A conversation with Steve Ord, Technology Manager within the Flight Opportunities Program at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

Transcript

Matthew C. Buffington (Host):You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 36. Today we are talking to Steve Ord, the Technology Manager within the Flight Opportunities Program at NASA Ames. Basically, Steve manages the payload selections for the program in a variety of space related environments, this includes working with commercial partners on reusable launch vehicles, high-altitude balloons, parabolic aircraft flights, amongst many others. We talk about his early days working in one of NASA’s largest video games, the vertical motion simulator, and working on the LCROSS mission to the moon. And of course, talk about some of the cool things he has seen while working here at NASA. So, here is Steve Ord.

[Music]

Host: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get to NASA, how did you get to Silicon Valley, what are you working?

Steve Ord: Well, I started at NASA Ames many years ago as a student. I was going to San Jose State University at the time, and found an opportunity to work in the Flight Simulations Division. And I had always wanted to be a pilot in growing-up years, and it turned out that, you know, it wasn’t going to work out for me to be a pilot, with bad vision and that.

Host:That’ll do it.

Steve Ord:So, what I ended up doing was finding something else in engineering, and I always liked space too, and aeronautics.

Host:Were you always local, and that’s why you ended up at San Jose?

Steve Ord:No, that’s kind of a long story. We got stationed overseas when I was in high school.

Host:Okay, Army brat?

Steve Ord:Air Force brat. I grew up in Fairfield up north, though, that’s my hometown. We spent 10 years there. Then we got stationed overseas when I was in high school. So, I basically chose a college from a book without visiting. No visiting, just hey, this one looks good, and they’ve got aeronautics. So, that’s how I ended up at San Jose State.

Host:Well, you picked a place with good weather, nice people, nice ambience in the Bay Area. Can’t complain.

Steve Ord:Yep, also found my wife there at San Jose State, so that was a really good bonus there too, yeah.

Host:Did you start off doing engineering? Did you always – I mean, growing up in the military, being around government people, was it like, I’m going to fly planes, I’m going to be an engineer?

Steve Ord:Absolutely. When you’re around planes your whole life, and you just – you not only see them, you can smell them. I mean, just that whole, the flight line atmosphere is just so exciting, always has been exciting to me. And so, I was picturing myself as being a transport pilot maybe for the military, then maybe flying 747s someday.

Host:This has been fun for me here, because I grew up near Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. And then, moving out here, the sound of planes flying over, or even the wind tunnel – whereas some newcomers to Silicon Valley have been like, why the noise? How is this – I grew up around it. It just becomes background, you don’t even notice.

Steve Ord:Yeah, and it’s hard to miss the huge Hanger One that we have here at Moffett Field. So, very inspiring. I always wanted to work out here at NASA, knowing that it was here at Moffett Field. And so, I got a start to work as a student in the simulations branch.

Host:Cool. As an intern, I’m guessing?

Steve Ord:Yeah, I was a co-op student, actually, which is a great career path. It’s hard to see when you’re young, it’s hard to see how that could end up as a nice retirement plan and everything else. Nevertheless, I took the advice, some sage advice from some of the folks there and got into the civil service part of that. And so, at first I was just a student through a regular program, but then got into the co-op program.

Host:And so, what were you working on? What were you getting…

Steve Ord:With flight simulation – it was a great place to work. Astronauts would come in, and a very humbling experience, working on something in a simulator that’s like the world’s largest video game. It goes up and down tens of feet, and moves around in all six degrees of freedom.

Host:This was the vertical motion?

Steve Ord:Vertical Motion Simulator, yeah. And I still, in fact, one of my coworkers there is now my boss after all these years, and she’s great. But the, yeah, working on that systems, maintaining the mechanical systems, was one of my jobs. Of course, under the supervision of the other engineers in the facility. But, it was just awesome. I remember kneeling down – we were working on this boarding ramp that used to access the actual simulator, and it would slide out and people would walk on it to get into the simulator. And I remember John Young, a moonwalker, walking down the ramp next to me. And I couldn’t even breathe. It was amazing. It was just amazing.

Host:So, for folks who don’t fully understand, describe the Vertical Motion Simulator. I’ve seen it in person, I haven’t actually been in it.

Steve Ord:It’s a large building with this big beam that goes the span of the building inside. And on top of the beam is a unit that rotates around, and it has a cockpit inside, a simulated cockpit. In many cases, they flew space shuttle landing simulations there. So, you’d have the space shuttle cockpit with all the instruments that are used for landing. There was a lot of blank areas where they’re used for flight, not landing. And of course, we save taxpayer money, we don’t buy the stuff we don’t need. And so they, the pilot and the commander would go in and do simulations. I actually got to fly one time with one of the astronauts. And it’s just awesome.

