A conversation with James Cockrell, Project Manager for Small Spacecrafts. For more information, visit www.nasa.gov/smallsats.
Transcript
Matthew C. Buffington (Host): This is NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 14. Today’s guest is James Cockrell, Project Manager for Small Spacecrafts at NASA Ames. We discuss his early days at NASA working on airborne infrared telescopes, such as SOFIA. We also discuss his current work on the Cube Quest Challenge program and how technology drives exploration. In fact recently in the news, NASA just announced the creation of the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI), which is designed to advance the field of small spacecraft systems throughout industry, academia and government agencies. A more detailed description of the institute is up on www.nasa.gov/ames, but we will also release an audio version on the podcast by the end of the week. Without any further delay, here is James Cockrell.
[Music]
Matthew C. Buffington (Host): Tell us about how you got to NASA. What brought you to Silicon Valley? How did you end up in this chair in California?
James Cockrell: Man, that goes back a ways. I’ve been here my whole career —
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: — which spans 30 — let’s see. I started here in ’82. So that’s 34 years now this October.
Host: Wow. Congratulations.
James Cockrell: Thank you. I wasn’t always a civil servant. I began as a contractor in ’82. I answered an ad in the newspaper. You remember newspapers.
Host: I do remember newspapers. They’re online now for the most part.
James Cockrell: Yeah. Yeah. This was, you know —
Host: Ink on your hands.
James Cockrell: — paper with ink. Right.
Host: I had a paper like delivery job. I was a paperboy at one point. So —
James Cockrell: I was a paper boy. So I was an electric engineer from Ohio State. I had —
Host: Go Buckeyes.
James Cockrell: — a bachelor’s of science in electrical engineering, looking for work. And my sister lived in Berkeley. So I was one of the few graduates from the School of Engineering that didn’t have a job upon graduation. ’82 was sort of a slump year for the Silicon Valley. So they weren’t really hiring fresh outs. And I came out here looking for a job. And I started to shotgun my resume around, cold calling to newspaper ads. And I saw an ad for — they were looking for an entry-level engineer to support an airborne telescope for infrared astronomy, which was intriguing because it combined the fact that I wanted to get a job in electrical engineering and it was for NASA — supporting a NASA telescope.
Host: Can’t beat it.
James Cockrell: And I was already interested in astronomy, you know, just as a layperson because of a lifelong interest in looking up at the stars. So I answered that ad and then went in and interviewed. It was the support service contractor for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. The KAO was the predecessor to SOFIA.
Host: I was going to say I just met with Pamela who talked about SOFIA.
James Cockrell: Sure. Yeah.
Host: I was like, infrared telescope on a big old plane.
James Cockrell: Yeah. So this was a 92-centimeter telescope in a C-141 troop transport plane that goes to 41,000 feet and does infrared astronomy. And they called me back. And they said they wanted me to work. So I think it was because I asked for the least amount of money of any of the other applicants. But I said, well, this will tide me over until I can get a job working for Apple or Intel or Motorola or something. And little did I know —
Host: But it gets into your blood, and you can’t leave.
James Cockrell: — here I am. Because it was really interesting. The work on the KAO was — I was a supporting engineer for the telescope. But I got to work — because of that, I got to work in the telescope stabilization system. So I was working on controls. I got to work on the power distribution for the telescope, video distribution, data acquisition systems, which —
Host: All of the stuff.
James Cockrell: — yeah — built a star tracker for the telescope. So it was always something new and interesting. There was never a dull moment. Plus, they did infrared astronomy. So I got to rub elbows with the PI’s that came from universities to do — look at things like the galactic center. They were looking at star formation regions where there is intergalactic dust —
Host: Completely different when you’re doing it in infrared as opposed to like normal telescopes or optical —
James Cockrell: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very different. And that’s why you get up above the water vapor in the atmosphere. Flying at 41,000 feet, you’re in the stratosphere. And you don’t have the absorption lines from the water vapor in the air. So you have to do it — Gerard Kuiper was the groundbreaker. He was for whom the observatory was named. He was the guy who proposed putting a telescope in an airplane. And it started out in the Learjet. They had a 12-inch telescope in the Learjet. That was the predecessor to the KAO. The KAO flew for 25 years. I worked on the KAO for 12 years till they decommissioned it to prepare to work on SOFIA. And I worked on SOFIA for a little bit and then moved on to a different contract, ended up working on a life sciences experiment for the space shuttle and then, just after that, was offered a job as a civil servant in 2000. So in 2000, I was working — this is a longer story than you have time for —
Host: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
James Cockrell: — but —
Host: No. It’s great.
