Dr. Douglas Terrier - CTO of NASA

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) I see a world where technologists are known as excellent leaders, communicators, and for their vision. I don't believe that technologists were made to be quiet and introverted indefinitely. I believe it's a phase that we go through as we're growing. Break out of your shell, learn people, master communication, and become more than you ever thought possible at leaderbits.io. Today, we are talking to Douglas Terrier, the CTO of NASA, and we discuss making products when there is no room for error, creating a feedback loop with your team, and how innovation at NASA is impacting our everyday lives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:00:45) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. We're doing it today. You excited?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:00:59) Oh yeah, this is fun. I'm glad we did this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) It looks so official back there.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:01:03) Well, you know, we try.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Oh, I'm really excited. We're filming a movie over a number of days here. It's got like me running at 5 a.m. and like all this different stuff that I do. They're showing what my day looks like. And the videographer is here and he's set up, and that's why we got this cool blue cinema light over here and everything.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:01:23) Excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) And he's like, who are you talking to? I was like, CTO NASA. He's like, why is he talking to you? I'm like, I don't know. We're just like talking about technology and like life and it's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Right. Yeah, it's pretty relaxed. We just get to hang out.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:01:44) I need a cup of coffee. You got a cup of coffee?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) Yeah, I got some water, but this mug, William Sonoma CTO.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:01:54) Oh, is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Yeah.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:01:57) Very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) So I expect a rocket.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:01) Well, either that or lapel pin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) There you go.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:07) Standard issue NASA lapel pin here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) That's amazing. Yeah.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:13) It's nice. It's pretty nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) No, it's very nice.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:16) We'll get you one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) That would be amazing. My father, retired Air Force.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:21) Oh, is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) Yeah. That's actually how he got into technology. He had not a good childhood, so at 18 he went and joined the Air Force. They educated him, and he worked for the Air Force out in Nevada. And then he got all his electronics design and education through his just while working in the Air Force. And then he came out, he had kids, he taught me technology, and here I am.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:02:47) Excellent. Hey man, well you're doing God's work. This is awesome. Anybody that's helping us get kids and folks generally excited about science and technology, you're like a great partner to have. You're doing the right thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) Have you heard about our little STEM foundation that we have?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:03:03) I do not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Oh, so my mom passed away, and my sister is a science teacher, my brother is a physician, and I'm an engineer. And so she left us $25,000 between the three of us, and we said, what could we do that's better than paying, going on a trip? Like what can we do that's cooler? And so my wife was pregnant with my daughter, and we thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if they could remember her by maybe a children's book?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:03:33) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) So we wrote this children's book up here. It's called The Princess Physicist, and it's about a princess that gets stuck in a tower, but instead of a guy coming to save her, she finds a book on physics.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:03:43) To get her out of it? Yes. That's brilliant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) So I hired one of the illustrators that works for the Disney-type companies that do all the children's books. And it was only like $2,000 to have the book illustrated, so we took the rest of the money and we started a charity. And we printed up thousands of copies and then started giving them away to like homeless pregnant women shelters and in-need-type charities. And so that's what we did with the money.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:04:14) That is really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) We'll send you some books. I'm going to send you some books.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:04:18) Oh, I'd love it. That is cool. And you got one, a daughter, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) Oh yes.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:04:25) You have kids? Oh yeah, of course. Right? I've got actually I have two older kids, in their thirties, and I have grandkids. Between them they have eight grandkids. And then I've got a son that's nine that's just keeping me really crazy, busy, fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:43) Now did they follow, are they in space? Are they in tech? Where are they at?