I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293

Alright, I'm a PhD student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. There's a lot that goes into that. It's something very difficult for me. I am studying with Dr. Jason Cassibry. Very funny. The other day, someone from the university came up to me and

said

, Hey, doesn't your student Destin give talks from time to time or whatever? It was the American Astronautical Society. This is a group that discusses the future of space exploration, aerospace CEOs, industry leaders, students and government officials. They've been having these discussions since the 1950s. They asked me if I would do what I call a spoken word.

Now, I usually say no to speaking engagements because I like to prepare and do it well, and it just takes a lot of time. Plus, I only do a few of them a year and I didn't know if it was the right thing to do. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the people who were going to be in

this

room are the movers and shakers of the aerospace industry. And these are the people who are doing things like planning the mission architecture to return to the moon. And when I looked at the name of the talk, it was about the advancement of space from Leo to the Moon and beyond, or at least

this

is the symposium.

It's the von Braun Space Exploration Symposium of 2023. Now, Werner von Braun, or von Braun, depending on how you pronounce his name, was the main architect behind the Apollo program, which was when we went to the moon. Right now, the United States is doing what is called the Artemis program. The Artemis program is our effort to return to the moon and get humans there now with new technology. It's very interesting. In most of the chatty talks I give, I like to provide a perspective outside the organization or company that asked me to come and speak. In this case, all the people in front of me are the most important leaders in the aerospace industry.

I thought about what it would look like to have a view of Artemis from a third party's perspective. I thought it would be pretty good. But the more I started researching Artemis, the more I realized there might be some problems with the way people communicate about it. There are some architectural issues that people aren't willing to talk about today because of how they got there politically. I was like, You know what? I just want to say what no one says. That's what I decided to do. A lot of people I respect, when I was researching and asking these questions,

said

, Be careful, Destin.

If you say certain things, it could change your relationship with NASA forever. I thought about it and decided: You know what? This is the truth and this is what needs to be said. And NASA, please don't hate me. But seriously, I'm nervous about this talk before I go in. You will see. I decided to play the talk for you and let you see what this is like. Now, to be clear, being a YouTuber means nothing in this room. The first part of the talk is me trying to establish credibility within the aerospace industry by saying some of the things I've done.

I did Defense Acquisition University. I know what it means to develop a system that will be evaluated by humans. I have to establish that. But I also have to add a little bit of: I'm the YouTuber you think I am. And in the end I want to ask the hard questions. So, for me, this was an exercise in something called rhetoric. Rhetoric is about persuading someone to take a certain position, and that's what I was doing here. I thought you would enjoy being in the room. This is me in a room I normally wouldn't be able to be in, and I thought you might like to take a look and see what I have to say.

I'd love to know what you think of my points about Artemis. That's all. We'll see how it works. I almost forget it. At some point I'll show you the design of this year's patron sticker. If you're interested in that, I think it's really cool. I'll show you here in a moment. Anyway, let's get on with the talk. Now we come to our closing speech for the day. We are truly honored and happy to have this speaker with us. He is no stranger to speaking to large audiences. Destin Sandlin is a husband, father, and aerospace engineer known for his educational video series, Smarter Every Day.

He is also a current UAH student. So, Destin, I'm giving it to you to talk to. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. I'm seeing people I know. That's always good. My name is Destin, and when you leave here, what I hope is that you see the mission differently. In a world of talkers, you will be a thinker and a doer and ask the hard questions. I... Well, let's do this. Who is this guy? It's something we do in Alabama. I know them from all over. Here in Alabama we like to just... Can you hear me? Is this good?

Well. Here in Alabama we are low-key rednecks. You know that about us. I'll just go over who I am. I grew up across the river and was just a redneck kid. It's me and my big dog, Thunder. My dad is there. Dad, you can come up here and sit if you want. Are you OK? Yes, dad is here. Yes, dad is amazing. I grew up a normal kid and my grandfather, my father's father, worked for a small organization called the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Have you ever heard of him? Yeah, have you heard about that? Yeah, he's pretty good.

His name was Pryor Wilson Sandlin. Why do people always laugh when I show this slide? Every time I show it to my grandfather. They say, Ha, ha, ha. I was like, I don't understand. That's how I grew up. It's a culture thing, I guess. But my grandfather, the same guy who taught me how to shoot a squirrel out of a tree, a guy who taught me all kinds of things... I mean, he taught me about science and he would take me outside and teach me stuff. I remember that Grandpa didn't, I don't know if you remember this dad, but Grandpa didn't tell me that he loved me.

