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Ali Guarneros Luna Talks About Engineering a New Path to Space

Season 1Mar 17, 2017

A conversation with Ali Guarneros Luna, NASA Engineer and Deputy Project Manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The cover art display for the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast.

A conversation with Ali Guarneros Luna, NASA Engineer and Deputy Project Manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. For more information on small satellites at Ames, visit https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/engineering/smallsat

Transcript

Matthew C. Buffington (Host): You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 30. In the spirit of Silicon Valley, NASA Ames is rethinking space with smaller, cheaper and faster missions using off-the-shelf technology. We discuss various small satellite projects with today’s guest, NASA engineer Ali Guarneros Luna. Ali has a fascinating personal story of how she worked her way through school and into NASA. We also discuss her early work on developing safety systems for small satellites and her current work testing exo-brake technology to better control small satellites while in orbit. So, here is our conversation with Ali Guarneros Luna.

[Music]

Host: Tell us a little bit about yourself, what brought you to NASA, and how did you end up in Silicon Valley?

Ali Guarneros Luna: I was born in Mexico. My mother was born there. But her mother was an American from Houston, Texas. So when she was in Mexico and I was growing up my father actually left the house. She was a single mother with four children. And we had the earthquake in Mexico in 1996. So she found herself by herself with four children.

And I was the oldest one. So my mother having the opportunity to live here, she thought that coming to the United States would be the best opportunity to raise her children as a single mother. She was also an uneducated person. So she only was able to finish 6th grade. So she had no education. So having been in Mexico with four children, having experienced that earthquake, it was devastating. A lot of people died. A lot of my classmates died. For me, just in my experience, it changed completely the scope of what life was at that time. I was about 12 years old, I want to say. So it definitely gave me a different perspective of what life meant at that young age.

So we came to the United States. I was the oldest one. My mother finds jobs here and there. I grew up. We went to Los Angeles for six months. And then we moved to Milpitas and then to San Jose. We just stayed in San Jose because my mother was able to find a stable job, and I was able to go to school and everything. So being a student and my mother being the one that was —

Host: The provider.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Right. I didn’t understand what was going on. So when I graduated and I wanted to go to university, there were all these things that they require you to have. And I was like, I don’t know if I — am I going to pursue an education? I have no idea. So I started going to San Jose City College. In my mind I never thought about where I was going to go, what career I was going to take, what education do I want. It was just about the opportunity that presented in front of me. So I went into college, and I decided I wanted to get a degree and then transfer maybe to the university.

So I was there for about two years. Then I drop out. I start work. I had four kids. Then when my youngest one was about 2 years old, I decided to back and pursue my degree. So I went back to school. And then I ended up going to college and then transferred to the university, San Jose State, got my bachelor’s degree in aerospace. It was just an opportunity because when I transferred from San Jose City College to San Jose State, obviously I didn’t know the career I was going to take.

It was not in my plan. I just wanted to have a diploma. When I transferred to San Jose State, they said there’s aerospace engineering. I thought, “Oh. Well, I should pursue that.”

Host: So going into college did you always want to do something with aerospace or even NASA? Did you think about that as kid growing up? That was always in your head? Or was it just like, “I need to get a degree,” so you just picked aerospace?

Ali Guarneros Luna: No, actually when I was in Mexico growing up, after school I would come home and read encyclopedias.

Host: Really?

Ali Guarneros Luna: My mother loved encyclopedias. The guy would come to the house, and he would know that my mother would buy any encyclopedia the guy had. So my mother had so many. So after I would come home and look at encyclopedias and read about different things. One of the things that impacted me and kind of stayed with me was about the shuttle and the people who were building it, design and all this stuff.

So I read about it. And aerospace engineers were the ones who were building it. I fell in love with it. I was like, “I want to be in aerospace.” So when I was 7 or 6 years old I told my family like I wanted to be an aerospace engineer without thinking what it was. So I already knew that was the career I wanted to pursue.

Host: I love it because most people you see, “I want to be an astronaut. I want to go into space.” And you’re like, “No, I want to build the machine that takes them to space.” It’s a whole different aspect.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Totally. So when I transferred from college to San Jose State, one of the careers that was possible for me to go into was engineering in aerospace, I was like, “I’m doing this. I’m going for that.”

