Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Lockheed Martin CTO Ray Johnson

Episode Date: July 2, 2012

The Chief Technology Officer for the world's largest aerospace company wants more young people to consider careers as engineers.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The CTO for the world's largest aerospace company, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. A slight departure from strictly space as we bring you a conversation with Ray Johnson, the Chief Technology Officer for Lockheed Martin. The company's Orion spacecraft will come up, but I'll mostly talk with Ray about the effort to encourage more people, and especially young people, to become the engineers behind projects like Orion. Bill Nye will join us from the exciting baggage claim at Los Angeles' airport,

while Bruce Betts will get us rolling on a new What's Up Space trivia contest, including a cool new prize. Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator Emily Lakdawalla will get us underway. Welcome back, Emily. Thank you, Matt. A couple of good things to talk about today. One of them quite fascinating. I mean, really, maybe an improvement on the periodic table. We'll get to that in a moment.

How about this big object that's apparently bigger than a lot of people might have guessed? Yeah, this one kind of snuck up on me because I discovered it just reading the table of contents in a scientific peer-reviewed journal. And it was a description of an interesting-sounding trans-Neptunian object named Celesia. It happens to be a binary. It has a large companion. And I looked at the article and I was like, this thing is a thousand kilometers across. That is big. That is as big as the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt series. And it makes it somewhere around the 10th biggest object in the Kuiper belt, give or take a few. So not far behind Pluto.

Well, it's a little less than half the size of Pluto. It's actually somewhat more similar to the size of Charon. You know, there's several more big objects out there that don't really even have names. It's actually so common to have objects that big out there that, you know, they're kind of behind on the naming. There's other things like Orcus and Sedna and all of these rather interesting objects that people just really don't hear about because the main problem is that we don't know very much about them because they're so far away and they're so dim. But we're learning more and more with each passing year, and it's really quite fascinating.

And more to come, no doubt. Absolutely. So let's turn to this periodic table, which has got to be the dream of geochemists everywhere. You were pretty happy to see it. Well, of course, I've always been fascinated by the periodic table, and I suspect that most people listening to this show share that fascination. You know, you just look at it, you look at all the symbols, even if you have no idea what any of them mean, like I did when I was a little kid, I found all the numbers and the symbols absolutely fascinating. But the periodic table that we

usually see displayed on the wall is, it's one written for chemists, and they have particular needs in terms of the information that they're looking for. Geochemists look at the world quite differently because they don't deal with covalently bonded compounds, which are the ones that you learn about in high school chemistry. They deal with minerals, which are crystals, which is quite a different way of atoms getting together. So this geochemist periodic table of elements details all kinds of information about the elements, not as the single atoms like you get that covalently bond with each other, but as ions and how they behave when they make ionic compounds. And it's absolutely fascinating to follow the trends. It's very different from the kinds of trends that you follow when you look at a chemist's periodic table of elements.

I used to have a map of the New York subway system on my wall. This reminds me a bit of that. But kudos to Bruce Railsback at the University of Georgia. Yeah, he actually put it together a long time ago, and I just discovered it recently. Emily, it's great fun. I think I'll try and trace my way through it when we are finished talking here. And I guess we are done. Thanks for joining us again.

Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Up next, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, it's not often we get to go on location for your segment, but here we are at LAX, LA International Airport. Yes, eat your heart out, everybody. We're in baggage claim.

No, we just came from Boulder, Colorado, in the Comparative Climatology Conference. Now, you were there, Matt. It was the heavy hitters. It was the major leaguers of climate. So it was James Hansen, Jim Hansen, the guy who wrote the very earliest papers after discovering the greenhouse effect on Venus. Brian Toon, who was a doctoral student under Carl Sagan, and they did the early, early computer models of nuclear winter, where so much dust is thrown in the air or above the air that the Earth turns cold, and this probably would kill the ancient dinosaurs,

not with nuclear weapons, but with a meteoric impact. Karen Rice, the hydrologist who studies acid, the acidification of the earth, soil, water, and air is very, whoa, it's very compelling. And David Grinspoon, the guy from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is very good. And then I was the moderator. I moderated. To say nothing of the nearly 600 very enthusiastic fans of climate. It's very, well, yeah. And this, everybody, look. These are four world-class scientists who are very concerned about climate change because they have run the numbers.

