A conversation with John Marmie, Asteroid Redirect Mission Commercial Partnerships & Hosted Payload Lead. For more information, visit https://www.nasa.gov/arm.
Transcript
Matthew C. Buffington (Host):You are listening to episode 19 of the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. Today’s guest is John Marmie, the Asteroid Redirect Mission Commercial Partnerships & Hosted Payload Lead. He also serves as the Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator project manager. We discuss John’s previous work on the LCROSS mission, which is a great pick up from last week’s episode on the moon. We also go into his current work on the Asteroid Redirect Mission and how all of it is preparation for the journey to Mars. We talk about connecting his passions of engineering with playing the guitar and songwriting. And finally, we close everything out with a special musical treat. Here is John Marmie.
[Music]
Host: Tell us about yourself. Tell us how you joined NASA, what brought you to Silicon Valley.
John Marmie: So what really brought me to NASA, it really wasn’t on my radar as a kid or anything like that. I remember watching the old Apollo programs on black-and-white TV and stuff. But it just wasn’t something that a kid really kind of dreamed of in that area and stuff. I guess the mothership had really not called me yet or anything yet.
Host: Not quite yet.
John Marmie: No. So I ended up going to college at Ohio University. And I studied what was called electromagnetics, computational electromagnetics at the time. And that’s where college really taught me many things, such as independence, the socialness, diversity, discipline, engineering, et cetera. And I was really all about job security coming out of the Ohio Valley at the time, because jobs were kind of far and few between at the time, especially good jobs. And so job security was really important to me. So my major that I chose at the time was computer science initially. And as I got into it, I was like, you know what? I don’t really want to sit behind a desk my whole life. So I switched majors to electrical engineering. And now I find that ironic that I sit behind a computer my whole life now and everything.
Host: It all comes full-circle.
John Marmie: Yes, it does.
Host: It was your destiny.
John Marmie: Yeah. So with that bachelor’s of engineering in hand, I sent out 80 resumes, particularly to places that ended in beach, like Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach. And I ended up getting 80 rejection letters at the time. The job market at the time was horrible. And so I took those 80 rejection letters down to the local pub, and I even asked for a pity pitcher of beer for those. And they would not give it to me. That’s how tough things were back then.
Host: They’re like, “Suck it up.”
John Marmie: So you have to have a backup plan. So my backup plan at the time, first, was I applied to grad school. And the second was I took this clipping out of the paper. It was for a job in the North Atlantic to work on a oil rig. It said you make $70,000 a year tax-free.
Host: Oh, wow.
John Marmie: And I was like, you know, that’s not a bad alternative. So I took that clipping, put it in my back pocket, and I kept it around for a couple years. And so luckily grad school came through. You just can’t go wrong with education. And that’s for any young listener out there. You can’t go wrong with education —
Host: Nobody can take it away from you.
John Marmie: — as a backup plan. So I had finished my master’s in electrical engineering. And this time I felt a little bit more confident in myself, and I relied on some divine guidance. And I sent out 50 resumes this time to places that ended in beach. And a couple of those places were Lawrence Livermore and NASA Ames Research Center.
But as I was going through grad school, I specialized in computational electromagnetics. And what that really is, you use computer codes to simulate antenna patterns. Or you use computer codes to simulate how those antennas were working at certain airports, et cetera, because the FAA was sending us work. And that’s what we would work on. And we’d get our thesis out of it, et cetera.
Host: Oh, wow. So was that straight up? You just sent an application over to Ames, and then it just set you on your path?
John Marmie: I’d sent it out to all of these places. And interestingly enough, I went to the library to get Peterson’s Guide to Engineering and Scientific Jobs. And I looked in there, and it said NASA Ames was looking for computational electromagnetics. I was like “There’s a match.”
Host: All right. That’s awesome.
John Marmie: So I sent them a resume. I sent Lawrence Livermore a resume. NASA wouldn’t fly me out here for an interview.
Host: Oh, for an interview. Okay.
John Marmie: But Lawrence Livermore would.
Host: And Lawrence Livermore’s just on the other side of the Bay.
John Marmie: Lawrence Livermore’s just on there… They gave me —
Host: Right near Oakland.
John Marmie: — they gave me a couple days to look around the area, too.
Host: There you go.
John Marmie: So I took one of those days. I drove down here to NASA.
Host: I have work to do.
John Marmie: And it was during like a February timeframe. The hills were just plush green. I’d also interviewed in D.C., where it was concrete. So I’m from the country. And all this green, I saw all this plush green, and it just felt right. The gut feeling felt right. And it was at that point I knew that going to NASA Ames was the right choice.