Host: Did you always have a passion for STEM stuff, of like math and…

Ali Guarneros Luna: My upbringing was different, I want to say, from most girls because I was never told that I had to fit certain roles.

Host: “This is your job. This is what girls do.” You never had that.

Ali Guarneros Luna: No, I never. I guess it was because I was the oldest one of four.

Host: So you kind of had to step up.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. And the two youngest ones were boys. And I was a hyperactive child. So I always was the one that was getting my brothers into trouble or whatever we were doing I was the leader and they follow. So I never had that actually being a situation where I felt that I was not good enough in math or science. Because I was —

Host: You had to be the boss.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah.

Host: You were already a project manager at 12.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Probably yes. And my brothers were my followers. And my neighbors. So it just happens that in that environment, even though I was only one of two girls within a bunch of young kids, mostly boys, I was doing what I wanted to do. And it was very exciting. So I never really had that. So with me going into aerospace engineering, I think it was an easy thing.

Host: You just kind of moved on over.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. It was just like, yeah, this is exactly what I want to do.

Host: Sometimes if you come over to this country — you’d suffered something traumatic like an earthquake. You’re the oldest. You have younger siblings. So often it’s easy to get pulled into the, man, I just got to work. I just got to get a job.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah.

Host: But it seemed like you were always focused on, “No, I’m going to go to school.”

Ali Guarneros Luna: When I turned 18, given the fact I was the oldest one, I needed to help my mother with my brothers. So I stepped into the role of my father. So I was going to school, and I was going to work full-time —

Host: Had to do it all.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. So within six months of working full-time, my mother lost her job. So I became the one that supported the whole family.

Host: Oh, wow.

Ali Guarneros Luna: And I did it for about five years. It was tough because being so young and understand that my mother needed my support. And my brothers, being they were looking up to me — it’s something that’s heavy when you’re so young. You don’t understand. But when I was growing up, I always moved on the opportunities that presented in front of me, and I did what I needed to do without looking back.

Host: Awesome. So you go to school. You go to university. You have your aerospace engineering degree. At what point did that leverage into NASA?

Ali Guarneros Luna: Actually I never thought that I was going to go and work for the sector because the only thing I wanted to have was a degree. The reason why was because when I had my youngest child, I find out that my two middle ones were special needs children. So doing my own research it was clear to me that having a parent that had a degree, that had a career, your children will have a much better life than children that didn’t have a parent that had a stable job.

So for me that was the main goal, to have a degree, that I can work in a stable job. But it was just the opportunity that when I went to school there was aerospace engineering. I can just get into that. So for me, when I graduated from aerospace engineering with my bachelor’s degree, I never thought I was going to come to NASA and work here. I always thought I was going to work in Loral, maybe Lockheed Martin, or some other sector. I don’t know.

But it just happened that my professors at San Jose State told me that there were some internships in this and I should apply. So following his advice I went and applied without thinking that I was ever going to come and work for NASA. So I was a single mother. Found myself again with four children, single mother. I did have a bachelor’s degree, but I was old. I was not a young person.

So I really didn’t think that I was going to get an internship. But the chief of technologists here at NASA Ames, contacted me and said, “Yes, can we offer you the internship?” So the internship was only going to be for three months, and I had to drop one of my jobs because I actually worked two jobs and then I went to school —

Host: And the internship?

Ali Guarneros Luna: And the internship. Because of the internship I have to leave one job and then be here. I knew it was only for three months, but the opportunity was —

Host: Too much to pass it up.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes. The opportunity’s there. So I took it. And then I stayed. They extended my internship. And then I became a contractor. And then it was important to apply for a civil servant. And I became a civil servant. So it was just the opportunity presented itself, and I took it without even thinking about it.

Host: When you started you were working on some safety aspects?

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. Safety mission assurance. Again, it was not something I expected to do. It just happened. So when I started for this small set of projected, specifically the TechEdSat, you’re going through the space station. And you’re dealing with humans inside. So everything you put inside the space station, you have to be careful of what you put in there and understand what are the consequences if something goes wrong.

So I was one of the group of engineers who started that process and started learning and setting it up for the following satellites that are going to be deployed from the space station. So I ended up doing all the safety data package, which is like documentation about your hardware that you put into space where you analyze all the hazards that you present to the space station or to the astronauts and then how are you going to control them and how are you going to verify them. So I was doing that. I became so good that I ended up doing every single one from the one first one to now, right?

