A conversation with the leadership of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Center Director Eugene Tu and Deputy Center Director Carol Carroll.
Transcript
Host (Matthew Buffington):You are listening to the 100th episode of the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast! And by a fortuitous aligning of the sun and Earth – today, July 20, is also the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon. In fact, if you listen to this podcast at roughly 8 p.m. Pacific time, you are right at the anniversary of the famous, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
As our 100th episode, our special guests are the NASA Ames Center Director Dr. Eugene Tu and Deputy Center Director Carol Carroll. We talk about their early days here at Ames and go into detail about NASA’s unique research center in the heart of Silicon Valley.
As a housekeeping note for the podcast, we are going to go on a bit of a hiatus for the next few weeks. Don’t worry, we are not going away, but we are working on some fun, new content. We will not have any new episodes for a few weeks as we get things in order, but keep an ear out on this very RSS feed towards the end of the summer and you’ll get to listen to what we are cooking up.
Without further delay, here is Dr. Eugene Tu and Carol Carroll.
Music
Host: I always like to start it off with, “How did you join NASA? How did you get to Silicon Valley?” Eugene, I think you’re from the area, right?
Eugene Tu: Correct.
Host: Carol, you didn’t grow up around here, though, right?
Carol Carroll: No, I grew up in New Jersey.
Host: New Jersey? So we’re going to start off with Carol.
Eugene Tu: That’s a more interesting story. I can tell already.
Host: Carol, how did you join NASA? How did you get to Silicon Valley from New Jersey? That’s quite a flight.
Carol Carroll: Yes. Well, I was actually out here before NASA. The story starts before NASA. I came out to Silicon Valley after college. I got hired on with Westinghouse, which is now Northrop Grumman in Sunnyvale. I was only supposed to be out here three months. I was on a graduate rotation program.
Host: The weather was too good.
Carol Carroll: It was too good. After three months, I was like – I hadn’t even been skiing yet, you know? I had been to wine tasting and the beach in San Francisco, but hadn’t even been here for a winter. After three months, they asked me to actually commit. “Are you going to start here in Sunnyvale, or are you going to go for your next rotation?” – which would have been Connecticut or Florida. And I said, “I can’t leave.” There’s just too much to do. I loved it out here.
I ended up staying, and I worked at Westinghouse for a few years. And then I worked at another small company called Accurax. And then I ended up going back to Westinghouse and worked on an interesting program, where somebody had the brilliant idea to put Peacekeeper missiles in railroad cars. It was a fascinating engineering program, and I’m glad it never got built.
Host: I was going to say, “Starting out with Peacekeeper missiles?”
Carol Carroll: Peacekeeper, nuclear missiles on railroad cars. It was a great engineering program, but I was happy when it was canceled. But then I was looking for my next job. I got called from a former boss. My very first boss when I was out of college was, by this point, over here at Ames managing one of the on-site contracts, which was Boeing at the time, Boeing Aerospace Operations.
So I came over and worked in safety in the wind tunnels. I thought, “Hey, I’m an engineer. Safety is a good thing to learn.” That’s how I came to Ames.
Host: I know that you’ve bounced around NASA. When I first arrived, you were doing mission support, like human capital stuff. You’re trained as an engineer, I’m guessing?
Carol Carroll: Yes, I went to college at Virginia Tech. I’m a mechanical engineer. I’m an engineer, a systems engineer, project manager. Going over to human capital was a very big stretch for me.
Host: It seems like overall the point is to get things done – “Do you know how to get things done?”
Carol Carroll: Well, I became passionate about the people. I really enjoyed working in human capital and trying to figure out how we could do things for our people here at Ames. That’s why I went and did that.
Host: I’m going to totally drill-down into that stuff because I find it completely fascinating, but when you first got here, did you already know Eugene? When did you guys meet?
Carol Carroll: No, I think I first heard of Eugene after I became a civil servant. I was a contractor for about three years, and then I became a civil servant. That’s an interesting story. But I think I became aware of Eugene after I’d been here in probably the late ’90s, when you were doing CICT.
Eugene Tu: Yeah, project management.