So that is, in a nutshell, kind of how I ended up here. But I can also distinctly remember when I accepted the job, I was at my grad school office. And I accepted. I remember that chill that I felt when I said yes. And it’s like I remember it was sort of surreal. And then when I got out here, I was having real trouble finding a place to stay. I had just arrived in the area. I had nothing but my guitar with me, and that was about really it.
And I was having a hard time. And I get on the pay phone, at the time, with my parents. And I was having a hard time place to stay. I was like I just want to go home. But I stuck it out, and I’m very glad I stayed. So that’s how I ended up at NASA Ames Research Center, and that was 27 years ago.
Host: So I would imagine that, especially compared to now, we have a whole supercomputing, quantum computing infrastructure, all the stuff that NASA’s working on. I imagine when you first came over, it was just like the nascence of all of that.
John Marmie: Oh, it was.
Host: You were building it.
John Marmie: Yeah. And at that time, computational electromagnetics is very computationally intensive. And you need supercomputers. And at the time, I got to work on Cray supercomputers at the time. And state of the art were 4-gigabyte hard drives.
Host: Really? Nice.
John Marmie: You know, at the time. And I was like, wow, I get 4 gigabytes of hard drive.
Host: How could you ever need more than that? So when you get here, you’re hitting the ground. You’re missing the lack of cornfields from Ohio, I’m sure.
John Marmie: Hayfield. Hay and corn.
Host: And allergies. And winter. But I don’t know. For me, I don’t miss winter as much, as an Ohioan.
John Marmie: Yeah, that’s one thing I don’t miss.
Host: So what was some of the stuff when you first came on, what were some of the big projects that you’re working on? Because Ames is kind of interesting, where it’s a lot of the science. Or it’s not necessarily a big, massive mission or program, but it’s a piece of something.
John Marmie: Yeah.
Host: So what was some of the stuff that you were working on?
John Marmie: When I was first hired in, that’s where I did all that work on the Cray supercomputers. And we would analyze and attend radar testing of various technologies. And I distinctly remember during some of that, we’d go back to Langley, do some testing. But I’d also be out in the middle of the desert. And one time I remember I’m out there, and we were doing radar testing in the middle of the night. And the bay doors would open, something like out of Star Trek. It would be [alarm sound].
Host: Oh, yeah.
John Marmie: Open up, and it was like, oh, my God, the stars and everything. And we would do that because we knew the Soviet satellites would be flying over at certain times.
Host: Oh, really?
John Marmie: So there were windows in which we would do these testings, and we’d do it at night and everything. So I thought during that time and seeing things like that, I was like, “Now how freaking cool is this?”
Host: Yeah, absolutely.
John Marmie: But I moved over into the engineering org, which is called RE at this time there. And that’s where we started to develop instruments or instrumentation for the scientists. We started enabling their ideas for that. And I started working with this really fun group of young guys. And we were at the top of the building over there. And we kind of had run of the place. And we would practical-joke all the time. And we were the kings —
Host: You get engineers pulling practical jokes.
John Marmie: — we were nerd engineers pulling off practical jokes like you wouldn’t believe. For instance, I had this windshield washer spray pump and everything. And I hooked it up to my computer. And I would activate it. If you hit a key on the keyboard, it would actually spray. And I’d point that spray towards the person that was at the keyboard. So whoever sat at my keyboard and touched the key was going to get doused. And so you’d activate things like that. There were so many more practical jokes I won’t go into. I’ll protect the guilty at this point. But one of the great experiences I had, we were developing instruments.
Host: Yeah, what kind of instruments?
John Marmie: And so this instrument was called Argus at the time that I came over, A-R-G-U-S. And it was an instrument that would fly on a balloon platform. You’d put it on a gondola, fly it up to 100,000 feet, and you would test for tracer gasses in the atmosphere. Tracer gas would be an indicator of how much maybe ozone would be in the atmosphere. We tested various places around the world. But one of the coolest places I got to go to was Brazil, in the middle of Brazil.
Host: Really?
John Marmie: And we were there for six weeks testing that. And that was almost life-changing. It was like seeing that culture. I mean, the place —
Host: It’s not like Ohio.
John Marmie: — it was like donkey carts. Donkeys pulling carts in a place, but they had cellphones. I didn’t even have a cellphone at the time. Because they didn’t have that infrastructure to support them, so they needed cellphones. But that was sort of like a really eye-opening — just such a rewarding experience to be part of that for six weeks, and to do that.
