NASA, the name conjures up images
of dramatic space launches and exploring the stars,
yet the Space Race has impacted our lives here on Earth
in so many ways, it's hard to even imagine
modern life without that force.
Suddenly NASA technology just, poof, disappears,
you're gonna be looking at a lot of rotting food.
It shapes our very existence
with a steady energy we don't even see.
Often, we take the Sun for granted on Earth,
but that technology is also gonna be critical
for us to be able to explore space.
Every AI always has a mission, and that's to be correct.
Yet experience every day.
There are a lot of follow-on effects
from the sorts of problems that NASA's thinking about today,
that will be useful 10, 20, 30 years from now.
But the next big step is going much further
and that's going to Mars.
(rockets roar) (step thuds)
(upbeat sci-fi music)
(mysterious music)
Space, the most inhospitable environment.
One that NASA had to conquer to reach beyond our planet.
The dating world, too, can be an inhospitable environment.
Every single has a story of a bad date,
meetings with zero follow-through,
one night stands that go nowhere,
and budding relationships that crumble into nothing.
But how did an algorithm created for the Space Shuttle
impact online matchmaking?
(digitized music)
It all starts here, with the Space Shuttle program,
the world's first reusable space craft.
This complex vehicle is comprised of an Orbiter,
two solid rocket boosters, and an external tank.
Like its predecessors, it launches vertically,
but unlike any other spacecraft,
it reenters the atmosphere and glides to Earth,
landing like a plane.
The really marvelous thing about the shuttle
is it could be reused.
We would go into space, come back to Earth,
be refurbished and then fly in space again.
The Space Shuttle's where the crew was and the cargo,
and then it was mounted to that large orange structure,
was the external tank that fed the engines
on the Space Shuttle.
The two solid rocket boosters were on the side
and they provided most of the thrust for the ascent.
We have little engines on board
that can move the shuttle around.
Then, when we're ready to come home,
we fire a couple of big engines that we have
and that brings the shuttle back to Earth
and it would just free-fall,
and it lands like a massive 100-ton glider.
So to give you some sense of the numbers involved here,
one Apollo rocket in the late '60s
cost a few hundred million dollars.
If you were to extend that cost to today,
it would be a few billion dollars for each spacecraft,
so it's pretty unlikely that we would have flown
135 Space Shuttle missions
with a billion-dollar price tag for each vehicle.
The Space Shuttle was nothing less
than a revolution in the space flight industry.
It lowered the cost of space travel significantly,
though it meant NASA had to figure out
how to keep the spacecraft in operating shape.
How do systems received feedback?
How do they determine red flags?
How do the different systems interact
to produce the best result?
The checklists are designed to make sure
that the spacecraft operates correctly
in terms of sending information back and forth,
and also that it makes the correct decisions
based on whatever the situation is.
So in the very early days,
the checkout of the spacecraft
used thousands of pages of paper,
where someone would have to go step by step.
Doing it manually eventually becomes impossible to do.
That pushed companies like IBM
to create these large mainframe computers
that could handle these kinds of tasks.
Would we have done these things ordinarily?
We would have gotten to it eventually,
but the fact that there was an impetus
to handle this one very important data-driven task
that helped push technologies,
computer technologies in particular, forward.
Apollo was so complicated that we introduced computers
into the preflight checkout, into the launch itself.
As NASA continued to embrace more technology,
they developed a program called the reaction control system,
allowing 44 small engines on the Space Shuttle
to automatically adjust the flight.
This system became more accurate
with each transmission of the information
and overall, made it much safer for the crew.
That process of controlling the position
that the shuttle was in, with those 44 engines,
was really one of the first simple ways
of artificial intelligence because the system is not only
taking data but it's taking action.
Taking more data, taking more action.
So it was really this interactive loop
between the system's performance
and the data it was putting out.
NASA has to come up with a complex AI
that will help control the systems on the shuttle.
But the idea of giving the computer control
is quite revolutionary and a cause of concern.
In the movies, HAL9000 is this AI that exists
to help these astronauts as they're exploring space,
and the idea is that using an AI allows you
to figure out the constraints
and then from there, figure out,
what actions do I need to perform
in order to make this command come to be?
You could get a human to do this, fine,
but the idea of a computer is that
it can take in more data than the human could,
it's not as prone to error,
it doesn't need to sleep.
The computer and the AI is able to take in this information
and be able to act the way a human would
and do it with a certain reliability.
The same innovator uses the NASA algorithm
to launch a cutting edge dating website
called weAttract.com.
So in 2003, Match.com incorporated
the weAttract software into their algorithms,
they were the first dating platform
that incorporated an in depth personality questionnaire,
were leaps and bounds
above any other personality questionnaire
compared to pop psychology questionnaires
that were out there at the time.
Every AI, matchmaking or otherwise,
always has a mission and that's to be correct.
And if you feed the system with bad information,
it's gonna create bad matches.
And sometimes people's beliefs about themselves
and their rank in the food chain
is not a reflection of what's reality.
Matchmaking software, it would develop a belief
of what you are like and what other people are like,
and it's not necessarily going to match you with the people
that fit exactly what you're looking for.