Carol Carroll: At that time, I was in entry systems, and you were doing CICT. That’s when I first heard the name, “Eugene.”
Host: What’s CICT?
Eugene Tu: Computing Information and Communications Technologies. It was an IT program. It was the outgrowth of what was two programs before. One was called the Information Technology Base Program and the other one was a High-Performance Computing Communications Program, or HPCC. Those two programs got merged right around the time Carol was mentioning it and became CICT.
Host: Did you guys work together at any point in time?
Carol Carroll: I don’t think our careers ever crossed. I think they’ve run parallel. I don’t think they’ve ever crossed.
Host: I remember when I first arrived, one of the first press events that we did – the protocol person was like, “Matt, your job is you need to get Eugene from this press interview over to the Roverscape.” I was the new person. I had no clue where anything was. I was listening in on the interview. You probably don’t even remember this.
Eugene Tu: I don’t.
Host: But then I got pulled over and had to go talk with somebody else who was trying to get their camera set up. I came back and you were gone. I had this panic of, “I lost the center director!” I hopped in my car and started driving around, and then it dawned on me. I was like, “I think Eugene was an intern at Ames. He’s probably more familiar with this place than I am. I think he just walked.” You just walked on over, and I was freaking out.
Eugene Tu: I knew where the Roverscape was.
Host: I was freaking out. I was texting Carolyn. I’m like, “Where is he? I can’t find him.” She’s like, “Oh, no. He’s already here!”
So tell us about that: growing up in the area, internship, I’m guessing – or was it straight out of school?
Eugene Tu: No, internship. I came to the Bay Area – my family moved here when I was about seven. At the time, my father took a job at UC [University of California] Berkeley. We basically moved to Berkeley, and I was in grade school at the time, probably third grade. Basically, I grew up in Berkeley from that point forward, went to Berkeley High School.
I always knew early on I wanted to do something in engineering but wasn’t sure what. Aerospace always attracted me, aviation, airplanes. I loved airplanes.
Host: Are you a mechanical engineer, the same as Carol?
Eugene Tu: Yes. So my undergrad was in mechanical engineering, but it didn’t start out that way. I was originally going to be going to the University of Washington and do aerospace engineering up there. At the very last moment – I think I had already secured a dorm. I had maybe even picked classes for my freshman year. And at the time, I decided, “Well, maybe I want to stay closer to home for a little while,” because I realized at the University of Washington, you actually did not go formally into the aerospace engineering program until your third year. Your first two years was just general engineering.
And so I had an opportunity to go to Berkeley at the time, and I said, “Okay. It will be a little bit cheaper. It’ll be closer to home. I’ll do that for two years, and then if I’m still interested, I’ll transfer up north,” which, of course, I never did. I went to Berkeley, mechanical engineering. I actually started out as an undergraduate in letters and science, undeclared. And then after my first year, I declared for engineering, went into mechanical engineering.
The fall of my second year, I was introduced by a family friend of mine, who was a professor at Arizona State University, and he had worked with some people here at Ames. And in particular, there was a new group starting up here at Ames in the area of computational fluid dynamics, which was still in its early stages of development and research at the time. He knew of my interest in engineering. He introduced me to some of the researchers down here, so I came down. I spent a few months volunteering down here, just part of the Ames Associate Program.
Carol Carroll: You were still in college at the time?
Eugene Tu: Still in college at the time, and just came down maybe once a week, twice a week, during those days I didn’t have a heavy course load.
Host: I know there’s an intern photo floating around somewhere. I’ve seen the picture with a young Eugene. We’re going to try to get that as the album art for this episode.
Eugene Tu: No, no! So I volunteered for a little while, and then the opportunity came up. They had the co-op [cooperative education] program, which is now very similar to our Pathways Program, where if you’re an intern in school – or you’re in school, you can become an intern. You can get paid a little bit, and also the school supports that program. I applied to it and got into that program. So basically, I started here as an intern here at Ames.
Carol Carroll: I wish I had known about that program.
Host: I know, right? Well, we did a whole podcast episode a while back with the head of recruitment for us about how to get a job.
Carol Carroll: It’s a great program.
