A conversation with Steven Zornetzer, the associate center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, discussing Sustainability Base, one of the most eco-friendly buildings in the federal government.

Transcript

Matthew Buffington (Host):You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley Episode 73. With me is Miss Abby Tabor.

Abby Tabor:Hello Matt, welcome back!

Host:And Abby’s been holding down the fort since I’ve been gone for the last like two weeks?

Abby Tabor:Yeah, I think so! Because Frank and I did a couple of podcast episodes while you were out. So, held down the fort! But welcome back.

Host:Happy to be back, and very much appreciated. I was bouncing around between Washington DC over at NASA Headquarters, and also over in Los Angeles. But speaking of podcasts, while I was at headquarters and having all the meetings, of course you have to run outside and go to a food truck to get some food.

Abby Tabor:Of course!

Host:So while running outside waiting for a fried chicken sandwich, I ran into NASA’s very own Jim Green, and the host of Gravity Assist, the NASA headquarters podcast!

Abby Tabor:Yeah, the new podcast!

Host:Yeah, so we get to chit-chat, we talk about some of his episodes, and how much fun he was having.

Abby Tabor:Cool.

Host:I think they just finished their episode on Earth, and he teased a new episode that they had, I think it was like their 11th.

Abby Tabor:Okay.

Host:Can’t spoil that for the group, but they have some cool stuff, cool content they’re coming out with. So, had a lot of fun!

Abby Tabor:Great! Yeah, we’ll go look for that!

Host:And then for today’s episode we have Steve Zornetzer.

Abby Tabor:Right, yeah, the associate center director of Ames.

Host:Yeah, the way that I kinda think about it is, you know, you have different groups within Ames. You have an aeronautics group, you have a technology group, engineering and science. Steve kinda like, heads up all those. Helps pull all those groups together to work on their different projects, to kinda find out where people can work together. One thing of which that he had worked on, that we talk a lot about in this episode, is sustainability base. It is a building here at NASA Ames that has won a bunch of awards for being like the greenest building in California.

Abby Tabor:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been honored a bunch of times, and I heard it was the first Carbon-neutral building in the US government. So that’s pretty awesome.

Host:It has all different aspects, it has solar panels, it has bloom boxes, and even if you’re sitting in that building, you’ll notice like the shades and the lights will dim and modify and change in order to conserve energy, it’s really neat.

Abby Tabor:Yeah! It adjusts on its own. That’s really impressive. For people who are listening, before we jump into the episode, a reminder we have a phone number. And you can call with any questions or comments, leave us a message, and we’ll see about getting you an answer and sticking that into a future episode. That number is (650) 604-1400. So give us a call! And otherwise, you can do the same on social media. We’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley.

Host:Excellent! So for now, we will listen to the episode with Steve Zornetzer.

[Music]

Host: We always like to start it off the same way, to hear a little bit about yourself. What brought you to NASA? How did you end up in Silicon Valley?

Steven Zornetzer:Well, it’s my third and final time living in California.

Host: Okay.

Steven Zornetzer:It’s a place I’ve always loved, but for some reason I always got pulled away for other reasons. So this time I decided, great opportunity for a job about —

Host: Staying this time.

Steven Zornetzer:— almost 20 years ago now. In fact, it is 20 years. And so I just decided to take advantage of the opportunity, and came out here.

Host: When you first joined NASA was that straight out of school? Is this an entire career of NASA? How did you fall into it?

Steven Zornetzer:No, I’ve had a storied career. I got my PhD out of University of California Irvine — dating myself here — in 1971.

Host: Okay.

Steven Zornetzer:And then immediately took a job in Florida. Of course, much to my wife’s chagrin at the time, leaving California. But it was a great opportunity professionally. My PhD was in neurobiology.

Host: Okay.

Steven Zornetzer:And I was hired right out of my PhD to be the first faculty member of a brand-new neuroscience department that was just starting up at the medical school at the University of Florida. So it was sort of a dream job, and I took it. So I left California the first time, spent 10 years building a department in Florida —

Host: In the humidity of Florida.