He didn't say that. He said, "Wow, I love you to the kite belt." I thought: What the hell does that mean? I do not know what that means. Then, years later, he was sitting here in the hallways at UAH, writing some things down with a pencil and calculating the Delta V requirements to go to Mars. I was like, you know? Not only is it likely or possible that we will go to Mars, it is going to happen. He loves me beyond that. I know this is the asteroid belt, not the comet belt. I have to say this because you guys are smart.

But grandpa used to say things like that. The same person who made me feel very, very small and made me want to outwit a squirrel, he was the same guy who made me think about how big the universe was. That's how we grew up here in Alabama. It's great. I love it. I went to the University of Alabama. I learned a lot from Darryl Sandlin, who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope. That's a photo of Dad when he was doing metrology on the SunShields of the James Webb Space Telescope. Really interesting stuff. Dad used to work as an MMC operator and programmer, and he used to teach me things about coordinate transformations before he knew what algebra was.

I had a very good education. I did internships at the University of Alabama. I worked at Eaton, aerospace. The cool thing about this is the test cell next to me, I was working on the Joint Strike Fighters fuel pump, which was also the hydraulic pump, really cool stuff. I used to test the lubricity on that thing. But in the next cell was the SR-71 fuel pump test cell. It was designed to explode. They told me they're in Jackson, Mississippi, and they said, Yeah. These guys showed up and said, Okay, we need a fuel pump that has to generate this flow and this pressure.

The Mississippi boys said, Nothing needs a fuel pump like that. They say: Build it. That's the coolest story ever. Anyway, I also worked on Little Debbie Snack Cakes, basically on the same level as, Why are you laughing at me? Little Debbie is amazing. Let me tell you about little Debbie. Imagine that here is a sheet of zebra cakes. It is improving. You have a double guillotine that hits that thing as it goes. Brilliant. How do you get chocolate drizzle in there? You just turn on this little switch and the little motor starts spinning and the chocolate drizzle starts coming out and you get a sign on top of your cakes.

But wait, there is more. Turn another mechanical lever, you enter the cosine, the other one, you shift it out of phase, it forms a circle. This is how they make elegant cakes. In the same vein they make zebra cakes and elegant cakes. Is incredible. I'm losing my time. Let's keep going. That's where I met my wife. Look at this, isn't she hot? My wife is also very pretty. Do you see my wife? She's great. My wife and I have four children, we love them and we believe we are going to keep them. Right here, this is my training as a professional.

I worked across the interstate here at a place called Redstone Test Center. What you see on the left is a component of something called the active protection system. We were trying to defeat rocket-propelled grenades as they were fired at vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. I spent a lot of time on that. Maybe in 25 years we can talk about it. But it's really cool. On the right I worked with missiles for a long time. Right, I went after a while and thought: I'm going to work on airplanes because I don't know airplanes. I can't speak that language.

I learned a lot there. The good thing about ATEC, the Army Test Evaluation Command, is that we were in the developmental test command. We were helping to acquire material for the army, material that would be used by the soldiers. The human rating of the products was enormous. I had to go through what is called the Defense Acquisition University. I understand what it's like for a human being to rate a product. It's very important. I'm just giving it to you so you can say: Yeah, you tip, gaha, that's funny. Also, a little field experience here. This is something great.

This is what we would call at the range on Tuesday. Three, two, one, fire. Many people don't know, here we try Javelin. I remember a very specific moment. We had just blown up a Russian tank. I remember the smell. I just remember a lot of things. We're down and I'm living my best life, scoring the target, watching the charge penetrate the hole. I look at Tracy Williams, who is a Vietnam veteran, who helped develop Javelin when it was called All Zem, if you know. She helped develop it. She fought in the Vietnam War. We're heading back down that road over there, Center Line Road, Test Area One.

I look at Tracy and said, Tracy, what are we doing? What are we doing? He says: What do you mean? I thought: Dude, we can destroy a tank. It's amazing how good we are at this. We can blow up tanks and shoot the turret. There will never be another ground war with tanks in Europe. This is a bullshit. Nobody is ever going to do this. Young man, right? I have it resolved. I look at the gray beard, Tracy says, I've seen a lot of things. You never know. You never know, young man. Keep driving. Fast forward to recently, right?

I think about that conversation a lot. I think about that conversation a lot. I had it figured out. We have the new technology. These old problems will never come back. Man, I think about that a lot. I used to waste time at night doing things in the garage. This is the first photograph I took of a bullet hitting a match. I was really excited about that. Then one day I did something stupid. I bought my dad a gift for Father's Day. I don't know if the audio works here, but let's move on. I uploaded this. Hey, it's me, Destin.

Can you hear that at all? I bought my dad a gift for Father's Day and this got weird. I posted this online, and I was taking orientation and control classes here. I bought him a chicken. It is a chicken. I bought my dad a chicken. I started looking at it and thought: I want it. There is some CNG stuff happening here. She knows where his head is. As it moves, in some ways there is a control loop here. Then this happens. The movement goes so you can compensate for it. Chickens are very good at this. I'll show you.

