The Future of Space Flight

GURU MADHAVAN

Look up at the night sky ,each pinprick of light is a world beyond our own. Now take a tube, pack it with fuel, and generate thrust for it to break free from the planet. Every gram of mass must be justified. Every option must be meticulously managed. Every system must work flawlessly, often for years on end, with no possibility of repair. Today's advanced technologies, reusable rockets, robotics, life support systems, aren't just marvels. They are keys to unlocking the solar system and perhaps beyond. But at what cost? Spaceflight is more than engineering. It's a mirror held up to humanity itself.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

You know, we had near failures with SpaceX on their very first launch because they had refused to listen to us.

DAVA NEWMAN

The science question is, are we going to find life, past evidence of life? So we need to enable our astronauts to be the super humans they are.

GURU MADHAVAN

I'm Guru Madhavan. Joining me are Major General Charles Bolden Jr., former administrator of NASA.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

We're going to stop being able to breathe and live and Earth will spit us out.

GURU MADHAVAN

And Dava Newman, director of MIT Media Lab and former deputy administrator of NASA.

DAVA NEWMAN

Yeah, let's talk about innovation, I just love it.

GURU MADHAVAN

Welcome to Create the Future, Charlie and Deva. Charlie, let's start with you. You know, when most of us imagine astronauts, it's some lonely creature floating in the void kind of thing. So what really got you into stargazing?

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

My response is going to disappoint you. I grew up in the Jim Crow South in the days of segregation. As NASA started getting into the space program, you know, human spaceflight with Mercury, Jim and Apollo. That didn't excite me at all. I had no desire to go to space or be an astronaut because I honestly felt that that was beyond the possibility for a black kid growing up in the South. One of my heroes was an astronaut and that was Buck Rogers because back home in Columbia, we were allowed to go to the theater on Saturday mornings for the matinee because that was what the law allowed, and we sat up in the balcony to watch and they always had matinee features. One was a Western and one was science fiction, and I loved Buck Rogers because he walked out to his spaceship just like we currently walk to a car or a bus or something and he climbed into his spaceship, flew off to Mars and came back all in the same day and I didn't know any better. But I did think, you know, that would be really neat to be like Buck Rogers, but then it kind of went away. And it was not until I was an adult, to be quite honest, that I met Dr. Ron McNair, the late great Dr. Ron McNair, who was one of the first three blacks selected by NASA when they selected the first space shuttle program members in 1978. Ron had grown up not very far from me, about 42 miles from me in Lake City, South Carolina, really tiny town. And according to Ron's family, he had always dreamed of being an astronaut, unlike me. I had known two things when I left my high school, C.A. Johnson High School in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally went to the Naval Academy, a place I'd wanted to go since I was 12 years old. I knew I was not gonna be a Marine because I thought they were crazy, and I knew I was not gonna fly airplanes because that was inherently dangerous. And I was gonna be an infantry officer and go to Vietnam and defy the law of averages for the life expectancy of a second lieutenant. My wife did not like that. My father cried like a baby, but I still went in the Marine Corps. And I later found I didn't like crawling around in the mud, so I had an aviation option out of the Naval Academy that I went back in and told my company officer, ok I changed my mind, I want to go to flight school. And things really started changing. I fell in love with flying when I first got in an airplane and took off. And eventually I decided I wanted to be a test pilot. And I was at work in Patuxent River, Maryland when Ron McNair and several of his astronaut classmates came flying in in their sleek looking NASA T -38s for a reunion. And I saw this black guy get out of the back of this T-38 and I ran out and introduced myself to him and we talked the whole weekend. And as he was getting ready to go back to Houston, he asked me if I was going to apply for the space program, I said, not on your life. And he looked at me real strange said, why not? I said, they'd never pick me. And he paused for a moment. He said, “you know, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard. How do you know if you don't ask?” And that embarrassed me more than anything because my mom and dad, who had been my teachers, had always told my brother and me we could do anything we wanted to do if we were willing to work really hard and study and most importantly never ever be afraid of failure. Don't ever let anybody tell us what we could not do. And I had placed this artificial limitation on myself and Ron made me feel about tiny. So when he got in his jet and flew back to Houston, I went home and I told my wife, "Hey, this is a crazy idea, but I'm going to apply for the space program” and I did. The Marine Corps nominated me to NASA. NASA called me to Houston to interview and I ended up being selected in the second group of space shuttle astronauts. So I'm not an engineer and I'm not a scientist. I went to the United States Naval Academy and I was trained to be a jack of all trades. I'm never the smartest person in the room or anything. That is my long journey to being a stargazer or a star sailor, if you will.

