Joseph Stalin

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Engineers draw the cutting edge in every capacity for NASA, from avionics to electronics, software to rocketry. Similarly, to explain the things and places it explores, NASA enlists scientists from a multitude of specialties within the fields of astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, materials science and physics. As NASA has extended its presence on the final frontier, they have defined new fields and expanded knowledge and technology on almost every front. One in every 1,000 patents issued by United States Patent and Trade Organization has gone to scientists or engineers working on NASA projects and tens of thousands of scientific studies from the agency’s missions have been published in leading journals worldwide.

If your image of a NASA engineer or scientist is that of a white male in a crisp white shirt with black clip-on tie and pocket protector, think again. NASA has evolved and so has it workforce. Drawing on the talents of individuals from all nationalities and cultural backgrounds, NASA is looking to acquire the best of what humanity has to offer.

No one builds a rocket or makes a discovery in space alone. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people may be involved in a single project. For a mission to succeed, NASA scientists and engineers must share certain qualities despite their inherent differences, “qualities like patience, dedication, optimism, faith in colleagues, a willingness to take informed risks, and the capacity to be a team player,” according to former Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Director Edward C. Stone, also the Voyager project scientist. Only together can scientists and engineers do the work of NASA and it has been that way from the start.

While engineering – building the rockets and spacecraft and getting them out to their destinations in working order – was clearly the driving force of NASA in the early years, science was always an integral part of the space program. Even Sputnik was the U.S.S.R.’s contribution to a cooperative global science project called International Geophysical Year 1957-’58, at least officially. Its beep-beep-beep startled the world and scored the U.S.S.R. an unprecedented achievement. But the United States response – Explorer 1 – flew higher and returned textbook-changing knowledge. It was engineering and science together that demonstrated American capabilities and put the U.S. on the space map. Thousands of inspiring stories involving extraordinary scientists and engineers have been lived and told in NASA’s first 50 years. Only a few are mentioned here.

Rocket Science

When the United States announced in September 1955 that it would produce the first artificial satellite for the International Geophysical Year project, James Van Allen, head of the University of Iowa’s physics department, began building an instrument to measure radiation in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Explorer 1 lifted off on Jan. 31, 1958, and his cosmic ray detector was onboard “by virtue of preparedness and good fortune,” as he often recalled. The data revealed a donut-shaped ring of charged particle radiation trapped by Earth’s magnetic field surrounding the planet. It was the first major discovery of the Space Age.

In demonstrating the possibilities for the world, Explorer I made space a race. It also laid the initial groundwork for NASA’s exploration of the moon and planets. “The event was symbolic of the mixing process between engineering and science, between the world and the research laboratory … it had mixed rocket technology with the universe, and reduced astronautics to practice at last,” then-JPL Director William Pickering reflected years later.

Van Allen and colleagues discovered a second ring of radiation on another flight in December 1958. The two rings became known internationally as the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Van Allen became the icon of a space scientist. He also went on to be one of the most influential people at NASA, sending instruments on more than 25 missions from the moon to Neptune, and serving as a member of the powerful Space Science Board that recommends how science projects should be chosen.

Pay it foward

President John F. Kennedy’s moon proclamation in May 1961 set NASA on a bold and daring adventure. Leadership was critical. Aeronautical engineer and aviation pioneer Robert "Bob" Rowe Gilruth, the appointed director of the Manned Spacecraft Center from Mercury through Apollo, came to the agency from NACA’s Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, where he had already laid the groundwork for the country’s first launch of humans into space. “There were many heroes during the early days of the space program, but Bob Gilruth was the most respected of them all and particularly by those who knew what it took to reach the goals that were established,” noted former Johnson Space Center Director Christopher Kraft, Jr., a longtime associate and friend, on Gilruth’s passing in August 2000.

At NASA, Gilruth fostered a work environment that encouraged independent thinking, empowering the engineers and scientists to achieve the technological breakthroughs the agency needed to accomplish Kennedy’s goal. “Gilruth allowed the space program to happen,” said Kraft, who had first worked for Gilruth at NACA before being selected as one of the original members of the Space Task Group. “He shaped my mind by letting me do what I thought was the right thing to do and encouraging me to go further,” Kraft said. “He had confidence that I could do the job, then did whatever he could to promote my ideas and at the same time gave me the tools and the responsibility to get the job done -- and the authority to get it done. It meant we took the hits as well as the glory.”

