[00:00] All right, so I am a PhD student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. I'm studying under Dr. Jason Cassibry. The other day, someone from the university reaches out and they said, Hey, doesn't
[00:12] your student, Destin, doesn't he do talks occasionally or whatever? This is a group that discusses the future of space exploration, aerospace CEOs, They've been having these discussions since the 1950s.
[00:28] Now, usually I say no to talky talks because I like to prepare and get it right, and it just takes a long time. I just didn't know if this was the right thing to do.
[00:41] the more I realized that the people that were going to be in this room are the And these are the people that are doing things like planning the mission architecture to go back to the moon.
[00:53] And when I looked at the name of the talk, it was advancing space from Leo to Lunar It's the 2023 von Braun Space exploration symposium. depending on what way you pronounce his name, was the main architect behind the
[01:11] Right now, America is doing what's called the Artemis program. our effort to go back to the moon to take humans there now with new technology.
[01:24] provide an external perspective to the organization or the In this case, all the people in front of I thought about what it would look like to
[01:41] take a third-party perspective view of Artemis. But the more I started digging into Artemis, the more I realized there might There's some architecture problems that people are unwilling to talk about
[01:57] I was like, You know what? That's what I decided to do. doing my research and asking these questions, they said, Be careful, Destin.
[02:10] change your relationship with NASA forever. This is the truth and this is what needs to be said.
[02:22] In all seriousness though, I'm nervous about this talk before I go in. I decided just to play the talk for you and let you see what this is like. Now, to be clear, being a YouTuber means nothing in this room.
[02:36] The first part of the talk is me trying to establish credibility within the aerospace I've done the Defense Acquisition University. I know what it means to develop a system that's going to be human-rated.
[02:49] the, I'm the YouTuber guy who you think I am. So for me, this was an exercise in something called rhetoric.
[03:02] a certain position, and that's what I was doing here. This is me in a room I usually wouldn't get to be in, and I thought you might like
[03:14] I would love to know what your thoughts are with my points about Artemis. At some point, I'm going to show you this year's sticker design for patron.
[03:26] I'll show you that here in a bit. We now get to get to our closing keynote for the day. We are really honored and pleased to have this speaker with us.
[03:44] He's no stranger talking to large audiences. Destin Sandlin is a husband, father, and aerospace engineer known for his He's also a current UAH student.
[03:59] Thanks. That's always good. here, what I'm hoping is that you'll look at the mission differently.
[04:17] In a world of talkers, you'll be a thinker and a doer and ask the hard questions. Who is this dude? It's a thing we do in Alabama. Here in Alabama, we like to just... Can you hear me?
[04:33] Here in Alabama, we're just low key, rednecks. I'll just go through who I am. I grew up across the river and just a Redneck kid.
[04:46] That's me and my big dog, Thunder. My dad's over there. You're okay? Yeah, dad's here. Yeah, dad's awesome. [Audience applaudes]
[05:01] I grew up just a normal kid, and my grandfather, my dad's dad, worked at this Have you ever heard of it? Yeah, you heard of it? His name was Pryor Wilson Sandlin, [Audience laughs]
[05:14] Every time I show my grandfather. This is how I grew up. me how to shoot a squirrel out of a tree, a guy that taught me all kinds of stuff...
[05:30] would take me outside and he would show me stuff. if you remember this dad, but Granddaddy didn't tell me he loved me. He said, "Boy, I love you to the Comet Belt." [Emulating a granddads voice]
[05:45] Then years later, I was sitting here in the halls of UAH, pencil-whipping some I was like, You know? or possible that we're going to go to Mars, it's going to happen.
[06:01] I know this is the asteroid belt, not the comet belt. But granddaddy used to say things like that. really small and made me want to outwit a squirrel,
[06:17] was the same guy that made me think about how big the universe was. I love it. I went to University of Alabama. there who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope.
[06:31] doing metrology on the SunShields for the James Webb Space Telescope. Dad used to moonlight as a CMM operator and programmer, and he used to teach me
[06:44] stuff about coordinate transformations before I knew what algebra was. I had internships at the University of Alabama. The cool thing about that is the test cell next to me, I was working on the Joint
[06:58] Strike Fighters fuel pump, which was also the hydraulic pump, really neat thing. But in the cell right next to me was the SR-71 fuel pump test cell.
[07:10] They told me, they're in Jackson, Mississippi, they said, Yeah. All right, we need a fuel pump that needs to do this flow rate and this pressure.