Host: You do it right once, then they keep coming back.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes.

Host: This is my job now.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes. I was an engineer. I was part of the engineer group like two years ago. But there was an opening in safety mission assurance. Just for me to learn, I just say, “Why not? Let me go in there.” So when you’re an engineer and you go to school, nobody teaches you anything about that. You learn it on the job.

Host: The safety stuff. You’re busy trying to get things to work, not necessarily —

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes, not worried about the safety because you’re just designing and building.

Host: But it’s huge because if you send something up into the space station and things go wrong, it didn’t really work. Even if it did the scientific thing you wanted it to do. If it’s causing other problems. The definition of “working” is a little bit…

Ali Guarneros Luna: Exactly. So because of that, I decided to just give it a try in safety and see what’s in there that I can learn. Because it’s all about learning, right? One of the things I learned in this job is that it doesn’t matter how old you are, how many degrees you have, you still continue and will learn stuff. New things. So I decided to go there. And I’ve been in that position for about two years almost.

Host: You mentioned the small satellites. Normally you don’t think of safety around small satellites because the whole thing with small sats is they’re typically cheaper, you can turn them around faster, off-the-shelf products, get them out. Well, how does safety play into that?

Ali Guarneros Luna: Well, it is true what you’re saying. They’re supposed to easy to build up, and you just integrate them into the rocket and deploy them, right? That was the concept and idea. But when we moved from the rockets, just to be integrating into the rocket, that it will be into an orbit, it is actually mission success what you’re looking for, that quality that you’re actually trying to implement the satellite to make sure that it actually works.

You’re not really interfacing with safety. But when you take the product, the CubeSat, from the rocket to the space station and you put it inside, then safety becomes a big deal.

Host: Oh, yes. Because now you’re playing with a sensitive environment.

Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right.

Host: And astronauts.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes. So you have to control. And you have to make sure that everything you put inside a space station where the humans are, it is actually controlled and verified.

Host: And they have to handle these things to put them in to get launched.

Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right. Actually it hasn’t changed that much from what you integrate to a rocket to what you integrate into a space station. But because there is a human that actually handles the deployer inside the space station, something had to happen – where the door comes out and the satellite shoots out – inside the space station. It becomes a big issue.

Even though that’s not what you design or intend, you still need to count it as a risk. And you have to control that risk.

Host: As you’re building, designing some of these systems, what are some of the challenges that puts in?

Ali Guarneros Luna: Well, the space station is a big space vehicle that carries humans. It has very huge bureaucratic requirements.

Host: Yeah, of course. Checklists, clearances.

Ali Guarneros Luna: You have to verify everything. There’s a lot of oversight because it’s a big thing that we put up there, and it costs a lot of money. Small satellites, they’re obvious, kind of work, like, that somebody puts in together. You can break it, and you can build another one right away. So having completely two different scopes of requirement. One, you just care about the functionality.

The other one is make sure that you don’t cause any problems with the space station. So to marry those things, it was hard at the beginning because there was nothing in place when I became an engineer and I was the engineer for the first CubeSat deployed from the space station. There was nothing in place. I had to set the standards for —

Host: You had to invent the standard operating procedures.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes, I had to come up with the rationale of why do we want to do this and why do we not want to do that. So it is a compromise between the mission assurance and the risk that you present to the space station.

Host: It’s a funny thing about engineering, when you’re put in certain parameters, in restrictions — here, try to accomplish what a small sat needs to do, but here’s all these safety requirements you are adding on top of it — you can come up with different innovations, different ideas that you probably never would have thought about on your own. But once you have these restrictions, you have to puzzle-solve.

Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right.

Host: So what are some new innovations or engineering things that you’ve had to implement?

Ali Guarneros Luna: In the beginning it was completely try this, try that, try to see if you satisfy the safety engineers in the space station. So one example I can think of is the ALI switch, which is the Auxiliary Lateral Inhibit switch. So it’s named after me.

Host: It’s named ALI. How fortuitous.