Notice how his head remains completely stationary. You guys are super nerds, so I know where your brain is going right now. You go to the pigeon-guided bomb of the world. I know what you're thinking. You're great, you're smart. But this is not what I was thinking. At that moment I thought: I'm going to put this on the Internet because it's amazing. This is surprising because there is clearly a closed loop control system here that appears to be optically coupled to this chicken. I'm back driving it. By the way, do you know why chickens do this? Do you know this?

This is the smartest room I've ever talked to. Nobody knows. Well, basically there is something called the vestibular ocular reflex. Do you know about that? Everyone look at my hand. I'm going to move my hand. Follow my hand. Okay, it's hard for birds to do that. What they do is they block the head and that's the frame of reference, and then they walk underneath it and it ends up looking like this. They will walk and then walk under it. They will throw the head, and now it makes sense? That's what they do. Yeah, so when wow! brilliant.

Basically, what's happening is I'm putting this on the Internet and I'm thinking, Man, I'm in a place of thinking. I am very smart and I am proud of myself for how smart I am. So what does the Internet do with this? Hey, look at this redneck playing with a chicken on the Internet. He'll take that thing and move it like this andcommunication. We can put communication there so that it gives us a green box to justify it. But what this doesn't say is that the orbiter can't see the landing site. But 86% of the time. We are going to have a relay satellite no matter what.

We are going to have a relay system. Because what is 14% of six and a half days? It's about a day. There is coming a day when we will not be able to talk unless we have a relay satellite. I have to think about all this. I found this in a newspaper. I thought this was really interesting. Then I started trying to understand the architecture to get there. I didn't understand until this week, when I really thought I was going to embarrass myself in front of you and then decided to embarrass myself even more in front of you, I didn't realize that to get the human lander to the moon, we have to launch a bunch of rockets. additional to reach low Earth orbit.

I didn't know. I say: Well, how many rockets do we have to do that? They're like, Six. Then I start, because I know people, I started calling people. I was like, Dude, seriously, how many rockets is that? They're like, Well, it boils... I was like, Some people were like, Well, it looks like eight. I was like, Eight rockets? Do we have to fire eight rockets to launch one rocket to the moon? Then they say, I mean, that's what they're saying, but it's probably more like 12, actually. So I thought: I'm an engineer, I know how to do these things.

I began to count the deviation and boiling from the nominal schedule. This is the number of rockets that will be needed to refuel and take it to the moon. I have done the calculations. If you have any questions, I'm joking. Remember, I'm the bad guy. I'm going to turn around and be the good guy in a minute. The question is, is this smart? Now is the time when people are afraid to speak again. Not efficient. It is not efficient. At the bottom right, I made a drawing, I chose an image from the Let's go video. That is the number of rockets that went to the moon and landed for Apollo, for all of Apollo.

I'll take you back to this graph. Okay, I've said enough. Is this the simplest solution? Okay, so I should probably go now. I'm Destin. Hence. It seems I'm referring to the number of rockets in the talk here. In fact, I'm messing with communication. So what's interesting to me is that people in the audience didn't know the number of rockets that were going to be used to refuel the lander. That is a problem. I was trying to be funny and there were interested parties in the room. When I said 12 rockets like I said it. They laughed. It's probably more like 12.

There were others who weren't laughing. Here's the deal. People didn't know the answer to this question. Shortly after giving this talk, we saw an answer to this question. This article came out. Someone at NASA said it would take at least 15. So now we at least have a baseline. We have a flat. It could be more than that. It's at least 15. We still don't know the answer to how many rockets it will take to power that thing. I would tell you that that is a problem. This is indicative of a communication problem. The fact that we have this very complex architecture and we don't know the exact answer to such an important question is quite damning because if we don't know such a simple answer to such an important question, what does that say about the little things? ?

When my grandfather was drinking coffee from this mug down the street, they had quarterly reports on

every

little component of what was going on, right down to some subcontractor's pressure transducers at a small plant somewhere in the United States. They knew what was going to happen because the more complex the system, the more communication is needed. Make it work. Saturn V Quarterly Film Report Number Seven. Saturn V Quarterly Film Report Number Nine. I think there is a problem because right now we are two years away from this launch and we don't know the number of rockets.

I don't think that means we're going to release this in two years. I'm just saying it. That's where I am as an engineer. It's time to be honest. As engineers, we are not known for being effective communicators. That is not the strong point of an engineer. It is time to design and systematize communication so that each organization involved knows much more information than it needs. We have real goals and dates that are achievable and don't depend on a technological innovation miracle happening somewhere on the Gantt chart. In fact, we have actionable things that need to happen in certain periods of time.