Host: Speaking of that, and that dips into some of the human capital stuff, Carol – actually, for both of you guys. You’re mechanical engineers. Your careers are going around in parallel. I guess the common thread is trying to figure out how to get things done, whether it’s computational fluid dynamics or something you were working on, Carol. But maybe that falls into the human capital stuff and people, the most complicated of puzzles. Tell us a little bit about that.
Carol Carroll: Exactly. And the most important, right? Everything we do comes down to the people. I’ve worked in projects all over the center. I’ve worked in a lot of the fields here at Ames, from entry systems, to SOFIA, to wind tunnels. And it all comes down to the people. I got passionate.
I worked on the Headquarters business services assessment for human capital, and they asked me to lead that. I said, “I think you have the wrong person, because I don’t know anything about human capital, other than I’ve been a supervisor and I’ve hired people. But other than that, I don’t know any rules and regulations.” They said, “That’s exactly what we want. We want a customer, somebody that will understand the importance of the workforce.”
I did that for headquarters, and we went out and benchmarked all other kinds of companies: Google, Mozilla and other federal agencies. I started to learn what some of our flexibilities were, and I got really excited about bringing them back to Ames – and increasing how many hires we could do in a year and restarting some programs. Eugene wanted to start the full-time graduate study program, where we actually will pay your tuition and your salary to finish your master’s or finish your Ph.D. for one year full-term. That’s a great benefit. We’re working on the student loan repayment program.
Anyway, I got passionate about the people. The human capital group is great. They didn’t need another human capital expert. They needed a leader and somebody to help them figure out how to navigate the waters and make sure we’re doing all we can for all our employees.
Host: Was that some of the first things you guys worked on together?
Eugene Tu: It was. And I just wanted to add especially the graduate student fellowship program. I mean, I was personally a beneficiary of that. After I had been hired on full-time when I graduated, basically it was a choice at that point for me between going on to graduate school or taking the job, or position, here at Ames. One of the reasons I chose to take the position here at Ames was because I didn’t really have to choose. Ames offered me, when they hired me, they said, “We’ll put you in the graduate program here, and we will pay for you to get your Ph.D.” That’s essentially what happened.
Carol Carroll: You can’t beat that! Is there a better deal?
Host: I know, school paid for, and you have a job.
Eugene Tu: You had a job. Now, you still had to work and go to school. You had to do both, but since I was in a research field, basically the research I was doing as part of my job would count towards my dissertation work at school. It really came out really well.
Host: Didn’t you get to brag at Berkeley? “Yeah, I work at NASA.”
Eugene Tu: Well, at that point, since it was closer by and they had an aerospace engineering department, I ended up doing graduate work at Stanford, which, of course, is a rival of Berkeley.
Carol Carroll: He switched allegiances!
Eugene Tu: No, I never switched. My sports allegiance is, “Go Bears!” My sports allegiance is still to Cal. But I actually spent more time at Stanford. I ended up spending eight years there. It took a little longer to go through the master’s and Ph.D. program because I was working at the same time, but I wouldn’t trade that. The benefits of actually working while you’re doing your graduate studies and really understanding how what you’re learning in school applies to the real job world was something I would not redo any differently.
Host: It’s one thing to sit through classes, write papers or take tests. It’s quite another thing to work in an office.
Carol Carroll: And when you’re in class, you’re trying to figure out how this all applies to the real world. Well, there, he’s applying it to the real world.
Eugene Tu: And then bringing it back to some of the things Carol just mentioned, I think these are some of the key things that Ames, NASA, can draw people into wanting to take on a job here. It’s one of our recruiting tools, if you will, as well as one of our career development tools for our folks. That’s one of the things we do, that NASA does invest in, and we’re willing to invest in. Sometimes, we can’t compete with the salaries, just straight-up salaries in the Silicon Valley area, but we can instead really bring in the benefits of career development and, as Carol said, developing the workforce and the people, which are the most important asset.
Host: A thing that comes up frequently on the podcast is just how Ames has this array of core competencies. It’s got a whole bunch of different things and research. It dabbles in little things. It’s where those things cross-section, or cross-cutting, I guess – it’s just interesting nuggets where you’ll have the engineer, and then the scientist, and then the aeronautics expert, and the supercomputing expert. I guess at some centers where they focus on a smaller part, they maybe would never interact.