James Cockrell: — worked for two years on issues with aging wiring on the space shuttle orbiters. They were big — the shuttle program by that time had been flying for over 15 years. And they were starting to see wear and tear on the wiring systems. So they were interested in building — or finding ways that they could test the wiring in a non-invasive way. And we worked on instruments for doing that, remote sensing of wiring defects. And did that for two years, then went back to SOFIA and did that for a few years and, from there, started working in small satellites. I got an offer to work on the EDSN project, which was Edison’s Demonstration of Small Satellite Networks. So that was my first job in these little tiny CubeSats.
Host: That’s quite a path from like Ohio looking at a newspaper.
James Cockrell: Never a dull moment. So that’s what’s so great about working here at Ames is that you don’t get pigeonholed into a niche where you’re just working on the same widget year after year. There’s always something new and different. And if you’re curious and interested, you can find something interesting to keep you occupied, you know. That’s how you do a career at 34 years at NASA is to keep moving around and finding new stuff.
Host: Wow. So you’d mentioned like the small satellites. So for somebody who has no clue what are SmallSats or CubeSats, what is the bare-bones like —
James Cockrell: Yeah.
Host: — what is that?
James Cockrell: So the CubeSat standard has been around for a few years. It was proposed by a couple of professors at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and Stanford. The idea was take a standard size, standard dimensions — in this case a CubeSat, a 1U-sized CubeSat is 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters — a cube. So that’s how it got the term CubeSat.
Host: So it’s not just a clever name.
James Cockrell: Right. Right. Right. And the idea is, by standardizing that size in a way of storing and deploying these satellites from a launch vehicle, you make them interchangeable. So if you’re developing a 1U-sized CubeSat, it’s got a standardized size and a standardized weight. And there happens to come a launch of opportunity because they’ve got surplus payload. And they’ve already got the dispenser attached to their launch vehicle. They can accommodate whatever satellite is available at the time. So it’s a great learning opportunity for students who may be from anywhere in the country building these standardized-sized satellites as a technology demonstrator. And once a CubeSat is available for launch, there may be a launch opportunity that can take advantage of flying that particular CubeSat. So —
Host: It’s not necessarily paying for the rocket to go up there. But it’s able to take advantage of these payloads that are already going up.
James Cockrell: Exactly. Because if you were to pay as a primary payload, you’re paying big bucks. You’re calling the shots. They’re building and delivering the rocket for your benefit on your timeline. But you’re paying for that luxury. As a CubeSat with a standardized payload that’s built in — easy to build — they’re interchangeable. You can take advantage of surplus mass, volume and capacity on a launch vehicle. You can take advantage of a ride of opportunity, not as a primary payload but as a secondary payload. So there are people who are building CubeSats all over the country. It’s becoming very popular. They’re not limited to a 1U size. You can stack them up, two 1U CubeSats makes what they call a 2U. 3U is a very common format where you’ve got three lined up in a row. To give you an example of — since the growth of popularity since the 1990’s, these were kind of — this was the first time people thought of CubeSats. Last year, there were over 100 CubeSats — that were successfully launched.
Host: How long do those stay in orbit?
James Cockrell: It really depends on where the launch service provider is dropping you off. So you’re kind of like a hitchhiker. You’re getting a ride of opportunity. If you happen to be on a Space Station resupply mission, you’re going to be deployed in more or less the Space Station orbit, the Space Station altitude. So you’re way outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’re going to last for a number of years.
Host: You’re really high up there.
James Cockrell: You’re really high up there. So there’s not that much drag to bring you down. If you are on a launch that happens to be of a lower altitude — and we’re talking like a couple hundred kilometers, let’s say — you’re going to come down much faster, maybe in a matter of months because there’s more atmospheric drag. But as a secondary payload, you don’t get a choice. You know, you may be —
Host: You take what you can get.
James Cockrell: You take what you can get. You’re on a ride of opportunity. So you don’t get to specify your altitude or even your timeline of when you’re going to be deployed.
Host: And these payloads literally get sent up — I mean, for some of them — get sent up to the Space Station. And then, the astronauts that are on that Space Station at a certain point in time when they’re ready will load it into a launching vehicle and shoot them out.
