A conversation with Alex Mazhari, Manager of the NASA SpaceShop Rapid Prototyping Lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. For more info on the SpaceShop, visit www.NASA.gov/centers/ames/spaceshop
Transcript
Matthew C. Buffington (Host): This is NASA in Silicon Valley episode 10. Today’s guest is Alex Mazhari, Manager at the SpaceShop Rapid Prototyping Lab at NASA Ames. We discuss his ongoing passion for aeronautics; including a slight spoiler on a project we will discuss in future episodes called MADCAT. We talk about how the Space Shop is helping folks all over NASA innovate and try out new ideas and focusing on how technology drives exploration. Without any delay, here is Alex Mazhari.
Host: You’re originally form the east coast. How’d you end up in Silicon Valley, how’d you end up at NASA?
Alex Mazhari: You know, my family’s from the east coast, but I was actually born in Redwood City, and I’ve been a Silicon Valley native my whole life. Born in Redwood City, grew up in San Jose, went to Piedmont Hills High School.
Host: Okay, a local.
Alex Mazhari: Local as it gets. And my family wanted me to stay local so I could kind of mentor my brother through engineering as well. So, I went to San Jose State and majored in aerospace engineering, and then graduated in 2014. Continued for a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, finished in December. And I’m enrolled in a Ph.D. program at UCSC doing computer-engineering emphasizing in aeronautical control systems.
Host: Crazy. So, did your family end up moving out east at some point?
Alex Mazhari: My parents met in Colorado, and my family decided to go back out east and my dad found a job in Silicon Valley back in the early ’80s, because he’s an engineer himself. So, he moved out here, and we came here and then everyone else went there.
Host: So before, coming straight out of high school and stuff, you were all about aeroscience and aerospace?
Alex Mazhari: Oh, yeah, man. I knew I wanted to be an aerospace engineer when I was in third grade, and I was at the local library, and I picked up this book regarding how things fly — aircraft, helicopters. And I was the one kid that didn’t want to put the book back onto the shelf, and I knew at that point I wanted to figure that out. So, I knew what I wanted to do for quite a while, and when it came time to declare, it was where, not what.
Host: Okay, it was just a matter of figuring out where you wanted to go and do it. So, was NASA always a part of that, or just kind of always in your mind, or did it happenstance of what jobs were available?
Alex Mazhari: No, the interesting thing is a lot of people tend to forget that NASA’s pretty much the agency in charge of aeronautics as well, in terms of civilian research. And that’s the specific center.
Host: When you think aeronautics, you tend to think the FAA or something like that.
Alex Mazhari: Right, but a lot of the amazing things that have developed beneath the stratosphere have happened at NASA, and especially from NACA, people don’t understand that history, the connection.
Host: NACA is what it was, basically what Ames was before NASA was even a thing. So, it was the original.
Alex Mazhari: And being part of that was always a dream, right? It’s an aspiration, and whether that happens or not is sometimes out of your hands, but I tried to increase the probability of that the best I could by majoring in the right things, by staying interested in the field, making sure that I would devote as much time as I could to it. I remember my friends would go out and skateboard, and after the first or second time I’d fall that day, I’d go inside, turn up a flight simulator, and fly around.
Host: As one does.
Alex Mazhari: As one does, and fly around. And that’s what I did with my childhood. Yeah, I mean, through my undergraduate, I was really lucky that San Jose State, essentially every professor I had either worked at NASA, was a visiting researcher at NASA, or currently worked there.
Host: Somehow connected, directly or indirectly.
Alex Mazhari: Right, it was just kind of in the — that’s the way things worked out there. And my junior year, one of my professors for propulsion, Marcus Murbach, is a PI for Tech Ed out here. And he needed some help on — he just needed an aero intern, and what better pool than his students?
Host: Tech Ed, is that more of like the small satellites?
Alex Mazhari: Exactly, it’s a small satellite, and pretty much he does demonstrations for various technologies on the small sat platform, like exo breaks, sustainable de-orbiting, stuff like that. And as I noted, my interest was specifically in aeronautics, and I mean, astronautics is cool too. I’m for all the aero, but aeronautics was my passion. So, as part of that internship, we used the SpaceShop, and the SpaceShop if you’re not familiar…
Host: Yeah, tell us about the SpaceShop. How did that become a thing, because that’s your main job right now, right?
Alex Mazhari: It became my main job, yeah. What I started out as was just playing around in the SpaceShop as an intern on a different project, and this was the rapid prototyping facility that was open to us.
Host: Okay, and the SpaceShop is literally, this is a building with, what’s actually in it?