GURU MADHAVAN

Dava, you have designed novel spacesuits, famously the second skinned Biosuit. It was featured in the Venice Biennale, the V &A, the Met. Tell us how you got interested in improving space travel.

DAVA NEWMAN

I have to say, I do go back to my childhood and Apollo was really inspirational for me because it taught me to dream. It taught me to see humanity is focused on a mission, getting humanity to the moon. And I was very passionate about human spaceflight, looking at the systems and keeping the astronauts healthy and safe during exploration became a passion. And the spacesuit, if you think about it, it's incredible engineering marvel. It has all of the systems of the entire spacecraft and now you're shrinking it around a person. And we just thought design wise could we flip that paradigm? How could I keep astronauts healthy, well, safe? But I want to empower their capabilities, their locomotion, their mobility. I'm always focused on the moon and Mars becoming, you know, interplanetary. So that's where the biosuit comes in. We came up with a design paradigm that we could apply the pressure but very closely to the skin, and call that a second skin capability, applying the third of an atmosphere that someone needs to stay alive. It was a technology push in terms of the design, it's a technology push in terms of the materials, and just pushing us to say, is there a different paradigm rather than the gas pressurized, know, 160 kilo, 300 pound space suit that again, is an engineering marvel, but just thinking about what's the breakthrough technology that could really enable human astronaut performance, thinking about Mars. The science question is, are we going to find life, past evidence of life? So we need to enable our astronauts to be the super humans they are. So to me, it's more like designing for an Olympic athlete. That's the goal. We want to have them as capable, as safe as they can be, not constrained. So innovation let's talk about innovation, I just love it. Innovation at NASA, we broke it down into the framework and real briefly, continuous innovation. Just having everyone come every day every day with their great ideas, every day being innovative, that's continuous innovation. Everyone bringing their A game. And then for what I call revolutionary innovation. What's that new breakthrough technology? The bio suit fits right into that category. What's something for the future that we really think can be a game changer? Lots of engineers love that. That's kind of our sweet spot. Super important, what I call disruptive innovation. That's change your business model. That's change the organization. And guess what? We're trying to find life in the universe elsewhere. We're trying to find habitable planets. That takes transformative innovation. Transformative innovation is when you both change the business model and you change the technology, that revolutionary technology. So that's hard, but I think that transformative innovation is what we still want to aspire to and giving people agency, making sure that they know that their job is every day to innovate. I think that's where we start, just with that continuous innovation.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

Some of us, how do I put it? We were offended that my dear friend Dr. Newman had come in and told us that we didn't know how to innovate, that was what NASA thought it was. She came to NASA as my deputy administrator and her arrival was rocky, if I can put it that way, because she came in and she wanted to make NASA an innovating organization. But then we started talking about what innovation really is and how critical it is and how you integrate ideas from everybody in the group and you don't have a designated group of people that you count on to give all the good ideas because they historically have done that. Some of the people with the innovative ideas were excluded from the discussion. So to bring diversity and I hate these terms because they're firebrands that cause people to get all upset.

DAVA NEWMAN

And just giving people agency to every day think that yes, you are empowered every day, your job is to innovate. And NASA is such an innovative place. But it is true that Charlie said I came in because what we were trying to do is just raise that bar and really give people agency because everyone comes to NASA there and they want to bring their great ideas forward and the excitement and then that long -term vision, those long-term goals, finding life elsewhere, finding new exoplanets, finding habitable planets. That's what really we're all about. And then doing this internationally, being the role models and the leaders for international exploration, that's really important as well.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

Exactly and you know, we always talk about the value of systems engineering. I think what separates perhaps the U.S, but definitely what separates NASA from a lot of our commercial partners is the fact that we heavily rely on systems engineering from the very beginning. We want to know how the system is going to be integrated with everything around it. How do you integrate the people into it and you know the total system?

GURU MADHAVAN

How hard was it to enable early commercial work at NASA with cargo, crew, and low Earth orbit destinations?