James Cockrell: Yeah. So now, the Space Station — They have these dispensers now on the station. And they’ll launch you out of the vacuum door on the Space Station.
Host: Nice.
James Cockrell: The astronauts will just put in a dispenser —
Host: Deploy the satellite.
James Cockrell: — put you out kind of like a Gatling gun. They’re spring-loaded dispensers that — they look like a jack-in-the-box. They have a spring in the bottom. You put the satellite in, stick it out the door. And then, they open the release mechanism. And the satellites pop out.
Host: Just boom.
James Cockrell: Yeah. So that’s how they deploy them, really easy to do, low overhead. So it’s a great opportunity for students or for small businesses that are inexpensively getting their satellite into orbit.
Host: And I think it’s easy to take for granted having a standardized size because you figure I’m going to build my satellite. I should be able to do what I want. But by having that standardized size, it basically makes all this possible because, if some of them were much bigger or smaller, then it’d just make everything way more complicated.
James Cockrell: Right. Right. And there’s an advantage to the launcher too. If, for example, your payload is not ready when you planned because you had a setback or just, for whatever reason, your schedule didn’t match up, there will be another payload provider that is ready to step into your place and take advantage of that launch opportunity.
Host: Everybody is all on the same page.
James Cockrell: Everybody is on the same page because of the standardized size.
Host: So you’re looking at that 10X10. So if I’m looking at it, I’m guessing possibly like the size of a loaf of bread. What does that look like? I’ve seen some with — it looks like almost solar panels on the sides.
James Cockrell: Yeah. Yeah. So 10x10x10 centimeters is about the size of like — you know compact discs come in a jewel case.
Host: Yeah. Exactly.
James Cockrell: They’re about that —
Host: CDs.
James Cockrell: 10X10 square — CD. So when you stack up about 15 of those, you would have a cube about 10X10X10. Or the size of one of those small Kleenex dispensers, not the big Kleenex dispenser but the little one —
Host: The fancy cube ones —
James Cockrell: Yeah. The fancy cube ones.
Host: — with lotion.
James Cockrell: That’s about 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. So putting three of those together, you’ve got like a large shoebox. So that’s about this size. What do they look like? Well, they can look like —
Host: Whatever they want.
James Cockrell: — other than the fact that you’re limited to that size, they look like whatever you’ve designed them to do. So you may have solar — you will likely have solar cells on the outside so that you can generate power. But you may have an antenna attached to the outside. You may have solar panels that spring open so that you can have a larger surface area for collecting solar energy. You may have new — there are some new designs of CubeSats that have large antennas that spring out and will unfold so that you have a larger antenna area. So you can — as long as you’re inside that standardized format, you do what you want as a satellite designer.
Host: And then, for like the innards of it, I’ve heard of people using basically small computers like a Raspberry Pi or a small maybe kind of program it to do or collect data —
James Cockrell: Yeah. It just so happened that there used to be a computer — well, still is — a PC/104 computer circuit board standard that happens to fit into that 10-centimeter size.
Host: How fortuitous.
James Cockrell: Yeah. But there’s nothing stopping you from putting anything else. You could put, like you said, a Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone Black or, in the case of PhoneSat, NASA Ames a couple of years ago launched three CubeSats that had smartphones inside of them. They had an android operating system smartphone with the cover removed but inside of a 1U CubeSat that served as the controller for the CubeSat.
Host: Wow. And you’re saying it’s like anybody from like NASA Ames — some teams here at NASA could be creating these and making these for a project but also just like high school students —
James Cockrell: Yeah. So —
Host: — or universities, small businesses, startups, anyone.
James Cockrell: It’s really great because there’s now an industry of companies that are selling parts for CubeSats. So you don’t have to build it from scratch. You can buy the frame. You can buy solar arrays. You can buy the microprocessors.
Host: Plug and play.
James Cockrell: It’s kind of plug and play.
Host: Yeah.
James Cockrell: You can buy the power supplies and the radios and everything else and put them together. Maybe you’re just writing the software. Or you want to do something unique maybe with just the radio. But you’re not interested in building your own microprocessor. So you can go to the catalog and buy these parts and put them together. That makes it really accessible for engineering students at the university level or even, like you said, high school students are launching their own CubeSats. And this isn’t just an American thing. But there are students all over the world who are building their own CubeSats, you know, for — can you imagine — when I was in university, the idea that I could —
Host: Put a satellite —
James Cockrell: — put together my own satellite and see it launched in the period of time of, let’s say, my senior year would be inconceivable. But now, it’s within reach of a university student.