And if something doesn't happen, a critical technology is not in development, we communicate that there is a delay in the schedule to

every

one. The fact that this launch is still two years away tells me that we have a communication problem and I would like to see that solved by centralized leadership. There I said my thing. Well, at this point you will see a change in the tone of the talk. I have exposed the problem. Now I'm going to transition into aspirational goals. How do we get there? And a lot will depend on this. What made Apollo a success?

And you'll see me talk about that later here in the talk. Remember what I said earlier about the importance of negative comments. I'm just a simple engineer from Redneck, Alabama. But really, here's the deal. Were going. We have selected this architecture. So how do we make it work? I will accept that the contracts are written. We have European partners who are building the first Gateway node. I'm going to accept it right now. Let's say everyone in the room accepts it. Come on, let's be united and let's make it happen. Now, what do you do with that information?

What do you do with that information? I think the key is to learn lessons from the past. Who is this person? Jose Shea. He is a very, very important person. This story, which I am about to tell you, is sad. Joseph Shea is sitting in a meeting here in the '60s at a presentation. If you're in the aerospace industry, you're in meetings all day. That's what you do. That's what this guy is doing now. Who are these people? Apollo 1. Yes, there is a high school here in Huntsville called Grissom, after the gentleman on the left.

These astronauts were preparing for Apollo 1 and knew there were problems with the capsule. They knew it. The engineering team knew there were problems with the capsule. Everyone was working feverishly to solve it. Everyone was trying to figure this out. Then, on January 27, 1967, a farce occurred. There was an accident on the platform. The capsule burned because they were in a 100% oxygen environment, a flame started by Gus Grissom's seat. They died. I remember being at a family reunion years ago. My grandfather worked at NASA and I remember hearing veterans talk about that fire with deep sadness and reverence.

It occurred to me that something changed at NASA at that time. It changed in the middle of Apollo. Things were going so fast that something changed. As a joke, I didn't know, and I'm just telling you this so I don't bring down the room, but I just want you to know that this happened. As a joke, earlier, at the end of one of the meetings, the Apollo astronauts talk to the photographer and say: Hey, we have to make one more joke. Let's play a prank on Shea. We want a photo of us with our hands in prayer around our capsule.

We mean, and they said down there in the note, they said, It's not that we don't trust you, Joe, but this time we've decided to go over your head. They joked: We all know there's trouble here, and we just, man, we don't feel good about it. At the same time, to be clear, the Apollo astronauts, these gentlemen, knew the risk and didn't say anything to the point of saying, We've got to figure this out. I do not know what happened. I do not know what happened. All I know is that an engineering error occurred and went undetected.

That will happen because we are human and we are imperfect. But when that happened, what I do know is that NASA changed, it changed completely. The way they did things, like they had conversations, and I'll get into that here in a minute. Here's something to think about. Do you like movies? Return to the future. It's pretty good, right? Marty McFly, that's great. One of the interesting things about those time travel movies is that they go back in time and say, Oh, man, I can't change things because of how crazy it will influence the future timeline. If I move this bottle and to the wrong person, whatever, I might not even be born.

These small changes have monumental impacts. By the way, a really good time travel movie, if you haven't seen it, Primer, really good. You've never heard of that. The budget for that film was $7,000. Look Primer, it's amazing. Great plot. These time travel movies can teach us something. Why don't we realize that we now have so much control over the future? Right now, you have so much control over the future while you're sitting there. Oh man, if I would just send this email and say this in a compelling way and impact the way CDR and program reviews are done, if I could just make them understand that Eclus needs blah blah.

Blah, why don't we have that level of seriousness about what we think now? I just think it's cool, something to think about. Has anyone ever heard of this document? Don't raise your hand. Don't raise your hand. Does everyone remember the score from before? MMM. Well, if I'm not mistaken, this room is full of people who are industry leaders who are in charge of taking humans back to the moon. Okay, in your head, don't raise your hand, in your head, answer the following question, have I read NASA SP 287? The title of the document is What Made Apollo a Success?

Have you read it? And if you haven't read it, I'm not kidding, shame on you. Oh really. You have a whole generation of engineers who did the best thing humans have ever done and they gave you the manual. They wrote it. All you have to do is read it. I have read it. I'm not even in your food chain. I haven't even... read this. Of course, I read it very, very quickly, so you could say I read it for effect, but I read it. I highlighted things here. I want to go over some of this with you.

Imagine the score. You have the people who actually went to the moon. If they handed you the playbook and said, Hey, this is how you do it. This is the key. It seems pretty important. This exists. It's crazy that you don't know that if you don't know this exists. Okay, by the way, it's really fun to read. It's written by several people who dealt with different things, like trajectory calculations. Jean Krantz writes a section. There are a lot of really good things, but let's read some of them. Of course, the way we did this work was through meetings.

