A conversation with Bruce Yost, the director of the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (or S3VI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. For more information on the Cube Quest Challenge event, visit https://www.nasa.gov/ames/press-release/nasa-hosts-media-day-for-small-spacecraft-technology-and-announcement-of-cube-quest.

Transcript

Host (Matthew Buffington):Welcome to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 43. Our guest is Bruce Yost, the director of the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute here at NASA Ames. Basically, the institute brings together a mix of organizations working on small satellites, which are about the size of a loaf of bread. This includes NASA, other federal government agencies, tech companies, universities,and even start-ups. In fact on the day this podcast releases, the institute is hosting a Small Satellite Deep Space Symposium, where NASA experts share how the agency is using small spacecraft for deep space science and exploration missions. The symposium will announce the winners of the Centennial Challenges program’s Cube Quest Challenge. The winners will get prize money in addition to being selected for a rocket launch to the moon. So, here to talk about it all is Bruce Yost.

[Music]

Host:What brought you to NASA, Bruce, and kind of what brought you to Silicon Valley, specifically?

Bruce Yost: Well, I got involved with NASA as an intern out of college – well, yeah, college at [NASA] Dryden – which was [NASA] Dryden at the time, [now NASA’s] Armstrong [Flight Research Center].

Host:Okay. So it’s just outside of L.A., right?

Bruce Yost: It’s a bit outside of L.A.

Host:A healthy drive outside of L.A.

Bruce Yost: Yes. It’s in L.A. County, but that’s about it.

Host:Yes. Quite big.

Bruce Yost: But when I was there, [space] shuttle was just starting to fly. I was interning, and then there was a lot of folks from JSC [Johnson Space Center] and KSC [Kennedy Space Center] that would come into Dryden to recover the shuttle and the crew. As I was doing my internship there, they said, “Hey, are you interested in a job at KSC?” I was on the airplane before I had an answer, really. So I like that. Went back to KSC, did a lot of work at KSC.

Host:Off to Florida at Kennedy.

Bruce Yost: Yep. Went from Southern California to Florida and then did a stint at [NASA] Headquarters for about 5 years after that. Then after that we got married in Florida, actually, before we moved, and then we came here in ’95, I think it was. So it’s been a while. I’ve been at Ames most of my career.

Host:Were you always wanting to do NASA stuff growing up, or did it just… a fortuitous, like, stumbled into it?

Bruce Yost: I think I was probably a wayward college student one year, when I saw the first shuttle landing at Edwards [Air Force Base], and I said, “You know, I think that’s what I want to do.”

Host:That’s pretty cool.

Bruce Yost: That’s just flipped a bit from there, and that’s what I took off on.

Host:Excellent. When you went over to Kennedy, all the way to Florida…

Bruce Yost: Yep.

Host:… you’re leaving the California desert to the humid Florida Everglades. What were you working on?

Bruce Yost: The shuttle was flying quite a bit. It had a pretty high flight rate then. In almost every mission, I supported the crew and I also supported payload, so every mission there was plenty of stuff for me to do. I was very, very busy there, which was good. It’s what you want to do as you come out of school. You’re young. You can put in late all-nighters and stuff. It was good for a young person.

Host:Logistically, “support,” what does that mean?

Bruce Yost: Oh, sorry.

Host:Yeah. Go into that. Yeah.

Bruce Yost: Before and after the crew launched, there was a lot of medical tests at the time that NASA wanted to run on them to see how spaceflight affected them. The astronauts were flying the shuttle literally to the runway, and they wanted to make sure their vision was still accurate, their inner ears weren’t causing to feel like they’re flipping over when they’re not, things like that. So there was a lot of tests we ran on the crew.

Then on the other side was payload processing. We flew a lot of biology in those days for the same reason. We wanted to understand what was going on on the human physiology, so we used other things – plants sometimes, sometimes rodents – to try to understand that. There’s a lot of processing, preparation’s what I mean by “processing,” both before and after, to do all those science experiments.

Host:Yeah. So it’s not just going on up and doing a science experiment.

Bruce Yost: Oh.