Host: I remember kids putting together, you know, model rockets. And you’re all excited because like it takes off. You see it go, and a little parachute comes out.
James Cockrell: Yeah.
Host: But nowadays, kids get to build their own satellites —
James Cockrell: I know. Yeah.
Host: — as a school science project.
James Cockrell: Yeah.
Host: So what are some of the cool things that you’ve seen these things do? What are the different range of functionality, I guess, or —
James Cockrell: Yeah. So primarily, CubeSats, because they’re limited as to being secondary payloads and unable to afford their own launch — so they’re stuck in low-Earth orbit. So most of the CubeSats that you see are designed to be technology demonstrations. To date, primarily CubeSat developers have been focused on what can I do with the technology that expands the capability of a CubeSat? They’re really small. They’re very — it’s a very new form factor or standardized satellite. And trying to compress all the stuff that you would do in a large, conventional satellite into the small format is a technology trick. And that’s where most of the energy has been focused so far is doing the engineering to get all of that functionality into a small size, making the radio work well — making a camera work well, this kind of thing.
Host: Because it’s no fun to have a satellite up there if you can’t like somehow talk to it —
James Cockrell: Yeah. Yeah.
Host: — and figure what it’s seeing and doing.
James Cockrell: So CubeSat developers are sending pictures down to Earth and things like that. In fact, there’s a commercial company that is making CubeSats that just take pictures of the ground. And they’ve got a large number of CubeSats that are in the orbit right now. And they’re taking photographs of wherever they happen to be crossing over the ground and sending those photographs to the ground as a product to sell to customers. But that’s not where CubeSats are going to stay. Now, in say within the — recently, within the last year or two, CubeSat developers are starting to look at what can I do for science. What can I do with these CubeSats, that are useful to, say, produce data that’s never been seen before.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: So there are things you can do with a CubeSat that you can’t do with a single conventional satellite. An example is include — in low-Earth orbit, if you’re trying to measure the effects of the solar wind on the Earth’s atmosphere, you can do that with a conventional satellite. But you’re only getting one data point. You’re looking at one spot in the atmosphere. If you take three inexpensive CubeSats and deploy them and send them out one at a time and you measure the interact — they’re following each other. So now, if you’re measuring the same phenomenon, the interaction of the solar wind with the upper atmosphere, you’ve got three data points that are distributed in space, taking data simultaneously. So you can see phenomenon that are changing in time distributed over a larger area. You can do that with a set of inexpensive CubeSats that you can, you know, take — that you can’t do with a single conventional satellite.
Host: And not even stopping at three, you get to like 10. You have even more just — it just builds.
James Cockrell: Yeah. Yeah.
Host: So after they’ve been in orbit, they take their information, do they for the most part just burn up as they — get closer to the Earth? How does that work?
James Cockrell: So by law, satellite operators are required to show that they will — once they are no longer in operations, they must come down and burn up in the atmosphere within a limited period of time. It’s 25 years. This is an international treaty agreement to limit the amount of debris that’s in orbit. So that’s easily done. If you — your CubeSat is going to run out of battery, or eventually it’s going to wear out or — and then, it’ll naturally decay its orbit in the Earth’s atmosphere because of atmospheric drag. But you need to — before they will allow you to launch, you have to show by analysis that your satellite comes down in a limited period of time.
Host: Wow. Okay. So what do you see as kind of the next steps?
James Cockrell: To date, CubeSats have mostly been limited to low-Earth orbit. So we want to see CubeSats go where no CubeSat has gone before.
Host: [laughs] Nice.
James Cockrell: We think that CubeSats have a mission to play in deep space. CubeSats that are able to, for example, go to Mars —
Host: Wow. Okay.
James Cockrell: — CubeSats that can — we can drop — because these CubeSats are inexpensive, they’re small, lightweight and affordable, generally made of commercial, off-the-shelf parts, we can afford to launch and deploy a number of them for an affordable price.
Host: Yeah.
James Cockrell: For example, if you want to observe — let’s say you want to look at wind patterns and barometric pressure on Mars. With a single satellite, you can do that. With —
Host: Several.
James Cockrell: With an ensemble working together of multiple CubeSats, you can drop your satellites at different latitudes on the Martian surface. Now, you’re taking weather measurements of a weather system at multiple points at the same time. And you can do it affordably with these small CubeSats. But the limitations are that — that’s only one example —
Host: Yeah. Yeah.