Steven Zornetzer:Alligators, mosquitoes, humidity.

Host: Yeah.

Steven Zornetzer:But it was a great professional opportunity and I enjoyed that part of my career. Then had the opportunity to do a sabbatical, came back to California to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where I did about a year and a half’s worth of really interesting research at the Salk Institute. And then rather than going back to Florida to my academic position, I took another academic position at my old alma mater, University of California Irvine.

And from there — I spent almost three years there, and then got an invitation to come back to Washington to join federal service at the Office of Naval Research in Washington, where I was offered the position — and took the position — of director of all of the life science and biomedical research for the Navy. Which was again, a very interesting position, interesting opportunity. And it was from that position that I got asked if I would be interested in coming out to NASA Ames in 1997.

Host: Oh wow.

Steven Zornetzer:So that was my third time to California, and my final time.

Host: You were talking about neurobiology. Somebody doesn’t naturally think of that as NASA, with rockets and sending astronauts. Talk a little bit about that. But I guess it makes a little bit more sense on the administrative, federal, and just kind of the science behind it and running a . . .

Steven Zornetzer:There is that aspect of it, from just the administrative — I was an [SESer] for the Navy at the Office of Naval Research and developed a lot of research programs for the Navy and the DoD. The hook that the then-center director Harry McDonald used to bring me out here was the work that I had been doing at ONR, part of the portfolio that I had created for the Navy was the first interdisciplinary research program in what’s called neural networks.

Host: Okay.

Steven Zornetzer:And so my research interests at the time had really migrated toward answering the question, “How does the brain process information, and what can we learn from the way biological systems have evolved to do that that we might be able to mimic and emulate in silicon, in engineered systems, that would be an alternative approach to the way traditional AI tries to learn about the world?”

So Harry McDonald at the time brought me out here to be the head of the computer science research programs here at NASA Ames. And one of the reasons he did that was because he believed that traditional AI was reaching its limits, and that if NASA was going to use artificial intelligence in the future to assist human exploration with robotic systems, those robotic systems would need to be intelligent. And they would need to learn from their environment in situations where there was such uncertainty that they couldn’t be preprogrammed.

Host: Exactly.

Steven Zornetzer:And that’s what we do. That’s what all living organisms do. They learn about their environment, and in many cases they learn in real time and they adapt to it so that they can survive. Well, Harry believed that those are the qualities that NASA needed in its intelligent and robotic systems if we were going to explore effectively in the future. So that’s why he hired me, was because I had that kind of background and expertise.

Host: [It must have been] a field day when you came on over. If you think of the broad portfolio that is Ames, on one side you have these bioscience — these science experiments that are going to the Space Station, but on the flip side you have supercomputers, you have intelligent systems. So this must have been perfect for you as you came in.

Steven Zornetzer:It was a great opportunity. And Ames had — at the time Ames had a really deep [bench] in computer science researchers, and so it was an exciting place to be.

Host: Tell the people, what do you do now? What is the big, fancy title that Steve has now?

Steven Zornetzer:Over the years, I guess they kicked me upstairs. So now I am the associate center director for research and technology at NASA Ames. And part of my job is to sort of coordinate and oversee the overall research and technology portfolio for the center.

Host: What does that end up looking like day to day? With the broad portfolio, with the different things that are coming up, do you focus on one at a time? Or it is just — how do you direct this? What goes into your day-do-day?

Steven Zornetzer:Well, I think one of the goals that I had from the very beginning — and from my own experience, being the director of a technical organization prior to this current position — I saw that many of the technical organizations were stovepiped. They really weren’t optimizing their effectiveness. They weren’t coordinating with one another. They weren’t collaborating in an interdisciplinary fashion to the extent that they could.

And so one of the goals that I had in this new position as associate center director was to sort of create a community of technical organizations to get them all working together to break down some of those artificial turfs and artificial barriers that they constructed for various reasons. In some cases they just inherited it because that was the culture.

Host: Exactly. “This is how we do things.”