You may say you want these things
but the AI would actually look at it and say,
"Okay, well based on this, I figured out
"that people who answer these profile questions in this way
"are looking for this type of person,
"even if that type is not necessarily a direct match
"to the answers you've given."
This idea of evolving beliefs is possible
but it has to be something that's built into
its original directives, to say,
"In order to satisfy my directives,
"I have to go beyond some of my original programming
"and perform actions that might not have been anticipated,
"but satisfy my directives better
"than my programmers might have anticipated."
Using these two people, we might discover
that John's not ready to settle down even though Sandy is.
Sandy believes in monogamy and she's on a date with John
because his profile indicates
that he believes the same thing.
Sandy believes that if she plays the fun girl,
she'll get a second date with John.
As an overarching desire,
she wants to get married and have kids.
Finally, intentions are desires
to which the agent has committed.
She's chosen to stick out the date
because she's decided that he's a good catch.
Next, desires.
John believes women are easy to acquire.
Now, he ultimately does believe in monogamy
but not right now.
He desires to take Sandy home with him.
John's also getting distracted
by the two attractive women in the corner
and he keeps looking at them when she's not looking.
Finally, intentions.
He's chosen to stick out this date
because he's discovered
that Sandy's actually prettier than most
and not uninteresting.
John's belief that there's plenty of fish in the sea
might actually prevent him from appreciating the woman
right in front of him.
weAttract work to build psychological models
of data's emotional and cognitive attitudes
to predict how they best accomplish
what they ultimately desired.
By having in-depth models of participants,
the software not only susses out
the basic demographic and behavioral attitudes,
it also delves deep into their emotional
and cognitive makeup.
Let's say that you love hiking,
and the key to happiness for you is being outdoors.
The software is not going to match you
with someone that's not into fitness.
There are new models and new information
constantly being fed into modern day matchmaking algorithms.
The information of what's on the internet,
research studies, actual facts,
things that our human brain
cannot compute in one single match,
so the technology gets more sophisticated.
It learns and it continues to perfect matches
according to your behavior and beliefs.
If you're going at a party
and you're trying to figure out who you want to talk to,
you'd look at the way they dress,
look at the way they're behaving,
look at their face, and come up with
an overall set of candidates of people you wanna approach.
We do this for a lot of things, humans.
When we're trying to identify
if somebody is someone you want to introduce yourself to,
or somebody you might wanna feel threatened by.
Facial recognition is AI.
It is not only able to identify faces
in photographs and video, but it can do a fairly decent job
of identifying or matching faces together.
Humans can't possibly maintain a list of faces
as well as a computer can.
You can use AI to look at other faces, say at an airport,
and identify who matches with a list of potential threats.
NASA's tech has done far more to protect you
on an everyday basis than you can imagine.
(engine roaring) (bell clanging)
(horns tooting)
(ominous sci-fi music)
(quake rumbling)
(debris crashing) (siren howls)
Good technology you don't see or feel.
It's designed to be seamless with the environment
so that it doesn't impact your experience.
People walking across bridges
just assume it's going to be safe.
We notice technology when it's not working.
You just expect things to work,
and because of engineering, they do.
After Russia becomes the first nation
to put a man in space, the U.S. ramps up its approach.
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
The Russians really got way ahead of us.
They had the first satellite in space,
they had the first animal in space,
the first man, the first woman, the first space walk.
We were really way behind,
and it really is a testament to our combined effort
to actually catch up and then to get to the Moon first.
In the early days of the Apollo program
with this huge Saturn V rocket,
they had to put it on a mobile launch platform
that would move, essentially from the assembly building
and bring this out the launch pad itself.
That rocket weighs millions of pounds, right,
then so you're trying to launch
this extremely heavy thing up into the air,
that's being pulled down by gravity the whole time.
You're sitting on top
of essentially a controlled explosion,
going from being stationary
to traveling 25 times the speed of sound in 8 1/2 minutes.
That's an incredible ride,
and it's a ride associated with risk.
You need that rocket to ultimately be moving
at something like 11 kilometers per second.
That takes a tremendous amount of force
to launch this rocket upward and get to this speed
that you need to reach to be able to put something in orbit.
To fuel the rockets,
NASA comes up with a mobile launch platform.
Nine umbilical arms
attach to the rocket via electrical bolts
and connect it with the rocket systems.
Generating this much thrust,
what's happening is that you can also create resonance
that causes not only the rocket to vibrate,
but it also causes anything around it to vibrate.
You've gotta figure out, how can you disconnect this
in a safe way without it snapping
or interfering with the rocket as its launching.
You know, you see that iconic footage
of the Saturn V going up and there are these giant arms
that swing away from the rocket before it takes off.
Those are 10, 20, 30 feet long
and those gigantic arms, for example,
have to swing out of the way
exactly at the right time,
or it's gonna be catastrophic failure.
If you didn't have any dampening,
the acceleration imparted on them
would cause them to just recoil.
To address the issue of thrust,
NASA engages Taylor Devices.
Taylor Devices had developed these dampers
to stop that vibration in fighter jets,
that were undergoing very large accelerations
as they went through different kinds of maneuvers.