They have looked at this very carefully. And climate change here on Earth was discovered by studying other worlds. That's what we do at the planetary side. By studying Venus, people really, if I may, dialed in the greenhouse effect. By studying Mars, people realized what makes a world go cold when you strip away the atmosphere and so on. And then by studying the Earth, we've learned that these 7 billion people are changing it. Changing it.

Adding greenhouse gases faster than ever before in history. And this is what's making a deep concern for us people. It made for a great evening at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. Bill, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Now to the CTO of Lockheed Martin. Want to build a spacecraft?

Better find yourself some good engineers. And that has been a growing problem in the United States, where there is a critical shortage of young people entering so-called STEM careers. That's S-T-E-M, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Call it enlightened self-interest if you like, but aerospace and other companies, large and small, are taking a larger role in steering students to STEM with some success. The very largest aerospace company, Lockheed Martin, is one of them. And Ray Johnson is its chief technology officer. Ray, it's great to be talking to you again. We had a pretty good crowd last time at the USA

Science and Engineering Festival, but I'm very happy to welcome you to a much larger audience here for Planetary Radio. Oh, thank you, Matt. Glad to be on your show. Let's start with this. You are the chief technology officer of Lockheed Martin. What is a CTO? What do you do? The Chief Technology Officer in Lockheed Martin Corporation has the responsibility broadly for technology and engineering. And so when you think about technology inside our $46 billion corporation, at any one time we have 63,000 engineers working on over 4,000 programs. And so a broad range of technologies that encompass air, space, and a variety of other technical areas, making decisions about what to invest in, about what resources to apply, and what research and development activities is part of my job,

working with all the technical people across the enterprise. And on the engineering side, those 4,000 programs are developing things and developing products for our customers. And so we're working every day to make sure that those 4,000 programs deliver flawlessly on the promises that we've kept. And then finally, there's an area which I'll broadly call advanced concepts. And advanced concepts, we work with our customers to develop the concepts of operations for the new ideas that aren't yet out into our customers' environment. So is it your job to float among these, keeping everybody on track or adding your own thoughts?

It is. We develop the technology and engineering strategy for the corporation. And as you can imagine, a large organization with 123,000 people like we have, I have a direct reporting chain. And so the senior technical person in each one of our four business areas reports to me. And so I'm able to plan the operations within the business areas by working with those people and with their staff. Additionally, I have a number of vice presidents who report to me who take on specific initiatives that bring technology forward. For example, over the last three or four years, we've been working on an initiative in the area of nanotechnology. And now we have nanotechnology-enabled products that use carbon nanostructures and that use advanced composite, nano-enabled composites to develop materials that are stronger, lighter,

and cheaper than the materials that they replace. That's interesting. I may want to bring that up a little bit later if we have time for it, but I do wonder, what is it that led you to this position? What's your background? Well, my background is engineering and engineering physics. it, but I do wonder, what is it that led you to this position? What's your background? Well, my background is engineering and engineering physics, and I always have had a love for math and science, and I've been fortunate to be able to translate that into my academic work in electrical engineering and engineering physics, and then transition that into the workplace here in Lockheed Martin and previous places that I've worked.

Being the chief technology officer in the number one aerospace and defense company in the world is a fantastic position, and my work at an earlier age in science, technology, engineering, and math fields prepared me for that position. engineering, and math fields prepared me for that position. You've already, just with this description, demonstrated why Lockheed Martin would have a very, if you want to put it this way, selfish interest, if not a more altruistic one, in encouraging more people to go into STEM-type careers. The company seems to be taking this effort pretty seriously. I mean, that's why you guys were the biggest sponsor at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Is that really what this is all about, trying to convince especially more young people to become hireable by Lockheed Martin. You know, when you and I met, we were at the USA Science and Engineering