Big meetings, small meetings, hundreds of meetings. What we always tried to do at these meetings was encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak, hopefully, but not always, without being the subject of ridicule. We wanted to make sure we hadn't overlooked any legitimate input. That's how you feel now. But I don't know, nowadays many people are afraid to speak. It seems like they might have had a slightly different culture. Alright, spaceship design, I thought this was interesting. Talk about how, when designing a spaceship, you have elements of missiles and airplanes. I have never designed a spaceship, but I have worked on both aircraft and missile design.

I feel like I understand it. He says, and this is key, listen to this, this is the key to building your spaceship. Build it simply and then duplicate as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other takes over. Some examples are a thrust chamber blade that does not require regenerative cooling, hypergolic thrusters that do not require an ignition source, three fuel cells, and it goes on and on. I was impressed to learn that the climb stage in the current design does not use hypergolic thrusters. That blew my mind. I was like, Wait, so we're going to go there and we have to turn this on.

I understand. You want to use In situ and you want to make methane. I got it, I get it. But hyper goals always work. You make them play and they say: Boom, that's how it works. I just thought it was interesting. I thought: We are changing. Is that good? Why are we introducing complexity into a system? I thought it was really interesting. This was an amazing graph. This graph, the person who wrote it, was in the first chapter, the guy who wrote this, or the lady who wrote this, I forget, George M. Lowe wrote this. Do we know George Lowe?

Is this good or bad? I don't know. I'm ignorant. That's good? Well. You can see how ignorant I am. This is great. I am an outside observer. I could leave and you guys will have to deal with what I said. Okay, so George Lowe said this, this is how they planned what missions they were going to do and when. They said that a step too small would have involved the risk always inherent in human spaceflight without any significant benefit, without any real progress toward the moon landing. Too big a step, on the other hand, could have stretched the system beyond its capacity and to the point where the risk would have become excessive because the new requirements in flight operations were more than people could learn, practice andperfect in the time available.

Basically, you don't take small steps, you take big steps because you actually have to move towards the goal and there will be risks involved, but you make sure that the risk is not too big so that the engineers on the ground can't learn the lessons. I thought that was brilliant. That is incredible. I've never read anything like it. I have worked on the development of vehicles and active protection systems and anti-missile systems. That was very concise. It was incredible. Then I looked at Artemis III, to be clear, this is after Artemis II, which is about to happen.

On Artemis III, for this to work, it starts, at first, it starts or

anyway

, we've never done cryogenic refueling in orbit. Humans haven't done that. Am I wrong about that? Someone correct me. Am I wrong about that? Okay, let's let this sink in. Humans have never performed cryogenic refueling in orbit up to this point. Make all the graphics you want, but we need to follow a few steps. I don't know how they are doing their programs, but I think this is very, very interesting. I think it's important that they talk about this with authority because they are intelligent and they know things.

Alright, don't get hung up on the tech demo. Focus on the mission. Focus on the mission. Focus on the mission. I sound arrogant right now, don't I? Please understand. I try to be the voice of the engineers of the 60s, at least that's what I'm going to tell myself. What is the mission? Some really great people. Really cool people. These people are amazing. If you've ever met any of them, you know that they are legitimately amazing people. They really are. My advice, and it's not my advice, but through my grandfather's generation, is to keep it simple.

As simple as you can make it and accomplish the mission, that's what we should do. We should make it as simple as possible. If you read the old Apollo books, have you ever seen how they decided to take the lunar lander off the moon, the ascent stage? It's crazy because it's incredible. They say, Okay, then we'll find the right time and we'll launch. That doesn't work because things aren't what they are. This is what we are going to do. You can read this in the material. They say: Okay, if all else fails, this is what you do.

Open the hatch, go around the back. There are these guillotines that connect the decent stage and the active stage. You had to flip a switch and the guillotines were cut. They would release them and they would be disconnected and ready to start the engine and climb. If that didn't work for some reason, they wrote a procedure. They say: Okay, here's the deal. Left-wing friend or right-wing friend. Whoever has the best integrity of their suit at that time, the least amount of leaks, you're going to depressurize it, you're going to exit the spacecraft, you're going to go to the bottom of the spacecraft with a bolt. cutters.

Is awesome. It's great. Using a bolt cutter, you will cut the straps holding the asset in the decent stage. That's like the sixth thing. They tried this, okay, it worked. What if it doesn't work? Okay, let's get to this. Okay, so let's get to this. They had redundancy after redundancy after redundancy after redundancy until they got to the bolt cutters. Harrison Schmidt said there was something after this. I just want to know what that was. What's that? That is incredible. Are we building that level of redundancy into current systems? Go look at the documents. This is a real thing.

