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Losing the ‘acting’ on a high ranking title at NASA
"There's the NASA administrator with the very highest, and then the associate administrator for particular mission director at our next," said Clayton Turner.
A satisfying thing it is when that ‘acting’ moniker is removed from your title. My next guest has become simply the associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA. For what it all means, Clayton Turner joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with more.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin And you have then risen in a long career at NASA to basically the highest career civil servant level there is there.
Clayton Turner Yeah. So there’s the NASA administrator with the very highest, and then the associate administrator for particular mission director at our next. So yeah, it’s pretty lofty. I tell people that as an engineer back in the day I was the slide the piece under the door and product will come out guys. So I watch all this too and I’m very appreciative of the support.
Tom Temin And this is really a vast and kind of far flung operation going on with all of the centers and so forth. And my question is, when you log on in the morning, what do you look at to know that things are operating right?
Clayton Turner Yeah. So there’s a couple of things. So there is, of course, the incoming that comes in, but there is a connection with the activities. So you talked about the centers, NASA centers that are engaged in this work, but we also are tightly engaged with industry and academia. So getting the work, because the nature of what we do is developing technologies that will enable things for our future and address those missions that we’re doing. So that’s a wide swath. The magic sauce is that I have an amazing team right here that helps me keep in line with those things and set a plan or if I can use that term commander’s intent and that team is talented and they will go forth and do those things and we keep the things on the radar. Given that we’re working in that technology realm, we’re going to try a lot of things. And if everything we do works, then we’re probably trying the wrong things because we’re supposed to be breaking new ground, tackling those top holes where we can solve challenges for internal to NASA for industry. So we’re growing that economic impact for academia and we’re also creating that next set of engineers that are going to come in that next set of researchers, next set of accountants, next set of lawyers, next set of communication specialists. They’re going to come and help us do this amazing mission.
Tom Temin One of the challenges is ensuring that failures or experiments that don’t work out occur at the lowest level of integration possible. That is to say, by the time you light, say, a rocket, those are all ironed out, because yes, rockets do fail sometimes, but it gets more expensive and more visible and in some sense more politically difficult.
Clayton Turner You want to do your learning early on, because typically, if something’s not gone right, there’s an opportunity to learn something well. But as you’re maturing technologies where if you’re focused on just a specific technology, you can do a lot of maturing and learning from that. But at some point it goes into a larger system. So how do those parts play together and did I make the trades in the right places? And that goes into a larger system. So you’re maturing along the way, and as you describe, where lowering the risk that something didn’t go out, right. So we start with, Hey, this is a great idea. Do the physics hold together? And then if the physics hold together, can I engineer it? And if I can engineer it, does it give me that bang to now I can talk about how do I integrate it into a system? And there’s two things, am I integrating it into a completely new system or my integrating it into an existing system. And as you know, those are two different challenges.
Tom Temin Just as in software, integrating two physical things often changes the characteristics of them. And then there are effects that you couldn’t necessarily have anticipated. And let me ask you this. As a longtime engineer, the tools of engineering have changed dramatically. And we joke about slide rules and so forth, but really artificial intelligence and the degree to which material knowledge has advanced. How is engineering the same as when you started and how is it different, the engineering function?
Clayton Turner So I will say the same. And I’m smiling because I have lots of old guy stories to share, what is consistent is that you have to come with a curiosity and a hunger and a desire to learn. You have to be curious. You want to be a person that wants to solve challenges and problems. Then you pour into how you learn that material and how you get experience learning those materials. That’s the part that’s changing. You commented on the slide rule. I remember going to the Smithsonian a few years ago and they had a slide rule and a display case, and I was insulted because I used the slide rule. So things change. And today they don’t even let me go into a lab by myself. So clearly my time to be in the lab. But the folks coming in, the early career, the mid-career, the folks that have had different experiences in me, they’re coming in with amazing ideas. I can tell you a story of a person that had been with NASA maybe two years, and there was a project we were working on for Heatshield for landing on planetary bodies with atmospheres. But this individual said, could this material be used in other ways? So he was aware of the fire in Arizona where some firefighters of forest fires had lost their lives. So what they do is they had typically carried a little pack. And if the fire gets around them, they have to dig a bit of a hole and cover themselves up where they didn’t survive. Because he asked that question. He was curious. He was looking to learn. We were able to leverage that same material. So myself and my team sitting there. That never would have occurred to us because we were laser focused on this mission. As it turned out, we work with other government agencies and that material, they’re using that. And they did a test fire burn in southwest Canada. And up until that point, I had no idea how fast the fire can move in the forest. Well, they did, obviously with instruments and measurements. And this would provide more survivability. And the key being it’s still small enough for the firefighters to carry. So that’s the mindset. So when folks are in school now, when they’re in their jobs, they’re trying things in different ways. We need all of that. We need lots of ideas coming in. We’ve always done it that way, but this might be better. So we’re learning from each other.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with Clayton Turner. He’s the associate NASA administrator for Space Technology Mission Directorate. And I want to ask about Mars for a minute. That still seems to be an objective of successive administrations and of administrators of nature. Are we actually going to put a person in Mars realistically?
