Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Subcontractors: Making Space Happen

Episode Date: August 9, 2016

You may never hear their names, but there are thousands of small to medium-sized companies without which space exploration and development wouldn’t happen.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The companies that make space happen, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Something different today, we'll stay at ground level for a couple of conversations about the thousands of small to medium-sized organizations you've never heard of that make space exploration and development possible. Emily Lachter-Wall is on vacation this week, but Bill Nye the Science Guy will join us as usual in a moment. And we'll have another What's Up conversation with the Planetary Society's Director of Science and Technology, Bruce Betts. He's got the lowdown on what may be an especially good meteor shower along with a new space trivia contest. Bill and I couldn't get to us via Skype, so here he is on his mobile phone. Bill, we have several things to talk about this week, and they all have to do with education in various forms, most of it informal. I was hoping you could start with this thing that I just learned about

that the Planetary Society is going to do called the STEAM Team. STEAM Team. For those of you, everybody, we cannot get away from the acronym STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. But very, very popular along with that is the acronym STEAM, where you add the letter A for art. Science, technology, engineering, art, and math. And the science teachers at the National Science Teachers Association were very responsive to this.

They thought it was cool. They thought it was great. So if you're listening, if you're out there, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team and consider joining us. Because at long last, this is the vision of Bruce Murray and Carl Sagan, the people who founded the Planetary Society, to have an educational effort. To have, essentially, curriculum materials, mostly informal curriculum materials, to help teachers and students appreciate the cosmos and our place within it, man. So as I understand it, we are looking for educators who want to be part of this, help advise us, whatever. And it's that website, planetary.org slash STEAM team.

This makes me think of the students that are involved with LightSail and its sister craft, ProxOne. Oh, yeah. Our blogger, Jason Davis, wrote about this. The Whitesail-2 spacecraft is engaging a lot of university students. These are spacecraft built by students, designed and built by students, and the Planetary Society is in cooperation on this mission with Georgia Tech, which is building the Prox-1 spacecraft, and Prox is an abbreviation for proximity.

Light sail 2 will be out there, and PROX-1 will fly around it, something that organizations like the Air Force have been very interested in for a long time, station-keeping cubesats, very cool thing. The educational aspect of this is enormous because the students are building them, building these spacecraft. It's very cool. To learn more about this one, you can just go to planetary.org and Jason's blog entry. It's an August 8th entry on the website.

We can close with this event, which is, I admit, mostly going to be for people who are within reach of L.A. on Wednesday, August 18th, called LA Moonwalk. Moonwalk, yes. The Planetary Society is in collaboration with LA Magazine and Celestron. I have two Celestron telescopes, Matt, some disclosure. I only have one. It's how we know and appreciate the cosmos. it starts with telescopes looking at the sky. So I hope that for those of you who live in Southern California and will come over on the 18th of August, it's going to be fun. We're going to walk like we're on the moon, except we're going to be on Earth. That is part of it.

We will stay on Earth. And this one you can learn about at planetary.org slash LAMoonWalk. And Bill will be there, along with Bob Picardo, board member of the Planetary Society, John Davis, the creator of Jimmy Neutron, and live music from Joe Normal and the AnyTowners, which I'm looking forward to. And I'm going to be on stage helping to get from one of you to the other, I believe. So I'm looking forward to a great evening, 7 p.m. on August 18th, LA Moonwalk. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. That's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. We're going to go to a company

that is not just shares a name with him, but actually, Bill, what I found out after talking to the people at Nye Lubricants is you actually have a connection to them. Oh, yes. The Nye family, not to trouble anybody, they were whalers in New England selling whale oil. And the Nye Lubricants Company, we have common ancestry. And Nye Lubricants is a subcontractor working for NASA selling lubricants that are not based on whale oil. Carry on, Matt. Thank you, Bill.