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:04:48) My daughters, one's an MBA and one's an attorney. So they both love science, did well, did undergraduate work in science, but they both went their own ways, which is part of the joy of being a parent is being able to celebrate and enjoy whatever turns them on and just, you know, be the best at whatever you choose to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:06) Yeah. She's starting, she walks now without us. She's walking around the house.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:05:10) Oh, it's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:11) And I'm just like every morning, you know, I do get up really early. I'm running at 5:30, but by the time I get done with my run, I go and I get her up out of bed and I get those morning smiles, and I'm like, these are the moments that I'm going to remember forever.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:05:24) Right. You're absolutely right. Yeah, it's really cool. And I think daughters are especially fun, so my two girls are still like daddy's little girls now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) And then we just found out recently that she's doing April with a boy.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:05:39) Oh wow. Yeah, congratulations, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) Yeah, we figured we had all the baby stuff out.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:05:47) Excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) Yeah. So I saw that you were, I'm going to talk about some of the stuff I'm most interested in. I saw F-35 and then also the Raptor. You know, my father, when he's in the Air Force, his team, his unit was responsible for putting GPS into the B-2 stealth bomber.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:06:08) Oh wow. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) Yeah. I remember he told us about it like ten years ago because it finally was declassified. There was a limit, and he was true to that limit. He didn't tell his family or anybody until it expired.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:06:21) As he should, right? Very good. Very good. Those were incredible airplanes, and I was really very lucky, very privileged to work on both the F-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter. So yeah, I think I did that till I was about 42-ish, so I had a whole career of twenty years. And then I thought, what could be cooler than that, right, than to have this opportunity to work for NASA? And it is actually cooler, which is a pretty high bar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) So it doesn't disappoint?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:06:53) No, it has not disappointed. It still hasn't. Yeah, it's still pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:57) So Douglas, walk me through that. Like you're 18, tell me how you get to where you are today.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:07:02) Oh man, alright. I have a pretty unusual story. Pretty much everybody you meet at NASA that's certainly my age group, you know, all will say something about Apollo, right? That's the spark. That's the thing that ignited their passion, right? My story is a little different because I was born in Jamaica, and I grew up in the rural hills of Jamaica. If you've ever been there, it's not a resort with all the glitzy stuff, right? It's literally, at the time most people don't have running water, don't have electricity. You know, and I'm in this little one-room schoolhouse, right? And our teacher reads every day whatever she could get her hands on to motivate us, right? And so in '69, she started reading us telemetry in the newspaper, the telemetry from Apollo, the downlink telemetry to Houston. And we were just like all just captivated. And that was it for me. I was captured. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And so, you know, I was probably eight years old at that time. And whatever it took to go figure out how to be a scientist, be an engineer, I was going to do that, to be a part of that team. So it's really literally the catalyst in my life, personally. And that's why I'm so passionate about this, so motivated about the kind of work you're doing, right? Just to get that same inspiration and spirit out to as many people as we can reach, right? My granddaughters, we talked about, my granddaughters are kind of in that age group, eight, nine, ten. And, you know, I feel like in some ways they're in a very similar situation where there's a lot of distraction, a lot of negative stuff going on that they can easily get sucked into. And I'm really grateful to be a part of something that can help to inspire that next generation and get them something to kind of aspire for and be motivated by. So that's what gets me just jazzed about coming in every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) I love it because I love your energy too. You're rare. I like when I meet people like you, right? Because it's just, it's like we're doing life together.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:09:05) Right, and this is the real deal. This is the real thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:09) So what does a typical day look like for you?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:09:12) You know, it varies a lot, right? So when I'm in the building, because I'm part of the senior team here, we spend a lot of time in meetings trying to go through the strategies and plan what we're going to do. Today, for example, you know, we just had a pretty significant event over the weekend. We had an anomaly in a launch in Russia, which you may be aware of. We had an abort scenario, which is a pretty critical flight regime. And fortunately, crews are all safe. Everybody's great. But we're kind of going through that and figuring how we're going to really incorporate the lessons from that and recover as much learning as we can from that so we don't have that situation again. So we spend a lot of time doing that, but I really spend a lot of time outside the building. We're going to go to Cornell at the end of the week. I was at Georgia Tech last week. So I spend a lot of time out with universities for two reasons. One, to do exactly what we're doing now, just