My Experiences as Logistics Manager of the GSFC NASA Academy

I arrived in Maryland expecting to be the support manager for the Robotics Academy. However within 20 minutes of being at Goddard, I was reassigned to the logistics manager of the NASA Academy because one of the managers for the NASA Academy had just accepted a job at Marshall Space Flight Center. I was vaguely familiar with the Academy, so most of it was new to me and I had to hit the ground running. I met the operations manager and the person I would be working with all summer, Sherrica Newsome, who was in the previous year’s Academy at GSFC.

Immediately after I accepted the position of logistics manager on Thursday, I went to a meeting with all the managers for the internship programs at the Office of Higher Education. The meeting was to make sure everything was set for the students to arrive on Saturday. I learned that NASA’s procurement office hadn’t authorized payment for the bus company or for the housing at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) but despite NASA breaking their contracts, the housing would be ready and the buses would take students to work on Monday. I should have realized from this first day that there would be financial problems all summer.

On Saturday, Sherrica and I drove vans acquired from the Goddard motor pool to the airport to transport students to UMBC. For the most part, the participants in the NASA Academy were undergraduate juniors and seniors studying a space related field, mainly aerospace engineering. They came from all over the world, including 2 from France and 1 from Japan.

I spent the first week of the Academy figuring out exactly what my responsibilities were and getting used to the management position. The events that we went on were planned before I arrived, so I went along for the ride on our tour of the National Air and Space Museum and downtown Washington DC. The first weekend, we went on a bonding trip. Again, this was largely planned before I arrived and all I had to do was get directions to every stop on our trip and make sure the group was on time to every appointment. We drove government vans and stayed in the dorms at West Virginia University. We went caving, whitewater rafting, took a tour of the WVU Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Lab and had dinner at the director of the West Virginia Space Grant’s house.

During the second week, I settled into the rhythm of being logistics manager. My work day consisted of finalizing all the plans we had for the next week and figuring out the logistics of getting to every destination. Over the entire 10 weeks we met with the following people:

• Eric Anderson, President and CEO, Space Adventures
• Maj. Gen. Joseph T. Anderson, Director of the National Air and Space Museum
• Dr. David Atkinson, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Idaho
• Jim Brice, Orbital Sciences Corp
• Steven Brody, Vice President for North American Operations for the International Space University
• Josh Chamot, Media Officer for Engineering, National Science Foundation
• Dr. Lynn Cline, Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Operations Directorate, NASA
• Doug Cooke, Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA
• LaVida Cooper, GSFC Researcher
• Tom Crouch, Head Curator of the National Air and Space Museum
• Ken Davidian, ESMD Commercial Development Policy Lead, NASA
• Christopher Edwards, Patent Attorney, GSFC
• Dr. Richard Fahey, Deputy Chief, GSFC Office of Higher Education
• Dr. Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, Assistant Professor of Physics, MIT
• Dr. Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator
• Peter Hughes, Chief Technologist, GSFC
• Alan Ladwig, Manager of Space Systems Consultancy Whitney, Bradley & Brown, Inc.
• Rivers Lamb, Flight Dynamics Ground Systems Lead for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, GSFC
• Laurie Leshin, Deputy Center Director for Science and Technology, GSFC
• John Logsdon, Director Space Studies Institute, George Washington University
• Dr. John Mather, GSFC Senior Astrophysicist and Goddard Fellow, Nobel Prize Winner for Physics
• Dr. Marcello Napolitano, Director West Virginia Space Grant
• William Pomerantz, Space Projects Director, X Prize Foundation
• Brian Roberts, Engineer, GSFC
• Dr. Jaiwon Shin, Associate Administrator of Aeronautics Research Directorate, NASA
• Dr. Vigdor Teplitz, Chief of the Office of Higher Education, GSFC
• David Thompson, Chairman and CEO, Orbital Sciences Corp
• Diana Trujillo, Orbital Sciences Corp
• George Whitesides, Executive Director, National Space Society
• Loretta Whitesides, Space Advocate, Zero G Flight Director, ISU-USA President

We also visited the following organizations in Washington DC:

• Federal Aviation Administration Office of Commercial Space Transportation
• White House Office of Management and Budget
• X PRIZE Foundation
• Personal Spaceflight Federation
• National Space Society
• Japanese Exploration Agency
• NASA Headquarters
• House Committee on Science and Technology

July 2-3 we took a trip to Houston, Texas. We went on a behind-the-scenes tour of Johnson Space Center and got to see their neutral buoyancy tank, Apollo mission control center, ISS mission control center, space shuttle flight control room, and some of the astronaut training facilities. While we were in Houston, we also took tours of United Space Alliance and Lockheed Martin.

Some of the NASA Academy attended the NewSpace 2008 conference put on by the Space Frontier Foundation in Virginia. The conference was focused on emerging space companies and the issues that face them. The Minister of Space from the Isle of Man gave a talk about the financial benefits of starting a space company in the Isle of Man. We learned from industry experts about the shortcomings of ITAR regulations and what could be done to reform it to allow US space companies to be more competitive internationally. There were lots of other talks, but the most rewarding part of the conference was networking with the other participants and learning about new opportunities in the space sector.