We also tested in Ireland. We’d go test some instruments there as well. So as I started doing that, I began to take on more engineering management roles. We needed more of that in that org. So I began to take on more responsibilities. But it just so happened at that time the dot-com era was kicking in. And a lot of we —
Host: And a rough time for the Bay Area.
John Marmie: — a rough time for NASA actually —
Host: Wow.
John Marmie: — in the Bay Area, because a lot of people started going for the money, including myself. I went out, interviewed, I had an offer from Motorola in hand. And I weighed the decision really hard. And I went down to my branch chief, and I took it, and I tore it up in front of her. And I was like, “I just can’t do it.”
Host: Oh, wow.
John Marmie: And I’m so glad I stayed, again, on that. So as that went on, I also started working with this group on this Mars airplane concept.
Host: Really? Okay.
John Marmie: We were talking about flying like an RC plane on Mars type of thing, so not really —
Host: Okay. Interesting.
John Marmie: — autonomously controlled plane. And I would frequently call my parents at home and tell them all the cool things that I was working on. And I distinctly remember calling Mom and Dad that one day. And I said, “Mom, Dad, we’re working on this cool airplane now that we want to fly on Mars.” And so hung up. About a week later, my mom calls me back. And she goes, “John, I don’t want you to go.”
Host: You’re like, “Go where?”
John Marmie: She literally thought I was going to go fly this.
Host: You’re going to go fly on Mars.
John Marmie: We’ve got an airplane on Mars.
Host: All right.
John Marmie: That was Mom protecting me there. Got to love.
Host: Well, I appreciate your concern. I think we have that taken care of.
John Marmie: So that was right around the 2000s. And Ames was really suffering an identity crisis. We had to be the center of excellence for something right around that time. And so there was this dip in projects. We weren’t bringing in projects. We weren’t bringing in money and everything. And at that phase, we really began what was a — everybody was putting out proposals, trying to get new work and everything.
And it was during that time that I really got my big break essentially, so to say. We were working on proposals, and this particular one we were awarded a mission to confirm the presence of water ice on the moon.
Host: Oh, wow.
John Marmie: And that mission was named LCROSS, or the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. And I would say that project was probably the most rewarding project that I worked on. It really gave me a sense of purpose and an identity here at Ames. I remember talking to the project manager. I think you may have interviewed him already. Dan?
Host: Yeah. I was going to say. Right when you mentioned LCROSS, Dan Andrews.
John Marmie: Andrews, yeah.
Host: Yeah. He came in and was going through the difference between LADEE and LCROSS and throwing things at the moon and checking out the cloud afterwards.
John Marmie: Yeah. It was a great experience —
Host: Finding things in there.
John Marmie: — he and I went through. And I remember we were a bit uneasy after that selection. We were in NASA headquarters back at D.C., and we were walking. And I was like, “Dan, we can do this. I know we can do this, you and I together.” So I’d frequently go into this office. And some of the mornings were rough on the project, while I would get going. And I’d go, “Dan, we get to work on a mission to the moon today,” and always remind ourselves what we were really doing —
Host: Yeah, you’ve got to keep your eye on the prize.
John Marmie: — the bigger picture on that and everything.
Host: Big picture.
John Marmie: But three exhausting years later, LCROSS slammed into the moon at about twice the speed of a bullet —
Host: Wow.
John Marmie: — confirming the presence of water ice in permanently shadowed regions. But one really cool tidbit of information about that is we had some extra space in our avionics system there. And there was this aluminum plate, a couple of aluminum plates that we took, and we engraved the names of our families —
Host: Oh, really?
John Marmie: — and our team members. And we engraved the names of those. And that plate is now a mangled hunk of metal in a permanently shadowed crater of Cabeus crater on the moon right now.
Host: So the perks of the job.
John Marmie: Yeah.
Host: You can make sure your family knows your name is somewhere sitting on the moon.
John Marmie: And my two boys, I tell them that, they kind of glaze over, but I don’t think they really grasp the gravity of that yet. You know? But it is such a cool thing that they’ll have going forward.
Host: So after that project, what are you kind of working on now?
John Marmie: After LCROSS, five days after we impact, I had worked on another proposal called IRIS and found out we had won. I’m at Cape Canaveral waiting on the launch LCROSS, and I was finding out we had actually won the IRIS mission, which is the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. And that was a mission to actually study the sun. And it’s still on orbit today. I work with Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto. I went over and sat with them for three and a half years and delivered. But that thing is still orbiting Earth today. It’s in an extended-mission mode right now, collecting solar secrets, as we speak. And what’s really cool is that I have on my cellphone, I get texts from the spacecraft.