[07:23] The Mississippi boys were like, Nothing needs a fuel pump like that. That's the coolest story ever. basically the same level of, Why are you laughing at me?
[07:38] Imagine this is a sheet of zebra cakes right here. You have a double guillotine striking that thing as it moves along. You just flip on this little switch and the little motor starts turning and the
[07:55] chocolate drizzle starts coming out and you get a sign wave on top of your cakes. Flip another mechanical lever, you throw in the cosine, the other, you get it out of phase, it makes a circle.
[08:08] They do zebra cakes and fancy cakes on the same line. Let's keep going. Check this out, isn't she hot? [Audience Laughs]
[08:22] She's great. My wife and I, we have four kids and we Right here, this is my upbringing as a professional.
[08:35] I worked across the interstate here in a place called Redstone Test Center. something called an active protection system. Grenades as they were fired at vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[08:52] Maybe in 25 years, we can talk about that. On the right, I went after a while and I I can't speak that language. I learned a lot there.
[09:06] Evaluation Command, we were in the developmental test command. for the army, material that would be used by soldiers.
[09:18] I had to go through what's called the Defense Acquisition University. It's a big deal. I'm just giving you that to say like, Yeah, you tip gaha, funny.
[09:33] Also, a little bit of experience in the field here. This is what we would call at the range Tuesday. Three, two, one, fire.
[09:53] I remember a very specific moment. I remember the smell.
[10:05] We've gone down and I'm living my best life, scoring the target, looking at the shape charge penetration in the hole. I look at Tracy Williams, who's a Vietnam veteran, who helped develop
[10:18] Javelin for when it was called All Zem, if you know about that. He fought in the Vietnam War. We're driving back up that road right there, Center Line Road, Test Area One.
[10:30] I look at Tracy and I said, Tracy, what are we doing? I was like, Dude, we can destroy a tank.
[10:42] We can blow up tanks and throw the turret. There is never going to be another land war in Europe with tanks. Young buck, right?
[10:56] I look at the gray beard, Tracy says, I've seen a lot of things. Fast forward to recently, right?
[11:09] I think about that conversation a lot. We got the new technology. Man, I think about that a lot.
[11:22] I used to goof around at night making stuff in the garage. This is the first photo I ever took of a bullet striking a match. I got my dad a Father's Day present.
[11:37] I don't know if the audio is working here, but we're just going to roll with it. Hey, it's me, Destin. Can you hear that at all? I uploaded this to the internet, and I was taking guidance and control classes here.
[11:54] I got my dad a chicken. want toThere's some GNC stuff going on here. It knows where its head is.
[12:06] As it moves, somehow there's a control loop here. The chickens are really good at this. I'll show you. You guys are super nerdy, so I know where your brain's going right now.
[12:24] I know what you're thinking. But this is not what I was thinking. upload this to the internet because it's amazing.
[12:36] This is amazing because there is clearly a closed loop control system here that [Audience Laughs] appears to be optically coupled to this chicken. Do you know this?
[12:50] Nobody knows this. Do you know about it? Everybody look at my hand. Okay, birds have a hard time doing that.
[13:04] walk under it and it ends up looking like this. They'll walk and then they'll walk under it. That's what they do.
[13:17] Yeah, so when whoops! [Audience Laughs] Basically, what's happening is I'm I'm really smart and I'm proud of myself for how smart I am.
[13:30] Then what does the internet do with this? Hey, look at this red neck playing with a chicken on the internet. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[13:44] They're like, No, man, that chicken wiggle so weird. But then after that, something happened.
[13:57] This grew into Smarter Every Day. is my dad made me take a business minor class, honestly, that was part of it. reevaluated how I looked at how I communicate with people.
[14:16] I'm going to do this. I'm going to take my videos, which I create called Penny Whistle Productions, I'm going to call it Smarter Every Day.
[14:29] on quality over quantity, and I just basically engineered it. This is another thing I did. I'm going to be deliberate about how I execute the video.
[14:45] I'm going to start the video with incredibly high personality. I'm going to tell you about chickens and you're going to like it because chickens. personality over time and I'll ramp up the topical complexity.
[15:01] When you ramp up that topical complexity, then people walk up that mountain with you because it's not like, Hey, zero to a hundred instantly. No, we're just going to slowly ramp up the mountain together.
[15:18] ramp down before people get bored and scared. I ramp it down and then we land the plane. It worked very, very well.