Host:There’s a whole lot of prep work.

Bruce Yost: Tons of prep work.

Host:I’m sure paperwork as well.

Bruce Yost: Yeah. That too. Everything has to be safe on a shuttle, of course.

Host:Then that ended up launching you over to Headquarters and then eventually over here.

Bruce Yost: Yeah. There was a startup that was saying, “Hey, we’re going to go to Headquarters.” It was a startup.

Host:Like a company?

Bruce Yost: A company. They said, “We’re going to support the Headquarters folks, and we need some people from the centers that understand what goes on at the centers.” So they said, “Do you want to go?”

I said, “Sure.”

Host:This is part of a contract, I’m guessing.

Bruce Yost: It was a contract, and we were program analysts. There was a group of us from the centers, all of us relatively young, and we did five years there, until it was time to come to Ames.

Host:Cool. Were you still doing shuttle-related stuff when you came out to Ames?

Bruce Yost: Yes. Started doing shuttle-related stuff, moved into station [the International Space Station], because then it was starting to come online, and then after that, then I got involved with small sats. It wasn’t until we as a group kind of got a little bit antsy to get more of our hardware into space, and while you’re building the space station, you have to build a space station. You have to lift all of those pieces.

Host:Yes. Yes. [Laughs]

Bruce Yost: It was very hard to get a lot of our hardware into space for testing, so we decided to do small sats.

Host:For people who are listening that have no clue, what is a small sat?

Bruce Yost: I define a small sat as something that’s about, let me think in pounds, maybe 400 pounds and smaller in weight. Those are typically classified as spacecraft that can be launched almost as an afterthought on somebody else’s rocket. They call them sometimes secondary payloads, auxiliary payloads, but you’re not the main go. You’re just the extra add-on at the last minute type of thing.

Host:Okay. Somebody’s already paid millions of dollars…

Bruce Yost: Right.

Host:…for a rocket, and you’re like, “Hey, can I hitch a ride?”

Bruce Yost: “Well, can I hitch a ride? I won’t pay millions, but I’ll pay a little bit.”

Host:“I’ll help you out a little bit.”

Bruce Yost: “A little bit.” And they say, “Sure, fine.” That’s how I define a small sat, is something that can share rides with other spacecraft.

Host:Okay. Then that’s also different. We’d spoken with somebody earlier about CubeSats and some of these other smaller spacecraft, but you’re thinking a little bit bigger, not quite a cube.

Bruce Yost: Well, actually, I consider…

Host:It’s all of the above.

Bruce Yost: All of the above. The CubeSats are a class of secondary or small sats. They just happen to have a lot of work that’s been done on them to kind of standardize what shape they’re in, how much they can weigh, what you can and can’t do with them as far as safety goes, so you don’t add increased risk to the overall mission. They’re very, very successful, by the way.

The idea sprung out of a local university here, Stanford, and Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Then NASA Ames was the first NASA center to pick up on that concept and use it to fly, and we’ve been flying CubeSats over, what is it now? It’s been at least 10 years. Yeah. It was 2005 and 6 is when we did the first one.

Host:Okay. If you’re looking even at these larger ones, pushing up on 400 pounds…

Bruce Yost: Right.

Host:…what kind of science, what kind of stuff goes up there?

Bruce Yost: On the larger ones, it tends to be things that can carry rather large telescopes, and these telescopes can be aimed at the Earth for obvious reasons, to watch what’s going on in the Earth, or even aimed out to stars and planets and things like that.

The larger ones like to be larger because the larger the telescope is, the farther you can see, and the more crisp the image is that you get. As you get smaller with some of the CubeSats, they’re still useful. There’s a company in San Francisco making very good progress on imaging with very small CubeSats, but the laws of physics don’t allow that to be as high-resolution, is what I’m looking for.

What we did in the earlier days was we flew biological payloads, again, looking at the effects of spaceflight on biology, especially at the genetic level, which is now becoming very, very important to NASA as we talk about crewmen surviving long missions to Mars and that.