Dampers help you move large structures
into a particular position quickly
and don't allow them to bounce.
It's basically a super-large effective shock absorber.
A damper works by exchanging kinetic energy
into heat or friction, redirects that force
and tunes it down to an acceptable level.
Taylor Devices would develop
a revolutionary fluid-based damper,
withstanding higher pressures than any that preceded it.
There are various fluids that you can use in a damper.
Often it's a silicone oil.
The higher the viscosity, the thicker that fluid is,
and the more dampening you're gonna get.
Viscosity of a fluid is important.
This is the mechanism that helps us dampen these forces.
You can imagine swimming in a pool.
If you're walking on the pool bottom,
you're not feeling too much resistance.
But say you start to try running in the water,
you're gonna have resistance, you can't do it,
and that is a dampening force.
With rocket-grade dampers under their belt,
Taylor Devices looked at commercializing
their new technology.
Dampers are in all kinds of things
that we don't even think about.
In our cars we have shock absorbers,
on the forks of our bicycles, on motorcycles, door closers.
Hinges on kitchen cabinets, on drawers.
Bridges, buildings, you think about earthquake areas,
geologic disaster's kinda my thing,
and the last thing that you want
is to be on a bridge during an earthquake
or in a tall building during an earthquake
and not have dampers.
There's this famous video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
in Washington State, that was vibrating due to the wind
and it started twisting back and forth
to the point where the bridge snapped
and completely collapsed.
There could be dozens of dampers on any structure.
It's all part of dissipating energy
and ensuring that the structure performs
the way that we're expecting it to.
When an earthquake occurs,
you're talking about energy
that's moving through the ground.
You've got seismic waves that are gonna propagate outwards.
Well when that hits a building or a bridge,
that bridge and building is gonna take that energy
and is gonna try and move it through that,
and if you have dampers, the dampers are gonna help
secure that bridge so that it won't shake and fall apart,
or that building won't start to sway and then crumble down.
The potential lifespan of these dampers
is pretty reasonable.
They're pretty low-maintenance.
You would need to ensure that they're not leaking
or any of that fluid is escaping out.
We need to make sure that they don't corrode
if they're exposed to the environment
and if there's any points of lubrication,
they need to be lubricated.
The London Millennium Bridge is an excellent example
of why dampers are so cool.
The Millennium Bridge connects Bankside
with the City of London.
The city's engineers considered everything
including weather, but they overlooked
an unlikely human impact.
Pedestrians fall under the category of a live load
and they can behave erratically.
The pedestrians excited the bridge
in a way that engineers didn't expect,
a lateral excitation.
What happened was, as it would start to sway a little bit,
people would step in line with the sway,
so when it opens, it amplifies the effect.
Was shaking it at a rate
that made the whole thing sway rather alarmingly.
People were like, "Whoa!", you know?
"Is this bridge safe?"
They started getting sick or nauseous
because of the swaying movement,
and they had to shut the bridge down.
Just two days after opening,
the Millennium Bridge closes.
Taylor Devices steps in.
Then they renovated the bridge
to install dampers underneath it, to stop that motion,
and these are exactly the same kind of dampers
that they used for the retracting arms
on the Saturn V launch platform.
It's a fascinatingly simple technology.
It's not anything electronic or computerized
or anything like that.
It is a cylinder full of oil
and you're dragging a piston through it.
And by carefully engineering the shape of the piston
and the shape of the cylinder,
you can get exquisite control
over how much motion you get.
Because we now have this technology,
it's making things safer.
We can build bigger, better, longer-lasting,
more efficient, more comfortable structures.
It's pushing the bounds
of what we're able to do in the world.
This is just one way NASA's quest for space
actually ends up changing our daily lives on the planet.
But you don't have to look at extreme disaster
to see its impact on your daily life.
The supermarket.
In these aisles, the freshest bounty is within reach.
Shiny apples, plump tomatoes, greener than green kale.
In a world without NASA, strawberries rot faster,
bananas go soft, broccoli curls and peaches go brown.
Oh man, if you were sitting in the supermarket
and suddenly NASA technology just, poof, disappears,
you're gonna be looking at
a lot of rotting food really quickly.
If you think about the water budget
for three people going around the Moon for about a week,
that's manageable, but if you're talking about
having people be in space for two, three months,
and even stretching beyond that, it's just not feasible.
In space, when we go to the bathroom and we void,
the water in our urine actually goes through
a very complex system of technology and is reclaimed
and ultimately, we reuse it as drinking water.
We've developed that technology to enhance our ability
to have these closed loop systems work effectively.
Weight is the currency of space launches.
You don't want to have to keep doing launches,
it's terribly expensive.
You need a way to recycle
what you have with you, to reuse it,
and this is what NASA had to start thinking about
as they were transitioning away from the Apollo era.
But if humans are to survive in space,
we'll need to figure out a reliable food source.
The whole purpose of plants, isn't it, is to reproduce.
What they've got to do first
is attract insect and birds to take it,
so they've got nice sweetness,
but then what they've got to do is ripen more.
What they do to ripen is produce ethylene.
So ethylene is what makes bananas
going from green to yellow to brown.
Tomatoes going from green to red.
Ethylene is what we call a plant hormone.