to get the word out and make contact with graduate students in STEM disciplines and get them excited about what we're doing. But also for me to learn what they're doing and the great research that is going on all over, you know, across academia. There's a lot of good stuff going on outside this building. So I spend a lot of time outside and kind of learning about what's going on there. I spend a lot of time in industry with the other agencies, the DOD, our friends at the Air Force. I lead a partnership with the Chief Scientist of the Air Force, Chief Scientist of NRO, and the other communities that are involved in space. So spend a lot of time collaborating and getting that cross-talk among other agencies and other both private sector and academia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:48) You know, that's so interesting. Like I love the value of that. I first came across this concept of mycelium. They're like these little organisms that transfer information between the roots of trees and the soil, and they can actually broker nutrients. And when I saw the value that that brings to an ecosystem, I was like, this is cool. This is where I belong. I like this ability to engage with people and be that bridge between communities and conversations.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:11:17) That's a great point. And, you know, I think the other thing is my other responsibility, right? So the CTO here is a little different than a lot of times in corporations. CTO refers to IT specifically, information technologies. My job is really to look across all the advanced technologies that we do across the agency. So that's, you know, everything from structures and propulsion and avionics and everything, right? But I'm also responsible for innovation and our innovation culture at NASA, which is probably the sort of secret sauce to NASA. You know, what keeps NASA at the forefront is really that innovation culture. And the thing that's vastly different than it was when we started is that when we started out in the sixties and seventies, most of the invention, most of the new technologies were being developed inside NASA, right? And today we have a very different situation where, you know, with all the investments going on out in Silicon Valley and in industry generally, there's just so much going on that, you know, kind of like you said, being a part, figuring out how to be a part of that ecosystem. A lot of my job is trying to figure out where we are unique and where we can most efficiently use our money to do the things that only NASA can do, and at the same time to leverage and foster all the great work that's being done outside. So that whole idea of an ecosystem is really what becomes an integral part of our innovation sort of culture right now. So it's not just about knowing what we're doing, but about being super curious about what everybody else is doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:46) And rightfully so, you can bridge the gap with innovation time by knowing that other technologies that you may be able to integrate or leverage exist in the market. Now Neil deGrasse Tyson, have you ever gotten to meet him?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:12:58) I have, and I think Neil's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:00) Is he as cool in person as you would expect if you just like consumed all his content and everything?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:13:06) Yeah, you know, I think so, right? So I, meetings that I think, guy's super smart, and he's just a fun person, really. You know? So that's a cool combination.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:15) I had seen one of the things where he was talking about the public-private partnership, right, with power tools. This is one of the reasons we have power tools is because of NASA.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:13:26) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:27) That's so cool.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:13:28) Yeah, so, you know, you could go on and on, right? There are many examples. And I think that, you know, a lot of people don't realize that that's not just sort of an accident, that it's an integral part of our mission. NASA was really formed to do, the Space Act of 1958 that created NASA is actually really specific about us doing two things. The first one is to do the exploration and discovery in space, which everybody kind of is aware of. But the second part is to ensure that that technology is having, maximizing impact on other parts of the economy and just the quality of life generally. So that idea of spinoff, I really think that word is sometimes misplaced because it sounds like it's accidental, but it's actually very purposeful that we want to be sure that the investment that the nation and taxpayers make in NASA has benefit in space and in science and discovery in space, but has many times more benefit in all facets of the economy. And I mean, I could give you tons of examples.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:14:25) Right? It's, I think many people are sort of generally aware that a lot of our lives are kind of powered from space, whether they're using GPS to navigate or, you know, our transactions in the financial systems are all GPS time-stamped. Our energy grid is all focused on precise timing that comes from space to enable that to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) I guess my 24-hour time format, I'm ready to go.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:14:52) You know, it's something we take for granted, right? But all of that's going on sort of in the background. And as I said, the cool thing is whether it's agriculture that you're trying to lay down a precise fertilizer, you know, automated fertilizer pattern, that's also enabled by GPS, right, and precision nav from space, or you're just doing your cell phone, just communicating with your family or watching TV or whatever. It's sort of kind of transparent, but it's not just enhancing, but it's foundational and critical to everything we do in life, right? All the computers, all the digital life that we're living and the benefits that we have.