Host:Talking about some of these payloads, is this primarily payloads that will eventually go to the International Space Station to be experimented on, or this is something that’s orbiting the Earth in and of itself?

Bruce Yost: It’s the latter. It’s things that are self-sufficient, is the word I was looking for. They don’t necessarily have to ever go to station.

Host:Okay. Is it primarily just in orbit around Earth? Is that the idea? Or do you put in other things?

Bruce Yost: If I understand your question, there’s two reasons to go to space. One is to remove gravity from the equation.

For biological reasons, that’s very important. The other is, from a biological standpoint, to be exposed to the same environment that the crewmen would be exposed to. You can’t really replicate that very easily on the ground, and you certainly don’t want to expose a person to that on the ground. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. So you can create models that can do that research for you in space. We apply the data to then the human crewmen for exploration purposes.

Host:What are the main benefits of using these smaller spacecraft, as opposed to the typical way that NASA has been doing things?

Bruce Yost: The first thing that comes to people’s minds is the cost.

That was only enabled by the fact that some of the launch vehicles were able to offer up ride shares to allow people to share. You don’t have to pay for the whole launch type of thing. So the cost becomes very attractive, because you can do a lot of missions, and you can repeat if you find results you’re not expecting, or you can repeat it just to confirm that you found it.

Host:You can modify it, I’m guessing?

Bruce Yost: Or modify it, learn a little bit, test a little bit, learn a little bit more, and test a little bit more. Mainly, the rapid turnaround time, which is part of the cost, but the rapid turnaround time makes it very attractive, as opposed to waiting 10 years to get a single data point with a larger satellite.

Host:Yeah. I was going to say some of the larger space telescopes, just the conception takes a long time, building it takes a long time, testing it, launching it, and then you’re normally waiting years until it gets to its object, but you’re looking at a much faster turnaround.

Bruce Yost: Right. Now, not to say that the smaller satellites can do everything the larger ones can…

Host:Obviously. Obviously.

Bruce Yost:… especially in telescopes, but you certainly can do a lot of things quicker, like I said, to try different things out, learn a little bit, and then go again. Or if for some reason the small satellite doesn’t work properly, for whatever reason, since it wasn’t very expensive, you can try it again.

Host:Cool. What are some of the examples of things that you’ve had your hands in? What are some of the examples of things that you’ve been working on of the instrumentation and stuff?

Bruce Yost: The first thing we did was we flew a genetic experiment on GeneSat where we co-opted some technology that was being developed here in the Valley that was very small samples. You don’t need large samples anymore. It got very, very efficient and compact. We adapted those types of genetic assays to be able to be flown in space, and we used things like bacteria, or yeast is the model organism. I cut my teeth on those in those early missions. We did a series of those.

Matter of fact, I’m not involved with it right now, but the Ames Research Center guys here are working on a things called BioSentinel, which is a deep-space version of GeneSat, in a way, where they’re taking, I believe it’s yeast, and putting it into a small CubeSat, but that CubeSat’s going to be launched past the moon. We’re very excited about the data we’ll get from there.

I think someone said it will be the furthest anytime any known biology from Earth has been sent into space, even past the moon. The Apollo astronauts were at the moon, so we’ll be past that.

Host:Oh, excellent.

Bruce Yost: So they’re excited about that.

Host:As these smaller spacecraft have become a thing, can put really cool science up you have a cheaper or a faster turnaround.

Bruce Yost: Right.

Host:As that’s kind of grown, especially in this area, then I know that you started being involved with this virtual institute as a kind of way that NASA’s trying to understand and help collaborate with all of these different entities.

Bruce Yost: Yeah. That’s pretty close. The virtual institute is, well, it’s virtual, obviously. It’s based here, but we’re going to use modern-day internet tools and collaborative tools, video conferencing and things like that, to actually communicate with other parts of NASA and others outside of NASA.

The idea of the institute is to try to capture a lot of the knowledge and expertise, if you will, of what’s unique about small sats, and then to kind of publish that out to what I call the small satellite community, so that we can avoid repeating mistakes. We can accelerate technology faster and better, type of thing. We can continue to keep the cost down, but it’s an information, knowledge-sharing device to help out with these small missions as they go forward.