We don't need it, but for a plant,
ethylene is vital because it's that ripening process.
One of the things that you can try
that you may not have thought of,
when it comes to ripening food
that you've gotten at the grocery store,
is take an avocado that is unripe, it's still hard,
and a banana, and because they both produce ethylene,
this one produces more than this one,
you can take them, drop them into a brown paper bag,
close it up and let it sit for 24 hours, or just overnight.
What's happened is that ethylene has nowhere to go,
and it's going to cause our avocado to ripen quicker.
And you'll be amazed at what happens when you come back.
Voila, a ripe avocado, ready to be eaten.
So now, when we take and apply
our ethylene scrubber in space,
what that does is it reduces the ripening effect
so that this stays fresh longer.
When we go to the grocery store,
that means that we get more fresh avocados
and other fruits and vegetables all the time,
instead of ripened fruit that must be eaten right away.
You could think of the Space Shuttle
and International Space Station
as giant paper bags, basically.
Whatever you take up in them
is just going to start rotting right away.
If NASA could figure out
a way to remove the ethylene,
fruits and vegetables would last longer in space.
At Marshall Space Flight Center,
scientists invented what is called a scrubber.
Scrubbers are devices, basically,
that are titanium dioxide tubes that suck the air out.
By scrubbing the ethylene gas,
you have vast extended the shelf life
of those fruits and vegetables
and that's perfect for space flight.
And, the ethylene that gets removed
from the fruits and vegetables
actually gets converted into water; very valuable in space.
So imagine being able to grow lettuce,
grow tomatoes in space,
on board the International Space Station,
this is research that will be critical for us in the future
to be able to go to the Moon and on to Mars and things.
And so the way that these ethylene scrubbers work
is that you're gonna take ethylene in the atmosphere
and you're gonna push it through these tubes
that are made of titanium dioxide
and basically you zap 'em with ultraviolet radiation
and what happens is the ethylene actually breaks down
into carbon dioxide and water.
And so those two byproducts,
well, they're actually useful for the plants.
To test this new technology,
the scrubber is sent up in the Space Shuttle
with a crop of potato seedlings.
Using the scrubber, NASA is able to stop the seeds
from ripening and rotting.
Not only do the scrubbers clear the air of ethylene gas,
they also sterilize the air of bacteria and mold spores,
even odors are all removed by the scrubbers.
It's not only food transport and grocery stores
where ethylene scrubbers have been a major step forward.
They're also used extensively in hospitals.
You think about hospitals,
there's a lot of stuff in the air there that you want out.
If we get better at cleaning the air
that astronauts are breathing on a years-long trip,
that's technology that we can use
to clean carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
and reduce the impact of climate change.
There are a lot of follow-on effects
from the sorts of problems that NASA's thinking about today
that will be useful 10, 20, 30 years from now.
Some of the best tech
has come from NASA innovations.
Unfortunately, some of those lessons
also had to be learned through tragedy.
(thrusters roaring)
We've got fire in the cockpit.
The Apollo I crew
was training for their upcoming launch
when fire broke out in the capsule.
NASA attempts a rescue,
but the astronauts perish in the fire.
Leading up to the Apollo I incident,
scientists and engineers were really trying
to minimize the amount of weight.
They made the decision to try and use pure oxygen
for the astronauts to breathe in the capsule.
In pure oxygen environments,
organic materials become very combustible,
much more so than they would be in normal air.
What happened was, in the pure oxygen environment,
when that spark occurred,
a fire very rapidly broke out in the capsule.
The capsule is a sealed unit.
Remember, it's supposed to go up into space
so it has to retain the pressurization of the breathable gas
in the capsule, when it's in space.
Much like an airplane fuselage,
where the door has to swing in
and then pop out and lock into place,
the capsule door was similar was similar
in that it was held in place
by the pressure of the capsule inside, when it was in space.
On Earth, if there was a pressure balance
inside and outside,
there would be very little force across that door
and it would be easy to move in and out.
In a fire environment, we're producing more gas,
so we're starting to pressurize that capsule.
As heat's produced, the gas is also expanding
and pressurizing that capsule.
As the fire progressed, what ended up happening
was it basically became impossible
for the astronauts to open the door.
With the tragedy that day,
NASA did learn some important lessons about space flight.
If at the time of the accident, the astronauts had
a particular type of fabric on, and breathing apparatuses,
they could have survived long enough,
hopefully in time for responders who've gotten there
and put out the fire.
To move forward,
NASA would have to look into the past,
to a material first developed
by chemists Vogel and Marvell for the U.S. Air Force.
A lot of innovations in the world are happenstance,
so we develop one material with something in mind
and then we end up using it for something else.
It takes time for scientists
to have those epiphanies where they go,
"Oh my god, this may be good in this situation,
"even though that wasn't what
"we originally intended this material for."
With the debut of fighter jets,
drogue parachutes were needed
to slow the aircraft down upon landing.
Jets put out extremely high heat from their engines
and these parachutes could not be made
out of a material that would catch on fire.
The result, a polymer called Polybenzimidazole.
The breakthrough with PBI is
it resists the impact of radiation or flame contact.