And then there's other things that maybe people would, at least many people might see that connection very quickly because they're technology and kind of digital things. The things that maybe are not as easy to see is that we also have a lot of life sciences and, you know, kind of human system research, right? I mean, obviously, to make, you know, help people live on International Space Station for a year at a time, there is a lot that has to happen. Much of the consumables of air and water that the astronauts use, they're actually recycled, actually regenerated on station. Well, those technologies have immediate impact, right, to create clean drinking water in remote areas with all the filtration systems. So we license those, and those are in use in Mexico, in Iran, in Africa, around the world, right? So you kind of get the technical side, the technology side, and that's obvious. But the side that may not be obvious is that literally, you know, thousands and thousands of lives are saved from having some of the simplest clean drinking water. That's a spin-off of NASA technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) I love it. Now is that the concept of tech transfer? Can you explain this concept of tech transfer to me?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:16:36) Yeah, that's exactly right. So, yeah, we call that, you know, tech transfer, transferring space technologies into other sectors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:43) So this is what we're talking about, because I had it on my show notes. It said tech transfer and how it's changing our lives. And I hadn't heard that term before, but this is what we're discussing.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:16:52) That's exactly what we're discussing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Got it.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:16:55) Yeah. And like I said, that's sort of the second part of NASA, right? We talk a lot about the great science that's being created every day. I mean, we're literally rewriting textbooks, you know, with all the information we get from Hubble and all the observatories of space and exploration. But the other side of NASA is just as important, that the transfer of those technologies is literally not just improving the quality of life. It's literally saving lives every single day. And so that, in many ways, is a really great argument for why this investment is worth it, right? Because even if you're not bought into, which obviously I am and most of us are, into the benefits of new knowledge and discoveries in space, I think everybody can relate to the fact that we're impacting, you know, climate science and understanding, better prediction of hurricanes, better prediction of phenomenon on the Earth, right? We're having this impact in creating opportunities for clean water and clean air around the globe. There's our air filtration system that's licensed again off the International Space Station. That's really helpful to folks, you know, people for indoor air quality for asthma and other diseases like that. That technology has been transferred.

The other area that may not be obvious is we do a lot of direct medical interventions in space that are required to give—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15) Oh, yeah.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:18:16) Health, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:17) So, natural emergencies don't stop in space.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:18:20) Right. You actually have two parts. One, it's a really tough environment, right? So, you know, you've got to maintain health in a weightless environment, in microgravity. There are a lot of degenerative effects that occur from that: bone loss, ocular degeneration, fluid buildup in the body, and so on. There are some radiation exposure effects and so on. So we're constantly working to combat those. And the technologies that we use to do that have immediate transfer to, you know, similar instances, whether it's osteoporosis for bone loss on Earth. You know, we can have some of those therapies can be transferred there, whether it's radiation effects that can have impact in oncology. So we have a lot of active partnerships with various medical centers around the globe, really, where we're actively engaged in collaborative research so we can see the analog in space and where those technologies can be used.

The second piece is that because of the fact, what you mentioned, you're kind of pretty far from a hospital, so you've got to work with what you've got. We develop a lot of monitoring technologies that are miniaturized so the astronauts can have them on their person while they move around and work. We have also a lot of miniaturized treatment devices, including, for example, a miniaturized DNA sequencer that's the size of a thumb drive, basically, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) I love it.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:19:39) So we use that to, you know, look for samples on station. But that's the kind of technology that can be then transferred again, and a lot of the applications are in remote areas where you're far from a big medical center. If you can think of, you know, rural communities in Africa or in the third world, where you can use the same telemedicine technologies with miniaturized portable sensors locally in situ and then have that communication with a big medical center and the diagnostics can be done remotely and the therapies can be applied locally, which is exactly how we operate on station with our medical team on the ground. So those are some of the great examples where we're having immediate impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:18) No, I love it because I watched the—I can't remember the name of the movie. I'm sorry. I watched a movie that was recently made about one of the space shuttle launches, and it was how essentially the entire country came together over this concept of getting into space. It was about the females who were in charge—like, they played a large role, and I think the programming or the mathematicians—

(Douglas Terrier at 00:20:40) So we're thinking of Hidden Figures, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:42) Hidden Figures. Yes.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:20:43) Yeah. Great movie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) I loved it. And I walked away from that movie wanting Earth or a country or whatever. I wanted us as a collection of humans to have such a great purpose. Like, it felt like in every—the director did such a good job—in every aspect of life, this was a thing, and it was like it drew our focus so strongly to achieve this goal that everything else seemed to kind of fade in the background. And I wish I was a part of that, like, but I look forward to that happening again and it not being because of, like, an alien invasion.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:21:24) Right? So no, no. So first of all, you are a part of it because we're doing this podcast, right? So you're very much a part of it. And as I said, I really appreciate that. Everybody's part of this team helping us get that excitement out and that inspiration out, right? That's in many ways kind of our product, is inspiration for that next generation. And you said it really well. The fact that we choose to do things that are, as Kennedy said, we choose to do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. And it really measures us as a human race, as a nation, that we can achieve literally, we make it possible, right? That is literally what our mission is for. And that is what provides, certainly provided inspiration for me as a young kid, and I think it continues to provide inspiration for folks.

