disinterest and skepticism; being motivated and professional, and keeping these rules in mind, is a good place to start.
There was some post on the internet recently about Rules for Radicals - I don't remember where exactly it was and don't really care; it was some trite thing about Thinking Outside The Box or some such nonsense. But after skimming over the article, I realized that several of the notions actually apply to what I do at work.
For those who don't know: I work with a very small group of people at Johnson Space Center researching advanced human interfaces for future crewed spacecraft. Technically we're a Constellation lab, which means that if the proposed FY2011 budget is approved, my work becomes de-funded and I'm out job hunting.
At least that's the first thing that people think when I tell them I work in a Constellation lab. It's not what I think though. The Constellation program has advanced the state of the art in many spacecraft systems (including regenerative environmental systems, high-speed data networks, automated systems), but beyond that I personally don't believe that it's the right vehicle for the future. My personal opinion is that the architecture is a nostalgic throwback dreamed up by uncreative people, and it will not serve us well once it is created. The future isn't a 2-week round trip to the moon, or a small crew ferry vehicle for the ISS (the latter is the only thing being designed right now). The future is a spacecraft designed and built for long-duration missions to celestial bodies: moons, asteroids, and planets. Orion won't take us there, for several reasons.
In all the patriotic hand-wringing about gaps and job loss, people are forgetting that we're not designing a vehicle that is appropriate for a long-duration mission to Mars. I think this fact rests in the back of many minds, but the only things we are able to focus on are Orion 1 and Orion 2, which are moving us toward a 4-person capsule that can only survive unassisted for long enough to reach the ISS. Is this progress?
A new kind of space mission demands a new kind of spacecraft, and we're not creating one. My constant frustration at work is that despite the fact that people are aware of this, there is no funding or desire to actually do the kind of basic research and blank-paper design that will be required to make the new spacecraft happen. The FY2011 budget actually makes the funding available and enforces the desire, which is why it's so important to pass it - "saving" Constellation as a jobs program is a waste of time and money. Continuing development of Ares/Orion to minimize the "gap" is also a poor choice; the gap will be there regardless and once we're able to launch a crewed Orion capsule, we're stuck with a very expensive suite of machines and processes that aren't robust enough to do the things we need.
While the notion of designing a vehicle I personally dislike is somewhat frustrating, I'm well aware that I'm not the smartest person at NASA and given such a complex problem (how do we explore space?) there are bound to be a multitude of paths that can be followed. I don't feel that my dislike of an idea makes it bad (a quick read of the discourse on the proposed NASA budget will show you that this attitude is unusual). My frustration comes from the fact that so many people in positions of power at NASA are uncreative, uninformed, and unmotivated. There is no will to explore new ideas; there is no tolerance for risk; there doesn't even seem to be a recognition that we're making shortsighted decisions that will become very costly in the future. The recent NRC report on the state of NASA labs was dead on target when it made the point that R&D labs are forced to use their limited resources buying basic equipment and begging for further resources; it's a big part of what I do. Though the report explicitly did not address JSC, the little R&D work that we do is hobbled by the same problems that frustrate scientists and engineers at other centers.
When I'm wallowing in frustration, I write long-winded ranty e-mails and fire them off to co-workers and managers. It's somewhat therapeutic, but in the end it's worthless because my co-workers and managers are not motivated enough to pursue important changes. Since I don't know anyone who is motivated, I'm going to start posting them here as well. If you're patient and bored, you can kill some time every once in a while wading through my nonsense, until someone at work finds it and I end up unemployed, living under an overpass or something. Ah, the grand possibilities of the future!
I'm in Seattle, WA for the SID 2010 conference this week. I've been pushing a human interface architecture at work (now it's "our" architecture) and a lot of features of it seem to work well using transparent and/or flexible displays.
OLED displays can be flexible, transparent, or both - seemingly perfect. Electrophoretic ink technology can be flexible; I haven't seen any transparent e-ink displays but don't see why that's not possible (in fact I expect that it is). There are quantum dot displays which are cool, but I don't think they're going to be transparent or flexible.
Anyway. So there's this display technology that's perpetually 5 years out and sure enough, at SID 2010, OLED is only really present on the 6th floor (where they're talking about what will overtake LCDs in 5 years). Meanwhile on the 4th floor at the trade show booths, it's all 3D (yawn), touch (yawn), and LCD. LCD doesn't get a yawn mainly because there are some VERY impressive LCD displays out there (NEC in particular had LCD displays that could easily be mistaken for OLED, or real life). (Aside: lots of noise about in-plane switching LCDs, which is what's on the iPad. Seen a few iPads here, not in use by people but at booths. I'm still 0% impressed with the iPad; hardware, software, concept. Sorry ...)