[15:32] If only going to the moon were that easy. Let's award some contracts and let's do it.
[15:45] If only your job were that easy. My assumption here is that I'm talking to a room full of policymakers, intelligent Is that correct? [crickets]
[16:02] Engineers, program managers. put on literally your fancy pants and come hang out together, right? Very nice. [Audience Laughs]
[16:15] One of the reasons why things get difficult is politics. I learned this firsthand. I don't know how that happened.
[16:31] What I learned in this moment is here in Huntsville, I was like, Hey, I'm going to go talk to the President. I get three questions.
[16:44] [In Southern Accent] He's like, I'll tell you what I'd tell him. [Accent again] He ain't going to take my guns.
[16:57] This is literally going to happen. I don't think I'm going to win friends and influence people if I do that. Politics, you got to communicate.
[17:13] One of the things I did is I talked to him about political discourse. I decided to ask the.
[17:25] He might not be the expert on. clear that he's changed his methods over the course of his presidency. His body language was a little rigid.
[17:39] president still doesn't know what interviewer I'm going to be. What happened next was a moment I will never forget. Were both on the same wavelength, and I really.
[17:52] After all, I had listened to him already for 10 hours via audiobook. If you watch the President's face, you can see the exact moment that we connect. with how scientists approach problems in general.
[18:05] And in Dreams of My Father, it ended with Let's back it up and watch his body language.
[18:17] Isn't that cool? an interview and became a fun, intelligent conversation between two. And I won't forget it.
[18:31] some really interesting things, and he talked about negative feedback and how we as a society have lost the ability to provide negative feedback to each other. [Zero response from audience...]
[18:46] You're scared to even talk right now. [Audience Laughs] You're terrified to talk right now. You know the truth and you're afraid to say it.
[19:03] No, the deal is we know things and we're afraid to say it. fight or we might get canceled or whatever is happening today in your office.
[19:15] But we're engineers, right? Young engineers on the front row. What is this? Rock and roll. That's what I'm talking about.
[19:29] What's an important part of the PID control loop? Let's go up here to the little summation symbol on the top right. Feedback. Right.
[19:44] If you have only positive feedback in the system, what happens to it? Is this political science?
[19:57] It also works with political science. If you don't have positive and negative feedback in any system, it goes unstable We know this to be true because whatever your degree is.
[20:12] I think it's important for negative feedback. I also asked the President about his plans for deep space exploration at the time. it's an opinion I have and I'm allowed to have opinions.
[20:27] Now, that's a big deal because as people that work with NASA, you're an executive branch thing, right?
[20:40] That stability in your direction is very, very difficult. Congratulations, you guys have successfully navigated that. There's a lot of reasons you navigated that.
[20:55] Kind of like Penny Whistl Productions flipping it to Smarter Every Day. This is great. This is more fun for me than it is you. Everybody, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this.
[21:11] I've seen the video. I've heard people make fun of the video, but I think it's a pretty good video. But there's this thing in the back of all your heads, at least it would be for me.
[21:26] leave and I'm not in anybody's food chain in the room. There's a scoreboard that exists and the scoreboard looks like this.
[21:39] It's a scoreboard, Lunar Landings, Apollo era engineers and infrastructure. Six Lunar landings; Artemis, zero.
[21:51] We made that. I was like, I don't think that'll work. Let's look at this. Let's look at this. They've got points on the board.
[22:03] We're going? This is a really cool graphic. Left Earth, circularized left, went out to LLO,
[22:21] went down, ascent stage, come back up. Come home, right? Let's look at this.
[22:37] What do you guys think about this? A very wise, politically savvy engineer that I happen to know.
[22:53] Why is it different? Okay, so let's zoom in on this one thing. You have to deal with this.
[23:06] It's NRHO, Near Rectalinear Halo Orbit. Have you looked into it? Do you know why we're doing NRHO?
[23:22] Line of sight with the earth. I know the reason. A lot of you know the reason. If you don't, you need to figure it out.
[23:36] You probably have never heard Destin talk like that. There's a lot of people in the room, not bringing up a truth that they've often wondered about.
[23:52] Because that's a really big orbit that takes many days to get back to the moon, whereas Apollo did low lunar orbit, which So the reason we're doing this is because
[24:08] the Orion spacecraft does not have enough Delta-V to get down into low lunar orbit. system if you were to design something for scratch. in the room is like, he's saying things we don't normally talk about.