It's funny you mentioned the movie Hidden Figures. We actually—I mentioned that I do a lot of outreach with universities. So one of the things we do is we also try to make sure, you know, just as I was in Jamaica in a classroom and that message reached me, right? We try to make sure that reaches as broad a cross-section of our community as possible. And I do a lot of outreach with HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities. And we use that movie actually as sort of a talking point to start the discussion about, you know, getting folks really excited and using that example of where those ladies in the sixties were breaking a lot of barriers. And because they were all just focused on getting the job done, right? It seems like when we have a really unifying focus, we really pull together as a country and we kind of overlook a lot of these societal challenges that did exist then. And it was really a great example to folks just breaking barriers and making their contribution, right? And we want to use that message to inspire all the kids around the country, all the, you know, kids, K through 12, university students, everyone for that matter, that, hey, let's focus our energy on something exciting, something, you know, really audacious as a nation where we can be great as a nation and focus all the energies in achieving that goal. And I think that's really what inspires all of us that come to work every day here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) Well, I can give you goosebumps right now. So—

(Douglas Terrier at 00:23:29) Hey, right? I'll tell you something else. There's a lot of things that the United States has a lot of tools in its arsenal. Some are in the military. Some are, you know, diplomatic. We have a lot of tools with which we affect sort of our place in the world, right, you know, across the globe. There are very few—in fact, I can't think of any—that have the profound impact of the projection of soft power that NASA has that is entirely positive. Like, everywhere I go around the world, right, and you talk about NASA, it doesn't matter where you are. I mean, even the French that hate us—oh, geez. It's pretty hard to not get positive feedback when you talk about NASA. But the point is that it's a unifying theme that everybody around the globe can really see where United States is having a positive impact on the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:24) No, I fully agree to your point. Alex is our full-time videographer or cinematographer now, and because we have a business outside of the podcast too. And he actually—he's so good at video, he won a green card in the lottery because he was living in Russia, right? So then he comes to Connecticut last year, teaches himself English, and he did full-time video in Russia. But he won the lottery, and so he brought his family over here because why not? And then I found him in Connecticut and I relocated him down to Florida. We're in Sarasota, Florida. And the first thing he gets here, he asked me, he says, when can I go see a rocket launch? He's like, my wife and I, we're going to take our son—they have a five-year-old son there. They said, we're going to take our son. We want to go see a rocket launch. When's the next one?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:25:14) Did he grow up in Russia?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Yeah. Yeah.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:25:17) Very cool. So, I mean, you know, I mentioned about the Soyuz launch. You know, obviously, Russians are just absolutely great partners, and we've had a partnership now for, you know, over two decades, right? Building the space station. And that's an example of where NASA has been an amazing tool of uniting people, right? So I can—I mean, that's probably the best example I can think of where we've really, you know, forged our relationship that's just an amazing partnership that continues. And we expect to continue that as we go on and, you know, go back to the moon and on to Mars in the coming decades. We're looking forward to doing that with the international community and continue to work together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:53) And that's the thing that drew me so strongly to the STEM world, is because there seems to be, like, not really borders in STEM. It's just, like, let's figure it out. Let's move forward. Let's solve a problem. Let's learn a little bit more. And I've always really enjoyed how when you see, what was it? I was watching a documentary on CERN, right, and they were showing how they built it, and it was, like, a long project over many years. But I love how in the science community, the collaboration happens. It's so open and free, and I really enjoy that.

Now I want to ask because you kind of touched on this, and you were explaining all of this stuff that NASA does that's great, right? But at no point did you mention launching a rocket. So I'm curious, the privatization of the, you know, the Blue Origins and the SpaceX, it seems like it almost is a benefit to you because now the general public will stop seeing you as, oh, they put the rocket in space, and instead allow all of this other, what I think is more important stuff, to take the main stage.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:27:01) Yeah. So that's a—I'm glad you asked. That's a really good question, right? So it's been in the press a lot. And it's probably—I would say it's one of the things that I get questions about a lot that there's more misunderstanding around than anything else, right? So remember I said NASA's goal is really to explore space and also to ensure that we have maximum benefit from that investment, right? Part of that benefit is all the spin-offs that we talked about in the tech transfer, but some of the benefit is also in enabling the growth of private sector, you know, space-faring businesses around us, right?

