NARRATOR

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center stretches over acres of forest and fields speckled with hills and bright green lawns. There are a few water features on the campus, often surrounded by flocks of geese. There’s a pond towards the end of the property by an entrance from the highway. I pass it every day on my ways to and from Goddard.

The buildings are a hodgepodge of architectural styles. They’re all numbered, assigned numerals in the order in which they were constructed. I work in Building 12. It’s not the newest, but it’s not the oldest either. It’s an L-shaped box of red brick, more utilitarian than bright or airy. It was built into the side of a hill, like a piece of an office park dropped into the middle of the Shire, a sort of corporate Hobbiton.

When you step inside, though, it hardly feels like Middle Earth. There’s nothing pseudo-medieval about the work being done there. The halls buzz with the sounds of history being made, of many firsts coming to fruition.

I work on the second floor. In the offices below mine, project managers work to put an optical communications terminal on a crewed Orion spacecraft, a first for human spaceflight. To my right, the Satellite Servicing Projects Division develops technologies necessary for a full-fledged robotic refueling of a satellite that has run out of fuel but was not designed to be serviced — another first. There’s a wing of the building dedicated to the world’s first optical relay satellite. There’s a group making sure satellites can use GPS near the Moon.

There are so many firsts in progress — history in the making, but there’s also history at work.

On the bottom floor of Building 12, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, or TDRS, project office is preparing to close after decades of contributions to the agency. In August of 2017, they launched the last of their satellites, TDRS-13. Their offices will soon be filled by the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration mission, one that will propel us into the “Decade of Light,” a future where optical communications join radio to enable mission success.

There’s so much to say about the legacy of TDRS, a communications relay system that enabled, for the first time, continuous communications coverage for satellites in low-Earth orbit. So many inventive ideas came out of the TDRS office, too many to mention in one podcast.

But, I’d like to talk about one.

I’m Danny Baird. This is “The Invisible Network.”

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In an unassuming, windowless room of paper-strewn cubicles, embedded deep into the hill beneath Building 12, sits Tom Williams, an engineer who participated in the development of the TDRS system in the 1970s. An engineer who used his work on TDRS to help the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, create a system that freezes bone marrow.

Williams was my first interview at Goddard. I was nervous that I wasn’t up to the task, but his warm demeanor and jolly candor quickly turned a nerve-racking 15-minute interview into an hour-long discussion of his work on the TDRS project.

His bone marrow research came up naturally. I asked him for some interesting tidbits and he offered this:

TOM WILLIAMS

Most people don’t know that NASA’s work isn’t just aerospace and satellites. The work we do ends up helping people that have little to do with the space program and little interest in it.

NARRATOR

Bone marrow presented a unique challenge to medical researchers. To maintain a sample viable for transplant, the cells must be chilled to temperatures unattainable by traditional refrigeration units, colder than the lowest natural ground temperature ever recorded on Earth. Cooling marrow too quickly causes freezing water within the cell to expand and burst the cell wall. Cooling marrow too slowly can result in cell death.

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Goddard’s so called “Chamber of Horrors” rests within a bulbous collection of interconnected buildings. The labyrinthine complex houses the equipment necessary to subject spacecraft hardware to extreme environments, some of the harshest environments known to man: the extreme vacuum of space, the heat of the Sun, the radiation of the cosmos. There’s a tall chamber with speakers that can reach an ear-splitting 150 decibels, shaking whatever’s inside with the same tremendous vigor of a launch.

Williams tested communications spacecraft components in these artificial environments. When a call came from the NIH for someone who might know a viable way to freeze bone marrow, Williams had an idea. Goddard’s thermal vacuum chamber uses liquid nitrogen and helium to mimic the chill of space. He thought a similar process might just work for bone marrow.

While continuing his work with NASA, Williams spent the next few years developing a liquid nitrogen freezer that chilled marrow without destroying the sample. He used a compound that modified the way water froze within the cell and identified a cooling rate and process that avoided cell death. NASA and Williams patented the technology in 1978, making it available for licensing to the medical community.

Since donor matches are rare, donors and patients are often very far apart. The development of these freezing techniques facilitated transplants at a distance. Additionally, patients undergoing radiation treatments that damage marrow can store samples for future transplantation. Using this method might, in the future, facilitate transplants through banks of frozen marrow.

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A communications engineer developing breakthrough medical techniques may seem strange, but it’s a familiar story at NASA. NASA’s Technology Transfer Program makes agency patents and software available to the private sector, encouraging the development of commercial products and technologies. Daniel Lockney, Technology Transfer program executive, speaks to the power of tech transfer.

DANIEL LOCKNEY

Innovation at NASA not only helps fuel economic growth; it advances the creation of new industries, companies, jobs, and the global competitiveness of U.S. products and services. By leveraging the knowledge and experience of our scientists and engineers, NASA innovations help advance many fields, including the medical field, which benefits all of us.