All of that coming up as part of our discussion about the little companies, the subcontractors, that make space exploration possible. Stay with us. We're going to get to nilubricants, but first, a conversation with two women who work with many companies that are similar. I found them at the AMP SoCal booth on the exhibit floor of the Space Tech Expo. This year's expo was held last May in Pasadena, California, just steps from the headquarters of the Planetary Society. AMP SoCal is the advanced manufacturing partnership for Southern California. Dr. Marie Talnak is the director of technology transfer

at California Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. Cal Poly is just one of the 18 academic partners in this consortium that includes many other institutional participants. that includes many other institutional participants. With Marie was Dion Jackson, Program Director for the USC Center for Economic Development that leads the AMP SoCal effort. Dion also coordinates the work of the partnership. We are literally surrounded by hundreds of these small to medium-sized companies, most of them the general, will never know their names

the way they know Boeing or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX. And yet, just in the times I've talked to them, including here today, they play a very important role and they tend to be pretty proud of what they do. That's true. If you ask Boeing, they've got thousands of suppliers. They couldn't make their planes without them. People specialize in all those different pieces that go on the plane, whether it's the avionics that run the plane, or it's the wings, or it's the seats. There's all kinds of materials that go into it. Tell me what AMP SoCal is and how it came to be. AMP SoCal is a collaboration across ten counties, a combination of government, industry, and academia.

It was an initiative of the federal government to create partnerships across the U.S. in different regions for different industries that already had a strength and then to improve that to support the economy. Why did the federal government see a need for this? Manufacturing has been on the decline and even more so in our thinking, but it's foundational to our economy. So bringing that attention back was what this was about. You know, I asked somebody I know, actually the president of the Planetary Society, Jim Bell, who's in charge of building the next really great camera that's going to go to the surface of Mars.

It's called Mastcam-Z. And I asked him just the other day, hey, Jim, how many parts in that camera are off the shelf? And he said, none, maybe a resistor here and there. Do you see a lot of that where these companies may be asked by a big company or by the federal government, we need you to build this widget that's never been built? Well, I'll share with you an experience, a pretty eye-opening experience I had a few years ago. I went to one of these connecting conferences where there was a large, well-known brand name, manufacturer of aircraft, who said, we want to bid on the XXX plane for the government. So what we want is we want all of you small vendors to come and bring us your best ideas, and we're going bring us your best ideas

and we're going to put your best ideas into our proposal and that's how we're going to win. And it's really kind of a flip from what maybe the layman understands and that is that these large OEMs, original equipment manufacturers for aircraft, for military or commercial aircraft, the Boeings, the Northrop Grumman's, those, they really rely on their small vendors to come up with a creative and innovative systems that they can then put into the innovative aircraft. They may have the framework, the idea of what they want, the specs of what the military is going to need for the next F-22 aircraft, but it is the small businesses,

the small vendors that come up with the most creative, innovative component systems. And if you put them all together, you've got a winning proposal to win that contract, to win that big contract. So we're really surrounded by hundreds of innovators as we sit here. Absolutely. And that's one of the things that makes Southern California so strong in this industry is because we have people who create. What are the challenges that the companies around us are facing nowadays? Are they the same challenges they've always faced or are there new ones?

The newest one, which they've actually been dealing with for the last 15 years, is that their workforce is aging out and retiring and they have to replace them. But they're so small in their company size that they haven't been able to put systems in place to capture that knowledge. And so they're having to hire green people, and they don't know how to deal with green people and have them absorb the information from the people who've been there for a long time. So they need to adopt things like apprenticeships

or other mentoring- type relationships in order to do that, but it's new for them. And this has been a challenge for big contractors and for NASA as well. You talk about technology transfer, we're talking about knowledge transfer. That's right. It can be done. You just have to put your mind to that problem instead of hiding from it. People in Southern California will say, but we don't build any of the big commercial and military aircraft here anymore. You know, Boeing left. You know, there's a lot of myth to it.