James Cockrell: — of how you would use CubeSats for a deep space mission.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: Other examples would be you can go to a near-Earth object and take stereoscopic images with two CubeSats or put them in orbit and measure the mass and the distribution of mass of an asteroid or a near-Earth object. You can use them to do a number of things affordably in deep space that you can’t do with a conventional satellite.
Host: So for the Cube Quest Challenge, how do people get involved in that? Is that like a student thing? Or is this like companies? Or —
James Cockrell: The Cube Quest Challenge is open to any U.S. citizen or permanent resident or a U.S. based entity such as a university or a small business that wants to enter to compete in the Cube Quest Challenge. The Cube Quest Challenge has two tracks. There’s a series of ground tournaments that take place on the ground, leading up to the Exploration Mission-1. EM-1 is scheduled to launch in 2018. EM-1 will be the first lunar flyby of the Orion capsule deployed from the SLS.
Host: Yes.
James Cockrell: It’s an uncrewed, unmanned flyby of the moon. So it’ll be the first time that the Orion capsule goes to the moon and returns.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: And the Exploration program decided that they were going to allocate some space for CubeSats on the SLS during the EM-1 mission. So they allocated three of those dispenser slots — they have a total of 13 — to the Centennial Challenge program to come up with a competition that would make good use of these three CubeSat slots. So they said, here are three slots on the EM-1. We’re going to the moon in 2018. What can you do, useful stuff with these three CubeSat slots?
Host: Nice.
James Cockrell: So that’s the Cube Quest Challenge. We went away and determined what kind of achievements do we need CubeSat developers to demonstrate that will ultimately expand the capabilities of CubeSats for their application in deep space. NASA believes that, in the near future, CubeSats will allow NASA to do science and exploration missions more affordably because of their small mass, their small weight and short development cycles than we can do today. And they may even serve as precursor missions for man’s journey to Mars.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: However, CubeSats have these limitations that we talked about. To date, they’ve only been in use in low-Earth orbit. So that means, typically, they don’t have any propulsion. Typically, for navigation, the either use the Earth’s magnetic field, or they use GPS. But when you go to Mars, there’s no magnetic field.
Host: [laughs] The signal is really bad.
James Cockrell: There’s no GPS. So you’re going to get lost. You’re going to get lost. You need a map. You need some way of doing the navigation —
Host: Yeah. Some way to figure out where you are.
James Cockrell: — outside of the — beyond Earth without GPS. Other challenges to CubeSats today include thermal management. They’re really small. And because of their small size, they tend to accumulate heat. In low-Earth orbit, that’s a different environment than when you’re going into deep space. You’re going to need to manage your power and manage your ability to dissipate heat in a way that you don’t have to do in low-Earth orbit. Other challenges — and this is the big one.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: In low-Earth orbit, all of your ground receiving radios are not that far away from your CubeSat. So you can transmit using amateur radios. Or you can transmit to low power in receivers using a low-power transmitter and low-gain antennas. When you get to distance of the moon or Mars or beyond, you’re going to need to be able to communicate from those much greater distances, which is a big challenge.
Host: Okay.
James Cockrell: You’re going to need to have higher-powered transmitters, higher-gain antennas. And you’re going to have to have a bigger antenna on the ground to hear from your CubeSat. So those are the kinds of obstacles or, let’s say, design challenges that a CubeSat developer is going to have to overcome if NASA will — you be able to use CubeSats for deep-space missions like going to the moon or going to Mars.
Host: Wow. Okay. So we haven’t even scratched the surface. But if somebody who is listening wants to dig around and find out more about the CubeSats, more about the challenge or just about SmallSats in general, where is the best place to go to?
James Cockrell: They can go to the Cube Quest website, which is www.nasa.gov/cubequestchallenge/details.
Host: Okay. When it doubt, they can type in Cube Quest Challenge into your favorite search engine —
James Cockrell: Google Cube Quest Challenge. Yeah.
Host: — and figure that out. Awesome. And if anybody has questions for Jim, we are on Twitter @NASAAmes. We are using the #NASASiliconValley. This is fascinating. We need to have you back to talk more about this.
James Cockrell: Yeah. I’d be glad to come back.
Host: Excellent. Well, thanks for coming, Jim.
James Cockrell: Thank you.
[End]