Alex Mazhari: We’re really lucky, because it had a little bit of everything, and in that sense it was definitely a maker space. There’s a little bit of subtractive/additive manufacturing, assembly materials, stuff to test it all with, oscilloscopes, function generators, multimeters.
Host:If you have an idea, you have a concept, a thing, you want to build something to test it out, this is where you do it.
Alex Mazhari: That’s the place to be, that’s the place to be. And considering we were all interns on a cube sat project, seemed like a really good match. But as I noted, I was kind of interested in aeronautics as opposed to astronautics, so I actually requested to transfer my internship into the SpaceShop. So, I spoke to the then-manager, and kind of begged and pleaded. She heard me out, gave me an interview, and eventually was like fine, you can start here. And Marcus Murbach’s a cool guy, and he understood, and he had plenty of applicants to fill in for me, so no hard feelings there. And we still play soccer together on the field.
But yeah, so I stayed there, and then as soon as I graduated with my undergraduate, they made me an engineer at the SpaceShop. Just kind of went through the ranks. And then, when the then-manager left, I filled the role. I guess I did a good enough job, and was able to convince people I could do it, so yeah, they made me the manager. And I continued on for grad school, because I loved it.
Host: You were going to school the whole time?
Alex Mazhari: The whole time, I was going to school.
Host: Slowly working up the ranks, taking over things.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah. Some people say they can’t do that, and I like to think as an engineer, you can pick one of these three things that people typically do — they sleep, get good grades, or have a social life. For me, it was getting good grades, and I didn’t sleep or have a social life, but I loved what I did at work, and that more than made up for it in terms of fulfillment.
Host: So, what is the SpaceShop? What is the purpose of it now, or what are you guys working on? Is it just a free, open space for people to come and use?
Alex Mazhari: Right, that’s kind of the purpose of the SpaceShop. The SpaceShop is very unique in the federal government in the sense that it’s a completely open facility. And when I mean open, anyone who is agency personnel can come and use it with the proper paperwork and the right authorizations.
Host: Yeah, your boss has got to be okay with it.
Alex Mazhari: Exactly. They have to understand what you’re doing with your time, and approve that that’s something you can do. And you’re able to come in and use all the equipment. And as I noted, it’s very diverse. You have laser cutters, a huge variety of 3D printers, everything to a band saw and drill press and power tools. And these are things you typically don’t have access to in your office.
Host: Yeah, some office and they’re like, okay, now you’ve got to go through procurement, a whole process to buy this setup, or a 3D printer, and some people may have it and some may not. But this is a cool place where if you don’t, you have a whole bunch of stuff altogether.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, absolutely. And the combination of these things, it’s been attempted a couple of times throughout the agency, but maybe with not as much trust in the individual employees, right? The little bit of supervision, you have to be there the whole time, you can’t leave anyone unattended — you have to do the work for them, for example, if they’re using a certain type of equipment.
And the way our paperwork is formatted is that you get trained to a point where you can handle this equipment by yourself, and NASA has approved you to.
Host: So, it’s not just a free-for-all. It’s like, you want to come use it, awesome, we’re not going to make you buy the stuff, here’s a place you can work. But, kind of train them up, learn how to use it.
Alex Mazhari: And there’s a lot of safety protocols. Legal was involved, safety was involved. They approved everything step by step. There are job hazard reports everyone must read before using the equipment, all this stuff. And we make sure they get to a certain standard so they are not posing a very large danger to themselves. And yeah, but they’re able to work on their prototypes, and I loved it, so I stayed around, helped it.
And I’ve refocused the facility within the last couple of years, which originally was just primarily for low-fidelity prototyping. People kind of…
Host: Low-fidelity, what do you mean?
Alex Mazhari: By low-fidelity, I mean just very basic types of printing were available, very low-grade, desktop-grade FDM printing. The facility started, and as you know, when you get funds, you have to distribute it, especially for that type of facility, so you have a little bit of everything. But the emphasis on a little bit bothered some of the directorates. The usage wasn’t what it could’ve been and should’ve been and it’s definitely not what it is now.
And the way we got to where we are now is by understanding what people needed. What a research center really needs, and what a research center tends to use most often, what people were requesting in terms of materials and in terms of additive processes — and turnaround times, more importantly, making sure you can go from A to B really quickly is kind of the whole purpose of an in-house facility, right?
Host: This is kind of unique when people think of NASA centers. The big ones that are launching rockets or training humans for spaceflight, NASA Ames in Silicon Valley, it’s a research center, and so you’re starting the ideas, the nuggets of the ideas that will be instrumentation on Curiosity or into the Space Station. This is the beginning of those ideas.