Steven Zornetzer:That was the culture. So part of it was changing the culture to be much more collaborative, and work more effectively as a team of researchers and break down some of those interdisciplinary barriers.

Host: I would imagine there are a lot of synergies and different advantages — efficiencies you can build off of that. Just from the course of doing the podcasts and talking to people, you find people who are working on intelligent systems but they’re able to leverage stuff that other people are doing in fluid dynamics, or the supercomputing for aeronautics. There is a lot that people can kind of pick and learn off of each other.

Steven Zornetzer:Yeah. I think when we did an inventory of our entire research and technology portfolio, we realized that there are many, many cross-cutting themes that cut across traditional disciplines and traditional areas of research and technology development, in such a way that if we were to capitalize on those cross-cutting capabilities that we have, everybody wins. It’s like a rising tide floats all ships. That’s the sort of research environment we want to create here.

Host: I guess that fits in to a lot of the stuff that we’ve had conversations about. A campus of the future, looking at what’s the next step, or what Ames is looking like. And a lot of that also comes into just these facilities.

Steven Zornetzer:Right.

Host:I mean we’re on this old, former naval base, and there are different processes — like we did a podcast a couple months ago where USGS is coming and joining us over here at Ames, sitting side by side, researchers — see what other kinds of synergies we can get between NASA and them. And then also new buildings coming up.

Steven Zornetzer:Yeah. I mean one of the goals of campus of the future is to capitalize on the intellectual synergies that we have here among our researchers and engineers to bring them together physically, bring them together.

Right now, given just the physical constraints of the campus, they’re distributed across a large geographical area on the campus. Well, that distribution sort of inhibits collaboration. So one of the things we want to do is bring these intellectual communities together so that they can actually bump into each other at the coffee pot or the water cooler, to create collaborative spaces for them to work together on spontaneous projects that may arise and give them a workspace that really stimulates that kind of creative, intellectual environment.

Host: Yeah, creating more of those water cooler moments.

Steven Zornetzer:Yeah.

Host: But some of that also falls into — I know you worked previously on what we affectionately call Sustainability Base. What is Sustainability Base? How did that all come about?

Steven Zornetzer:That’s a very interesting story. In 2008, Ames applied for an agency wide competition to build a next new building within the agency. And other centers also competed for that building. We won it. And so we were at that point, in 2008, given the resources, the funding, to build a new building. This was the first new building at NASA Ames in over 25 years.

Host: Wow.

Steven Zornetzer:So this was a big deal for NASA Ames. So I wasn’t involved in any of this; I was doing my job, which has nothing to do with new buildings. But I was curious; after we had started the design of this new building, I was curious about what it is that we were going to build. So I went to a meeting where the designers were presenting what’s called the 30 percent design review.

So they had done a lot of thinking about it. They’d come up with the 30 percent complete design of this new building, so it was still pretty conceptual, but, you know, they had drawings and they had their notion of what this new building would be. And I looked at his presentation. I listened to it. I saw the pictures, or the architects’ renderings of what the new building would look like, and I was horribly underwhelmed. I stood up in this room filled with people and I said, “Time out.”

Host: Okay.

Steven Zornetzer:I had no idea what I was getting myself into, nor did I know that I even had the authority to do what I was about to do.

Host: You never know till you try!

Steven Zornetzer:But I said, “Time out.” I said, “We’re not going to build this building. This is a building that could have been built 30 years ago, anywhere in the country. Not at NASA in the heart of Silicon Valley in the 21st Century. This is the wrong building for us to be building.” And I said — I made a declaration in front of all these people that — I had no idea what I was talking about, but I made this declaration. I said, “We are going to build the greenest building in the federal government.” Period. There was silence in the room.

Host: Oh, that’s funny.

Steven Zornetzer: I mean nobody believed that I did this. I didn’t believe that I did this. So I leave the room, and now all of a sudden I have a new mission. How am I going to do this? So I went back to the then-center director, Pete Warden, and told him what I had done. And he said, “Oh, good for you. That’s a great idea. Let’s do it.” So.