So, it moves up and down, it represents flight, and when you hit the ground, you feel it. When you veer to the side, if you have a landing gear failure, which they simulate, you’ll feel it veering to the side. It is the ultimate video game, hands-down.

Host:And the cabs can get replaced. Here’s a shuttle one, here’s an airliner one, they even have a moon lander one.

Steve Ord:They have, yeah. At the time I was there, they had mostly rotorcraft simulations, and they would do fixed-base without the motion between two – maybe two helicopters would do a scenario for the Army. But also, the space shuttle, they had a fighter cockpit, and various ones. So, a really cool place to start out working at NASA. Very professional organization with a very can-do experience. All of those cabs are not bought off the shelf, those are all homemade by NASA. The mechanics and electricians and folks working for NASA building those were awesome, just awesome.

Host:And so, what are you working on now, or what was that path you’re working on?

Steve Ord:So, fast-forward 29 years?

Host:Yes, sum up 29 years in about five minutes here.

Steve Ord:Yeah, so from there I went to work for wind tunnels, and worked in the wind tunnels. I was a facility engineer responsible for mechanical modifications and that to the facility. Became a facility engineer for an 11-foot wind tunnel. And those are, a wind tunnel basically, most people can kind of imagine – you blow wind past an aerodynamic shape, and then you can test the forces on it and the pressures and see what’s happening. I worked there for a long time, several years, and got a little bit into branch management there.

And then, decided I had an opportunity to go work on the space side of NASA. NASA has aeronautics and space. And so, I went from the aeronautics side over to the space side and worked on a project called LCROSS, where we sent a satellite to the moon to impact it to see if there was water ice on the moon.

Host:A callback to a previous podcast, where we had Dan Andrews talk about that.

Steve Ord:Yeah, so I worked for Dan Andrews. Dan was our project manager, and a great one at that. And so, I worked on that program. And that was interesting. That was a great introduction to the space side of NASA.

Host: And so now, you’re working on, this is a Flight Opportunities program?

Steve Ord:Yeah, I’m on the…

Host:Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing.

Steve Ord:So, now I’m working on the Flight Opportunities program. And we basically are interested in technology development for NASA in a couple of things. One is generic technology development according to the roadmaps that we have for future exploration. So hey, we’re going to Mars. What do we need to get to Mars? The other thing we do is, we help small launch vehicle technology. So, we have programs that help folks build small launch vehicles. So, not a Saturn V or space shuttle-size rocket, small rockets that maybe launch a few CubeSats. So, that’s kind of in a nutshell, that’s what our program is about, is helping those two things happen.

Host:And so, how do you bridge those together?

Steve Ord:So, we have, so we do various calls and announcements for opportunities for folks. So, we have some calls coming up where we’re going to say hey folks, do you have payloads that NASA needs for its technology? If you do, go ahead and apply, and we’ll pay for the flight for you. If you’re a commercial entity, there is some cost-sharing required, but basically, we’ll help you with the flight. And so, that’s NASA giving folks money to help develop their technology.

For small launch vehicles, we’ll also have solicitations that go out and say hey, are you at a tipping point, for instance, with your technology development? Are you on the verge of something huge, so that your vehicle could be used by NASA or others to really have access to space – low-cost and frequent? And so, then we’ll help fund those as well. And it’s a solicitation, so they compete for the funding, and the winners get funds to do that.

Host:How often does that happen? You know what I mean, you guys call out?

Steve Ord:For the small launch vehicle stuff, about once a year we have either an announcement of collaborative opportunity, which is where they come and they get help from NASA and facilities. There’s no money going back and forth for those, but let’s say that Marshall Space Flight Center has a rocket test stand that you could use, and you know, you’re developing a rocket engine, but you just don’t have a rocket test stand in your backyard – and a lot of folks don’t. They could use that. That’s a collaborative opportunity.

We also have a tipping point once per year, which is where we give you funds to go develop the technology. So, those are about once a year.

For the technology development, where folks might look at the roadmap and say, “I’ve got a way of measuring the amount of fuel left in a tank,” which is right now very hard to do with any good accuracy — maybe 5 percent accuracy, and you have to make the tank move in space and use fuel just to measure how much fills it. We’ve got folks looking at ways to do that in different ways, using modal analysis and things like that. So, those folks come forward and say hey, I’ve got a way of measuring fuel tank, and by the way it’s much more accurate. Let me test my technology.