Festival held at the Convention Center in Washington, and we are the host and founding sponsor for that event, second event of its kind. We believe that the number of people, well, we know the number of people entering into science, technology, engineering, and math fields in the United States is declining. We're not having as many people graduate in engineering. We also know that the STEM-related fields and the associated innovations that come from that have been key to the economic prosperity and growth for the United States for the last 50 or 60 years. Globalization, the distribution of higher education, and general technology leveling across the world has made competition more severe. People talk about the decline of the United States. It's

not really the decline of the United States. It's really the rise of other nations in the world. So for our competitiveness, both as a nation and as a leader in the aerospace and defense field, both as a nation and as a leader in the aerospace and defense field, we know that STEM-educated people are key to that successful workforce that we have. Even for a company the size of Lockheed Martin, this seems like a little bit too big of a challenge to take on by yourself. What is the role that everybody should be playing in encouraging people to adopt STEM professions? We have the great opportunity of working on technologies that are very cool,

very interesting to young people. If you think about space technology, aircraft technology like the F-22 and F-35, even things like renewable energy and taking on some of the world's global problems that we face today. Those are very cool technologies. They're very interesting. And so that creates for us a wonderful bully pulpit to speak from. So we're able to really through the exhibits that you saw, there were over 3,000 exhibits at the convention center, and they were typically hands-on exhibits. And so part of what we're doing through the science festival and things like that is to translate what it means to

be a STEM professional, what it means to be an engineer, from the theory into the practice. When young adults or kids experience the thrill that they get in building things, engineers create things, engineers build, engineers take ideas and make them reality. When they experience that and they realize that yes, there's hard math and there are things to learn, but after we learn those, we use those skills to help us build things. That thrill of victory is an experience when you build things, when you solve problems, that's a real experience. And again, that hands-on that the Science Festival brought begins to let people

know what that feels like. We're using the bully pulpit. We're not alone in this. We're working with other people in our industry and outside of our industry to really raise the awareness. And I think the way that our partner in the Science Festival, Larry Bach, describes it is, we're raising science and engineering to the level of celebrity. In this nation and around the world, we celebrate movie stars, actresses, actors, sports celebrities, but we don't have that same level of celebrity for science and engineering professionals, when in fact they have a more important role in our daily lives than do the entertainers or the athletes. Mar from Lockheed Martin, CTO Ray Johnson is a minute away. This is Planetary Radio.

Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The next Mars rover, Curiosity, is about to land on Mars. You can join the celebration. PlanetFest 2012 is Saturday and Sunday, August 4th and 5th at the Pasadena Center in California. I'll be there with dozens of special guests, spacecraft displays, a space art show, great activities for kids, Planetary Radio Live,

and the landing on Sunday night. Kids 8 and under are free. You can learn more at PlanetFest.org. It's a PlanetFest. I'll see you there. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org.

I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I first met Lockheed Martin Chief Technology Officer Ray Johnson when he visited the Planetary Society booth at April's USA Science and Engineering Festival. Now he has joined us on Planetary Radio to talk about why his company is using that festival and other efforts to get more young people interested in STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And they're not just talking to students. Well, one of the attendees at the

festival that I had a chance to speak with for some time was Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education. And Arne went around and saw all the exhibits. He actually brought his wife and his kids there. And, you know, there's nobody who has a bigger interest in STEM education than does Arnie, and in fact, than I think does the administration. Raising that level of awareness, it's really a cultural issue as much as anything else in the United States. I think we need to bring about a cultural change, if you will, in what we celebrate. And so the educators are doing their part. I think they're growing more science and math skill teachers.

That's an important component to have the teachers who actually teach the subjects have backgrounds and training in the subjects themselves. But I think more and more, we certainly, there were roughly a million people who attended the festival in the mall 18 months ago, and more than 500,000 people came through the convention center. And the families, the kids, the looks on their faces, and the excitement that they expressed tells me that there is a love and a desire to learn more about science, technology, engineering, and math. And the educators, I think, get that. I think the administration gets that. And certainly Arne Duncan's comments and support to us showed that. Yeah. Did you get the same sense of tremendous optimism being in that crowd of people, that half million at the convention center, that this, you know, there are a lot of people in this

country who do believe in science and engineering? Absolutely. The thing that struck me, the two things that struck me the most about the crowd was, number one, what a wonderful, diverse group that we got to come to the convention center. People of all race, creed, and color, of age, of experience. And then the second thing is the enthusiasm that they all showed. And it was really contagious. You saw the entertainers on the floor who maybe were telling stories about science or demonstrating science experiments.