Two weeks later, I happened to be at a meeting at Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, and they had invited one of the world’s leading green architects to come and give a talk. His name was Bill McDonough, William McDonough, and he had just recently written a book called “From Cradle To Cradle.” And it was his thesis and his belief that you can really be every good stewards of the environment without compromising workplace environment or quality of construction or anything else, but just being smart about how you design things.

So I listened to his talk. I was very impressed with him. I went up to him afterwards and I said, “We have to talk. I want to build the greenest building in the federal government.”

Host: I just volunteered to build the —

Steven Zornetzer: “And I need you to help me.”

Host: Nice.

Steven Zornetzer:So he had built many sustainable buildings around the country, around the world, but he had never built one for the federal government. So this was his opportunity to build the greenest building in the federal government.

So we went into a room, and we spent two hours with scratch paper and things just talking, and one thing led to another, and the bottom line is we built the greenest building in the federal government. And we called it Sustainability Base in honor of Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary of “one giant step for mankind,” landing on the moon, at Tranquility Base. This was Sustainability Base.

It’s a LEED Platinum certified building, one of the very few in the federal government. At the time it was the first one in NASA; now there are a couple more. It generates more energy than it consumes every single day of the year.

Host: Oh really?

Steven Zornetzer:It takes that extra energy and distributes it on our local electrical grid to other buildings, thereby reducing those buildings’ impact on the environment.

The building uses 90 percent less potable water than an equivalent size conventional building, and we do that with a combination of water recycling of gray water in the building, using the same technologies that we developed for the International Space Station to recycle the water on the International Space Station. And we use that recycled water in the building for toilet and urinal flushing, so we don’t have to waste drinkable, potable water for those purposes. And we use recycled water for irrigation around the building for its landscaping.

The building is a very smart building; it’s got over 5,000 sensors distributed throughout the building, and those sensors inform the building’s operating systems and subsystems about where people are in the building, what kinds of lighting systems should be on, the temperature of the building and whether it’s comfortable in different zones of the building.

Host: I remember sitting in there doing a presentation, and one time some of the blinds coming and going automatically. And it was like, “Oh, no; it’s adjusting to the temperature in the room, the energy that it’s taking up,” and it modifies it.

Steven Zornetzer:It’s a dynamic building. The sensors operate those buildings. So in the case of the example you just gave, you were in a room where that at that time of day there was direct sunlight coming in on the building, on the windows, creating glare on the interior spaces. So the sun sensors that we have distributed all around the building detected that direct sunlight coming in on those windows, and it lowered the blinds — the shades — so that we would minimize the amount of heat gain and the amount of glare for the occupants inside.

Host: That’s awesome. Talk a little bit about — you mentioned that it takes in more energy than it uses. Where does that energy come from? Is it a mix of solar panels? I’ve heard [Bloom boxes] or –?

Steven Zornetzer:There are two sources of energy production. There are photovoltaics on the roof, and that generates every day about 30 to 40 percent of the total energy consumption of the building. And in addition to that, we have a solid oxide fuel cell system that was actually a spinoff from NASA technology back in the late 1990s for the Mars exploration program.

The person who eventually became the founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, which manufactures these, had been a contractor for NASA, and he was developing this energy system for a Mars Rover. And one thing led to another, and he spun off that technology and now created Bloom Energy which manufactures these for all over the world. It’s a very efficient way of converting a natural gas — and the source of that could be methane or other combustible hydrocarbons — using a chemical, catalytic process to manufacture energy.

So it’s not a combustion process. You’re not actually burning natural gas to produce energy; you’re just taking a chemical conversion process, converting those hydrocarbons, and pulling off the electrons for energy consumption. So that generates quite a bit of energy each day. It works 24/7. It’s a very clean way of producing energy.

Host: You were just talking about the different technologies and spinoffs even of being NASA. We’re working on this stuff being incredibly efficient up in space; might as well use that here. And this is probably perfect we’re recording this pretty close to Earth Day. I remember watching — I was watching TV the other day and there was a comedian giving a rant about respecting Earth Day. “Forget about Mars. Don’t think of Mars as Earth 2.0., like, ‘Oh, we can ruin this planet, and then go to Mars.’ You need to focus on Earth.”