But as it turns out, we have still the supply chain. We have the vendors, the small businesses that produce the component parts for these large craft. And they're here, and they've been here for a long time, and we hope that they don't leave time and we hope that they don't leave and we hope that they don't close their doors because they lose a contract so we're trying to help them with not only sustaining their business but helping them to grow by thinking creatively about what other systems they can diversify into like we've been talking about UAVs and drones. So you could be producing for aircraft for the last 30 years. You're a small firm. You've got 30 employees. And if you lose

a big contract, you go, okay, what do we do? Do we close our doors? How do we transition? What we try to do is to work with the companies, educate them, and get them to thinking about, well, what are some new markets? Like, you know, now instead of producing components for your composite materials and components for the commercial aircraft, the military aircraft, the big scale, how about small scale UAVs, drones, cube satellites, those types of things? It's a cliche now, but no less true. Manufacturing jobs tend to be really good jobs. That's true. You can have a certificate or a two-year degree at a community college,

and you can make starting at $40,000 a year up to $75,000 a year. Somebody who runs one of those big computerized machining devices can do really well. Absolutely. And it's a career that, for those people who like to solve problems, like to figure out how to make things work, it's a perfect place. What's the outlook? What is it that you would like to accomplish in partnership with the companies like the ones around us here today over the next, I don't know, 10, 15 years? I'd like to get more young people engaged in this industry. I'd like them to get internships at companies so that they can experience it and see how great it is. And that means the companies need to open their doors and maybe get some coaching on how to have an intern.

And I'd also like to see those people be given enough education that they can create the next generation of companies. Aerospace, which really dominates what's happening here today, even though it's the space tech conference, dwarfs what's happening on the space side, which, of course, is what we pay the most attention to here with Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society. Do you see much of that happening as well? Well, for example, I have a nephew. He's now at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He's going there in the engineering program because he wants to help us get to Mars. And he did a summer program at NASA up in Northern California, and now he's committed.

It's that kind of outreach that needs to happen. Dion Jackson and Marie Telnack of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership for Southern California. You can find the partnership online at ampsocal.usc.edu. When we return, we'll go from whale oil to the deepest reaches of our solar system. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL,

partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. I hope you'll join us. missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, about to return to the 2016 Space Tech Expo held in late May here in Pasadena, California. As I wandered the exhibit hall, I did a double-take when I saw a sign that said, Nye Lubricants. I knew I had to talk to these guys for our discussion of the thousands of subcontractors

that make space exploration and all other elements of the aerospace industry possible. As you've already heard, it was days later that Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye told me he actually does share ancestors who go even further back than the creation of Nye Lubricants in 1840. The New England-based company is still family-owned, but not by any Nyes are their descendants. Full disclosure, about two months after the conversation you're about to hear, Nye Lubricants became a corporate partner of the Planetary Society. Well, I'm Bill Gallery. I'm a senior engineer at Nye Lubricants. I've been there for 40 years. I'm Bob Hoffman. I'm a regional engineering manager based in Southern California, and I've been there five years.

So, gentlemen, the first thing I want to make sure the audience knows is that there is no relationship between your Nye and our Nye. Nope, no relationship at all. Although your founder was... We met Nye. That's too good a coincidence to pass up. You are here on the exhibit floor at Space Tech Expo with hundreds of other companies.

I don't know how many others are direct competitors of yours, but you're all in this boat, or most of you are. There are very few sort of top-level contractors here. Most of the companies represented here have smaller booths like yours and are what we know as subcontractors. Does that seem to represent the experience accurately? Yes, it is. We're subcontractors. to represent the experience accurately? Yes, it is. Yeah, we're subcontractors.

We provide small but very crucial components for the aerospace industry. Many times the lubricants we use will be a few grams in a bearing, not a lot of volume, but it's a key portion of the mission. Tell me a little bit more about Nye Lubricants. Like, for example, one of those major contractors you work with is SpaceX? We work with SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell.

We work with all the big companies that put satellite systems and space missions up there. I hope it won't be a painful question, but, you know, these are big companies. They do a lot of stuff. Why do they find it advantageous to work with companies like yours and all the others that we have here rather than just saying, oh, we'll just make our own lubricants or whatever? Well, we have a very unique lubricant. It's low outgassing. You can activate it.