Okay, so PID control loop. Positive and negative feedback is important. As engineers responsible for safely landing humans on the Moon and returning them, our friends, it is imperative that you provide negative feedback in situations that require it, and do not be afraid to do so. If you lose your job for providing negative feedback, good for you. If it needed to be said and no one said it, it would be the worst thing to live with. Make sure you talk. Be bold, be polite. Once a decision has been made, let's all support it and fight. But at the same time let's be smart.

Other things we have, the architecture we have, let's make it work. I put some inspirational slides there. Alright, so you have a limited amount of time at this point to simplify. We have chosen the architecture, we know what we are going to do. There's a little bit of wiggle room right now, right? We have some game. Not much, but we have some play. There are different things you can choose and you can change. Make sure you make the right decisions. Focus on redundancy. Now I'm going to return to this document. Everyone take note. This is NASA, SP 287.

This is your assignment. If you don't read this document, I will think poorly of you until you do. There you go. There's a guy out there thinking bad things about you until you read this document. Some things I learned from this document that I will paraphrase, I will paraphrase as my own, I will focus on redundancy. This is the ascent engine. Many valves do similar things. Really cool design. Testing is the key. This blew me away. This graph is here. They tried things, vibration modes, triaxial acceleration tests. They tried things and shook them up. Do you know what they found?

Five percent of things broke because of how they did it. The 1.5% on the left is due to component design. Three and a half percent was labor for a total of five percent of the material. This is just a representative of these things. But they explained why and said, Hey, there will be hiccups because we're human and all the workmanship isn't going to be perfect. You need to know it's there, you need to go look for it. The way you find it is proof. I thought it was brilliant, man. This is an impressive document. Don't compromise your standards.

Let me tell you what's going to happen. I've given enough briefings at the Pentagon. Young engineers, if you haven't done it yet, you will and this is what is going to happen. You'll walk into that room and tell them: We can't do this and we can't do this because of that. They're going to say, But my agenda says this. You say: If you do this, then you just have to be willing to tell the truth. Sometimes the manager is going to accept the risk and that's okay. Mitigate risk to the extent possible. You communicate clearly, but make sure you don't compromise standards.

The only thing that always happened is that people tried to figure out how to remove tests from the test plan. Always happens. Oh man, we're six months late. How do we get that schedule? We eliminated that test that takes eight months. Sometimes that's smart. They did it in Apollo. After Apollo 8, they said here that they were able to delete a couple of tests or a couple of shots. I don't remember what it was, but they saved a lot of time because there were one or two things that were able to mitigate the risk through intelligent design of experiments and saved time.

It's pretty cool. Crew training is essential. I think I don't agree with a lot of people on this one. I think, and I did a video about this on Smarter Every Day, the linear lander test vehicle, for example, that if you're going to land in a 1/6 G environment, you need to know how to do it. Our pilots are used to walking in 1G. There is something strange happening. A helicopter does not behave the same in 1G as in 1/6-G. Neil Armstrong once had a really interesting talk about this at the test pilots conference. Anyway, long story short, due to time, I found the engineer who helped design this, the Lunar Lander test vehicle.

This is how astronauts were trained to land on the moon. I think it's important. The reason this is more important than a simulator is that the astronaut in the seat, her life is at stake. That matters. When your blood pressure goes up and you think, "It's important." I have to do it right. This psychological training has an enormous component. I spoke to a man named Dr., not Dr. Otinger, who worked on the control system, and I asked him a very important question. I said, Well, I'll let you hear it. Maybe I can do it right. Let's see what happens.

But I would like to ask you two more questions, and these are general questions. In the past, engineers and scientists on this program have done amazing things with limited analog electronics. Good. He said analog electronics. So do you think the engineers of the 50s and 60s were better than the engineers of today? No. No. No. I think we all had our unique place in history and there will continue to be new challenges faced. There will be innovation that will continue. Part of it is because they can build on our shoulders. They can learn from what we did and adapt to new technology, etc.

Do you think something like LLTV needs to happen to train astronauts to return to the moon? They won't go if they don't get a coach, a free flight coach, I can tell you that. Actually? Yes, they won't be left without it. They are smart enough to know that. Now the United States plans to return to the moon. Neil Armstrong. The plane is on final approach to that flat ridge near Shackleton Freiter. I hope that whoever is at the controls will have a simulation experience at least as good as what LLTV provided to the Apollo crews half a century later.