NARRATOR

Since its inception, NASA innovations have led to a diverse array of products. Material designed to protect commercial aircraft passengers became the memory foam you might find in your mattress. A carbon coating that protects satellite systems became the scratch resistant lenses you might find in your glasses. An Apollo-era device designed to collect lunar samples became the “Dustbuster,” a small handheld vacuum you might just have in your closet.

In the medical field, partnerships and licensing agreements benefit Americans by bringing transformative technologies into the doctor’s office, the hospital and even the operating room. Pacemakers, devices that deliver small shocks to the heart to correct an irregular pulse, have their origins in space circuitry systems. Technology that allows the Hubble Space Telescope to convert light into electronic files improved mammography, crucial in detecting and diagnosing breast cancer.

Many of these were passive infusions. NASA creates these technologies either way. It’s as though private industry reaches into our shelves and applies whatever knowledge lies archived there to problems of their own. NASA’s job is to keep the library open, to be open and supportive to those who enter in search of something new.

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I joined the bone marrow registry a few years ago. I’d heard that a young guy at my alma mater had been diagnosed with leukemia. Though I didn’t know him, and the chances were that I couldn’t help him, it just felt like something I should do. Marrow donation isn’t particularly invasive and it’s unlikely I’d ever be called to donate.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s rare for a patient to match with a marrow donor. Only about one in 40 are ever called in for additional testing; only one in 300 will be selected as the best possible donor for a patient; only one in 430 actually donate.

But this year, I got the call. I went for additional tests. I was a match. I was so excited to have the opportunity to donate, to help save a life…

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What strikes me most about tech transfer is the diversity of the portfolio.

As of this writing, the featured technologies on the NASA tech transfer website include a sterilizing fogger that cleans ambulances and carbon cement that reduces emissions and offers improved performance over its flat, non-carbonated bretheren. These innovations are part of the oft-invisible research that supports space science and exploration. They’re odd bits of technology that you might not read about in the context of spaceflight, but might just impact your everyday life.

See, NASA’s work doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Well, sometimes it does. What I mean to say is that NASA’s work takes place in the context of the world around it. Our engineers aren’t just sky-gazers.

Tom Williams was not an oncologist, not a doctor, not even a biologist. Yet, he jumped at the chance to lend his expertise to bone marrow research. In spite of the unknown, he answered the call.

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At a party in D.C., celebrating some arbitrary milestone, I received another call from the bone marrow registry. I took my phone to the bathroom and sat at the edge of the bath tub.

The voice over the phone told me that the man I’d matched with, a man I did not know, had passed away.

I spent a quiet moment mourning this anonymous man. As pop music and gentle laughter filtered through the thin door of the bathroom, he felt, at once, so distant and so important — a reminder of how fragile we are — of how much we depend on one another.

I did not know this man. I was not his doctor, nor even his friend. Even so, I wished, so deeply, that I’d been able to help him.

Perhaps, one day, banks of frozen marrow could save those in need of a transplant. Maybe some other medical marvel will cure diseases of the marrow with no need for a transplant.

Who knows? Maybe that breakthrough could come from NASA.

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In the public service, we all have our part to play. For NASA, programs like technology transfer endeavor to fulfill Congress’ mandate to “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof.”

These words, Section 203.a.3 of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, show remarkable generosity. The legislation founded an agency whose eyes were to the stars, but whose heart was on the ground. NASA is a civilian agency, one in service to humanity’s most innocent ambitions — to understand the universe, relishing our place within it.

For NASA, answering this call means being stewards of the technologies we create — to match scientific talent to human need, no matter how far outside our purview that need may seem.

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Today, Williams is partially retired. He visits Goddard a few times a week, lending his expertise to the space-based communications relay he helped develop. He analyzes data, identifying and correcting problems in the constellation of satellites that make up the Space Network.

He doesn’t really know what came of his bone marrow refrigerator… he set it up and let it go…

TOM WILLIAMS

My last contact with the project was in 1981. A doctor at the Johns Hopkins Hospital called me and asked if I would let them use the device, so I set it up there for them to use. The last time I contacted them, they were preparing to use it for the first time on a human patient.

NARRATOR

I rather enjoy the mysterious humility of it all. Williams may have helped thousands, may have pushed the medical field forward in so many ways, but that doesn’t matter. Williams offered his knowledge and then returned to his regular work at NASA, ready to move on to the next mission, the next adventure. He didn’t need credit.

That’s the nature of work at NASA though. Our engineers can be in some ways myopic, dedicated fully to the success of their missions. They might not always see the powerful ramifications of their work. They move from project to project, leaving in their wake innovations that transform the technological landscape.

Yes, there are sometimes accolades. Yes, there is a certain ceremony to the completion of a mission. At the end of the day though, most of the engineers don’t seem to particularly care for the limelight. They just love the work they do.

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The Invisible Network is a NASA podcast presented by theSpace Communications and Navigation program. This episode was written by me, Danny Baird, and released on Oct. 16,r 2018. Editorial oversight provided by Ashley Hume. Our public affairs officers are Clare Skelly and Peter Jacobs. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share us with a friend. For the full text of this episode, a list of sources and related images visit nasa.gov/SCaN.