The crowds were standing room only around the excitement that was associated with what they were showing. With just a couple of minutes left, I want to give you a chance to talk about the things that Lockheed Martin is up to that you're most excited about right now. And can we start with what I would have to say was the centerpiece of your huge exhibit at the USA Science and Engineering Festival? That was a space capsule named Orion. Yes, the first Orion spacecraft for NASA's Exploration Flight Test 1 is undergoing the final welds at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans,

even as we speak. This spacecraft will be delivered to Kennedy Space Center this month, and there it will go through final assembly and integration, leading to a 2014 test flight, which will launch Orion 3,600 miles above the Earth in this critical test flight and reentry, testing reentry for deep space missions. So the Orion team is now in production operations at Kennedy Space Center, and they're working on harness fabrication and getting ready for that, working in the Launch Control Center, which was just brought online. So it's a very, very exciting post-shuttle environment,

and it's becoming real right before our very eyes. Remind us of why this is not your father's Apollo capsule. This is something quite new. It is quite new. It is the capsule, and so when people see it, I think it will remind them of the Apollo capsules, because it's not shuttle-like, but it's going to have capabilities and enhancements around safety, around fundamental capabilities that will be far and above what the Apollo astronauts went through during that program. above what the Apollo astronauts went through during that program. Is it your hope that this capsule is going to be the one that finally, after all these decades, gets humankind out there beyond the orbit of the moon?

It certainly will provide that capability for the government and for the nation when we decide to move forward on that path. Anything else that you want to call our attention to? I was intrigued by your mention of nanotechnologies, nanostructures, carbon fiber. Nanotechnology is a component of advanced materials, which is going through a dramatic change. I think for the first time in probably 20 or 30 years, two or three decades, we have an opportunity to blend some of the advanced chemistry work that's going on with advanced materials, and we're beginning to

see payoff in the area of nanotechnology as an example. Metamaterials is another example. And when you combine advanced materials work like nanotechnology, some of the composite work with advanced manufacturing, you begin to see a revolution in manufacturing that can be very exciting for the nation and move what we know we've lost in terms of cheap labor-based manufacturing into a whole new realm of manufacturing that could be a job creation engine for the nation and certainly a wealth creation engine for the nation. So we're very excited about it. Ray, I better let you go. I've kept you a long time. Thank you so much for this

second conversation about the exciting things that Lockheed Martin is up to, and especially for the company and your leadership in getting more young people to go into these areas that are going to keep the United States competitive and keep all of humanity pushing out there in the final frontier. Matt, thank you so much for offering me the opportunity to speak with your audience. It's a great pleasure. Ray Johnson is, as we've heard, the chief technology officer. He's also an executive vice president at Lockheed Martin,

the world's largest aerospace contractor. Lockheed Martin is the founding sponsor of the USA Science and Engineering Festival. The second time around in Washington took place just about a month and a half ago. Planetary Society was there. But our booth was kind of dwarfed by the presence of Lockheed Martin. The centerpiece there was the Orion capsule, soon to be, we all hope, headed up beyond Earth's atmosphere. We'll head up there as well for a look at the night sky with Bruce Betts in just a few moments here. That'll be for What's Up.

Sitting in Bruce Betts' office, right across from Bruce Betts. So it's time for What's Up. Any significance to the fact that we both are wearing shorts today? Yes, the significance is you chose to wear shorts today. Because you wear them a lot. I just thought, I just want to, you know, emulate you. Well, that makes sense. That happens a lot in my life.

I'm not ready to tell people what's up in the night sky yet, though, so you do that. Okay, I do want to say I've just enjoyed a fabulous anti-gravity mint from the collection you got me last week at JPL. I appreciate that. I feel lighter already. They're strangely uplifting. Ha ha! Speaking of uplifting, up in the night sky, in the evening sky, we've got Mars to the right of Saturn.

All of that going on in the southwest in the evening. Saturn will be hanging out near bluish Spica for quite some time to come. And over the coming weeks, Mars, reddish, will get closer to Saturn and Spica. It's all very exciting. In the pre-dawn, things are a party with the super bright Jupiter and super, super bright Venus. Low in the east, very low in the east, but they're getting further apart. Jupiter's getting higher. Interestingly, you'll have the moon in the mix on July 15th, making for a crazy bunch of bright objects over there in the east in the pre-dawn.