As in most trade shows, the people on the 4th floor frequently don't know much about what they're showing off. In this particular case, new display technologies tend to come from Japan, South Korea, or Western Europe so there are a lot of people with very thick accents around. Actually I was a bit disappointed at the lack of US representation; apparently very few US institutions are pushing display technology. By contrast, the European Union has invested heavily in display technology (among other things) the last several years, and it shows - a huge Western European contingent was there. Germany, in particular, filled a large section of floor space with a coordinated set of booths.
I have another day here, but I expect that I'll leave somewhat disappointed in the prospects. Transparent, flexible OLED displays exist in the lab, but nobody is willing to move them to commercial products for some reason. The best example I've seen so far is a Samsung laptop with a 14.1" transparent OLED display, which works a lot better than you would think. How many of them exist? Apparently just the one. Are they planning to start commercial sales of them? Maybe later. Which is what they said last year.
Playing the NASA card got at least a few of the people interested, so I may yet have work to do after this fiscal year (if NASA will support this work - they should, but that's a rant for another day).
Historical note: this was a post that I started and never finished. That's why there are so many [things] that seem like they are incomplete. I never posted this but the end of the Shuttle program was a big deal for me so I'm posting it now.
Atlantis is back in space, for its final voyage. Every Shuttle mission these days seems to have more meaning, as we approach the end of the Shuttle program and the orbiters are flying their final missions. Atlantis has had a short but distinguished career; it has helped us explore the solar system [Magellan], view the universe [Hubble], and [other thing]. It has served as a vehicle of diplomacy [Shuttle-Mir], and brought [x] modules and other ingredients for life to the International Space Station.
And soon, it will be decommissioned.
For someone in my generation, it is truly the end of an era. Our parents may have Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, but we grew up with the Shuttle - the most complex and capable vehicle ever designed, and one whose vast capabilities no government or corporation has even considered duplicating.
Against this backdrop, a few of us are working on creating some sort of successor. The shape and capabilities of that successor were decided for us by men who looked to the past for inspiration and economy. The Constellation had lofty goals, but the vehicles chosen to reach those goals are lacking in many ways.
From a technical standpoint, the vehicles were never intended to be great. Launched by rockets vaguely reminiscent of the Space Transportation System (why not just use the STS?), the Orion capsule and Altair lander were going to face a rougher ride to orbit of any spacecraft ever designed. Then once in space, we find that NASA has reversed the trend of making larger, more comfortable vehicles, and instead made Orion a cramped, monolithic space with no privacy; no place for science; [no other thing]. The Altair lander would barely be bigger from the crew's perspective. The "architecture" neglected science, crew health care systems, living quarters, privacy, and []; it was designed to re-use as much as possible from existing aircraft or the intellectual property of large [lockmart] and incompetent [honeywell] contractors in order to reduce development time and cost and just get something into space quickly. Guess what: that wasn't going to happen; all of those pieces don't fit together cleanly and are not capable of doing what we need in a true vehicle of exploration.
[Rant! Rant! Rant! I need to come back to this later]
Historical note: I came back, without my co-workers (who were, in fact, terrible people). LA is nice.
Leaving for home in a few hours. Overall this was a really fun trip. Got to see some really cool things, both for work and on my own. Learned a lot about my co-workers (perhaps more than I wanted to know, but that's OK). Gorgeous weather the whole time. Pretty good hotel (I give it a solid B). There's plenty more to do around here, of course. Will have to come back at some point.
Historical note: nothing came of the Oblong visit, because NASA. But it was still really freaking awesome and I'm proud to have been there.
I've been in the Los Angeles area for about a week now. Over the last few days, I've done several things that I found exciting:
I've taken lots (and lots) of photos. At some point, I'll post them here (along with all of the other ones that used to be here). Driving the Mulholland Freeway was definitely the high point of today. It would have been more fun in a vehicle that was sportier than my rental Toyota Camry hybrid, but the little thing behaved predictably and was still fun. I don't think I'd buy one, but it's a totally acceptable car.
Visiting Oblong has probably been the high point of the entire trip. I think I'd get along great with Paul Y. I also think that Oblong has actually already designed the hard part of a very expansive (dare I say: paradigm shifting ... yes, I'll go rinse my mouth out with soap now) bit of work I want to do at NASA. We'll see what comes out of all this.
Still like the netbook. Still a little annoyed at the lack of bluetooth, but I'll get over it. It has this face recognition thing for logging in, which seems silly but it works, most of the time. Not especially quick. The only real problem I have so far is that the screen and the surround for the screen are very glossy, so if it's at all light outside the reflection makes it very hard to see the screen - you have to turn the brightness all the way up, and even then it's a bit tough. With CRT monitors, AGAR (anti-glare anti-reflection) was always a big deal, and that was something that LCDs were good at without much effort, so I'm not sure why they would have (apparently intentionally) taken something that is otherwise great for use outdoors and made it almost impossible to use in the sunshine. Eh.