Thank you. I thought that was really interesting. The older generation believes in you. He said that. I said: Do you think the Apollo engineers were

smarter

than today's engineers? I think a lot of us today, maybe we think to ourselves a little bit, like, Well, we have so many tools that we don't know how to do differential equations like they did by hand. I think that. I don't know if you do. It was really encouraging to hear him say that. He said: No. The way he said it was very interesting. No, we are not better than them.

It is different and they are going to be built on our shoulders. Here's the deal. There is a marker, it exists. Apollo engineers, six linear landings, Artemis Zero. It's time to put points on the board and you've been given the playbook. The manual is called What Made Apollo a Success? Sp 287. I encourage you to read it if you haven't already. We don't need to have an Apollo 1 type event to get us going. Don't get hung up on a technology demo. Just because we can do something new, sexy, amazing, surprising and wild, doesn't mean you have to.

Simple is good. As long as the mission is fulfilled. So focus on the mission and believe things will turn out well. Alright, this is what happens. Sometimes our thinking can get caught up in one thing and it's like a bias. We become biased about something. I'm going to tell you a story about how I became obsessed with something. Whatever you're doing in your job to get people back to the Moon or Mars or whatever your job is, don't get hung up on the way people have told you it has to be, and here's why. A long time ago, my friend Barney, who is a welder, said, Hey, Destin, come to the welding shop.

This was at the missile range. Barney had built this bike. It's really... Dad, can I see it real quick? Barney had taken a normal bicycle and turned it around. Look at this. Thank you. Is my dad. He is incredible. Well. This bike is really cool. It's like a transformer. Basically this, when you turn the handlebars to the left, it goes to the right. How many variables have I changed? A variable was changed. Does everyone in the room know how that thing works? It was very, very difficult for me to learn how to ride that thing. This is the first time I'm in it.

The faster you go, the better. Yes, I couldn't do it. You can see I'm laughing, but I'm actually very frustrated. At this moment, I had a really profound revelation. My thinking was stuck. This bike revealed a. Very deep. The truth for me. I had the knowledge of. How to handle the bike, but I didn't understand it. Okay, that's pretty interesting. Can any of you ride a bike? Can you ride a bicycle? Can you help me for a second? Yes that's fine. What is your name? Gabriel. Gabriel, we don't have PCOS, we don't have PPE, we don't have anything.

We're just going to roll. Alright, this is what we're going to do. Gabriel, I don't want you to get hurt. You're wearing a suit. It's a very nice suit. Do this. Go ahead and get on this thing. It's going to do weird things to your brain, man, I promise. Just put your foot there and then try to ride, say, one, two, three, look, man, don't hurt yourself, okay? And go. You felt it, didn't you? Yes. No one else in the room knows what it is. Try it again. No one else in the room knows how angry you are right now.

I know. And go. Good? It's not crazy? What do you feel? I don't know. It's like I go to the right and I try to turn right and it doesn't work. Good? Thank you so much. Leave it for Gabriel. What's happening now is that you have this way of thinking, you've grown up your whole life learning this way of thinking, and it's just natural. This is what I do. This is how I file the TPS report. That's how I do anything, right? It is very difficult. I had to work on getting past my own brain and figuring this out.

How long do you think it took me to learn how to ride this thing? Months. I did it for five minutes a day and this is what it looks like when it finally worked. One day I couldn't ride my bike, and the next day. Could. It was like I could feel something. Path in my brain that was now unlocked. It was really strange though. It's like there's a trail in my brain. But if I didn't pay enough attention to it, my brain would easily miss it. Neural pathway. And jump back to the. The old road with whichI was more familiar.

Any. Little. Any distraction, like the ringing of a cell phone in my pocket, would instantly revert my brain to the old control algorithm and ruin me. But at least I could ride it. My son is the closest person to me genetically and he has been riding a normal bicycle for three years. That ended. Middlehis life. He wanted to know how long it would take him to learn how to do it. To set up a. Bike backwards, so I told him if he learned to ride. By bicycle backwards, he could go with me to Australia and meet a real astronaut.

Are you going to give up? Forward. This is how it begins. Watch this. This is something very important. Get up. You understood it. Did you see that his brain understood it? So he in... How many weeks have we been doing this? Two weeks? In two weeks he did something that took me eight months, which shows that a child has more neuroplasticity, am I right? Than an adult. He is empty. From this. Experience that. The children have a. Much more plastic brain. Than the adults. That's why the best time to learn a language is when. You're a.

Toddler. So I have this weird thing in my head where when I push, I can detect what's happening, and then my brain picks an algorithm and I can write it down. For now, I'll quickly move on to the next thing. It's really interesting, your brain gets in the way of your brain. That is the result. So I only wrote this for two years. The metaphor here is that Apollo did something and then we come along and start doing our thing and we have the way we do things. Do you think we can just go back? Amsterdam, I decided I was going to go to Amsterdam because he was there doing test standards for missiles.