And we're the only company that has this particular oil. And it can be formulated into grease also. So it's something that works well in outer space, it lasts for missions that will go for 30 or 40 years and it's unique and that's why they come to us. So you've got a unique product. Yes we do. What are the challenges that you face as a subcontractor? I mean you were kind of at the beck and call of that bigger company that you're working for.

Well, of course, they have specifications that are sort of pretty specific to the performance that they're looking for. Aerospace is a fairly small but very important part of our business. You know, 50% of our business is automotive, which is a completely different set of requirements. In space, it's a little hard to send the repair guy out there to service the bearings. So you've got to have some very strict requirements in terms of reliability. It's a vacuum out there. So any kind of normal lubricant is going to evaporate and it's not going to work. So the one that Bill was referring to is called Penzane and people in the industry know it.

It's one of the few lubricants that lasts in a vacuum environment. And so it's been tested and and NASA has written about it, and so everybody in the industry knows it, and they just don't want to take a risk and pick a different lubricant. So you've got to leg up, because unlike a lot of the other companies here who are surrounded by competitors, you guys really do have a unique product that they kind of need to go to you for. Yeah, but we still have to innovate.

We have to, for one thing, we have to figure out improved ways of producing it and controlling it. You know, the quality is ever more important so that, you know, we don't just sit back and rest on our laurels. And one thing that's nice is that the requirements from the aerospace industry have been something that we could parlay into the semiconductor world because they also have vacuum requirements. So, you know, they are able to send a service guy out there to repair things, but they are even more stringent as far as contamination and some of the other requirements. So it's a little bit different. That's a really interesting angle. So it's a little bit different. That's a really interesting angle. So you are seeing what NASA, of course, calls spin-offs, the kinds of things that are developed

for space having advantages down here. That's right. That's exactly right. That's why aerospace is so interesting for us is that we see a play in another industry. Well, we're part of the Space Suppliers Council, which is specifically organized so that big and small companies can talk about the challenges in one of them. All of us have these export restrictions that prevent us from, rightfully so, not allowing our national enemies from getting secrets and things that we're not letting get out but there's also a naturally competitive playing field that where we as businesses would like to be able to sell to other companies like European Space Agency companies that need things that we make but we're restricted from doing that as easily as other companies in the world so there is

a kind of a challenge there that I think the American space industry is is looking at they're trying to figure out how to how to do that better think the American space industry is looking at. They're trying to figure out how to do that better. And just the size of our company. We have about 160 employees. And so when we get hit with a deadline that a Boeing or a Honeywell needs, we have to throw a lot of resources at it. And it's tough. You know, we have schedules and deadlines on our own.

And to commit even a few people. It makes it hard, but our management and our executives, they value the service that we provide to the aerospace community, and it's willing to do that. How does it feel to know that some of your product is keeping things moving up in space? Yeah, it's kind of cool to know that something you touched is now on something like the Curiosity on Mars. And you look up there, and you see see the Mars and you know the Curiosity is there and you know your product is keeping the mechanisms running.

Bill Gallery and Bob Hoffman in the Nye Lubricants booth at last May's Space Tech Expo. My thanks to them and to the thousands of companies and millions of workers we will never meet but who make the final frontier possible. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Why? Because Bruce Betts is here. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he'll start by telling us about the night sky. I suspect, unless he wants to go in a completely different direction than he ever has before.

I'm going to give you my Olympic predictions instead. That's good. That's good, because I'm getting tired of watching NBC. As long as you're not getting tired of the night sky. Not at all. Not at all. I predict there'll be some gold metal viewing coming up. So anyway,

we got the Perseids meteor shower peaking on the night of the 11th and 12th of August. And it is usually the second best of the year, traditionally. May have a bit of an outburst. Kind of like you, Matt. A bit of an outburst this year around the peak. So instead of 60 perburst, kind of like you, Matt. A bit of an outburst this year around the peak,

so instead of 60 per hour, there may be 160 or 200, or there may not be. Go out and find out. And it's a fairly broad shower, so if you miss the night of the 11th, 12th, you can catch it before or after by at least a few days. The moon's setting around midnight. You'll see more afterwards.