So when exposed to heat, instead of sustaining a flame
and adding to the combustion that's ongoing...
It doesn't actually catch on fire.
Which is sort of exactly what you would want
your astronauts to be wearing.
And it's basically an aromatic hydrocarbon,
so it has benzine rings,
and the neat thing about benzine rings
is they don't combust very well.
They actually decompose, which is a little bit different.
And stable at over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
But this miracle material, PBI, was expensive.
The Air Force decided not to use it;
they left it on the shelf.
They went to cheaper alternatives.
That is until NASA came calling.
Luckily, they also had the space race budget behind them.
PBI is so durable, some of the only parts
that survive the reentry of Skylab are made of it.
I remember Skylab, when it was falling to Earth,
my understanding is the only parts that survived
were those that had PBI on it.
But NASA'S new material
would be come invaluable to a whole other industry.
(siren wails) (upbeat sci-fi music)
Fire fighting technology has changed.
Fairly recently, within my career,
when I started in the Fire Service, I still had a canvas
two-side-with-rubber-in the-middle type coat.
Rubber boots, we did not have what is known as bunker gear.
That was relatively new in the late '80s, early '90s
is when we saw it.
Our SCBA, or self-contained breathing apparatus
were steel tanks, very heavy, cumbersome,
and then again, in the late '80s, early '90s,
we started to see composite fibers,
materials that were much lighter.
In the 1970s and 1980s,
PBI is used for flight suits, clothing, webbing,
and tethers to the Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions.
Any and all gear that may experience thermal extremes
include PBI.
Since its first use on the Apollo missions,
blends have been created to amplify the material's quality.
It remains one of the most flame proof
and durable materials around.
NASA's triumph helped create the shield
for your local fire heroes.
But NASA also had a hand in helping them breathe.
NASA technology and innovation
allowed humans to brave the most inhospitable environments.
Against the odds, firefighters can face the inferno,
protected from heat and with an air supply.
The Fire Service, as early as 1825,
was looking at ways to bring air to firefighters,
whether that was through a hose
to a, almost like a diving helmet.
All throughout history of what we call now
self-contained breathing apparatus, SCBA,
there was an evolution to, if you will,
bringing your own air
and having a self-contained breathing apparatus.
In the 1970s, fire chiefs started noticing
that a lot of their firefighters
were having smoke inhalation injuries and problems.
And that shouldn't have been the case,
because they had fire fighting breathing apparatuses.
But when they investigated it,
they noticed that a lot of firefighters
were choosing to go into burning buildings
without their breathing apparatuses.
When we started out,
they were what they called pressure-demand.
The way that these things worked is
you had to suck that thing onto your face a little tight
to get it to feed the air to you when you were working.
Some of the barriers to these earlier SCBA
and why people didn't want to wear them,
is they weren't comfortable.
They were big, they were bulky, they were cumbersome.
They took a lot of lung power
to get the air out of the tank.
All those aspects of the design made people just go,
"Maybe I'll just leave this on the side,
"I can move better in the fire."
And a number of chief officers,
leading lights in the Fire Service, went to NASA and said,
"Can you help us with these space-age technologies
"to improve, if you will, the technology
"that the Fire Service can use?"
And so, some of the developments
were direct spin-offs from NASA,
with respect to regulators, compressed air cylinders
that now use composites instead of heavy metals,
aluminum, carbon fiber, many things that were used
to lighten, if you will, the Apollo spacecraft.
And so those technologies
all got transferred into the Fire Service
through a research effort that was directed, if you will,
by the U.S. government and NASA as an agency.
The first major overhaul
was of the system's air canisters.
NASA contracts Martin Marietta and Structural Composites
to build lightweight air cylinders
inspired by rocket motor casings.
Some of these casings that NASA developed
had to hold a million liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
The key to making all this work of compressing that gas
and having to withstand these tremendous forces
is the metal, is the material that you're using.
By compressing the oxygen for firefighters,
this means you can have a smaller tank
or you can have much more that you need in the tank
to get the job done and you have the material
that can withstand that interior pressure
and withstand the exterior heat
that the firefighter's going to be exposed to.
For firefighters,
there are also payload specifications.
Fire fighting agencies had to come up
with strict weight guidelines on how much one could carry.
Making the canisters lighter
meant engineers could actually increase
the size of the canisters to hold more compressed gas.
A 30-pound tank could hold enough air for 30 minutes.
Newer canisters with the same amount of air
weighed just 20 pounds.
This allowed them to make bigger tanks
that could hold enough compressed air for 45 minutes.
The harness was also overhauled.
Previous tanks could be slung
around the firefighter's shoulders,
but the new harness would shift critical weight
to the firefighter's hips.
The modern cylinder is a combination
of aluminum and carbon graphite fiber
that is wrapped and has tremendous strength,
and it's considerably lighter, about half the weight,
than this old steel cylinder.
The modern pack, there's better padding on the shoulders,
the frame itself is considerably different
and it's designed to be adjusted for the user,
and very specifically, spread the weight
across the back in a better way,
and much easier in terms of the harness,
so that the weight is shifted to the hips
as opposed to the shoulders.