Someone said: Hey, let's go for a bike ride. I thought: Yes, I'm cycling to Amsterdam. It sounds amazing. I get on a bike and I can't ride a bike. I couldn't ride a bike at all. As a 35 year old man at that time here. What do you do for a living? What do you do when you can't ride a bike in a city with more bikes than people? You start trying to justify it. You're like, Oh, no, I promise. People were crowding around me and looking at me like, What's wrong with this American? A guy can't ride a bike.

I pulled out my laptop and started showing it to these kids. I thought: No, here's a video of me riding a really weird bike and that's why I can't ride the normal bike. This was really an interesting experience. The metaphor here is as if it were a simple bicycle. It's literally rocket science. It's not simple. That didn't work at all. But we have the test plan. We know how to do it. But we have another way of doing things. The good thing is that you need to be able to do both. Now what I can do is go back and learn to ride the other bike.

Don't let anyone record what I'm about to show you. Nobody records this. Well, there's a break in the video here because I'm showing the crowd something that happened to me that's very interesting. It's a video and it involves another person who was on the street and I don't have their permission to show it, so I don't want to show it publicly to the entire Internet. But I do talk about it when I give a spoken talk. It's a really fun thing I do in person, but I don't think it's something I want to post online. Anyway, it's also funny and makes the point, which is why everyone is laughing when we go back to the footage here.

That's probably enough. The point is, if you train for the unexpected, and they did that on Apollo, they had so many training plans that they went through that everything that came up, like over 80% of the things that happened in orbit, already had a procedure. for it. The decision was automatic. The point is, when you're preparing for this, you need to train for the unexpected because you might even start to surprise yourself. Does everyone know about the Apollo 12 lightning bolt? Great, right? What a great story. You have to be prepared for those things. This is what I wanted when I left, I hope you keep it with you.

Look at the mission differently. Keep it simple. In a world of talkers, be a thinker and a doer. Be willing to take action. Feel free to take a photo of this if you want. Be willing to step up in meetings to make tough decisions and ask the tough questions. That's all. I'm Destin, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope we're still friends. Wait. You enjoyed this video. I know this is a little different for the channel, but it was a lot of fun for me and I thought you might want to see it. I had to prepare and was intimidated by the topic, but it was a fun process and I thought you would enjoy watching this.

I am grateful to the American Astronautical Society. There are a lot of smart people in this room and I'm grateful to have been there. My point was to simplify. We have chosen a very complicated architecture. And I think, hopefully, this video ages poorly and Destin ends up looking like he cried like a wolf because he didn't understand or wasn't smart enough to see the blah blah blah. I'm fine with that. Sometimes you just have to throw your hat in the ring and do the whole man-in-the-arena thing. And that's what I was trying to do here. I decided to give this talk because I was seeing things and I felt like other people were seeing them and just not saying them, so I decided to say them.

I hope you will forgive me if I have gone too far in any way. But I think this is true. Also, I want to thank you. If you are watching this point in the video, thank you. I mean, you're emotionally supporting Smarter Every Day by giving me your time. I don't take it for granted. And I also want to thank the people who support on Patreon. I do this every year where I thank the people who stick with me by sending them stickers. So if you want to be part of the sticker team or whatever you want to call it, you can help by visiting patreon.com/

smarter

everyday.

That's really important when you choose to do that because it frees me up from the algorithm. I can just make videos that are true to me and authentic, and that's what I want to do. So sticker team, let me tell you how it went. In the past, people were. Able to obtain. This Superstonic baseball team sticker and this James Webb Space Telescope team sticker. You can't get them anymore because they were people who supported Patron for the last few years. Check out this year's sticker. It is the smartest daily exploration equipment. And I love these stickers.

It's my old helicopter helmet and I think they are amazing. I spent a lot of time thinking about the size of the stickers because I want them to be big enough to put on a water bottle or a door or something, like a laptop, but not too big. It's just overwhelming no matter what you put it in. That's why I spend a lot of time thinking about the size of these stickers. I hope you like it. I also have a little extra sticker that I'm going to put on there. I'm not going to tell you which one that is.

But to all those who support one boss after another. com/smartereveryday, this is my way of thanking you for sticking with me. And of course, if you just started supporting, I'll send you the baseball too. Patron.com/smartereveryday I am very grateful that you consider doing this because my goal is to create authentic content on the Internet while freeing myself from the increasing pressure of creating sensational content. That's not what I want to do. So thank you very much for considering that. That's patron.com/smartereveryday. That's all. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you for supporting me emotionally.

I'm thankful. I don't take it for granted. That's all. I'm Destin. You are getting smarter every day. Have a good. Bye bye.