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

From my perspective, it was incredibly difficult because of the dramatic difference between the way NASA used to be and the way that industry and the commercial sector used to be. I guess when I came in as the NASA administrator, I was naive, ill-informed about politics and the life in DC. And so for me, I thought I sucked as the NASA administrator. And the main reason was I just didn't understand the system in which I had been dropped, you know, the political system in DC. And I was faced with a bunch of people in the Obama administration that I referred to as commercial ideologues. They felt that just give the money to the commercial sector and everything's gonna happen like right now we're gonna be able to do all this things that that were the promise of commercial space. What we found was we took two years we we literally took two years of bringing people from the commercial sector and NASA together to talk about basic things like engineering standards, safety requirements, human rating standards and at the time that was pretty difficult because there was only one organization to be quite honest, not on the planet, but only one organization in America that knew anything about human spaceflight and human rating standards for a spacecraft, and that was NASA, because they were the only ones that had done it. So what we did in that two years was we allowed people to come in. Anybody who wanted to be involved with NASA in the commercial space program could sit at the table, and we ripped apart all the engineering standards. We ripped apart everything and all the stuff that applied to Apollo that we were still referring to that had no relevance whatsoever to modern day systems, we threw it out and SpaceX played a huge role. Orbital played a huge role. The entrepreneurial companies played a fantastic role in helping NASA to rebirth itself from an engineering and science perspective because we learned that we were not the guardians of the world on rules and regulations and standards that some stuff had passed us by or we had watched it go by and ignored it. And so I think, you know, in that period of time where we learned to listen to the private sector and the private sector learned to listen to us was invaluable. And we are where we are today because we went through that really, really rocky start. You know, we had near failures with SpaceX on their very first launch because they had refused to listen to us when we talked about the critical importance of software verification and validation and a thing called regression testing. Anytime you change software, you need to go back and make sure you didn't miss a one or a zero somewhere or push something off the line of code. We continue to see that happen. We had something happen, what was it, a week ago? With CrowdStrike when they shut down, almost shut down the world because they missed something in what was supposedly a minor change. You know, SpaceX had the same thing happen on our first flight, but we were able to regroup and to help them correct it. Boeing had the same thing happen on their first flight, and NASA has had the same thing happen every time we've flown something the first time. So we learned a lot from each other, and I think we are where we are today because we finally recognize, like, Dava was saying earlier, get rid of some of NASA's arrogance and hubris as we talk to people you know, NASA had to convince DoD that it was okay to rely on the private sector to get a launch vehicle. They felt that, I think they forgot that the private sector was always building the launch vehicles, but they were purchasing it and making great demands on how it looked, what color it was, what shape it was, everything else. And we went to them after working with SpaceX and Orbital and said, hey, these guys are pretty good. And we've got to watch them and we've got to help them, but they're really good at what they do, so get out of their way. And that took a while for us to convince DOD that you know not a bad idea to go with public-private partnerships.

DAVA NEWMAN

Yeah, I can add on and compliment Charlie's comments. So it's really, think, being much more open-minded. And there's huge gains. I think we've seen that in spades with our public-private partnerships, they are working, that was not easy. That was bringing a new organizational business model, but it's really paying off. The important thing is the literal definition of public-private partnership. So public, yes, the government is leading. The government is funding. The government has huge history in human space, like a lot of experience, right? We always want to go to wise people and learn the experience. But guess what? The commercial sector is coming in with faster. Hey, here's some more options, really state of the art. So a lot of listening has to happen. You need people around the table and nothing happens if you don't have the right people around the table and having that dialogue. What can the government do best? So much, so many lessons learned, having that vision, bringing the private folks and say, you're on task. Can you get it done? How efficiently can you get it done? What are some of those new technological breakthroughs? But then also asking for them to be open-minded, to have that win-win, you know, unbiased after put a shout out for academia. You know, we want state-of-the-art research. We want folks thinking, okay, what are the future possibilities? So if we're really at our best, and I think if we're all at the table with industry, government, and academia, we can pretty much do anything in the United States. That's the hope. So we just think that's the model. I think we're seeing the benefits of that.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

Nobody did it this way. I think our international partners, particularly those in Europe, where everything is subsidized, they were clueless as to what we were talking about. When we talked about public-private partnerships, because their government pays industry to do everything, and we didn't do it that way, and we were getting ready to become a partner with industry as opposed to just buying something from them all the time. But it took us a while to convince our international partners that this idea of a public-private partnership was not a bad thing to do. Now you look at China, European nations, you look around the world, even Russia is claiming to try to boost their private sector industries. And I think that is an area where the United States really became the role model. Dava used that word earlier. I think we became the role model for nations around the world.

GURU MADHAVAN

Let's talk about space tourism. It's in the news. What are you excited about and what are you nervous about?