[24:24] There's a lot of people in the room that Line of sight with the earth is one of the stated reasons. This was one of the charts that went into the decision-making process for NRHO.
[24:38] If you look over here, you'll see that for communication, I don't We've got Earth access, Orion, lunar access to polar, low-lunar orbit,
[24:52] station keeping, crewed, spacecraft communication, and thermal. Contact with it via radio is important. because we have to communicate with the crew, right?
[25:09] All right, so another thing they said is… Youknow, if we do this, This is the port… This was a NASA paper I read.
[25:24] It takes half a day to get from NRHO to low lunar orbit, right? Right? Guys, are we going? You should know this.
[25:38] I'm going to be the bad guy for a little bit, and then I'm going to come back But I just need to be the bad guy for a little bit, okay? This paper, which was used for justification to select NRHO, said it
[25:56] What's the period time of NRHO? What we're saying
[26:08] is we're in NRHO, the microphone is now the moon, we're in NRHO. It's a three-body orbit. By the way. It's a thing and it takes six and a half days to get back by the moon.
[26:24] You're going fast. Yeah, it takes half a to get from NRHO to LLO if you're in the right phase. Because if you'd go try to land, you're like, Oh, snap, we got to abort.
[26:38] lunar surface you went, you might not be able to catch the bus. You might have to wait till it comes up back around.
[26:50] That dictates all kinds of things. That dictates... Thomas. How are you doing? talking about the transmission in his old truck.
[27:05] [Audience Laughs] Basically, you have to factor in everything. When I understood this, I was like, Wait a second, are you telling me that it's
[27:22] possible that an astronaut could be on the surface of the moon? The astronauts are smart, they know that if there's a medical, incapacitated crew They're not dumb people.
[27:38] If something like that happens, how do we get them off? It's we have to wait. Anyway, when I started reading this, I
[27:52] started saying whoever, yeah, they wanted NRO to work. Remember, I'm the bad guy right now. I'm going to turn it around. I came in really wanting to punch you guys for making this choice.
[28:05] and I was like, Oh, Orion can't get to low lunar orbit. We can put communication on there to give us a green box to justify it.
[28:23] But what this thing doesn't say is that orbit can't see the landing site. We're going to have a relay satellite no matter what. Because what's 14% of six and a half days?
[28:40] able to talk unless we have a relay satellite. I found this in a paper. Then I started trying to understand the architecture to get there.
[28:54] I did not understand until this week when I really thought I embarrass myself in front of you guys, I didn't realize that
[29:06] in order to get the human lander to the moon, we have to launch a bunch of I didn't know that. I'm like, Well, how many rockets do we have to do that with?
[29:21] Then I start, because I know people, I started calling people. I was like, Some people were like, Well, it's looking like eight.
[29:34] We have to fire eight rockets to fire one rocket to the moon? they're saying, but it's probably more like 12, really. I started to do a count for nominal schedule slip and boil off.
[29:50] take to fuel up that thing to get it to the moon. I've done the math. If you have any questions, I'm joking. The question is, is this smart?
[30:04] Now is the time where people are scared to talk again. In the bottom right, I've drawn a picture, That's how many rockets went to the moon and landed for Apollo, for all of Apollo.
[30:23] I'll take you back to this chart. Is this the simplest solution? Looks like I'm picking on number of rockets in the talk here.
[30:39] So the thing that's interesting to me is that people in the audience did not know That's a problem.
[30:51] When I said 12 rockets the way I did. They laughed. There were others that weren't laughing. Here's the deal. Shortly after delivering this talk, we saw an answer to this question.
[31:09] Someone at NASA said it's going to take at least 15. It could be more than that. rockets that's going to take to fuel that thing up.
[31:23] This is indicative of a communication problem. The fact that we have this very complex architecture and we don't know the exact answer to such a big question is pretty damning because if we don't know such a
[31:40] simple answer to a big question, what does that say about the little things? of this mug down the road, they had quarterly reports on every little component of what was going on, down to the pressure transducers at some
[31:54] They knew what was going to happen because the more complex the system is, the more communication you need to. Saturn V quarterly film report number seven.
[32:07] I think there's a problem because right now we are two years out from this launch and we don't know the number of rockets. I don't think that means we're going to launch to this thing in two years.