Clayton Turner Yes. So that’s the short answer. But let me show you what what that means. So as we mature our capabilities and we learn to live and work on the lunar surface. If we were on video, I’d show you a picture of my grandson because he is two. He and his generation are going to routinely do things on the lunar surface. As we learn to do things on a lunar surface, we’re projecting and put that human presence on Mars. I have what I call an aspirational poster, and I’ll describe it to the group really quickly. It shows a child standing in a doorway with an adult holding their hand, and they’re looking out and there’s a vehicle outside. The vehicle’s yellow and it has a red stop sign on it. But if you look at the vista, it’s the surface of Mars. So what that aspirational picture is projecting, we are going to be at a time when we are comfortable with our children going to school on Mars. And then you project that to what are the challenges we’ve solved right here on home planet, because we are that comfortable with that. So absolutely, we’re going to go to Mars and we’re going to go, as my predecessor used to say in my previous job. It’s warp drive into the solar system.
Tom Temin But it’s going to be a long time. It’s not going to be in five years or anything like that. It takes two years to get there. And we haven’t solved the human bone density problem of five years in space.
Clayton Turner Absolutely. So, yes, there is a time component because it’s not only getting to Mars, but you mentioned the two years to get there. The propulsion methods we used to get to Mars. That’s the thing. How people survive and live on Mars. Where do we live in orbit? Those are all going to be factors. And I’ll take you back to aeronautics. There was a time when only the government and the crazy daredevils messed with those flying machines, but it took time to get to where we are now. I remember standing in Washington, D.C., watching a projection of Apollo 50, the Saturn five on the Washington Monument, and I took way too many pictures. I turned around to walk back to my hotel and there were a few hundred to a few thousand people in the mall. 9:30 at night in July, watching a projection of an event that happened 50 years ago. That morning I had breakfast in Seattle, Washington. That evening I was eating dinner in Washington, D.C. So, yes, things take time, but we do progress and we do things that appear to be almost magic just some number of years ago.
Tom Temin And from the inside, I guess my last question, the rise of commercial space has been an enormous influence on NASA, which NASA readily acknowledges. But what is it inside NASA that you think has fundamentally changed as a result of the emergence of commercial space?
Clayton Turner So the commercial space provides us more opportunities to integrate and make advancement. So when we talk about commercial space. Our job as a federal laboratory is to advance our ability to do certain things. And as commercial space takes on those things, NASA can move on to the next thing. We can look forward to what it’s going to take to live and work on the lunar surface and industries right there with us. So like right now, industries ready to take on low earth orbit activities. So NASA can now lean forward and then industry can lean forward. And that timeline that you talk about shrinks for the users and the companies, because they’re going to have a nearer, in some cases a nearer timeline. So each time industry takes on something, it enables us, gives us bandwidth to go farther. It allows us to build those subject matter expertise, not only here within NASA, but across our partners in industry and academia, not because we’re funding or paying them, but because we’re doing hard things together and we’re all learning together.
Tom Temin Right, because NASA still wants to, I’m imagining, remain a attractive place for great minds that want to do great things. So in a sense, you’re competing with industry for those minds.
Clayton Turner Competing with industry, but the work is going to be so significant, we’re all going to need many of them. When I meet with some of my industry colleagues, if we’re at a conference or something and we talk and we share ideas, I actively recruit if they bring early career people in because we all need them. So it’s not as if they get them all or we get them all. We need to grow more, which means while we’re sharing our amazing mission here at NASA and industry sharing their mission, we need to be going out to those three and four-year-olds, which I did my first day of my previous job, and talk to them about the solar system and talk to them three-year-olds about gravity, aero thermodynamics and coding. And here a three-year-old, when I ask why did the ball fall that I dropped out of my hand? Tell me because it’s not a balloon and tell me why a balloon went up. So I want to hire her when she’s ready. So, yes, industry has a role, NASA has a role. But we’re going to make success. I’m the front of my business card. It says, reach for new heights to reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind. That’s what we’re doing together. We have different roles in doing that, but we’re going to do that together.
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