DAVA NEWMAN

Well, I'm excited about access to space because that's really what we've done, the democratization of space. So this example is, you know, in elementary school, elementary school kids designed and developed the CubeSat. And then we, when Charlie and I were at NASA, we flew it for them. What message does that send to the world? Elementary kids now developing, designing, and flying something in space. And guess what they wanted to see? Their school. They want to put a camera on their eyes on Earth because they want to see how everyone on Earth is doing. So you go to space to see Earth. But that's just making sure that everyone feels like they can have access to space. That's fundamental. That is changing. And now that's a global phenomenon. I'm excited about access to space.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

I agree with everything that Dava said. It's key to really push STEM education at the very lowest level that we can in our schools. Because when I became President Obama's head of NASA, I took the same words he used with me about inspiring kids to do stuff. That's all I talked about was inspire, inspire, inspire. And I was in a meeting with some educators early on in my, in my term and a young man who was the national president of the student national society of black engineers raised his hand sheepishly. He said, sir, if I hear you say inspire one more time, I'm going to puke. And I was taken aback and I said, well, with all due respect, can you help me understand what it is about my using the word inspire? This is going to make you puke. He said, we can't inspire anybody until we inform them of what's possible and what's available. And I just think there's so many opportunities for us to inform young people, first of all, so that they can be inspired to want to go off and make a difference and try to make things better than they are right now. And when you talk about the part that worries me, it's exactly the fact that you know, spaceflight is something that's always going to be very risky. People talk about safety. Safety is a relative term. And so we can do the best we can do. You know we can always seek perfection, but that's just something that I think is, I wouldn't say it's impossible to attain, but very, very difficult. So we are going to continue to make mistakes. That's the thing that worries me the most.

GURU MADHAVAN

We should now talk about ethics and economics. Do we have a compelling rationale for space, especially when some basic human needs aren't being met on Earth?

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

Let me start because I'll go back to Apollo 11. It's documented that Reverend Hosea Williams and the Poor People's Campaign went to, they journeyed to the Kennedy Space Center with wagons and all kinds of stuff and mules and went down to meet with the NASA administrator to plead with him not to, you know, not to launch Apollo 11 because it was such a there was so many needs here on the planet to take care of people and to feed people. And the response, and I'll paraphrase it, he said, you know I wish I could not launch tomorrow, but that wouldn't solve the problems that you're addressing. We all need to try to find ways to feed people and to make people's lives much more comfortable and that's why we go to space, you know. Launching this mission and and what comes after it is going to enable us to do great things to make life better here on the planet and I go back to NASA's Vision and I'll screw it up, but but I'll paraphrase it It says we you know We reach for new heights to reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will make life better for people here on the planet Whether it's finding solutions to osteoporosis You know because astronauts begin to lose bone mass within days of getting into space. So we see adverse effects that come from the absence of gravity that enable us to answer questions about things that happen over a lifetime with people here on Earth. The research that's going on today in pharmaceuticals, because microgravity allows scientists to look at things like a protein crystal in a way that you can't see here on Earth because of the impact that gravity has on it and its basic shape, if you will. So space and space exploration allow us to make life better here on earth. Satellites today enable us to understand soil moisture content, enable us not to waste water the way we used to do when you just turned on the doggone spigot and sprayed whole fields randomly every single day. We now use satellites to look at soil moisture and we determined that some days you don't need to water at all because the, you know, it's got the right amount of moisture right now for grapes that we're growing, a lettuce that we're growing, tomatoes we're growing. NASA works with the U .S. Agency for International Development. My favorite program that NASA has is called SERVIR, where we look at ways to improve crop development, water resources management, disaster planning and relief. And that's a gift we give to people all over the world. And that's really important. And Dava and I both used to emphasize to people, okay, If what we're doing is not going to bring some intrinsic value, some benefit to people here on earth, we probably are spending our money incorrectly.

GURU MADHAVAN

Are we still in a space race? I mean, what I'm getting at is, given the state of global politics, could we use space as a moderating influence, say, to make us more cooperative?

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

I used to belong to an organization called the Alliance for Peacebuilding. It's headquartered here in DC. I was asked to speak at one of their big international conferences and I said, but you know, I don't really know anything about peace building. I'm a Marine. And they said, I'll think about it. And then I did, and I realized that that's exactly what we do, we try to, you know, we try to use America's soft power, The Department of Defense does. I always say that NASA is the greatest purveyor of soft power that this nation has and I don't mean to take anything from the State Department. That's their business, but they rely on us to help. Almost every program, every major program that we have is an international program, or it's a program in collaboration with the private sector here in the United States. And that's using diplomacy and quote unquote soft power to get things done that we can never get done if you go in and you just want to knock the doors down and stuff. Soft power keeps us, you know, from doing things that we really don't want to do.