Carol Carroll: I think that’s one of the benefits. I think that’s one of the interesting things at Ames, is that because we are a smaller center and we are a research center, our engineers and scientists can get to know each other, our technologists can get to know each other. I think we can come up with creative solutions because of that intersection, because our people can randomly run into each other, work with each other on project teams, or happy hours, or whatever. I think we can cross those bridges quicker than you can at larger centers, where they might have 1,000 or 3,000 engineers.
Host: And you’re in a completely different building.
Carol Carroll: Or you might not ever see anybody other than your fellow engineers. I think that’s a real benefit of Ames.
Eugene Tu: I would add that, to me, it’s even more fundamental than that, because I think some of the biggest challenges, whether it be NASA mission challenges or just problems to be solved in the world, are going to be inherently multidisciplinary in the future. You see the universities going that way as well. While they have their traditional engineering departments and their biology departments and so forth, it’s those multidisciplinary fields and departments that really are gaining a lot of traction, whether they be in the bioengineering fields or whether they be in – my wife got a degree in medical physics, which was, again, two different fields put together.
I think a lot of the things that we as a center, with the diversity of the portfolio we have and the different disciplines we have, but as you say, the ability to try to link some of those together can really bring unique solutions.
Host: That’s the funny thing, because I didn’t know that she studied – was it biomedical?
Eugene Tu: Medical physics. It’s biophysics with a medical –
Host: For the folks who are listening and like, “Why is he so surprised?” I know she’s in the aeronautics group right now.
Eugene Tu: Right, she did her master’s work in psychology and human factors.
Host: Well, that’s one of the cool pluses, is that diversity of experience, so even if you studied one thing, you can hop around in different places. Carol, when I first met you, I knew you were dabbling in some form the human capital stuff, but I think you were the deputy director for the science.
Carol Carroll: Right.
Host: How was that as an engineer, but with all the scientists?
Carol Carroll: That was fascinating. I loved it. For most of my career, I was doing engineering design work, systems engineering, project management. And then I went to Headquarters. I was working in the office of space science, and I got hooked on the science that NASA does. I realized I wanted to come back, and as an engineer, I wanted to figure out how to enable science.
So I really got hooked on that. I came back. I was on the SOFIA Program for a few years, and then became the deputy director of science, and then worked in the ISS [International Space Station] office here at Ames to help enable and get biological science really going on space station. It’s just the science that we do is amazing, and engineering can enable that.
Host: This is a shout-out. One of our first episodes that we ever did was with Steve Smith, our resident astronaut.
Carol Carroll: Our local astronaut.
Host: You know, kind of helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope and other things.
Carol Carroll: Yeah, sort of. You know, a couple times!
Host: But I remember one of the first meetings I sat through was him going through a PowerPoint deck of 50 something experiments that Ames had been involved with and were all going on to the space station. He was completely mindboggling.
So you worked your way up. You’re all rock stars: the intern, and then the stellar employees, and then you get put in management positions. I’m curious, though: Now as the center director and the deputy center director, if you were to go back and talk to yourself when you first arrived, what kind of advice would you give yourself?
Eugene Tu: I think the advice I would give myself would be the same advice I give everyone and especially students when I talk to them now.
Host: That’s very kind of you.
Eugene Tu: It’s to really embrace the opportunities that come up even if they aren’t directly in your plan. When I went through school and got a position here at NASA, I always thought, at that time, that I would just be doing research my entire career, and maybe if I ended up retiring from NASA, at some point I would go into teaching. I always saw myself doing the academic research side of it, never really thought of myself as doing management or those types of things.
But it was the opportunities that came up that weren’t within my “master plan” that I took advantage of and changed the direction of where I was headed in my career. I think that’s probably the biggest single advice I’d give, is to have a plan but be willing to deviate from it, to go in different directions and to broaden yourself, because you never know what you might be working on in the future or what teams you might be leading. And so the broader your experience base, the more you’d be able to be effective in that kind of environment.