So if we back up and think about the last century, the twentieth century, NASA's predecessor was the NACA, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, right? And that's a government body that invested a lot of money in aviation and creating the technologies and doing all the wind tunnel testing to create the database for designing airplanes and started going to World War II and then all into civil aviation. So today, we have a global aviation enterprise that's worth somewhere like $6 trillion is the value today. And that's a great example of success where the government's invested at a critical time, is sort of a catalyst in a very critical area, and created the technologies, allowed this, you know, this blossoming of this incredible industry.

We want to see the same thing happen in space. So far from thinking of SpaceX and Blue Origin and so on as competitors, which I see sometimes, that's really a very unfortunate mischaracterization because that's really a measure of success. We're able to create the conditions for which there are, you know, viable economic conditions for more companies to thrive in space, which then can provide, as you pointed to, us with the opportunity to, you know, to have more partners in our supply chain and as valued partners with NASA. So we're really delighted to see the work that's going on right now in those, you know, kind of the burgeoning so-called commercial space industry.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:29:03) It's really important to realize that going back as far as you can to Apollo, right, NASA is about designing missions, about doing that discovery. And to the extent, as I said, in the sixties and seventies, where a lot of technology or capability didn't exist, we had to do a lot of that internally. Where the technology exists outside, and not only where it currently exists, but where we can foster and help it to grow, that's great. Because then that focus gives NASA the opportunity to focus on, again, those areas that are the most challenging, for which there's some business case, but we're the only investor.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:29:36) We can really focus our energy there and leverage as much as possible the great work being done in the commercial sector around us. Right? So as we look at going back to the moon and on to Mars, we are, as you probably know, developing the Orion spacecraft and the SLS, the Space Launch System, which is a very large space transportation system launch vehicle, bigger than the Apollo Saturn V. But that's the kind of power that you need to get large systems into cislunar space. So we're building that.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:30:07) But at the same time, we expect to be able to make great use of the capabilities that we see emerging, and that'll be an integral part of the architecture. In the meantime, in low Earth orbit to service the International Space Station, we contracted with a number of the private sector companies that are creating capability to provide launch of both cargo and crew. So we've got, right now, we've been for a couple years now contracting with companies to ride cargo to the International Space Station. That's been a remarkable success. So again, that frees NASA from having to own all of that infrastructure to do that role, but we can rather contract that out.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:30:44) And then we're expecting to do that with crew transport starting next year. So it's a really exciting time. If you think about it, for the first time in history, we're operating an International Space Station, which has been crewed now for sixteen plus years continuously, right, in low Earth orbit. We're developing a commercial space economy in low Earth orbit, and we're seeing that really take off. And we're focusing our energy on building the new transportation system for deep space exploration.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:31:13) So all three of those are going on simultaneously. It's really remarkable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) No, I love it. And honestly, the SpaceX and the Blue Origin, it's literally going exactly the plan. I mean, NASA with the tech transfer, you just tech transferred your rockets, right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:31:30) That's exactly the template that we want to see. Right? So, you know, a lot, again, you see a lot in the press where people will be arguing that a lot of the technologies that SpaceX is using were developed in the previous investments for NASA. As it should be, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:47) As it should be.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:31:48) And we're delighted to see those finding a home and to be leveraged in innovative ways to achieve even more. So that's really a win for everybody, a win for the country.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) So you talk a lot about innovation, and there's this new conference. Well, I think it's like year two or year three. You know the Tampa Bay Lightning, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) It's like in that arena, and it's called Synapse, and what they do is it's really unique. So most conferences have like a theme, like we're the medical conference or we're the defense conference. What they did was they took the arena and they split it like a pie, and you walk through the sections, and the thing they all have in common is that they're all from Florida. So you get like space, defense, you'll get like drone, you'll get medicine. And so you walk around and you see all the innovation happening in all the industries for Florida.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:32:43) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) Have you heard of this before?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:32:45) I have not been there. No. I haven't heard of it. It's in Tampa?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) Yeah, it's in Tampa every year. I got invited because of the show to do interviews of the speakers, and then they invited me to speak this coming year. It's in January. But I'm going to nominate you to speak there.