[32:20] It's time to be honest. That's just not a strong suit of an engineer. It is time to lay out and systematize the communication so that every organization
[32:34] that's involved knows far more information than they need. actionable and they don't depend on a miracle in technological innovation
[32:46] We actually have actionable things that have to happen in certain time frames. And if something doesn't happen, a critical technology isn't development, we The fact that it still says two years till
[33:00] this launch tells me that we have a communication issue, and I would like for that to be resolved by centralized leadership. Okay, so at this point, you will see a shift in the tone of the talk.
[33:15] Now I'm going to transition towards aspirational goals. And it's going to hinge a lot upon this. And you'll see me talk about that later here in the talk.
[33:30] Remember what I said earlier about the importance of negative feedback. I am but a simple Redneck, Alabama, engineer. We're going.
[33:43] We've selected this architecture. I'm going to accept the contracts are written. We have European partners that are building the first node for Gateway.
[33:59] We're going, we're going to be unified and we're going to make it happen. What do you do with that information? Who is this person?
[34:16] He's a very, very important person. Joseph Shea is sitting in a meeting here in the '60s in a presentation.
[34:29] If you're in the airspace industry, you're in meetings all day long. That's what this guy is doing right now. Apollo 1.
[34:41] Huntsville named Grissom, after the gentleman on the left there. Apollo 1, and they knew there were problems with the capsule. The engineer team knew there were problems with the capsule.
[34:57] Everybody was trying to figure this out. Then on January 27th, 1967, a travesty happened.
[35:12] The capsule burned because they were in a 100% oxygen environment, a flame started by Gus Grissom's seat. I remember being at a family get-together years ago.
[35:25] My grandfather worked over at NASA, and I remember hearing the old timers talk about that fire with deep sadness and reverence. It occurred to me that something changed about NASA in that moment.
[35:39] Things were going so fast, something changed. As a joke, I did not know this, and I'm just telling you this not to bring the
[35:53] room down, but I just want you to know that this happened. the end of one of the meetings, the Apollo astronauts, they talk to the photographer, We're going to play a joke on Shea.
[36:10] We want a picture of us with praying hands around our capsule. We want to say, and they said down there, on the note, they said, It isn't that we They were jokingly saying, We all know
[36:26] there's problems here, and we're just, man, we're not feeling good about it. astronauts, these gentlemen, they knew the risk and they
[36:38] I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened. All I know is that an engineering mistake happened and it wasn't caught. But when that happened, what I do know is NASA changed, changed completely.
[36:58] conversations that happened, and I'll go through that here in a minute. You guys like movies? Back to the future. One of the cool things about those time travel movies is
[37:16] they'll go back in time and they're like, Oh, man, I can't change things because of how crazily I will influence the timeline of the future. and the wrong person, whatever, I might not even be born.
[37:35] By the way, a really good time travel You've never heard of it. Budget for that movie was 7,000 bucks. These time travel movies, they can teach us something.
[37:53] Why do we not realize that we have that much control over the future now? Right now, you have that much control over the future as you're sitting there.
[38:06] Oh, man, if I were just to send this email and say this thing in a compelling way and impact the way the program reviews go and the CDR is coming up, if I could just get them to understand that Eclus needs to blah, blah, blah,
[38:21] why don't we have that level of gravitas to what we think about now? Has anyone ever heard of this document? Don't raise your hand. Don't raise your hand.
[38:33] Okay, so if I'm not mistaken, this room is full of people that are industry leaders that are in charge of taking humans back to the moon.
[38:45] in your head, answer the following question, have I read NASA SP 287? The title of the document is what made Apollo a success?
[39:00] And if you have not read it, I'm not joking about this, shame on you. You have a whole generation of engineers that did the coolest thing engineering
[39:14] humans have ever done, and they gave you the playbook. I've read it. I'm not even in your food chain. Granted, I read it really, really fast, so
[39:26] I made highlighting things in here. You've got the people that actually went to the moon.
[39:38] If they handed you the playbook and they're like, Hey, this is how you do it. Seems pretty important. It's crazy that you don't know that if you don't know that this exists.
[39:50] It's written by several people that were Jean Krantz writes a section. Of course, the way we got this job done was with meetings.
[40:06] The thing we always tried to do in these meetings was to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out, hopefully, We wanted to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input.
[40:23] But I don't know, a lot of people are scared to talk today. All right, so spacecraft design, I thought this was interesting. it, you have elements of missiles and aircraft.
[40:38] but I've worked with both aircraft and missile design. It says, and this is key, please hear this, this is the key to how to build your spacecraft.