Alex Mazhari: From what it seems, Ames tends to do very well in terms of progressing the technology readiness level of stuff. That’s one of the core objectives of the research centers, is to take something that’s a nine or eight, and bring it down to something that might be usable, like a six or a seven, something you can take a chance on, and something your management would be more comfortable with you testing. And what better place to do that than a prototyping facility, where if you have a crazy idea, you can take a piece of cardboard and laser cut it to the right dimensions. If you don’t know how to CAD, we teach you how to CAD, and within a couple days you’ve got something.
And you show the right people, convince the right people, throw in the right proposals, all the innovation funds that are out there, and before you know it, you get funded and it becomes a project.
Host: Are there any projects that have come out of the SpaceShop of late, or is it still all in the nascence and the early stages?
Alex Mazhari: You know, we help many hundreds of projects every year, and the level of thoroughness in which we help these projects varies greatly. I don’t want to take the SpaceShop and claim the SpaceShop is taking credit for any of these projects, but one thing that I found very cool was the early prototyping of the next generation of the International Space Station glovebox. The glovebox is that portal in which the astronauts isolate themselves from their projects, but they’re able to interact with them and conduct whatever experiments they need without posing a threat to all the guys on-station. So, the next generation of this ISS glovebox.
Host: The glovebox is literally, there’s gloves in a box. You put your hands inside gloves.
Alex Mazhari: It’s literally a glovebox.
Host: It’s like you think of a glove compartment in your car — no, literally, you put your hands in these gloves and do your science so that nobody else — of all the creative names, it’s literally the glovebox.
Alex Mazhari: Absolutely. And I like to tell this story, because it really shows what rapid prototyping is all about, and the power of having these types of facilities, and doing your homework early on in the design process, so you kind of identify design flaws early on. This ISS glovebox, it had been mocked up in CAD beautifully, and a lot of people are convinced they don’t need physical prototypes because the software is advancing so much that all these testing and suites are…
Host: CAD is the software that’s used to do it?
Alex Mazhari: A computer-aided design. The softwares vary, but for the most part people pick their poison and go about their ways in designing their objects. And Ames and Johnson had come up with this design for this glovebox, and it was beautiful. It was spherical, it seemed extremely ergonomic, multiple astronauts could work in this simultaneously, in this environment. You had a better point of view, it wasn’t just this rectangle.
And pretty much the chief engineers from all the different centers had come to Ames for this big meeting, and someone was like, why don’t we have a physical prototype of this thing before we take it further? We’ve done all this work with software, we’ve never actually interacted with this thing. What if it doesn’t make sense? So, they come to us at 4:00 PM the day before this meeting — I’m not even kidding — 4:00 PM, they come to us, and they’re like, we know this is a lot, but would it be possible if you guys, just make a couple ISS prototypes for this glovebox? And we’re like, what were you looking at? And they’re like, five foot by like four foot, something like that in terms of volume. The fidelity doesn’t need to be crazy. You can make this thing out of cardboard for all we care — just make sure the geometry is right, because that’s what’s important.
And we said, okay, give us the dimensions. So, they told us the diameter of these portholes for the gloves and the astronauts would be sticking their hands through. One of them was spherical in the sense that you had a radius, and the other one was rectangular, more of an evolution of the traditional design.
And we stay at the SpaceShop until maybe 4:00 in the morning, working on this prototype, and we get this rectangular one, which would be an evolution. And the spherical one they spent so much time to, which would be the revolution in glovebox ergonomics. And it took no more than five minutes for them to realize that the spherical thing they had been working on was not going to work at all, at all. And all it took was a couple of these chief engineers to put their hands through the glovebox themselves, have someone come in from the other side, so it’s like two of these guys simultaneously, and they’re like, our arms hit each other. It’s too cramped. We can’t have two astronauts working on this simultaneously, that’s not sustainable.
And before you knew it, complete design change. And it took some cardboard, and a couple hours.
Host: Some cardboard and some construction to then pull it together. That’s crazy.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah. So, it’s important to note that although software is…
Host: Software can take you to a certain point. It doesn’t replace actually holding something in your hands.
Alex Mazhari: And I guess that might be just the way we’re wired as human beings, to really feel for whether something is right or wrong.
Host: I imagine the 3D printers and stuff have kind of been a game-changer for you guys, or is it just like a supplement on top of what you already were working with?
Alex Mazhari: You know, it depends on who you ask. Some people see 3D printing as the one key solution for everything. And it’s important to note that as you noted, it’s a tool, and using the tool wisely is very powerful, but you shouldn’t misuse additive manufacturing as the solution for everything. It’s not.