But if you go out while the moon is up, the moon will be very close to Saturn and Mars. It's hanging out near them on the 10th, 11th, and 12th. Reddish Mars over in the southwest sky, moving between Saturn and Antares, the large red giant star of Scorpius. They'll be lined up roughly on the 23rd, 24th of this month. That's all happening in the evening sky, low in the southwest. Well, high in the south. Wherever you want it to be, Matt. Where do you want it?

Up there. Just up there. We move on to this week in space history. 2005, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched 11 years ago, still working great in Mars orbit. And congratulations to the team behind that spacecraft. A random space effect. Oh, you can do better than that. Come on. You can do a better Italian accent, can't you? No, no, I really can't. All right. Never mind. I'm afraid it just gets more disturbing. A random space effect. See what I mean?

But there's a reason. You may ask, why am I butchering an Italian accent? Because in astrophysics, nuclear pasta, I kid you not, nuclear pasta is a type of matter found within the crusts of neutron stars. Named that because the geometry of the structures resembles various types of pasta. So wait, don't order yet. The theorized structures include gnocchi phase,

spaghetti phase, and lasagna phase. No eggplant parmesan? No, eggplant isn't allowed on neutron stars. I now want pasta that glows in the dark. Nuclear pasta. This is not actually what it means. All right. But I'll get you some. Thank you.

I take it as a challenge. Chef Boyardee nuclear pasta. It glows in the dark. We have to patent that really fast now. So anyway, we move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, what is the highest award given by NASA? It can only be earned by astronauts. And the president actually awards it in Congress's name.

How'd we do? A few people said the Distinguished Service Medal, which was not what you were looking for, is it? No, that's why I gave all that additional information about it. Well, I bet what you were looking for is what we got from Richard Angel. Richard, who has not won the contest in over four years. Talk about hanging in there. He's out of Milford, Arizona. He said it's called the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, correct?

That is correct. The award was authorized by Congress in 1969 to recognize, quote, any astronaut who in the performance of his duties has distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of the nation and mankind. 28 of these awarded, 17 of them posthumously. And one of those posthumously. And one of those was Ed Weitz. We heard from Mark Little in Port Stewart, Ireland, that Ed Weitz was actually sold at auction about 10 years ago for $80,000.

Wow. We got this from Mark Schindler in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yeah, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. But in the future, it may be replaced by the Mark Watney Trophy, which is, of course, a gold-plated potato. And finally this from Robert Madsen in Grand Junction, Colorado. He was actually thinking that the highest award given by NASA to any astronaut should be letting them go to the ISS,

which puts them up there pretty high. We're going to give Richard, this week's winner, that great prize package that we give away so often, a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, which I'm told we're running low on, we have to order some more, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for that worldwide non-profit network of telescopes that you can operate remotely from anywhere else in the world and point it anywhere in the universe. All right. Olympus Mons is well known as the tallest mountain, tallest volcano on Mars. What is the second tallest mountain on Mars? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I have no idea, which is good because I'd probably blurt it out.

You have until the 16th. That would be Tuesday, August 16th of 2016 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this latest question. time to get us the answer to this latest question. This time, we're going to give away another one of those great posters from Chop Shop Store. Chop Shop, they do fantastic design work. I have a t-shirt with this design that has a robotic spacecraft all over it, and it is a really nicely printed poster from Chop Shop, which happens to have a Kickstarter campaign going at the moment to sort of market these little icons that they come up with individually. That, of course, can be found on Kickstarter. But your answer, you want to get in to us, as you heard from Bruce, and you might win that poster and a Planetary Radio rubber biscuit, excuse me, rubber asteroid,

and a Planetary Radio rubber biscuit, excuse me, rubber asteroid, and an itelescope.net account. And with that, I think we are done for this week. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite color post-it. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

and so much more. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its hardworking members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.