And earlier on July 9th, Venus is very close. It's close all the time right now to aldebaran the brightest star in taurus but it'll they'll be quite close on july 9th so check that out we move on to this week in space history it was this week 15 years ago mars pathfinder landed on mars that is so long ago how can can that be? I have no idea. I have no idea. It doesn't seem that long ago. It seems a lot longer ago to my children, though. Something about not existing at the time it happened makes things seem older. I was going to say we have listeners to this show who weren't alive at that point, which is very depressing.

Well, I'm glad they're listening to our show. A little more recently, but still an amazingly long time ago, the amazing Mars rover Opportunity launched in 2003, nine years ago. Still working on the surface of Mars. Still trucking. We move on to Random Space Fact. And I was going to do a celebrity one this week, but I guess we'll hold off. I have a celebrity Random Space week, but I guess we'll hold off.

I have a celebrity random space fact, but we'll do it next week. Oh, okay. Well, I'm very excited. I can hardly wait. I don't even know. I don't know who it is. It's so exciting. But in the meantime, the orbital speed of the solar system, that's us, as we go around,

not the sun, but our whole solar system as it goes around the center of the galaxy is about 220 kilometers per second. At that speed, it takes us about 1,400 years to travel a distance of one light year. But it takes only eight days for us to travel one AU, the distance from the Earth to the sun. That would be our whole solar system and our movement around the galaxy. It's really fast. It's much faster than we've ever sent a spacecraft anyplace. And yet it's so incredibly slow.

It is, because things are so incredibly big. Big. We move on to the trivia contest. And I had asked you, what is the brightest star in Ursa Major, which, of course, is what contains the Big Dipper, and what does its traditional name mean? And as I'm sure you found out, Matt, I was just so amused I had to ask that part.

And now we're all amused, or those of you who aren't yet will be in a moment. Our winner, Brian Sevilla, I believe a first-time winner from Rockville, Maryland, he was one of those who discovered that the name, which is pronounced, is it Alioth? I believe so. Okay, so Alioth means the fat tail of a sheep. Yeah, how can this be true?

It's supposedly from Arabic, so perhaps some Arabic speakers out there can tell us if this is really true or just some myth that's built up. It seems odd. You would have only one word to describe the fat tail of a sheep. And I wondered the exact same thing that Kurt Lewis did, which is why in the world is there a star that means fat tail of a sheep in a constellation that has to do with a bear? Now, Kurt's theory is that maybe the tail is hanging out of the bear's mouth. I would have just guessed it was different cultural things. But yeah, that's probably it. Let's go with that.

Well, we're going to send Brian a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And then it's next week. week of course it'll be too late for anybody to get in on this when they hear this but it's next week we're giving away the Celestron telescope but I do have a cool prize for the question you're about to ask cool all right back to our going around the galaxy approximately how many times has the Sun gone around the galactic center since it began nuclear fusion? And it's going to have to be approximate because the amount, the galactic year is a little soft in terms of it's not one specific number, it's a range right now. But still, get us the approximate number of times since the Sun was born,

by which I mean, you know, started nuclear fusion. How many times has it gone around the galactic center? That is so dramatic. I love it. Oh, how exciting. All right. You have until the 9th of July. That'd be Monday, July 9 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And here is the prize. We've never given one of these away before. A classic, a Fisher Space Pen engraved either Planetary Radio or Planetary Society. I'm not sure, but it's your own Fisher Space Pen. You can take it up into orbit with you. Wow. That is a classic. It writes in any direction. You can write upside down with your Fisher Space Pen. I even heard you can write underwater, but then maybe all pens do.

I don't know. Eh. It's engraved? Yes, we're going to have it engraved as well. Wow. We're cool. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky,

and think about a block of cheese. And I'm going to go back to my snack. Oh, I can't bear to watch this. He has an actual block of Tillamook cheese, and he's about to take a bite. Now, I love cheese as much as the next guy, but... He's Bruce Batts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up? Mmm, that's good cheddar.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.