And I was going through it. I was like on that journey to Mars, you have to be so incredibly efficient with your resources that you literally will develop those technologies that could be used on Earth to be more efficient. Not only just here, but think throughout the entire world where —

Steven Zornetzer:That’s right.

Host:— potable water is a problem, energy is a problem. If you can be efficient in space, you could use that technology here.

Steven Zornetzer:Well, in fact that was exactly one of the intentions of the building from the very beginning. We listed what our intentions were before we built this building, and one of them was to take NASA aerospace technologies and bring them back to the people of Planet Earth, and demonstrate their effectiveness in this building.

So this building is really a showcase for many NASA technologies.

I mentioned the water recycling; that’s a very good one. The fuel cell technology. The photovoltaic technology was really developed for NASA satellites back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and from there it became a consumer commodity. It’s now penetrating the world’s energy production facilities all over the planet. And so it’s having a major effect.

There are other technologies in the building, like the glazing on the windows is the same glazing that’s used on the helmets of astronauts. And so a lot of these features have been spun off into technologies that the private sector has licensed, and now we’re incorporating them again in this building. So one of the very interesting success stories of this building is that it is demonstrating NASA technologies back in a building on Planet Earth.

Host: That’s awesome. So you’ve built the greenest building in the federal government. It’s been recognized for different awards, different recognitions. Talk a little bit about that.

Steven Zornetzer:From the very beginning, the building was dedicated, interestingly enough, five years ago on Earth Day. So on April 22 of 2012 we dedicated the building, and we had a big dedication ceremony in front of the building. That same day, we had received notification that we won LEED Platinum certification, the day of certification.

We had already won some awards even before the building was certified. We won a Silicon Valley Leadership Award for green building. We won an [Acterra] award. We won the Governor’s Award. We’ve won a White House award. We’ve won a GSA, General Services Administration Award, for green buildings. And just two weeks ago we learned that a group called Green California Summit had given us an award for leadership in green buildings.

We put a lot of information on our website about the building, and they discovered this website and found out more about the building, discovered that we’re actually producing more energy on the site than we’re consuming, and decided to give us an award. It was very nice for them to do that. We’re pleased that the building still gets that kind of recognition.

Host: Excellent, so before we wrap up, is there anything like advice that you give to people, or even more so, what do you see as some of the future things that you want to see at Ames, or things that you’re working on? You know, towards whatever the next five to 10 years at Ames are going to be?

Steven Zornetzer:I think the key for us is going to be to continue to attract bright young people to join us here at NASA Ames. I think as more and more of the senior members of our staff become eligible for retirement, we really want to bring in the next generation of scientists and engineers and accountants and lawyers and all the people that make a community like this function and operate effectively.

I think one of the things that I’m most interested in is creating an environment for that next generation workforce to come in and prosper and be creative and be involved in solving some of the most interesting challenges that mankind will face, whether it be solving problems here on Planet Earth or figuring out how we fit into this universe of ours. Is there life elsewhere? What are other habitable worlds like? Can we create a habitat elsewhere for humankind?

Host:Yeah.

Steven Zornetzer:I think these are really fascinating questions. And it’s this next generation of scientists and engineers and workers who really will be part of that. So one of the things that excites me is to try to create an environment for them that nurtures that and stimulates that.

Host: And that’s one of the cool things, especially if you have a part in designing that campus and the buildings that pop up, because that’s a legacy that remains even long after you’ve retired and moved on. It’s something that’s stable. It’s there.

Steven Zornetzer:I hope so.

Host: For anybody listening who has any questions for Steve, we are on Twitter @NASAAmes. We’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. Anybody has questions, feel free to send them on over and we’ll loop in back to Steve and we’ll get back to you guys. Thank you so much for coming on over, Steve.

Steven Zornetzer:My pleasure. Thank you.

[END]