Host: Because it’s still sending data back.
John Marmie: It’s still sending data. And I have some texts on my phone right now, and it’s a good party conversation piece if you wanted.
Host: You get a text, you’re like, “Oh, IRIS keeps texting me already.”
John Marmie: So what do you want? Stop bothering me.
Host: You’re like, “You know, no big deal. Texts from the sun, as one does.”
John Marmie: Yeah. But after IRIS, I just needed a break. I needed a break from project schedules at that point. And so I was offered an opportunity to become deputy division chief for the programs and project management division, Code PX here. And so I took that on. Our job there was to enable successful program and project management. And it was just something that org was just formed newly, not much earlier than that. So we were trying to build up capabilities and tools for managing projects here.
Host: Which is interesting, because here at Ames, there’s a directorate that mainly looks at science, another one looks at technology, another for engineering. And so having one that mainly just looks at the projects, the missions, that has a little bit of all of those things together, kind of keeping focus on that.
John Marmie: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But also at the same time, I took on what was called the commercial partnerships lead for the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. So I was doing dual duty at the time. But ARM — I don’t know if you’ve heard about that — but it’s similar to the Apollo missions, which led to footsteps on the moon. But ARM is considered a stepping stone towards Mars. It’s the journey, part of the journey —
Host: Okay. Part of the journey to Mars.
John Marmie: — towards Mars. And what we’re going to do, it’s the first-ever robotic mission to actually visit a near-Earth asteroid. And we’re going to collect a multi-ton boulder from the surface. So this asteroid, in itself, it’s called 2008 EV5. It’s about 1.1 AU. And AU is earth to the distance to the sun. So that’s about how far away it is. It’s a 400-meter asteroid. And we’re going to collect a three- to four-meter boulder from its surface, which weighs about 20 tons. And we’re going to do that with a spacecraft. Think of it as, you know, the Claw from —
Host: The Claw from Toy Story?
John Marmie: — what was it? Toy Story?
Host: Yes, the Claw.
John Marmie: That comes down and acts like Claw, collects the boulder and picks it up from the surface. Then we’re going to bring that back and put it in a stable orbit around the moon.
Host: Okay.
John Marmie: All right. So the spacecraft has this boulder that’s going to go in stable orbit around the moon. Then in the mid 2020s, the Orion with a crew, they’re going to come up, chip away at it, collect samples and bring those samples back to Earth.
Host: And is the asteroid currently orbiting with us around the sun? Where is it?
John Marmie: Yeah, it’s more out near the asteroid-built area.
Host: Okay. So it’s basically like we’re going to go grab you —
John Marmie: It’s a little bit, yeah.
Host: — bring you back, put you around the moon and then later on other people will come and take some stuff from you.
John Marmie: Exactly. So what we’re really doing with that, once we return those samples and everything, it’s really part of NASA’s plan to advance the technologies and the space flight experience that we actually need to get to Mars.
Host: Totally.
John Marmie: For example, we’re testing out the huge solar electric propulsion systems. We’re testing out the human space flight suits and these EVAs that we’ll perform when we get there.
Host: Wow.
John Marmie: We’ll test out maybe the technologies we need for rendezvous operations and docking and things like that in deep space. So it really is a stepping stone towards Mars. And it’s just really got cool written all over it.
Host: And some people who are listening may be familiar with the OSIRIS-REx mission that had launched later in 2016. And then that’s going to go take a sample and bring it back.
John Marmie: Yeah.
Host: This is that one extra step. It’s like we’re going to go grab one and bring it home.
John Marmie: We’re going to bring a huge sample back.
Host: Oh, wow.
John Marmie: That sample will be around for many, many years. And what’s great about that, you have commercial companies out there also interested in asteroid mining. And this plays into the partnership part of it. So these companies are very interested in harvesting either volatiles that could be used for fuel for spacecraft. Or they’re interested in the precious metals from asteroids and stuff.
So this is a perfect test bed for them as well. They are very interested in this asteroid. They’re interested in partnering with us. And we just recently put out a solicitation for hosted payloads, where they could potentially —
Host: Oh, really?
John Marmie: — partner with us and be a payload as one part of the robotic mission.
Host: And how do go about selecting that asteroid? You have plenty to choose from. How do you go about —
John Marmie: There are committees out there that actually look at different asteroids.