For Kraft, it was quite a job: helping develop basic mission and flight control techniques, serving as deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, flight director for the mission that sent America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, on his sub-orbital flight in the Freedom 7, as well as all the subsequent Mercury missions and some Gemini missions. Later, he was appointed director of Flight Operations and also oversaw the design and implementation of the Mission Control Center. “Gilruth instilled that approach in every aspect of the program. He never wanted to overshadow anyone and always, always gave credit where it was due.”

In 1972, Gilruth retired and Kraft was asked to follow in his footsteps. He had already followed his approach. “I brought on the best people I could and let them do the job. I’m very proud of the people I chose,” summed up Kraft. “They made the program happen.”

No Fear

At the start of the Apollo program, the onboard flight software needed to land on the moon didn’t exist. Computer science wasn’t in any college curriculum. NASA turned to mathematician Margaret Hamilton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pioneer and direct the effort. With her colleagues, she developed the building blocks for modern “software engineering,” a term Hamilton coined. What later became the foundations for her Universal Systems Language (001AXES) and Development Before the Fact (DBTF) formal systems theory, allowed the team to create what she called ultra-reliable software for the moon trip. In addition to creating the concept of priority displays, where the software in an emergency could interrupt the astronauts so they could reconfigure in realtime, Hamilton established hard requirements on the engineering of all components and subsystems, insisted on debugging all component and testing everything before assembly, then simulated every conceivable situation at the systems level to identify potential problems before releasing the code.

“There was no second chance. We all knew that,” Hamilton said. “We took our work very seriously, but we were young, many of us in our 20s. Coming up with new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.” Hamilton’s integrity and ability to balance fearlessness with attention to detail may have ensured Apollo 11’s success.

On July 20, 1969, three minutes before the Eagle landed, the ultra-reliable software overrode a manual command because of a faulty operations script. If the software had not functioned, the moon landing might not have happened. Instead, Neil Armstrong took that “giant leap” for all humankind. Remarkably, no “bug” occurred in the software during any crewed Apollo mission.

Fly me to the moon

Although the Space Race was mostly about beating the Russians and achieving the milestone of landing on the moon, there were forward-thinking scientists who saw the opportunity – and the future. Geologist-astronomer Eugene “Gene” Shoemaker, of the U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) in Flagstaff, Ariz., anticipated years before Apollo how geologic studies would expand as humanity ventured out to other planets and set out to be the first geologist to walk on the moon. A diagnosis of Addison’s disease soon clipped his wings. Instead of taking that walk himself, Shoemaker prepared others and encouraged NASA to make geology a part of Apollo. As he shifted goals, he established the field of astrogeology, studying planets from telescopic and spacecraft imagery. He also organized the geologic tasks planned for the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the moon, and gave crash courses to the Apollo crews training for the mission he would forever long to fly.

In December 1972, Jack Schmitt, of the U.S.G.S. Astrogeology Center that Shoemaker created, became the first and so far only Ph.D. geologist to walk on the moon. While he was realizing Shoemaker’s dream during the Apollo 17 mission, Shoemaker was by Walter Cronkite’s side, giving geologic commentary for CBS News. The walk on the moon would be Shoemaker’s greatest unfulfilled dream. But his story doesn’t end there.

Known for loving life and knowledge even more, Shoemaker, who co-discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993, became a revered legend in his own time and among planetary science’s first royalty. He was beloved for his “hearty body-quaking laugh that bounded its happy way across a room,” as his former student, friend and colleague Carolyn Porco described it. Then, in July 1997, his illustrious life came to a sudden, tragic end in a car accident in Australia. Though deeply saddened, an inspired and determined Porco, now leader of the Cassini Spacecraft Imaging Science Team, initiated Shoemaker’s final mission. On July 31, 1999, 30 years to the month after humans first set foot on the moon, the Lunar Prospector deposited a polycarbonate capsule containing some of Shoemaker’s ashes on the surface of the moon’s south polar region. “The fulfillment of one man’s dreams and the final episode of his inspirational life met on impact,” Porco announced later in a heartfelt tribute in Astronomy magazine (February 2000). To date, Shoemaker is the only human to have been “interred” on another celestial body.