Carol Carroll: I’d add to that: Seek those opportunities. When I came to Ames, I was not a quality systems engineer. I was a design engineer. I didn’t know anything about wind tunnels. You’d think, “Well, why would you take that job?” And it was like, “Well, I wanted to learn.” So be open to new opportunities, because you have no idea where they might lead you.
The other thing is the networking and the people. Every job I’ve gotten, it’s because I knew someone that I had previously worked with. The old saying, “Don’t burn bridges,” it’s so true. But not only that, whatever job you’re in, just do your best so that you will leave it with a good reputation, a reputation of, “Oh, that person gets things done.” You’ve got a good reputation for that next opportunity, because you never know where it’ll come from.
Host: Well, you even think of the bucket sort of things that Ames does. Some of that interdisciplinary cross-cutting things, there may be entire fields of research and things that nobody has even thought of yet, that hasn’t even started. And then just by just that synergy of getting together, it’s not just in your individual lens. It’s something you haven’t even thought of.
Carol Carroll: Exactly.
Eugene Tu: Earlier today in a different meeting, we were just talking about astrobiology, a field that really didn’t exist maybe more than 20 years ago that Ames was one of the entities in the forefront of. It’s a field that’s inherently multidisciplinary. It could be planetary geology, chemistry, atmospheric sciences – many different areas. For example, it’s a field that didn’t really exist back in the day.
Host: I think exoplanets falls into that same thing. I remember reading some stuff before coming here, and how in the early days, it was almost fringe. People were very suspicious or skeptical of whether or not some of the validations were really accurate, until Bill Borucki came through. And now it’s huge.
Carol Carroll: And then Kepler, yeah.
Host: I would be remiss – you know, us being Ames Research Center – of talking a little bit about the center. We always kind of get to it, and we’ll talk about supercomputing, or stuff we’re doing in aeronautics, or aeroscience, or even exoplanets. It’s not often that I get my two bosses sitting here, so talk about the center as a whole for folks who are – you know, my mom who is in Utah or in Ohio, she has no idea. She knows there’s NASA. How do you explain to people, “This is where Ames fits in with the larger scope of the agency”?
Carol Carroll: I’ll let Eugene…
Host: I feel like you’re well-versed on your elevator pitch.
Eugene Tu: All right, I’ll start off. As I’ve told many people, if you want to describe Ames Research Center in an elevator, you better be going up to a very tall building. Because of the diversity of the work we have, it’s hard to cover in one short sentence.
But really what Ames is, is fundamentally an innovative research center that also looks to do development and operations in key areas, in some ways much differently than has been the traditional way. For example, our work in small satellites, or small sats, has been one of those areas. But Ames has had a long, rich history. It’s the second oldest center in the agency.
Carol Carroll: Going to be 80 next year.
Eugene Tu: Going to be 80 next year. It was formed in 1939, almost 20 years before NASA. It was part of the original NACA, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. So, of course, our early roots were in aeronautics, aerothermodynamics. This center did some of the very early pioneering work in looking at how to protect a spacecraft from entering an atmosphere, both in terms of its shape and the materials.
When we became part of NASA in the late ’50s, we got involved in science missions and space missions. Pioneer, Galileo, Viking were all missions that had strong ties to Ames. And then, remember, back in those days, Silicon Valley didn’t exist. There wasn’t much out here other than orchards.
Carol Carroll: It was all orchards and fields.
Eugene Tu: But, of course, we grew up with Silicon Valley over the last three or four decades, and so all the information sciences, information technologies, supercomputing, quantum computing, AI [artificial intelligence], autonomy… And so if you really look at that history over 80 years, it’s how we became such a diverse center in terms of the work we do here. But fundamentally, I think we want to bring innovative solutions – technology, science, engineering solutions – to some of NASA’s most challenging missions.
Carol Carroll: Couldn’t have said it better.
Host: Well, thinking about the broader set of NASA – I mean, because there’s other research centers – Glenn in Cleveland, Langley. For folks who are listening who may not be sure, how different centers work together, and especially at your level, your peers are the other center directors. Talk about how that is, working throughout the agency and all that stuff.