[40:50] many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over. that don't require regenerative cooling, hypergolic propellants that don't require
[41:04] Ignition source, three fuel cells, and that goes on and on. stage in the current design does not use hypergolic propellants.
[41:17] I was like, Wait, so we're going up there and we got to ignite this. I got it, I understand. You make them touch and they go, Boom, that's how it works.
[41:34] I was like, We're changing. Why are we introducing complexity into a system? This was an amazing chart.
[41:47] This chart, the person that wrote this, this was in the first chapter, the guy that wrote this, or the lady that wrote this, I forget, George M. Is this good or bad? I don't know.
[42:02] This is great. I'm a third-party observer. All right, so George Lowe said this, this is how they planned out what missions they were going to do when.
[42:17] involved the risk that is always inherent in manned space flight without any significant gain, without any real progress towards the lunar landing. might have stretched the system beyond the capability and to the point where risk
[42:34] would have become excessive because the new requirements in flight operations were more than people could learn and practice and perfect in available time. you take significant steps because you actually have to go towards the goal and
[42:49] there will be risk involved, but you make sure that the risk isn't too I thought that was brilliant. That's amazing. I've worked on developing vehicles and
[43:03] active protection systems and counter missile systems. Then I looked at Artemis III, to be clear, this is after Artemis II, which is about to happen.
[43:18] On Artemis III, in order for this to work, it starts, up at the beginning, it starts or anyway, we've never done cryogenic refueling in orbit.
[43:33] Am I wrong about that? Humans have never done cryogenic refueling in orbit up to this point right now.
[43:47] Make all the charts you want, but we need to take some steps. programs, but I think this is very, very interesting. talk about this with authority because you're smart and you know things.
[44:03] All right, don't get fixated on technology demonstration. Focus on the mission. Focus on the mission. I'm trying to be the voice of the 60s
[44:16] What is the mission? Really, really cool people. If you've ever met any of them, you know they are legitimately awesome people.
[44:30] My advice, and it's not my advice, it's As simple as you can make it
[44:43] and accomplish the mission, that's what we should be doing. If you go through the old Apollo books, have you ever looked at how they decided
[44:56] Like, it's crazy because it's awesome. That doesn't work because things aren't whatevering.
[45:10] They say, All right, if all else fails, here's what you do. Open the hatch, go around the back. There's these guillotines that connect the decent and the asset stage.
[45:26] They would cut them loose and they would If that didn't work for whatever reason, they wrote a procedure. Dude on the left or dude on the right.
[45:41] Whoever has the best integrity of their suit at the time, the least amount of leaks, you're going to depressurize, you're going to get out of the spacecraft, you're going to go to the bottom of the spacecraft with bolt cutters.
[45:55] With bolt cutters, and you're going to cut the straps that are holding the asset in the decent stage together. They tried this, okay, that worked. What if it doesn't work?
[46:10] Okay, then we're going to go to this. redundancy after redundancy all the way down to the bolt cutters. I just want to know what that was. [Audience Laughs]
[46:25] That's amazing. Go look at the documents. This is a real thing.
[46:44] PID control loop. As the engineers responsible for getting humans to the moon safely and returning
[46:56] them, our friends, it is imperative that you provide negative feedback in situations that call for it, and you are not scared to do so. If you lose your job for providing negative feedback, good on you.
[47:12] nobody said it, that would be the worst thing to live with. Be bold, be courteous. Once a decision has been made, let's all get behind it and let's fight.
[47:26] Other things that we have the architecture we have, let's make it work. All right, so you have a limited amount of time at this point to simplify. We've chosen the architecture, we know what we're going to do.
[47:43] We've got some play. Not a lot, but we've got some play. Make sure that you're making the right decisions. Everybody take a note. This is NASA, SP 287.
[48:00] If you do not read this document, I will think bad things about you until you do. bad things about you until you read this document.
[48:12] that I'll paraphrase, paraphrase as mine, focus on redundancy. Lots of valves do similar things. This blew my mind. This chart's in here.
[48:28] They tested stuff, vibrational modes, triaxial acceleration tests. Five % of the stuff broke because of how they did it.
[48:40] One and a half % on the left was due to the design of the component. Three and a half % was workmanship for a total of five % of the stuff. But they explained why and they're like, Hey, there's going to be mishaps because
[48:54] You need to know it's there, need to go find it. This is an awesome document. I've given enough briefings at the Pentagon.