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:33:03) I'd be happy to. I love Florida, and that sounds like a great venue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) It's like, if there were one event that I've ever been to that would create the most impact in the youth and technology of STEM, it's this event.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:33:19) Sounds great. Yeah, sounds awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) So I'm curious. The Raptor, the F-35, and the F-22, you were in like an engineering or a project management style role with those?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:33:35) Yeah, that's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Okay. So my buddy Alex, who's one of the senior engineers over at Walmart, he was curious to know in the environment of failure avoidance, right, where you don't want to make mistakes, what sort of project iteration practices do you have? How do you ensure the high availability systems? Like, do you have any tips for us on that?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:33:59) So you're talking about specifically with the DOD kind of airplane systems or similar to NASA, or talk about NASA as well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) Yeah, I'm loosely trying to tie it back to a lot of our listeners make product. They make whether it's hardware or product, and they go through these life cycles. And sometimes they get a little crazy with pushing stuff too early.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:34:18) Well, so, you know, the thing about space flight is it cannot be overstated. Space flight is the most challenging environment, period. Right? It's a very, very hard business. So, you know, as I said, I worked twenty years on stealth fighter technology at Skunk Works at Lockheed, right, which is pretty cool, pretty demanding, and that was an amazing experience for me. Even from the outside, I used to look at NASA, obviously, like most people, admire what NASA was doing. But I didn't appreciate until I became a part of this organization that the bar is a little higher. Right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:34:59) So there are a couple of reasons. One is that the environment is the most challenging environment because of temperatures, pressures. You know, reentry at Mach, so you fly a supersonic aircraft at Mach 2, Mach 3 at eighty, ninety thousand feet. You're really pushing the envelope, so to speak. Right? That's not even, that's a corner of the envelope in space flight where you're going to fly at Mach 25 reentry speeds. Temperatures outside approaching the surface of the sun, right? And just to have any material, any system to perform in that environment is really difficult to explain just how hard that is to do from a physics perspective. We literally have one example that I think is really important to just to give you a sense of it, right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:35:43) The temperatures inside a liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen engine burning are much, much higher than the melting point of steel. But we build engine nozzles from basically steel, and we have a flame inside that's easily as a blowtorch that will melt through that in less than a second. And what protects that material from burning through is a thin film of cooling film of liquid hydrogen, usually, or gaseous hydrogen that's millimeters thick. And that's how precise the control is, and that's how small the margin is, right? So when you're operating in an environment like that, there really literally is no room for error. Right? And that's something you don't encounter in other systems.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:36:20) So back to your question, if you're designing a bridge, if you're not sure, use a safety factor of two. You put twice the material that you need. And most people don't realize it, they'll build a structure of any kind, a building, a bridge. Do your calculations as well as you can, estimate the loads, and then just multiply by two. So you've got some pad there to ensure that you won't have a failure, right? If you build an aircraft, typically a safety factor of 1.4 is about all you can afford because it'll be just too heavy to fly. When you build a spacecraft, as an example, the movie that's out this weekend, you know, First Man, with Neil Armstrong's landing, we left the ground with about six million pounds of fuel. The Eagle landed with about ten seconds of fuel remaining. Put that in perspective.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:37:15) That's how razor thin the margin is, right? Point is you can't pad, so you have to get it exactly right. With that being said, you know, so you don't have the advantage of just kind of adding more stuff or, you know, adding more redundancy or more mass than you need. So what we have to do is a very, very stringent acceptance testing process to ensure that we know for a fact it's going to work every single time. And that's different than most industries. That testing, a very rigorous qualification environment is very different than most industries. And that's what I learned coming in. The difference in margins and, because of that, the difference in how rigorous the testing has to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) That's interesting. I'm going to look for some books written by NASA related type project managers or engineers on how they draw a line with how much rigor is too much rigor. There's a process, you—