Spacecraft Troopers

When Pickering and his JPL team first set their sights on planetary exploration, nobody had ever built a spacecraft to another planet. NASA’s order was astronomically tall: design, build, fly, and operate robot spacecraft – the very first spacecraft – capable of surviving for a long time over great distances in space to reach Venus or Mars, find a way for it to study the planet with onboard scientific instruments, then get the data back to Earth.

In 1959, the NASA/JPL’s Chief of Mechanical Engineering John Small assigned John R. Casani to lead a team of young engineers that included Marc Comuntzis, Walter Downhower and James Burke to build a “planetary machine,” as Pickering first described it. “In the beginning, it was all about learning how to build systems that could be flown, operated successfully in space and be used for science,” recalled Casani, who arrived at JPL in 1956.

Perhaps most significantly, the team deemed it necessary to have complete control of the spacecraft for flights to the planets, in all three axes – roll, yaw, and pitch – instead of it stabilizing it by spinning like Explorer. The three-axis stabilization design would allow for more precise pointing of the science instruments and antenna, as well as maximize solar power collection and thermal control. Flight trajectory would be “tweaked” by igniting an onboard rocket in a midcourse maneuver, with a small rocket available to compensate for minor guidance errors on launch. From their huddles, NASA’s first spacecraft emerged.

“The very first spacecraft to go to the moon was Ranger,” Casani noted. Although the early Rangers failed, the first two because of rocket issues, every loss bestowed the engineers with necessary lessons and by the end of the project in 1965 the mission had returned thousands of highly informative images in plenty of time for the piloted missions to come. Before that, however, Casani and his team moved on to advance the work with Mariner, the first spacecraft bound for Venus and Mars.

Mounting a planetary mission took a colossal effort on the part of an enormous number of people. First, the spacecraft had to be designed and configured. Having directed the design teams, Casani not only helped architect these robot explorers but knew more about the parts of what they were building than anyone, pioneering the role of the missions’ system engineer, the one responsible for the overall “blueprint.”

Mechanical engineers Marc Comuntizis and Walter Downhower, along with John H. Gerpheide, and Bill Layman, designed the octagonal shape and magnesium frame structure of the Rangers and the 9.5-foot-tall Mariner, determining where everything went. Meanwhile, electronic engineers Steve Szirmay and Ted Kopf advanced avionics technology as they worked on the electronics for operating the spacecraft and its subsystems, creating a system of digital circuits and switches so it could maintain balance and orientation in space. Another team of electronic engineers, including Tom Gavin, William “Bill” Shipley, Larry Wright and Tom Gindorf, developed the fundamentals of “armoring” a spacecraft so it could survive the harshness of space, pioneering long life design and enabling the vast majority of NASA’s robot emissaries to live longer and prosper.

Since interplanetary spacecraft travel such great distances, they had to make adjustments along the way. Electrical engineers Walt Brown, Wayne Kohl and Ed Greenberg developed the fundamentals of spacecraft command and data handling by putting together an electronic system to take in telemetry and commands from Earth, prepare data for transmission back, process information from all subsystems and payloads, carry out commanded maneuvers and manage the collection of solar power and charging of the batteries, among other things.

Given the route to Mars or Venus had never been charted, NASA’s engineers and rocket scientists also had to figure out how interplanetary spacecraft would move through space. “Up to then, rocket propulsion was a controlled explosion,” Casani explained. “What we needed for spacecraft were systems that could operate reliably for years in a much different environment.” JPL’s propulsion engineers Duane Dipprey and Dave Evans literally transformed basic rocket technology into low thrust-level, long duration, highly reliable restartable systems, ironing out material compatibility issues and other things that were just not part of the existing rocket technology.