[49:09] You're going to get in that room They're going to say, But my schedule says this. You're like, If you do this, then you just have to be willing to say the truth.
[49:27] Sometimes the manager is going to accept the risk and that's okay. You communicate clearly, but you make sure you don't compromise on standards. people tried to figure out how to delete tests from the test plan.
[49:42] How do we gain that schedule? We delete that test that takes eight months. After Apollo 8, they said in here that
[49:56] I forget what it was, but they saved a lot by cleverly designing experiments and they saved time. It's really cool. Crew training is paramount.
[50:11] I think, and I made a video about this on Smarter Every Day, the linear lander test vehicle, for example, if you're going to land in a 1/6th-G environment, you have to know how to do that.
[50:26] There's a weird thing that happens. A helicopter doesn't behave the same in 1G as it does in 1/6th-G. interesting talk about this at the test pilot conference one time.
[50:42] I found the engineer that helped design this thing, the Lunar Lander test vehicle. I think it's important.
[50:54] simulator is the astronaut in the seat, their life is on the line. When your blood pressure goes up and you're like, It matters. That psychological training has a huge component.
[51:10] Otinger, who worked on the control system, and I asked him a very important question. But I would like to ask you two more
[51:22] So back in the day, the engineers and scientists on this program did amazing things with limited- Analog electronics. So do you think that engineers in the '50s and '60s were better than engineers today?
[51:42] No. I think we all had our unique place in history and they'll continue to be new challenges met.
[51:55] In part of it is because they can build on our shoulders. They can learn from what we did and adapt to the new technology and so forth.
[52:09] to happen to train astronauts to go back to the moon? a trainer, a free-flight trainer, I can tell you that. They're smart enough to know.
[52:25] Now the United States is planning to return to the moon. The aircraft is on final approach to that flat tip ridge near Shackleton Freiter. I hope that the person at the controls has a simulation experience that is at least
[52:41] as good as the LLTV provided the Apollo crews a half century later. I thought that was really interesting. I said, Do you think the Apollo engineers were smarter than the engineers are today?
[52:59] I think a lot of us today, we maybe think how to do differential equations like they did by hand. It was really encouraging to hear him say that.
[53:16] No, we're not better than they are. It's different and they're going to build on our shoulders.
[53:28] There's a scoreboard, it exists. It's time to put points on the board and they've given you the playbook.
[53:41] The playbook is called What made Apollo a success? I would encourage you to read it if you haven't. We do not need to have an Apollo 1 type of event in order to get us in gear.
[53:57] Don't get fixated on a technology demonstration. sexy and awesome and amazing and wild, doesn't mean you have to. As long as it accomplishes the mission.
[54:10] So be mission-focused, and I think things are going to be okay. Sometimes our thinking can get locked in on a thing, and it's like bias.
[54:23] I'm going to tell you a story about how I got fixated on something. get people back to the moon or Mars or whatever your job is, don't get fixated on the way people have told you it has to be, and this is why.
[54:38] welder, he said, Hey, Destin, come on down to the weld shop. It's a really... Barney had taken a normal bicycle and he had flipped it around.
[54:55] It's my dad. He's awesome. Okay. This bike, it's really cool. when you turn the handlebar to the left, it goes to the right.
[55:14] Changed one variable. It was really, really difficult for me to learn how to ride that thing.
[55:26] The faster I go the better. You can see that I'm laughing, but I'm actually really frustrated.
[55:39] My thinking was in a rut. Truth to me. I had the knowledge of. How to operate the bike, but I did not have the understanding.
[55:52] You can ride a bike? Can you help me for just a second? [Audience Applause] Gabriel, we don't have an SOP, we don't have PPE, we don't have anything.
[56:08] Gabriel, I don't want you to hurt yourself. Do this. It's going to do weird things to your brain, man, I promise.
[56:22] Just put your foot right there and then just try to ride, let's say, one, And go.
[56:36] Nobody else in the room knows what it is. Try it again. I know. And go.
[56:50] What are you feeling? I don't know. It's just like I go right and I try to turn right and it doesn't work. [Audience Applause]
[57:03] What's happening right now is you've got learning this way of thinking, and it's just natural. This is how I do the TPS report.
[57:16] It's so hard. How long do you think it took me to learn how to ride this thing? is what that looks like when it finally worked.
[57:30] I could. It was like I could feel some. It's like there's this trail in my brain. Neural path. And jump back onto the.