Host: — wow.
John Marmie: What’s the candidates? What’s advantageous? And what they look at, mainly for our purposes and for commercial purposes, are — they call them carbonaceous asteroids that maybe have volatiles. You know, water, water ice embedded in them. Because if you really think about it, for us to go into deep space to get to that next level, we’re going to need fuel depots, right?
Host: Yeah, totally.
John Marmie: So, say, if an asteroid has water embedded in it or water ice? You bring it in. And there’s a concept out there where they bag it, heat it up, and that becomes the water vapor and everything.
Host: Yeah, I mean, there’s hydrogen and there’s oxygen.
John Marmie: Oxygen. And you have a fuel source right there.
Host: Wow.
John Marmie: And you have oxygen for breathing. So you have a fuel depot in space, you know, that type thing.
Host: Yeah, little gas stations on the way to Mars.
John Marmie: You know, it takes a while to get there, but we have to get there one step at a time. And ARM is that first step, really, for humans to get to deeper space right now.
Host: One thing you talked about, coming from Ohio out to California and then all your time at NASA, you had mentioned bringing your guitar along the way. So a lot of times people tend to think you have — here’s your science brain and then an artsy, music side. So you’ve got both of those worlds in there. So how much does music and that kind of play into your normal, traditional STEM kind of background?
John Marmie: So I’ve been very fortunate and I’ve been able to combine passions.
Host: Awesome.
John Marmie: My passion for music. I grew up in a family that was inherently musical. I was writing songs at about 18, 19 years old, started writing about then. And I’d always kept songwriting separate from my professional work. And I had kept it separate for almost nearly 18 years. But it was during the LCROSS mission, I was flying to Kennedy Space Center for a working group. And I was watching this in-flight movie, and I noted this quote from Walt Disney that said something like “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, doing new things because we’re curious, and curiosity leads us down new paths.” And so with that — and LCROSS’s goal was to go find water on the moon. And so I went home, and in four hours that weekend, I wrote a song called “Water on the Moon.”
Host: Oh, wow.
John Marmie: And that song, when we placed it on a soundtrack to an LCROSS video. I was like, “I think I found my niche.”
Host: You got something here.
John Marmie: I got something.
Host: Combine the interests together.
John Marmie: I was like, you know, people were actually listening. Wow, that’s different. And another cool thing about that was the exposure that NASA provides as well. So “Water on the Moon,” it actually played through the Kennedy Space Center speaker system —
Host: Oh, really?
John Marmie: — and everything during launch. And I think it was on NASA TV as well.
Host: Oh, how fun.
John Marmie: So I was very fortunate, very blessed to be able to have done something like that, and people accepted that. So that’s really how the passion between music and the start. And since then I’ve started writing more songs. Anything that inspires me in space, I write a song about it. And I now have a couple albums out.
Host: And you have a special treat for us for the listeners that we’re going to tag on at the end of this episode. You want to kind of tee that up a little bit, let people know what it is?
John Marmie: This one is a song I wrote for the Asteroid Redirect Mission.
Host: Okay.
John Marmie: That mission just has very cool written all over it. It’s inspiration. I start off, in the first verse, it’s about a kid looking up into space and dreaming about what’s out there and everything. And then as you build into the chorus, it just goes into here’s the big picture. You can move a mountain, or you can do anything you want, anything —
Host: Move an asteroid.
John Marmie: Everything’s possible. You can move an asteroid in space.
Host: Wow.
John Marmie: So anything’s possible. And it’s just if you think big enough.
Host: Excellent.
John Marmie: So that was the inspiration behind that one. And really the style behind the song? Like I said, we were talking earlier about listening to the radio and everything and getting inspired by other bands and groups. And when you’re a songwriter, you look for ideas from those. And there’s a group out there called The Script — I don’t know if you’ve heard them — but anyway they have songs like “Superhero,” stuff like that.
Host: Okay, okay.
John Marmie: I took that genre. I was like —
Host: I can do this.
John Marmie: “I could write something like that.”
Host: I got this.
John Marmie: And so ARM, if you really listen to it, was sort of similar to something they would put out. So that was the two influences —
Host: Oh, awesome.
John Marmie: — that put that song together right there.
Host: Well, cool. So for any of the listeners who have questions for John, we are using the #NASASiliconValley. Of course, we’re on Twitter @NASAAmes. And thank you so much for coming on over, John. And we’re going to play out a little treat for everybody.
John Marmie: No, thank you very much for having me here.
[Music]
[End]