The weight of fuel makes rocketing directly to another other planet besides the moon prohibitive; therefore, the engineers knew that planetary spacecraft would have to rely on a combination of solar cells and batteries for power in space. Terry Koerner and Joe Savino designed the first schemes for power generation, distribution and management, enabling the necessary automatic shift from solar power to batteries and back again even as the power source, the sunlight, changed as the attitude of the spacecraft changed or when it moved into shadowed areas.

Another challenge for planetary missions was getting right with celestial mechanics, so that a spacecraft would rendezvous with its target at the correct time and place. Based on fundamentals developed by electrical engineer and mathematician Clarence R. (John) Gates, engineers Charles Kohlhase, Norman R. Haynes, Vic Clarke, John Beckman, and William Melbourne defined planetary mission design and space navigation. Also, to get the spacecraft to its destination, it takes more than knowing where the planets are. “You have to consider everything, from the launch vehicle to scientific instruments and their objectives, how steady the spacecraft has to be to hold the cameras, what light levels are out there, how we would use gravity assist, and what requirements every element places on the others, everything,” Kohlhase pointed out.

Most planetary missions launch on one-way trips, so telecommunications and tracking were obviously mission critical. In 1958, Pickering brought in a former student, electrical engineer Eberhardt Rechtin to develop spacecraft telecommunications. Beyond grasping complex systems, Rechtin had a knack for coming up with ingenious solutions to technical problems. The earliest space missions featured their own tracking and data acquisition systems, but it made much more sense if ground facilities could perform the functions for all projects. Moreover, the single station approach in use in the early 1960s to track satellites couldn’t monitor the spacecraft all the time.

Rechtin proposed a network of receivers in select locations around the globe which comprised a Deep Space Instrumentation Facility. With his principal system designer, Walter Victor, and a small team of engineers, Rechtin established three stations approximately 120 degrees longitude apart so one would always be in view of any spacecraft. One was placed north of Barstow, Calif.; another near Woomera, Australia; the third near Johannesburg, South Africa. Since the ground receivers would need large apertures and be highly directional to pick up the extremely weak signals coming from distant locales in space, William Merrick and Robertson Stevens borrowed an antenna design from radio astronomers and fashioned a 85-foot-diameter parabolic dish for the ground, while Lee Randolf and system engineer Sam Zingales worked on the redesign of the receivers to go inside spacecraft. Thus the Deep Space Network was born.

Pulling the parts of a planetary mission together took serious management, structure and discipline. At JPL, Jack James and Harris “Bud” Schurmeier literally wrote NASA’s first Project Management Manual. “Jack James invented project management as practiced at JPL and set the foundation for all the projects that followed the first two Mariner missions and Bud Schurmeier came in and really refined what James put in place,” said Casani, who later followed in their footsteps. Known around the lab as an “organizing genius,” James established an overall mission structure that included milestones, rigorous status monitoring and change control, a system wherein “freezes” were set on every part and the spacecraft itself, as well as weekly project meetings, setting the tone for effective communication.

“A key thing was putting together the project team, selecting the people, then respecting their knowledge and their capability, communicating with them and making sure they had respect for you as the guy making the decisions,” said Schurmeier, whose leadership skills were recognized by Pickering early on when he assigned the young aeronautical engineer the task of developing the lab’s systems division and, later, management of Ranger. Importantly, the discipline started at the top with project mangers assuming full responsibility. “The buck always stopped,” he said, “with me.”

On Dec. 14, 1962, Mariner 2 flew by Venus and into history books. It was the world’s first successful mission to another planet and the country’s first major space exploration achievement. It also returned the first data on the planet’s atmosphere and mass to the team’s scientists, which included a young astronomer named Carl Sagan. Less than three years later, on July 14, 1965, with James and Casani at the helm, as manager and system engineer, respectively, Mariner 4 – the NASA/JPL team’s “second generation spacecraft” -- flew by Mars and returned the first close-up photographs of another planet ever taken.