All of the above events were planned by the managers of the program, Sherrica and I. We also planned trips to Florida (to tour Kennedy Space Center) and to Colorado (to visit Lockheed Martin, UC Boulder, and the Air Force Academy), but they were canceled due to budget problems. The Office of Higher Education had severe budget issues all summer. In previous years, dinner has been provided to the interns and to their guest speakers. This summer, the students (and their managers) had to pay for those catered meals individually. In addition, usually the GSFC NASA Academy goes on 3 trips, but this summer no funding was provided by NASA. The trip to Houston was funded entirely by the Maryland Space Grant at the last minute, the 2 other trips were canceled. The budget problems stemmed from the Office of Higher Education’s debt to their contracting company LUX Consulting due to mismanagement of funds in previous years.

I learned more from this internship than I ever thought possible. I came into the summer thinking that I would learn about robots, a subject I am very familiar with. I came out of the summer with a in-depth knowledge of the efforts made to explore space. I learned about space policy, both nationally and internationally. We met some of the people who wrote Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration. We met the people in charge of NASA. We heard John Glenn testify to the House Committee on Science and Technology about the future of NASA. We also heard from the people who are leading the commercial sector into space (which is the exiting future in my opinion).

In addition, I learned about the bad parts of NASA. The huge amount of politics that exist within the organization that perpetually keeps it behind schedule and over budget. Being logistics manager for the NASA Academy was a great experience and I am glad that I had the opportunity to do it, but I would never do it again. I learned enough about managing people to know that I don’t want to do it in the future. I much prefer to be an engineer than to manage engineers. That being said, I would highly recommend any student who is interested in space to apply for the NASA Academy, and if they are interested in a management position, to consider becoming a manager for the program.

My engineering design class really sucks. The idea of it is good, but the execution is off. The entire class revolves around a group project made up of students from different engineering backgrounds. My group consists of an industrial engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer and me. The point of the class is for us to pick a project that we can all contribute to, and then learn about how to be a part of an effective multidisciplinary team. The project that we picked is making a hand-held wind-powered generator for small electronic devices. It has been fun working on the project even though I highly doubt it will actually work. The problem with the class is the lectures. The professor talks at us about how to do things like “List and define the main elements of a complete problem definition, and describe the key activities to develop a good problem definition.” I mean, come on. Who cares?

My real time microcontroller applications class is a lot of fun, but still a lot of work. Every week we have 4 hours of scheduled lab, and about 4 additional hours of unscheduled lab. The last project that we did involved inputting the current time from a keypad, writing it to a real time clock over I2C, and updating an LCD with the time from the real time clock. I really like the class because the assignments we do are not at all pointless. Every thing I have done in that class has been both fun and educational!

Circuits II is a lot of work and not very easy. Every week we have to cram 3 hours of lab work into a 2 hour lab session. Then spend 4-5 hours writing the lab report. That’s not including homework which is due 3 times a week. I decided that I hate analog electronics. I prefer digital, as my digital logic professor says “the only answers are 0, 1, or 2^n.”

Digital logic is pretty easy. We are programming FPGAs using VHDL. VHDL is a hardware description language that is fairly intuitive once you get the hang of it. We implement simple state machines that make LEDs blink and such.

Social dance is always the highlight of my day (2 days a week). There is never any homework, and I don’t have to think. Also I get to interact with lots of girls, some of whom are pretty cute.

I am about ready to get out of here. I have been looking at robotics companies, some of them look like a lot of fun to work at.

1 more year.

I am uninstalling it from my laptop. Forever.

I saw this on the internet and decided I needed to buy a “Wiimote” (a controller for the Nintendo Wii). I started at the top of the page and went down. Each video described a more awesome thing than the one before it. I want to play around with it and get the IR camera working as a mouse under Linux. Currently I don’t have any time for personal projects, so we’ll see what happens.

Last weekend my sisters came and visited me. We had a good time (or at least I did) seeing the sites of Bozeman. We went on a hike, went to the Museum of the Rockies, toured campus, tried to go rock climbing and made some good food.

So far this week I have spent an average of 6 hours a day in lab. I have 3 classes with labs this semester: Circuits II (EE207), Logic Design (EE367) and Real-time Microcontroller Applications (EE465). This week has been especially bad for my microcontrollers class. I have spent about 4 hours every day this week programming assembly in the digital lab. We had a big project due today, and the next project is due a week from today. It never ends.

It also came with Windows Vista. Since I need a windows computer for programming a microcontroller in one my my classes, I decided to give Vista a shot. When I booted up the computer, I found that Sony had decided to fill the computer with crappy software so the first thing I did was reinstall Vista. That’s one thing that Microsoft figured out, the installation process is much better than installing XP. Immediately after booting, I remembered all the things I don’t like about Windows, I had a hard time finding all the drivers I needed, and some of them wouldn’t completely install. I am going to give it a shot though, we’ll see how long it lasts before I upgrade to Windows XP.

A C program runs in the background of my computer and when a RFID tag is read, it executes a shell script with the 40 bit encoded number as an argument. The shell script then compares the code read to the code for the RFID tag I keep in my wallet. When I walk into my room, I brush my wallet against the reader and my computer unlocks. When I leave my room, my computer locks. For feedback, I have a sound play when I leave the room, and a random song starts playing when I enter the room.

This is the setup that I have been dreaming about for a long time. Now I have a security card for my room.

Past 24 Hours: 25″
Past 48 Hours:26″
Past 72 Hours: 32″

Today’s Forecast

Periods of snow. High near 20. Wind chill values between -1 and 4. South southwest wind between 10 and 13 mph, with gusts as high as 18 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Total daytime snow accumulation of 1 to 3 inches possible.

I’m headed up now. It is going to be awesome!!