Carol Carroll: I think the four research centers all have their slightly different focus. Armstrong down in Southern California is the flight research center. They’re out there, and they get to do all the really cool work to test X-planes.
Host: What I recently learned, as a NASA employee for the first time going to Armstrong, they actually have you do a training where you watch a video about rattle snakes and turtles, because you are in the middle of the desert. And I never felt a sonic boom before, and it feels a lot like an earthquake.
Carol Carroll: The research NASA is doing is we’re trying to lower that sonic boom, so that we can enable transonic aircraft again. And then Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, they’re a research center also. Again, a very broad portfolio like Ames, with a focus on some things like power and propulsion. They’re really known for their expertise in power and propulsion.
And then Langley in Virginia, they were the original – they were the first NASA center. They were the mother center. And very similar – in fact, Ames grew out Langley. Langley was the first center. Ames was the second center. The very first people that started Ames came from Langley. They do aeronautics work just like we do. We collaborate with them on a lot of things – aeronautics work, entry systems work. They do Earth science, small missions for Earth science. We work closely with them.
Host: We did an episode a couple of months back with Jack Boyd.
Carol Carroll: Oh, so you heard all about the history.
Host: We heard all about the early history. I remember him referring to it as like, “They had this aeronautics center at Langley,” and around World War II, “It’d be really nice to have one a lot further away from the Germans.”
Eugene Tu: If I’m not mistaken, I think he often uses the term that it’s the “renegades” from Langley that came out and formed Ames. And we’ve kind of kept that culture ever since.
Host: That fits with the Bay Area.
Carol Carroll: That personality exists to this day.
Eugene Tu: If you also then think of the other NASA centers, that’s where we now work much closely with them, because they have some of the operational responsibilities. Human space flight centers like JSC [Johnson Space Center in Houston] and KSC [Kennedy Space Center in Florida], also Marshall Space Flight Center [in Alabama] that does the rockets and SLS [Space Launch System] right now, Stennis [Space Center in Mississippi] which does the testing, rocket engine testing. And so these are centers that we also work very closely with – and, of course, with JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], the one FFRDC [Federally Funded Research and Development Centers] that NASA has that does most of the planetary missions.
At one point in time, I think it was viewed that there were ten separate NASA centers, and they were doing their own thing. I think with our focus now, whether it be in space exploration, or whether it be in aeronautics, or whether it be in science missions, some of the biggest challenges that we want to tackle as an agency requires many of our centers to work much more closely together. And we’re doing so.
Host: In my head, it’s almost like we have the different personalities of the different centers, because the way research centers are set up – I just see Ames as like the scrappy, in-the-garage, doing the stuff that nobody has even thought of, where you get these huge benefits. But it’s stuff that – I mean. You really don’t need Northrup Grumman and Boeing to have a big contract to do small satellites. It’s a little bit smaller, but it’s a big bang for your buck out of that, I guess.
Eugene Tu: Right. That’s another way we like to describe ourselves. As a center, we’re innovative. We’ve got that entrepreneurial type of attitude. We are trying to be out there. Sometimes, we’re too far out there, and Washington DC pulls us back a little bit and reigns us in. But that’s part of the value I think we bring to the agency.
On top of that, underlying almost everything we do is a whole notion of partnerships and engaging with the commercial, with the industry, with academic institutions, with other government institutions and internationally, because in some ways, I like to describe where we are for space exploration as similar to where we were for aeronautics maybe 100 years ago.
It started out as a government-funded entity. The government became one of the biggest contractors or users, but the commercial sector was coming up. Now, of course, aviation, much of it is privately funded. That’s the way we’ll really expand space exploration, is to be some combination of commercial and private funding, and the government buying down the risks and doing the longer-term research and risk reduction activities.
Host: That’s fit in perfectly. For folks who may not know, we have Moffett Federal Airfield. We have NASA sitting there, but we also have the NASA Research Park, with a whole mix of companies, some big ones, small ones, startups, universities, tech companies. It’s this really cool mix. And now the US Geological Survey.