You can see the width, as well, very similar,
but the padding's different
and the behavior of this pack system
redistributes the weight to the firefighter
in a much more efficient way.
In the old system, you'll notice the pack,
it's just a flat sheet of metal, but with a bump on it,
and it was really quite uncomfortable.
The straps themselves were holding most of the weight,
which compressed on your shoulders.
The assembly at the waist was poor
and threw you off-balance if you were working on ladders
or if you were throwing an ax.
It could throw off your center of gravity very, very easily.
A new face mask boasted a closer fit
and better visibility.
In addition, a new warning system is put into place
to alert firefighters when air is running low.
When you look at the face piece,
there's a set of lights in here that tells you
your air supply is down, and as the air goes down,
you'll see orange, telling you,
"Hey, heads up, you're about half way through,"
and then when it goes to red, you're about a quarter.
You've got time to get out.
And in the older systems, there is a bell on the back.
This warning device, and in a fire, you may not know
whose bell's going off,
so you had to reach back and feel your bell.
There's a lot of noise in a fire.
Machines operating, people yelling,
people chopping holes in floors or walls,
and you're in the interior of a building
and you may not hear that warning bell.
Both Captain and I came on with the same materials
and it is a very clunky material.
So the gear has changed
from the perspective of its performance ergonomically,
its capacity for heat,
but equally, in other unintended consequences,
is the superior protection.
We now have to explain to firefighters
the limitations of this gear,
whereas in this one, there's such a delay
in that transmission of heat to the body,
the firefighters are so well protected,
they may not recognize the danger.
So we're teaching them how to recognize
and what to look for in other cues,
other than what we would normally have done in the past
which is, "Hey, my ears are burning, I better back out."
There is a phenomenal amount of protection in this.
If you put both of these people in the same fire,
this firefighter would be backing out
much earlier than this firefighter.
NASA and its contractors
increased the amount of time firefighters can spend
inside a burning building.
They've given firefighters more breathing time
and reduced the weight they carry into the flames.
In '74 and '75, firefighters in big cities in the U.S.,
in New York, Houston and Los Angeles,
they were equipped with these space age systems.
They got to give them a go and the firefighters loved them.
This was so much better than what they were using before.
It let them go into the smoke-filled buildings,
it let them withstand the heat,
it really let them do their job so much better.
There's so many aspects of the Apollo program
that found their way into the Fire Service,
whether it's the clothing,
whether it's our breathing apparatus,
the equipment, all the types of equipment we use,
it's that science that is everywhere
in the Fire Service today.
Keeping us safe right here on Earth
is something NASA seems to do regularly.
But you might be surprised
that NASA tech helps with crime fighting.
As a surveillance camera looks on, a car is stolen.
The camera had just captured the event
but the footage is grainy.
When police try to zoom in on the license plate,
it's too distorted to read.
In the late 1990s, solar physicist David Hathaway,
and atmospheric scientist Paul Meyer are hard at work
at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Both Paul and I were in the business of processing images.
Paul processed images, satellite images of the Earth,
of clouds and formations in the Earth's atmosphere.
I was processing images of the Sun.
Some of that involves trying to make them clearer,
but there's a little bit of blur
that comes with those as well, and you like, clean it up,
and these are very specialized instruments
that you can literally split up sunlight
into a million different colors.
From the fine division of that,
you can not only tell the chemicals that are there,
you can tell how they're moving.
It's the Doppler Effect,
the same thing that the radar gun does.
To deal with the occasional shaky images
and imprecise data being beamed down to NASA
from a low Earth orbit,
Meyer and Hathaway developed software,
video image stabilization and registration, or VISAR.
We dealt with algorithms for taking fuzzy images
and making them clear, and that's what Hubble needed,
was Hubble would have a single image and it was blurry.
The great thing with Hubble,
you knew exactly how it was blurry.
'Cause they're stars,
and stars are single little points of light,
so you know this is a pinpoint,
and if you put it together right, it should be a pinpoint.
VISAR actually started out as an eye test,
where we tried to do it by hand.
It was like, "All right, move it over a pixel and a half
"and up three-quarters of a pixel.
"Is that better than moving it over this far?
"Is A better than B?"
And so it was literally like an eye test.
We did that for longer than we ever should have. (chuckles)
As far as how much time we spent on it.
"We can automate this," just write a program
using what we know about how to measure motions of things,
and that became VISAR.
If VISAR could help scientists uncover
more of the Earth's atmosphere and our solar system,
could it also help us solve crimes down here on Earth?
After the 1996 bombing
of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia,
the FBI are at an impasse.
Though they have photos of the suspect depositing bombs
they can't make out faces.
Hearing about Hathaway and Meyer's stabilization software,
the FBI approached the NASA scientists and asked for help.
We had never had any idea
we'd ever be working for law enforcement.
They knew the evidence was there,
as far as they've got lots of video,
but if you look at a single image,
even if you brighten it up,
because of the video noise, you're breaking it up,
you just see the noise.
This is where Paul and I came in.
So Hubble was easy, the problem we had
in particular when we get into the forensic ends of things
and video from the Olympic Park bombing,
is you don't know how fuzzy things are,
you don't have a star to look at to tell you
how fuzzy it is, and so we did do a fair amount of research.