There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation of these missions able to do a lot more of the NASA science and exploration roles, but we need to collaborate better on that, so that we can do those. I’m real excited about being able to set that up.

Host:Yeah. It’s cool, because you figure, as small sats become accessible to more people, not only just universities and researchers, but even students or people who are working on the CubeSats…

Bruce Yost: Right.

Host:…it really kind of opens up this whole thing, and the worst thing that could happen is people live in their own little silos and their own little stovepipes of working on their stuff, when you have an entire community that can help people all learn together, I guess.

Bruce Yost: Exactly. That community is changing very rapidly, but we don’t want to repeat mistakes. We want to make connections between different research groups and industry partners or government partners and just make sure the awareness and the collaboration potential is what you would expect in kind of a Silicon Valley kind of a tech kind of discipline we talk about.

Host:I was going to say that probably makes sense of why it’s based in Silicon Valley, I mean, because everything’s small sats and kind of startups. It kind of meshes well.

Bruce Yost: Yeah. Silicon Valley’s one of the… there’s actually a number of hotbeds, I think, popping up right now…

Host:Absolutely.

Bruce Yost:…but Silicon Valley’s certainly one of the recognized small sat kind of entrepreneurial areas. Plus you’ve got other industries in tech here as well, so it kind of fit in.

Host:Excellent. Is it mainly universities and academics, or is it a lot of startups and companies and tech companies?

Bruce Yost: It’s all the companies that are working in small sats, large and small. There are some large ones. It’s any university which turns out, NASA’s on track, I think, to have at least one university in each of the 50 states working somehow in small sats. We’re getting close to that goal. It’s the NASA centers, of course, but it’s also the other government people, including the military, that have invested a lot of money and time into developing technology that relates to small sats. We want to leverage that and use it to our benefit.

Host:What is your day-to-day starting to look like? What are the things of just trying to get this up off the ground? Obviously, you’ve been working in this for years.

Bruce Yost: Part of it’s kind of an IT activity, where I need to get the virtual part established, including websites. There are some really powerful, cool collaboration tools that Ames already uses here at the center and some of the other institutes, so I’m going to borrow or leverage those. I’ve got to get kind of the infrastructure set up, so that we can actually collect and ingest knowledge and information, but the biggest, funniest part about it is the networking, is keeping up with what’s going on in all those areas and capturing that to share with other parts of the agency that aren’t really aware of all that stuff, initially.

Host:I know, two of the people we have on the schedule of coming in to chat are [our NASA] Astrobiology Institute and also SSERVI [Solar System Exploratin Research Virtual Inisitute], another virtual institute, so I would imagine you’re chatting with them and just kind of understand, because it’s the same concept of virtual institute. How do you collaborate online with these communities?

Bruce Yost: Exactly. All those groups have some very tried and proven tools that they’ve been using that we plan just to use those as well, but it’s a little different. It’s not like going to a conference where you sit down and you listen to a presentation. It’s a little faster. Hopefully, it will allow for more participation by different people than some people that can’t travel to a location. But then it does have its challenges, that you have to capture things. I call it putting the genie back in the bottle, but I’m looking forward to it. That’s just the infrastructure part. Getting the word out, I think, is the fun part. Talking about small sats and stuff every day comes natural, so that’s good.

Host:Everybody loves talking about their work.

Bruce Yost: Yeah.

Host:This is awesome.

Bruce Yost: True. Yeah.

Host:I would imagine it’s also more than just the logistics of virtually connecting with people. Does NASA also have some, I don’t know, is it like proposals or funding things that they make the community aware of?

Bruce Yost: Yeah. NASA does have, more and more, as it turns out, solicitations, they call them, that are either targeted at directly or allow for researchers or technologists to propose as a small sat mission or activity. One of the things the institute wants to do is to make sure a lot of people are aware of that, because the more people know about that, the better kind of ideas and responses that the agency will get back. Yes. That will be a part of the institute as it steps forward.