Host: The solution, anything you can think of, print it.
Alex Mazhari: When you look at operational costs, sometimes it doesn’t make sense. It’s actually very energy-inefficient, it turns out. It makes a lot more sense that if you are printing 1,000 of something, to take a look at how much energy is that actually going to use? What if we were to mill these, what if we were to make a mold and then injection?
Host: For some things it makes sense, but for others it’s just, there’s probably more efficient ways to do it?
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, and I think the reason it’s taken on so much is because it’s bridged that gap between those who design and those who actually manufacture. And it’s not supposed to replace anyone or anything, per se, but it’s supposed to aid the design early on enough, at a low enough fidelity to where you know whether something’s going to work or not for the same reason that glovebox worked or didn’t work. You get an idea and you’re like, this isn’t going to work. And it’s not supposed to be for final flight fabrication or anything like that. You could help, it can aid you, but the conventional definition of 3D printing should be for rapid prototyping and just rapid prototyping.
That doesn’t mean you can’t assemble things into workable structures, but maybe not our current definition of fused deposition modeling.
Host: Seems like it’s got a lot of, it’s still got some progress to be made.
Alex Mazhari: Absolutely. There are other types of 3D printing as well — stereolithography, selective laser centering. People are doing a lot of research, and there’s a lot of research going on in the agency for how we could best use that, but as for open maker spaces and stuff like that, you really shouldn’t be 3D printing metal, and if you are, are you really prototyping?
Host: Then you’re making a thing. It’s not really just a prototype you quickly throw together.
Alex Mazhari: Absolutely.
Host: Cool. So, as a bit of an aeronautics buff, you’re in a center that’s got these huge wind tunnels and all this other stuff. That’s got to be, it’s like a playground just waiting for you.
Alex Mazhari: From my desk, we have these very large semi-opaque windows, and the view I see is the world’s largest wind tunnel. And sometimes, you didn’t get enough sleep at night, and you go into work that morning, and all it takes is to look through that window and be like man, I’m at the right place. I’m home. The projects that come through are amazing, and the people and the work is what keeps you here.
Host: Is there anything particularly that stands out? Maybe not something you’re particularly working on, but maybe something out of aeronautics or Kepler? What are the things that spark your interest?
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, there’s a couple people out here — one Kenneth Chung, who’s out of the center chief technologist’s office, and Sean Swei, who’s in intelligence systems. These guys are PI and co-PI of a project called MadCat. And pretty much, that project is for incorporating digital materials — in other ways, materials that have information embedded into them — through a morphing structure. In MadCat’s case, it’s an aero structure.
This is what I focused on my master’s thesis, was this morphing wing, this aircraft that would not deploy an actuator, an aileron to turn. It would morph the whole wing to turn, and what does that? A bird does that.
Host: Exactly. You think of an airplane wing is stiff, straight, but you’re talking about actually literally bending a wing.
Alex Mazhari: Absolutely. And that is in my opinion the revolution in aeronautics. It’s not tailoring a wing tip so it’s .1 percent more efficient over a certain range. It’s instead of deploying a part of the wing up and down, or deploying this up and down on the tail, you morph the whole aircraft. And that’s the way biology has figured out is the right way to go over millions of years, and that’s the way we need to go if we really want to increase lift-to-drag ratios and fuel efficiencies and stuff like that.
Host: It’s a fun thing to do in your spare time, go check out what other people are researching and working on.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, no, it’s amazing, and the project’s doing really well. I liked it so much, like I said, that I started a Ph.D. in it. So, I’m doing that on the side, and focusing on the SpaceShop.
Host: Cool. So, if anybody wanted to get more information on the SpaceShop or some of the stuff you’re working on, probably just go to NASA.gov?
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, well, we have a website, www.NASA.gov/centers/ames/spaceshop. And on there, we have all of our documentation. We partner up with a lot of people out in the public sector, and offer all of the lab manuals that NASA has approved in terms of safety. So if someone, if a school wants to figure out what are maybe some good protocols to follow, this stuff is pretty…
Host: And they could come and check it out.
Alex Mazhari: Absolutely, they could download the manuals. If they have them at their universities, they could use these things as references. We have a Kinect scanner in the shop. Everybody has an Xbox Kinect at home, or they know someone who does, and just download the right software and the right drivers, train yourself with the manual, and now you’ve got a really cool scanner.
Host: That’s awesome. Cool, well, I’m sure — then for folks with questions for Alex or anything about the SpaceShop, we’re @NASAAMES on Twitter, and we’re using #NASASiliconValley. Thanks a lot for coming over, man.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, thank you, thanks for having me.
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