Ali Guarneros Luna: So we were building this CubeSat. The space station was like we need to make sure that when you are inside the space station you don’t get turned on and start emitting from the radios that you have. We have three radios. And they were really worried because even though it was a one-unit cube sat – one unit is 10 by 10 by 10. So 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters.

They were worried that the three radios that we have, something might happen inside the space station or the satellite turns on, we will be radiating an interference with the communications to ground. So you’re talking about the life of the astronaut, and having constant communication with ground is very important. So we had two inhibits in the foot switches in the frame.

And they were going to be against the plate of the deployer. So you shouldn’t be turned on unless you get ejected from the deployer. So they were like, that is not sufficient because the frequency that you have in your CubeSat is too high, and we need to have a third inhibit. So where do you put a third inhibit in a 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter CubeSat, right? After you had already built it. Because we had already built it.

So to satisfy that requirement we ended up thinking about — we spent two days thinking between all the engineers and myself —

Host: Trying to figure it out.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. Where do we want to put the third inhibit? Do we want to put it in another foot? Do we want to put it on the opposite side of the other inhibits? Where? So from my experience of building amateur rockets – because I usually do it in the summer, and I go to Nevada and launch amateur rockets. Sometimes you have switches that have leverage. So they’re compressed.

And when you have a payload inside the rocket and they come out, the leverage, it gets lifted and then the payload turns on.

Host: So the act of lifting flips the switch.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. So I was like, well, we can do something like that. But we need a roller because what happened on the frame of the deployer, you have to be very smooth. You don’t want to scrape the deployer. So it has to be smooth. So I was like, well, we can have the same switch but with a roller.

Host: So it’s smoother, not friction.

Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right. And not to scrape. So we ended up finding one. Then we put it on the side of the frame in one of them. Then I was just like, well, we can do it, right? So we implement it. So my friends the next day, we came around to meet and talk about the inhibit, they came up with that acronym. The Auxiliary Lateral Inhibit — to name it after me.

Host: Nice.

Ali Guarneros Luna: And that’s what we’ve been using ever since actually.

Host: That’s awesome. So your namesake.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. So that’s one of the things that I found it very interesting that you wouldn’t think about it, but it just happens that we needed to have it.

Host: You just figure it out, find a way to make it work. So what kind of stuff are you working on, are you looking forward to, coming up?

Ali Guarneros Luna: Coming up, we’re having another satellite, which is TechEdSat 5, being deployed from the space station. And it’s going to be the first satellite that is going to be controlled to the orbit. Because it has an exo-brake, which is a cross parachute we can rig up. And it has a winch. We’re going to control it from the ground. Actually we’re going to control the winch to make sure that we can put in the two wires that are connected to the exo-brake.

So when we are in a certain orbit or altitude we can change the shape of the exo-brake and guide the CubeSat to reenter in the specific area that we want. Not survive, but just reentry.

Host: And that’s important because these are small 10 by 10 by 10 things. Normally they burn up in the atmosphere —

Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right.

Host: — when they’re done doing their job in orbit they fall down. They burn up. But you want it to survive the reentry. So you’re using this exo-brake to —

Ali Guarneros Luna: Well, yes. The exo-brake is more to guide the CubeSat to enter a specific area. If you’re shooting at something and aiming at a specific area – so the exo-brake will give you that capability. Usually when CubeSats are in orbit, they just go around the Earth. They do whatever they need to do, whatever experiment it is. Then as they come close to Earth’s altitude, they will burn in.

It could be anywhere. But what we’re trying to do is deploy something from the space station. Then as it’s coming down and going around the Earth, actually give it a route where to enter.

Host: Where you want to tell it — where you can control it —

Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes. Because that whole aspect to try to maneuver the cube sat, the next step for us is to build something a little bit bigger and actually be able to survive the reentry as we try to guide it —

Host: First figure out how to steer it. And then figure out how to make it survive.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Survive. Yeah. And reentry.

Host: Cool. So on our show notes for the podcast we’ll put in a link to the small sats and the webpage so anybody who’s interested can go and look up all the information, see some of the cool stuff you’re working on. We are on Twitter @NASAAmes. We’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. So if anybody has any questions for Ali about joining NASA, exo-brakes, small sats, you can go ahead and hit her up on those questions there. Thank you so much for coming over.

Ali Guarneros Luna: Oh, thank you for inviting me. It was my pleasure.

[End]