We hope that that adds a lot of value, again, getting the visibility up of these things. I get a lot of questions from folks that say, “Hey, we have this great idea, but we don’t know what to do with it. How do we get NASA to look at it?” Well, the institute wants to help with that.

Host:All right. Help make those connections.

Bruce Yost: Make those connections and make sure people know what’s going on and that sort of thing.

Host:Well, cool. Obviously, this entire field has changed so much even within the last, what, 5 to 10 years.

Bruce Yost: Oh, easily.

Host:What are you kind of excited for? What do you see in the next 5 to 10 years of where this stuff can go?

Bruce Yost: The thing that really excites me – but it’s also being talked about by a number of different centers and people in the community – is the potential roles that small sats can have that aren’t necessarily going to replace what NASA does, the bigger, larger missions. I don’t think you’re going to see a small sat at Pluto, although New Horizons was not that big, when you look at it, but I wouldn’t call that a small mission.

But we do have plans and a lot of excitement and interest to have these spacecraft go out to the moon and beyond, which BioSentinel is one example of. There’s a group at JPL talking about using small sats as part of a mission role at Mars to be a data relay for some of their other landers and things like that. There’s a lot of excitement in the deep-space part of small sats.

There’s also a lot of excitement in the area of using distributed pieces of things or distributed numbers of small sats to work together as a group that can do things that you really couldn’t just do with one single even big sat, so things where you want to measure something about the space environment, but over a large area at the same time.

Host:Because maybe you don’t want one specific data point.

Bruce Yost: Right.

Host:You want multiple data points over an area.

Bruce Yost: Exactly. You want distributed multiple data points over an area over a distributed period of time, so you can see things change and that sort of thing. There’s a lot of excitement on, we call it “swarms.”

Host:Nice.

Bruce Yost: There’s still some tricks to, “How do you do that?” If you have hundreds of these small sats working together, well, how does that happen? I mean, there’s no internet up there, so maybe you have to create some way for them to talk together. And then you don’t want to talk to all 100 of them. You’d be up all night. So maybe you want to talk to one of them and have that one talk to the rest of the 99. There’s some technologies in there that sound kind of, “Oh, that’s obvious,” but we really haven’t done to a large scale in space yet, that we’re very excited about doing.

Host:So talk a little about the Cube Quest challenge and how that fits in.

Bruce Yost: The Cube Quest challenge is an awards-based activity where, as a competitive team achieves a milestone, they actually win money from NASA. They have what they call tournaments right now, ground tournaments, and the ground, tournaments, there’s been four of them, and they’re leading up to ground tournament 4, here at Ames, in the research park, where the, quote/unquote, “winners” of the tournament will be announced, and they will be then given a free ride on this mission I was talking about that’s going out past the moon, planned for 2018 [now 2019]. So the winners don’t just get the award money from achieving their technical objectives. They get a chance to get a free launch, which also has award criteria at the moon. In other words, if you get to the moon and you can transmit back a certain amount of data, you win another prize. So there’s a lot of prizes lined up in this. We’re going to happily be supporting that with the Cube Quest team here at Ames in June.

Host:For anybody who’s listening to this who wants to learn more about some of the stuff that you’re working on, Bruce, or even wants to get involved, where’s the best place for them to go?

Bruce Yost: I guess the first place to go is just nasa.gov, and even sometimes nasa.gov/smallsats.

Host:Okay.

Bruce Yost: There’s a couple sites there that address that. Then when the institute site’s ready, it will then direct to that…

Host:Link on over.

Bruce Yost:… link on over to that. Then like I said, we’ll have a lot of information on the institute side about upcoming launch opportunities, upcoming funding opportunities from NASA, lessons learned, state of the art of all the different systems out there, and then a lot more information that the small sat community should find very valuable.

Host:Excellent. Also, for anybody who’s listening who has any specific questions for Bruce, we are on Twitter at @NASAAmes. We are using the #NASASiliconValley. Feel free to send something on over, and we’ll get it over to Bruce.

Bruce Yost: I agree.

Host:Excellent. Well, thanks for coming over.

Bruce Yost: Oh, my pleasure.

[End]