[57:44] Distractions at all, like a cell phone ringing in my pocket, would instantly But at least I could ride it. genetically, and he's been riding a normal bike for three years.
[57:58] I wanted to know how long it would take him to learn how. A backwards bike, he could go with me to Australia and meet a real astronaut. Go ahead.
[58:12] This is such a big deal. Get up. So he in... In two weeks, he did something that took me eight months to do, which demonstrates
[58:30] Than an adult. It's clear. That's why the best time to learn a language is when. So I have this weird thing in my head where as I push off, I can detect what's
[58:46] going on, and then my brain picks an algorithm and I can write it. It's really interesting, your brain gets in the way of your brain. The metaphor here is, Apollo did a thing and then we came along and we started
[59:05] doing our stuff and we have the way we do things. Amsterdam, I decided I'm going to go to Amsterdam because I was over there doing test standards for missile stuff.
[59:18] I was like, Yeah, I bike ride to Amsterdam. [Audience Laughs] Like a 35-year-old man at the time here.
[59:33] What do you do when you can't ride a bike in a city of more bicycles than people? You're like, Oh, no, I promise. People were crowding around and looking at me like, What's wrong with this American?
[59:47] A dude can't ride a bike. I got out my laptop and I started showing these kids. riding a really weird bike and that's why I can't do the normal bike.
[01:00:00] The metaphor here is like, it's a simple bike. That didn't work at all. But we have the test plan.
[01:00:15] But we've got this other way that we're doing things. Now what I can do is I went back and I learned how to ride the other bike. Okay, there's a cut in the video right here because I'm showing the crowd
[01:00:33] It's a video and it involves another person that was on the street and I don't have their permission But I do talk about it when I'm giving a talky talk.
[01:00:47] but I don't think it's something I want to put on the whole internet. Anyway, it's hilarious too, and it drives home the point, which is why everybody's laughing when we go back into the footage here.
[01:01:00] point is, if you train for the unexpected, and they did that on Apollo, they had so many training plans they went through that everything that came up, like over 80% of
[01:01:13] The decision was automatic. The point is, when you're preparing for this stuff, you need to train for the Everybody knows about the Apollo 12 lightning thing?
[01:01:27] You got to be ready for that stuff. This is what I wanted when I would leave, I hope you would keep this with you. Keep it simple.
[01:01:40] Be willing to take action. Be willing to take action in the meetings to make the hard decisions and ask the hard questions.
[01:01:53] I hope we're still friends. I hope. You enjoyed this video. channel, but this was really fun for me and I thought you'd want to see it.
[01:02:08] I had to prepare and I was intimidated by the subject matter, but it was a fun I'm grateful to the American Astronautical Society. There's a lot of smart people in this room and I'm just grateful to have been there.
[01:02:23] chosen a very complicated architecture. poorly and Destin ends up looking like he cried wolf because he didn't understand or
[01:02:37] I'm okay with that. Sometimes you just got to throw your hat And that was what I was trying to do here. I decided to give this talk because I was seeing things and I felt like other people
[01:02:51] I hope you would forgive me if I overstepped in any way. Also, I want to say thank you. I mean, you are emotionally supporting Smarter Every Day by giving me your time.
[01:03:09] And I also want to thank the people that support on Patreon. the people that stick with me by sending out stickers. sticker team or whatever you want to call it, you can support by going to
[01:03:23] That's a really big deal when you elect to do that because it frees me from the algorithm. and authentic, and that's what I want to do.
[01:03:38] Back in the day, people were. Able to get. team sticker and this James Webb Space Telescope team sticker. You can't get those anymore because those
[01:03:53] Check out this year's sticker. It's the smarter everyday exploration team. It's my old helicopter helmet, and I think they're awesome.
[01:04:06] size of the stickers because I want it to be just big enough where you might want to put it on a water bottle or a door or something like that, like a laptop, but
[01:04:18] not too big that it's just overwhelming whatever you're putting it on. I hope you like it. But to everybody that supports on patron at patron.
[01:04:33] com/smartereveryday, this is my way of saying thank you for sticking with me. supporting, I'm going to send you the baseball as well. I'm so grateful that you would consider
[01:04:47] doing that because my goal is making authentic content on the Internet while That's not what I want to do. That's patron.com/smartereveryday.
[01:05:01] Thank you for emotionally supporting me. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day.
[01:05:13] Have a good one. Bye.