And those folks come forward, and what they do is they test on different vehicles we have that provide flight environments, space-like flight environments. So, we have sounding rockets, we have the Vomit Comet, and it’s not – when I say we, it’s we basically provide funding. The folks go out and they find commercial flight providers to do this. Again, we are a program that really is trying to get the commercial aspect of space going, and so we help commercial folks do that.

Host:And you’d mentioned earlier, before NASA there was NACA [the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics], which was what Ames was beforehand. Even just thinking of aeronautics, it went through this whole process where it was government did the funding. Taking some ideas that came out of, from the Wright brothers, eventually the government funded it, did research. You had air mail that was government-subsidized, then eventually you think of Pan Am, and public/private partnerships, and then eventually turning into an entire commercial industry worth billions of dollars. And I kind of use that as an analog of how the space industry is going right now. It was just government. There’s been a lot of international partnerships, and now we’re moving into this public/private partnerships, just like we did for aeronautics. But, to eventually get into a place where we can do the, not really a moonshot, but the Mars shot, the bigger things, but then other people handle low-Earth orbit.

Steve Ord:Absolutely. We, you know, as Flight Opportunities, we’re heavily focused on commercialization. So, those things that commercial entities can do, we’re looking for them for help. And that benefits us, because that provides more options and lower-cost access to space. There are some things that the commercial folks, it’s just not a wise investment from a business perspective to go to Mars necessarily. And so, those kind of things are inherently government, and sure, we definitely take part, much more of a part in that.

But for other things – for instance, our flight providers, as I mentioned. Whether or not we’re going on a Vomit Comet, sounding rockets or small launch vehicles – in our program we use commercial vehicles for that, because they’re out there, they’re definitely capable of doing that.

Host:Yeah, I mean, if it already exists in the private sector, there’s no reason for NASA to build and do this themselves.

Steve Ord:That’s right.

Host:And if you think of sending a rover or a lander to Europa to try to bust through the ice and see what’s there, imagine the amount of investment a company would be willing to put into until they find any kind of profit return. So, it makes sense, let’s let NASA pave the way on that stuff, and then hopefully years down the road then it helps, you know, open up other doors for people.

Steve Ord:Absolutely. And what’s neat, what’s going on right now that is really neat that I see is these collaborative opportunities where you’ve got NASA expertise – we have crown jewels of people that are just phenomenally talented, and we have some facilities that are very talented that are public facilities. They’re NASA facilities.

Host:Taxpayers paid for this.

Steve Ord:What’s neat is seeing companies being able to tap into that with some of these agreements and that, and so you don’t have 20 of these same similar facilities being built around. You have a couple of them that people are using. So, I think everybody wins when we’re able to do those kind of partnerships.

Host:And so, looking at that, do you also tap into a bit of the tech transfer aspect of things?

Steve Ord:Yeah, and when folks come through our program, typically they will, they have the technology they’re developing already. So the technology… there’s not, for our program… NASA engineers are not designing or helping their payloads. They really are on their own, whether it be a university or commercial company or whatever, they are developing the technology on their own. So, the technology transfer is a little bit different there.

Host:Okay, because we, NASA does work in that to help transfer our technology to other people to help, and then also learn from what they’re doing. But you’re looking more at the tipping point. These are the people who are right up to that edge and just need a little bit more of a boost.

Steve Ord:Right. Now, there are, we do do flights for – albeit less flights – but we do flights for NASA technology developers as well. So, some folks will apply to our internal call for NASA payloads. Those folks, when they develop the technology, there’s a technology transfer process they go through. They may license the technology, other folks can use it, and build from there and move on. So, internal folks do that, as far as the technology transfer.

Host:So for folks who are listening, what’s something they may have heard of, some partnership or some technology that you kind of helped push them through?

Steve Ord:So, JPL developed one of my favorite payloads, if I can be biased.

Host:If you could have…

Steve Ord:It’s a gecko gripper. JPL developed a gecko gripper, and it’s awesome. As you know, geckos can walk right up the side of a wall, and that’s because they have little hairs on their toes that are so small and they bend just the right way that they have atomic forces that actually hold them to the wall, van der Waals forces. And so, JPL figured out a way to make that with rubber. And I’ve seen it in our microscope, I’ve seen it at their lab, and it is awesome. They have, and they’ve tested in our Vomit Comet, for instance. And they have a material that you can basically stick to something, like let’s say you’re installing a tank in space. They can stick, to hold onto this tank, and then they can release it at will, just by applying a side force to it. And it’s just phenomenal. So, they’re licensing that technology.