Eugene Tu: Yes, USGS is coming down here, and I think their first phase should be next year, with about half of their staff coming here. And then the plan is within, say, three years after that, the entire Menlo Park Science Center will move down here. Of course, a lot of people probably recognize the opportunity for NASA and USGS to collaborate on Earth science, but many folks might not realize that USGS did a lot of the early lunar geology research too, even back in the pre-Apollo days. We have a great opportunity to renew our collaboration as we’re returning to the Moon.
Carol Carroll: Yeah, tap into that expertise.
Host: The catchphrase we always use is “orbit-to-core,” from the orbit all the way down to the core of the Earth. There’s something special about going to the Space Bar and running into colleagues.
Carol Carroll: There’s something special about having a Space Bar.
Host: Yes, absolutely. For folks who are not sure, you’re missing out, a little cafeteria that we have that’s right next to where the hangar is.
Carol Carroll: Exactly.
Host: Before we wrap up, is there anything that you guys really want to talk about? We can talk about future stuff or things that you’re excited about. It can go wherever you want it to.
Carol Carroll: I’m excited about the future. There’s so many areas that it’s important for us to play in, because we really do bring solutions to missions and missions operations. Those partnerships that Eugene was talking about are really important. How can we not only bring the research that Ames is doing, but the research that Silicon Valley is doing, to tap into these really hard problems that NASA is trying to solve? Whether it’s the next missions, the exploration of the Moon, the new lunar plans that are being developed –we want to make sure we’re a strong part of that, and bringing our expertise, both science and mission development, to those new, exciting exploration plans. It’s an exciting time.
Eugene Tu: For me, looking to the future, I think it’s very exciting because we’ve got several key things. I think we’re on the cusp of really detecting life or past existence of life elsewhere for the first time. I think we’re also on the cusp of extending human presence beyond low-Earth orbit for longer periods of time, and maybe even on a permanent basis. And then here on Earth, we are having much greater understanding of the Earth, and its environment, and its future, but also revolutionizing the way we use our airspace.
If you think of all of those areas, all of those areas are areas that Ames has the ability, capability, and plans to make great contributions in. It’s going to be a very exciting time.
Host: We’ve been doing this podcast, this is the 100th. All the stuff Ames is doing, I remember early on, we were like, “Can we keep it up at once a week? Do we have enough content to talk about?”
Carol Carroll: And what do you think, Matt? Do we have enough content here at Ames for a once-a-week podcast? What do you think?
Host: I haven’t even gotten into reruns – having guests return. We’ve had one guest return. Eugene, as you were just talking about the future, we didn’t even talk about drones. We didn’t talk about air traffic management and all of that stuff. I’ve noticed after doing 100 of these that we’re not even close to running out of content. We could probably even do more than once a week and still not even come close to running out.
Eugene Tu: Well, maybe you’ll have to have us back before the 200th, then.
Host: Exactly.
Carol Carroll: That sounds good.
Host: For the folks who are listening, for the audio version, as we get prepped and ready to move into the video version of this – and Eugene tested it out. Back in January, we did a video version of the podcast, where we had guests come in, and they showed different video stuff. We’re looking to start that coming up into the late summer, early fall. We’ll have to get you guys on that one, so then they can see your sunshiny faces.
Eugene Tu: In the brand new studio.
Host: In the new brand new studio!
Eugene Tu: We’ll look forward to that.
Host: Excellent. So for folks who are listening, we are at @NASAAmes on Facebook and Twitter, and all the major social media. We are using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. If you have any questions or comments for Eugene and Carol, you can just send them on over our way and we’ll get back to you. Thank you so much for coming, guys. Happy 100th!
Carol Carroll: All right, thank you.
Eugene Tu: Thank you, my pleasure.
Host:You’ve been listening to the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast. Remember we are a NASA podcast, but we aren’t the only NASA podcast, so don’t forget to check out our friends at “Houston We Have a Podcast,” and there’s also “Gravity Assist” and “This Week at NASA.” If you’re a music fan, don’t forget to check out “Third Rock Radio.” The best way to capture all of the content is to subscribe to our omnibus RSS feed called “NASACasts” or visit the NASA app on iOS, Android or anywhere you find your apps.
End