The real gains in what we did
came simply from adding images together,
and fro that, the noise eventually goes away
and you end up with a clean image
that you can see all kinds of detail.
Hathaway and Meyer were able to clarify
the footage that was originally made
with hand-held camcorders.
From the footage, investigators were able to learn
more about the bomb and the explosions.
This was used on a daily basis.
I think the State of Florida
bought a whole bunch of their workstations.
People were using this every day,
and so I couldn't even guess
how many cases were ultimately worked on with that tool.
You never quite know
where the next big discovery's gonna come from,
but if you give people the resources and the freedom
to pursue some activity,
then perhaps they'll come up with something, like VISAR.
There were people like myself that studied the Sun,
people that studied the Earth's magnetosphere
and the Earth's atmosphere.
This is serendipity of discovery,
that you never know when something totally unexpected
is gonna come out of something,
and I think for that matter,
it behooves us to continue to explore
because it's in exploring that we make these discoveries.
We are a power-hungry society.
As technology advances, so too does the demand for energy.
NASA also has power challenges in deep space
and it's in their quest for solutions
that we might find our most breakthrough energy moment
right here on Earth.
We've spent the past 50 years
transitioning step by step,
getting off of the planet
then getting to the Moon,
establishing a shuttle program,
building a space station, but the next big step
is going much further, and that's going to Mars.
I'm 29 now, so for my entire life,
there has been a human being in space,
the entire time, non-stop.
That is incredible.
We have this innate curiosity and desire
to explore things that we don't understand,
whether it's diving to the bottom of the ocean
or going to outer space, but it is so far away.
Going to the Moon took three days.
It's about 240,000 miles away.
The distance to Mars is about 150 times
the distance to the Moon, so you can imagine,
that introduces all kinds of complications.
If you wanna go past the Moon, then you need to worry about
the truly gigantic amount of fuel that you have to have,
and where is that gonna come from?
There are no gas stations in space
that are gonna just conveniently fill you up
with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen
between here and the Moon.
Humans have devised
numerous ways to harness energy,
but most are not an option in space.
Here on Earth, most of the electricity
is generated by burning fossil fuels, coal and natural gas.
Fossil fuels are what their name describes.
They are quite literally from fossils.
They are from organic compounds decaying in the ground.
All these things get compressed in the ground
and they form oil, we mine the oil, we use it for energy.
If we go to other planets,
based on the current data we have,
we do not anticipate encountering
other forms of organic matter,
which means we're not gonna have fossil fuels.
There's different ways to power things in space.
If we look at the Voyager spacecrafts,
they use plutonium batteries, really crazy technology.
But they last forever.
We've used fuel cells in space for a long time,
in various battery technologies.
One of the ways that we could help solve the fuel problem
is to use what is available to us there in space.
There's hydrogen and oxygen in the atmospheres
of other planets, but then you just have the same problem
that you had to begin with,
where you have to go down into the gravity of those planets,
get the stuff, come back out, that's just as hard
as bringing it up from the Earth in the first place.
Space is empty, there's not a lot to work with there
but what is there is sunlight.
Solar is popping up in really interesting places
so we're getting to the point
where people are thinking about
how can we incorporate solar into our every day lives?
Often we take the sun for granted on Earth,
but that technology is also gonna be critical
for us to be able to explore space.
All of the electricity
that we generate by burning fossil fuels,
or nuclear reactors, or hydroelectric plants,
that's just absolutely dwarfed by the amount of energy
that comes to us from the Sun.
We see solar energy fields all over the world now.
We've gone past the barrier where it's cost prohibitive now
to where it's cost effective to make electricity
out of solar panels.
Arguably, we'll drive the development of that technology
in space to create more efficient solar arrays
and then use that technology here on Earth.
Solar energy is really nice,
because once we get it up there, it's there forever.
We don't have to bring more fuel up.
It keeps on going and going and going.
So where we're close enough to the sun,
as much as possible we like to use solar panels
to provide energy to the spacecraft.
Basically what happens is we have a silicone crystal
and it has to be very pure silicone.
We then cut that into really, really thin sheets
and we put thin wires on the top
and the bottom of the sheet.
You can think of the light coming from the Sun
as a stream of photons.
Each of those photons carries a small amount of energy.
Photons coming from the sun hit the solar panels,
eject electrons, you connect that to a circuit,
you can do all of the things
that you can do with electrical power.
From our car's perspective,
the car is driving along,
and it has solar cells on top surface of the car.
The sun, when it hits the solar cells,
it generates voltage, and it also generates
a current flowing through the solar cells
and into our battery box.
Between our battery box and between the solar cells,
we have something called the peak power trackers.
This essentially dictates what is the maximum power
that we can get from the Sun,
and what the voltage and the current is supposed to be.
So the motor would be able to use the energy
that is harnessed from the Sun
to drive the wheels and to go forward.
It seems straight forward here on Earth,
but in space, there are other factors to consider.
If we're gonna use solar arrays
and solar power out in space,
well, we gotta get it up there.
Getting there, we have to worry about weight.