GURU MADHAVAN

So we'll go to the final question, Dava, you go first. And I'm going to bring in the overview effect. Looking at Earth as a distant dot has actually transformed how we view our home. So how has that informed your work?

DAVA NEWMAN

Okay, the overview effect, looking down on Earth, you know, spaceship Earth, our pale blue planet, really gets people right in the soul, right in the soul. Really is transformative, I think, more philosophically, when people can see one planet, one humanity, that we're all united. So that perspective, that perspective, lucky astronauts get to see that and look down on Earth. But I think all of us can actually understand it through imagery, through looking down at all of our interconnections, seeing Earth holistically and all of Earth's systems from the oceans to the land to air, Earth's vital signs to say, you know what, we're all astronauts. We're in this together. We are on spaceship Earth and we're the astronauts and the team that has to work together.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

I always start with the Apollo 8 view of Earth, Earthrise as we called it. And I believe that was the informal beginning of the environmental movement because for the first time human beings through that imagery were able to see our planet in a way that we had never seen it before, and it was absolutely breathtaking. It also, unfortunately, caused us to begin to refer to Earth as fragile, and I disagree with that. I strongly disagree with that. Earth is like every other planet, It's not fragile. It's pretty doggone resilient. It's been around millions of years, and it causes us to miss the important point about sustainability and environmental responsibility and everything is because Earth presents a home, the only home we know right now where humans can survive. Only one that we know of in the universe. We suspect that there are other planets that may be able to sustain life, but that's all conjecture. I mean scientifically, we think that it's possible, but Earth, we know because we're here. We are the fragile component in the system that we call Earth. We're an integral part of the Earth system, and we're probably the most important part of it because we're the part of the system that allows Earth to remain a place that can sustain human life. We are about to screw that up. We have been working on it for several hundred years now and what we're going to do is we're going to take pieces out of that system like clean air, clean water. Those are very valuable components of the system and when we take those out, what we impact is the ability of life in the form of animals and plants and most importantly human beings to survive. You know I don’t quite get the overview effect in marvelling at Earth the way that some people do. What it does to me is that it gives us an ability to understand how critically important it is for us to preserve the planet the best way we can because it will allow us to continue to live and flourish here.

DAVA NEWMAN

Charlie just makes such an important point that Earth is going to be just fine. Earth is 4 .5 billion years old and just fine. We, so for humans, we have the choices. Are we going to live in balance with nature and biodiversity? And that's ancient wisdom to me. And people have known this again, over the millennia, we've become disconnected from nature and all living things. Who doesn't feel good when they're out in nature? I have very limited bandwidth with you right now, I'm sorry, but guess what? Being out in nature restores the soul. And that's what Earth is in all of its magnificence, nature and our oceans and all of our living systems. Now, humanity, we just, I think, have to be much more humble, take a step back and say, what's the right balance? We want to thrive. We want humanity to flourish, but at what cost? And so when we can see the interconnectedness from space back to spaceship Earth, that we are one, we are one, our systems are interconnected and that we're just part of that system. Humanity is part of the overall thriving, hopefully, living system. I think that's the perspective that we need to approach it with. And don't look at our differences, look at our similarities, look at what we can get done together. Let's see, we are genetically, we are the same. We are one when we talk about humanity. So let's have that, the unity, more of a unifying force. We know we're much better together.

MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES BOLDEN JR.

Guru, let me add something to what Dava just said from my military perspective. If we keep dorking with Earth, it'll spit us out. We're going to stop being able to breathe and live and earth will spit us out because we have a magnetosphere and because we have all the kinds of things that enable earth to be different than Mars and a lot of other planets that we know a lot about. It'll rebalance itself. It'll, I believe earth will recover once we're gone and it will be the way it was in the very beginning when, you know, if you're a religious person, when God created it or whatever else but it'll spit us out and we're fragile and we need to take it seriously.

GURU MADHAVAN

Charlie, as always, sir, thank you very, very much. Dava, this is fantastic. Thank you so much. The eagle has landed. Those are my questions. I think we nailed it. Our journey into space will continue to challenge us, inspire us, inform us, guide us, and perhaps redefine what it means to be responsible and reflective engineers and humans. Thanks for listening to Create the Future, a podcast from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and Peanut & Crumb. Look out for new episodes every two weeks and follow QEPrize on social channels, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. This show was produced by Tess Davidson and Jack Howson. And until next time, this is your host, Guru Madhavan.