And so, somebody out there is going to pick that up and go forth from here and possibly use it for all kinds of other applications. There’s a whole bunch of Earth applications for this. And so, here’s another example of NASA space developed technology, we need this technology to do certain things in space, but there’s a spinoff to the earth-based, like sunglasses and insulin pumps and all these other things we developed over time for space use, the technologies for space, but yet there’s a huge spinoff for the public.

Host:And we mentioned the Vomit Comet a handful of times. For folks who may not be familiar with what that is, this is an airplane that will go really high up in the air and then do a quick nosedive to simulate weightlessness, is that about right?

Steve Ord:Yeah, so it porpoises up and down, and you get about 20 seconds of weightlessness, and then you pull out, and you get about – you have to pull about two Gs [two times the regular force of Earth gravity] to pull out of the dive. And so it’s basically in freefall for about 20 seconds. And they might do 20-40 parabolas in a flight. And they’re awesome flights. The neat thing about it too is you don’t have to go zero G. We have tested technologies that want to go on Mars and moon and even asteroid G. So, I’ve been on a flight where we did 1/3 gravity, because that’s what Mars is. We did 1/6 gravity, lunar, and it’s kind of neat. You jump up and down. It’s a little different when you’re on the moon. And payloads definitely respond differently. The asteroid G is just a little bit of gravity. There’s not much at all on the asteroid, but it is there and it does affect payload, so we’ve even tested those on the Vomit Comet.

Host:. So, looking at Flight Opportunities, some of the stuff you’re working on, what do you see five years, 10 years from now, what are you hoping to see as this develops over the next couple years?

Steve Ord:Well, hopefully what we’ll see is more and more flight vehicles coming online, so that right now there is a backlog, for launching small satellites into space, for instance. NASA has a huge backlog, and there’s a lot of folks that want to do that for research and other, even commercial purposes. So, what I’m hoping is that we see a lot of small launch vehicles come to market. There’s several out there in development. They’ve been in development for a long time, but we haven’t seen them quite come out yet. There’s a few launch vehicles that are larger in scale, and those are coming out, and we’re seeing those more frequently. So, I think we’re right now on the cutting edge of having a whole bunch of vehicles coming out, and then with the commensurate payloads being flown, a lot of technology being developed in the future.

As for Flight Opportunities, we’ll look for other opportunities for partnering and other creative ways we can help that process. There’s a lot of ways to do it. There’s a lot of different facilities out there. And so, we’ll see where that goes in the future.

Host:It’s a nice saying I’ve had in my head for a while is, everybody always says space is hard. Space is really, really hard. But, the cool thing about it is, we don’t have to do it alone. We don’t have to be the only ones in this area.

Steve Ord: That’s right.

Host:NASA, we’re excited to partner with anybody that can help us get there. There’s no reason to do it by ourselves.

Steve Ord:That’s right. And there’s also another aspect. With Flight Opportunities, we can take higher-risk payloads. It’s not necessarily “failure is not an option.” With a crewed flight, failure is not an option, you have to be absolutely careful. And so, we’re not going to change that. But, for our flights that are uncrewed, such as sounding rocket flights or these launch vehicles that go up and come back suborbitally, you can take a lot more risk, and that’s kind of neat too. So, we’ll see payloads that you couldn’t normally fly on maybe a space station or those kind of vehicles, and it’s kind of neat. So, we can take some risks, and we can push the envelope there with those.

Host:Yeah, especially not only with the human factor, but even when you’re looking at multi-million dollar, very expensive instrumentation, similarly you don’t want to mess up on that. But if you’re doing it with stuff that’s less expensive, maybe off-the-shelf products or partnering with people.

Steve Ord:That’s one of the things that, that’s one of the things that the small launch vehicle technology brings. If you have small launch vehicles available to take these CubeSats and these small, high-risk payloads up, it also helps that problem, because those small high-risk payloads can find secondary rides with other larger, more important payloads. But as soon as you stick that onto that rocket, it now becomes a well-managed and very scrutinized payload. And a lot of times, that’s not cost-effective. So, one of the things we’re looking for is to drive that back and having these vehicles that can take higher-risk flights so we can develop that technology cheaper.

Host:So, for anybody who’s listening who’s got questions for you, we are using #NASASiliconValley, and we’re on Twitter @NASAAmes. So, for people who want to know more about your stuff, I’m guessing just go to NASA.gov?

Steve Ord:NASA.gov, and if you look for Flight Opportunities, we’re under the Space Technology Mission Directorate. But if you just go in and search on the internet for “Flight Opportunities NASA,” you’ll find our website on NASA, and then there’s contact info there for us.

Host:Awesome, thanks for coming on over.

Steve Ord:You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

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