Every kilogram we launch into space
costs thousands and thousands of dollars,
so anytime we can reduce the weight of those panels,
there's a huge advantage.
So almost more than anything, that weight constraint
is the biggest one we gotta engineer for.
But we also need a huge surface area.
We need hundreds of square meters of solar panels
on a spacecraft like the ISS.
You can't put 100 meters square area
on the surface of a rocket and send it into space.
There's too much friction, too much drag.
It's kinda like putting your arm
outside the window of your car
at 120 kilometers an hour.
You can feel the wind pushing on your arm.
If we had solar panels that were sticking out of a rocket,
they would just be ripped off,
and so what happens is,
we tuck all that stuff inside the rocket
and then once we get it up into space,
that whole assembly opens up
and these solar arrays roll out.
If you want to reenter,
you gotta fold those solar panels back up
and put 'em back inside some type of vehicle.
Reentry is probably the most difficult thing to deal with
in terms of space.
You've gotta go through the atmosphere,
and you're going to be moving very fast when you enter.
You have to deal with the enormous amount
of heat and friction that's generated as a fast moving thing
comes into the atmosphere.
The temperatures that we're talking about
in those type of reentries can be
2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so well beyond
the melting temperature of most common materials.
So we really have to spend a lot of time
developing technologies that can resist that heat
but again, like all space materials, it has to be light.
In addition to all the light and heat
that the Sun sends out, there's a constant stream
of high energy particles coming from the Sun.
That radiation is mostly blocked by the Earth's atmosphere
for people on the ground, but if you're out in space,
that radiation is much harder to screen out.
We are gonna be exposed to really strong radiation
on the way to Mars, and so we will have to figure out a way
to deal with that, so that the astronauts can survive
when they go to Mars.
So then think what it might do to your equipment as well.
That movement of charged particles past the Earth
and through our ionosphere, and through the Van Allen belts,
generates electric fields in the long power lines on Earth
and can lead to blackouts.
This same thing can happen on spacecraft.
Those particles can lead
to problems with the electrical systems
and can lead to short circuits and damage.
There's other issues to deal with.
There's space debris, of which there's a lot up there now,
and most of it is human's fault.
So these are tiny, tiny little bits
that are flying around the Earth.
Any one of those hits your solar panel and cracks it,
bye-bye solar panel.
So over time, there is some degradation in the panels
but we put a lot of technology into making sure
that those panels don't degrade
and they stay as functional as they can
over long periods of time.
So you can generate electricity relatively easily.
The trick is, how do you use that then
to propel your spacecraft forward?
It's not like you can just hook up a fan
and blow yourself through space,
'cause there's no air to push against.
The electrical current from the solar panels
must be converted to thrust.
You're producing thrust basically by taking stuff
and throwing it out the back of the rocket
at the highest speed you can.
Which means you're essentially setting off
a lot of little explosions ejecting material,
but that means you've gotta start
with an enormous amount of stuff
that you can throw out the back.
Typically, these days they use liquid hydrogen,
liquid oxygen, you mix the two of them together
and give it a spark;
they'll burn and produce water, essentially.
That's a very rapid reaction, generates a lot of energy,
shoots the water vapor that's produced
out the back of the rocket at extremely high speed
and propels it forward.
So how can a solar array create thrust?
Through something called solar electric propulsion.
At NASA's Glenn Research Center,
engineers have designed solar electric propulsion technology
that would feed energy into thrusters.
The thrusters would generate and track
electrons in a magnetic field,
and use them to ionize an onboard propellant, xenon,
to create an exhaust plume of plasma, or thrust.
This is as close to a self-sustaining power source in space
as we've ever come.
The amount required is 10 times less than current systems,
reducing the weight of the craft
and allowing for longer missions.
As we design for space exploration and solar in space,
and we overcome the hurdles that are associated with that,
we become efficient.
That technology directly comes back to Earth
and makes us more efficient here with solar energy.
That's important because we need to get off fossil fuels.
The world is still getting warmer
and there are gonna be consequences.
We're gonna have to deal with that.
You know, it's really in our DNA to go explore
because every time we explore, it seems like
we gather information that makes our lives better.
And so, through exploration, we often find things
that we never could have expected
and it's benefited our lives.
And I predict that we will be on the surface of Mars
and have humans walking and exploring the surface of Mars
before the 100th anniversary of Apollo,
and that's gonna be remarkable,
because those astronauts are probably alive today.
They may be five years old, they may be seven years old,
we don't know, and if you walked up
to one of those kids and said,
"Hey, have you ever thought about being an astronaut?",
they go, "Oh, I'd love to be an astronaut!"
"You could be one of the first people
"to walk on the surface of Mars,"
and that's something that's absolutely incredible,
and really, that's what the space program is all about,
making the impossible possible.
Return to the Moon, Mars, and our solar system
are merely the next stepping stone
in our quest for the heavens.
With NASA's inspiration, many other ventures
have set their sights on the stars
and as a result, newer and better technologies,
materials, and systems are being tested every day.
The conquest of space may seem like
an expensive and dangerous endeavor,
but it's the ripple effect and spin-off
that has created the very life we live here on Earth,
and we've only just begun venturing out of our home.
Imagine where the push for space will take us next.
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