Harnessing startups and ‘disruptive’ technologies is the key to space missions, says visiting technology chief
The United States space programme is famous for what it invented and also for how much it spent putting men on the moon. Now Nasa is getting smarter with money, using small and nimble startups to do the work.
Tom Soderstrom, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s chief technology officer, said his organisation worked with startups, particularly in IT and aerospace sectors.
“We talk to lots of startups, they’re very important because they’re like a life and death experiment in technology,” he said.
Nasa will pluck the technologies or systems it thinks have potential and “socialise” those trends with innovators across industry, whether they be large businesses such as Google or Apple, or much smaller firms.
“Then the magic happens. We prototype those that are going to disrupt,” said Soderstrom, who is coming to Auckland for the CIO Summit next month.
“If they’re successful and interesting we adopt them and run very fast. The overall goal is to change our habits and run much faster and make them more winnable and effective in things like putting rovers on Mars.”
In the past, Nasa innovated but in areas that it didn’t have to. With the consumerisation of IT, innovations were coming from the outside.
“We don’t have to invent a thing but we invent how to use a thing.”
The cost of the Apollo programme through the 1960s and early 1970s has been put at between NZ$40 billion and $160 billion.
Nasa now didn’t have the same federal government support.
“It’s paradoxical but to innovate from emerging technology like we do costs very little but if we’re going to put a rover on Mars that’s completely automated 150 million miles [ 240 million km] away — that costs a lot of money,” Soderstrom said.
Part of his job was picking trends over the next decade, which has a different span in IT. “An IT decade is three years because that’s the generation gap between a senior and a freshman in college.”
The overall goal is to change our habits and run much faster and make them more winnable and effective in things
like putting rovers on Mars.
The concept of the “disruption of everything” is an emerging trend helped by wearable technology and cloud computing.
“The things we’ve seen so far like Uber and Airbnb have started to disrupt but it’s only begun and it will reach into enterprises,” Soderstrom said.
“Could you, for instance, do a kickstarter inside a big company or in the Government? Could you share equipment the way Airbnb shares and has disrupted the hotel sector?”
This could involve sharing trucks, vans, machinery or 3D printers — a key to shaking up manufacturing.
Scheduling programmes dictated how this equipment was used within a business but they were often inefficient.
For Nasa missions, augmented reality was being used where scientists wearing high-tech gear or Google glasses could recreate the surroundings the Mars rover might find itself in and plan its next move.
Miniaturisation would also be a big part of space exploration in the future, he said. “Could we make much smaller spacecraft with big capabilities? Instead of sending one out we send out 20.”
Soderstrom said the danger of technology overload was being recognised more and more.
“We do a really good job of
Tom Soderstrom Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s chief technology officer