Following a string of successes, the planetary science community set its sites on the outer solar system and a celestial event that only occurs once every 176 years. In this rare event, the planets align, presenting a configuration that would allow spacecraft to travel efficiently from one to another. A Grand Tour was proposed to send four specially designed spacecraft to all four outer planets in only 12 years. Congress, however, cancelled it. “We just couldn’t let this opportunity slip by,” remembered Bruce C. Murray, then-JPL director, now professor emeritus of geology at Caltech. “As former NASA Administrator Tom Paine used to say: ‘The last time this alignment happened was when Thomas Jefferson was president. And he blew it.’ We weren’t going to.”

“We came up with a scaled-down version based on Mariner technology that we initially called Mariner Jupiter Saturn ‘77, or MJS77, and later renamed it Voyager,” said Schurmeier, the mission’s first project manager. “The most striking thing about Voyager was the timing – and not just the alignment of the planets. By that point, we had worked enough on these missions and we knew how to build the spacecraft, how to navigate, and the scientists knew how to make the right instruments. If it had been a few years later, politics wouldn’t have permitted it because of the space shuttle, any earlier and we wouldn’t have been ready.”

“Voyager was a third generation spacecraft with a specific design objective of going beyond Saturn and that was a big step up from Mariner,” added Casani, who took over project management from Schurmeier in 1975. “We had never built anything with that kind of longevity before.” To meet the challenge, they radiation-hardened all components, adopted a design policy that no single part failure could cause loss of mission, then implemented it with complete block redundancy of engineering systems, and enabled autonomous onboard fault detection and recovery.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched separately in the summer of 1977 and sailed off to the outer planets. Between 1979 and 1989 they flew by Jupiter and Saturn, then went on to Uranus and Neptune. For the scientists, it was an embarrassing challenge of riches. “As a scientist, you have most to learn when you see things you had not expected to see and with Voyager there was just a flood of discoveries at every encounter,” pointed out Ed Stone, who has served as project scientist from the beginning, even during his directorship of JPL from 1991 to 2001.

The discoveries were there for the taking. When Voyager 2 passed by Io, the innermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, astronomer Linda Morabito (Kelly), cognizant engineer for the mission’s optical navigation imaging processing system, noticed something protruding from the limb. “I had the sense I was seeing something that no one else had seen before,” she recalled. One by one, she convinced colleagues the protrusion was worth closer examination. It wound up being the first active volcano discovered on another planet and one the likes of which no scientist had ever seen. “It was the greatest experience any scientist could ever hope for,” she said.

All told, the Voyager mission visited almost 60 different worlds, presenting the solar system in its beauty, complexity and diversity to everyone on Earth with picture “postcards” that took the world’s collective breath away and more science than any planetary mission ever collected. “It was an extraordinary, epochal voyage of discovery that will be remembered in much the same way as we remember Captain Cook’s explorations of the then-hidden parts of the world,” summed up Murray. “It revolutionized our perceptions of the solar system.” It would also revolutionize our perception of Earth.

Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team and by then one of the most prolific and renowned scientists contributing to NASA missions, politicked for a decade, with Casani backing him, to ensure that when the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the outer solar system in the early 1990s, they would turn around for one last set of planetary portraits. It was the Voyagers’ final photographic assignment. Although Earth appeared as but a dot, those images remain some of the most profound ever taken by NASA spacecraft. “Look again at that dot,” Sagan urged in his best-selling book Pale Blue Dot (Random House, 1994). “On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

In just 15 fast years, the engineers and scientists at NASA/JPL had gone from the Earth’s upper atmosphere to beyond Neptune, advancing robotic spacecraft technology with uncanny speed to pioneer the world’s first interplanetary spacecraft and blaze the first trails into our solar system. “Voyager culminated our era of learning,” said Casani.

Today, the Voyagers sail on, more than 30 years after launching. No other spacecraft have gone so far. In 2005, Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in space, crossed the termination shock, the last major threshold in the solar system. Voyager 2 followed in 2007. “They’re in the heliosheath on the final lap of their race to the edge of interstellar space,” Stone said, projecting that Voyager 1 could cross the boundary in 2014, with Voyager 2 following two to three years later. The power systems should run to 2020 and scientists everywhere are anxiously hoping for that first glimpse of interstellar space. “It’s an incredible feeling,” Schurmeier smiled,