(Douglas Terrier at 00:38:12) You're exactly right. And, you know, the important thing to realize is that there is a discussion about, hey, are you putting too much safety? You know, what is too much safety, right? Well, I think many of us who are involved in this, first of all, NASA is a very different culture than you may find other places because we don't have test pilots. We have astronauts who are part of the team, whose kids go to school with my kids in Houston, with my son literally, right? Same churches. We go to the same baseball games on the weekend. So this is a family. And nothing, there is no higher value than safety here. None.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:38:44) Having said that, as I just mentioned, the margins are so thin that you have to be pretty, you have to really stress every possible analysis and test just to make it work. So I think it's actually not realistic to say maybe you're putting too much pad on it because there really isn't room for very much. We have to make sure it's in the right place to keep the system safe, and there's just enough to make it work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:20) Yeah. And I'm always just curious. I'm always looking for, I guess, a question that's just not an easily answered question. I get a lot of the people from the show, they reach out and they want to know. And I guess this question has come up with not just you, with many, many, many people, like, we've had medical devices and all sorts of things. And they want like a clear answer to, you know, they may be building apps and releasing code, and they want to know how exactly do these companies that have these life dependent systems structure their production release type processes. But I want to talk about some leadership stuff because I have you here. And the way you speak and just knowing you, you're a visionary and you're an exceptional leader. And so I've got to know, with your team that you work with, how do you go about feedback and doing sort of your feedback loop with your current team about how you improve and how you give them feedback? Could you talk a little bit about that?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:40:22) Sure. That's a good, that's a really good question because, like with everything else, right, it's all about the team. It literally is all about the people. And I'll tell you something that is a little different than maybe in other places, other particularly in the commercial sector where I come from. When I took the job here, I'll share this with you, my boss at the time, the acting administrator at the time, called me in, and he said, hey, now I want you to know as a member of the senior leadership team, you look at my resume, and you see that I've done a lot with inventing things and project management and so on. And he said something really interesting. He said, I want you to understand that I'm not actually measuring you from what you invent or what you do, your personal technical accomplishment. I'm measuring you by how well you grow and mentor your team.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:41:12) And that's a very different way to think about leadership, right? And that's the way NASA thinks about leadership. It's empowering the team to be the greatest they can be. Because we have this incredible advantage that everybody wants to work at NASA. So you get the brightest and the best people. And really, what you need to do is create the conditions for them to thrive and, by definition, the organization thrives. Right? The way we do that and have historically done that is really just to focus everybody on what we've been talking about, that audacious, inspirational mission. And as long as everybody can get their energies vectored around, well, everything you do every day is about enabling that mission to occur safely and productively.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:41:54) You could be pretty amazed at how much people can do if they're given a very precise mission and given the, you know, empowered to go do that. So one of the things we do in my group, just as an example, is we have, you know, we'll have a little retreat with the whole group and go off and take a day off and think about what our goals are in our particular organization and the technology investment world that we're concerned with. But we try to talk about what is our, who is our customer, and what does that customer value? And in our case, that's, you know, the leadership team and the mission that we're trying to accomplish. And we look at every single thing we do, every activity, and we try to analyze whether that's actually delivering value.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:42:36) And if it's not delivering value on that mission to that customer, then we don't need to do that, or we look at how we can do that better in every one of our given days. And I think, you know, that's again, that sounds pretty simple, but it is a secret sauce, right? Everybody really clear on what the goal is, and everybody will get behind that because we actually don't have the problem of trying to motivate people. We have extremely motivated people. We need to be able to channel that motivation and have it aligned, unequivocally aligned, focused on the mission at hand and to give people all the tools they need to succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:17) That, like, you went through like seven of my questions just there. No, it's, so you're exactly right. Because it's like when you were talking about that, I imagined an astronaut being with their tube being hooked back up to an oxygen tank. Like, when you have that focus, and I find myself as a leader of my team, we only have about seven people. But I find that whenever there's a disconnect, what I just have to do is connect them back to what we're actually doing because you get so lost in the details, and they really don't matter. It also, when you have, like, what you said, that very clear mission and all those people marching towards that very specific goal, it gives you certainty. It gives you confidence in knowing what to add or what to drop because you know your objective. And before, it's like, well, you could add a feature or you could not add or you could do this, you could do that. But then now you have a system, like a filtration system of your goals to align against. You have like a true north, right, for your compass to tune to.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:44:23) No. We talk a lot about that. We talk about alignment and integration. Right? So it's like I said, it's about knowing where—if you know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, exactly what value you're trying to deliver, then you have a way of measuring everything you're doing and seeing, does that really contribute?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:44:40) Is it doing—can I do it better? But the second part, the part you said is really important. Are there things I can stop doing? Right? If it really doesn't add any value, can I stop doing that?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:44:48) And those are the harder conversations, actually, because we kind of get—you know, whatever we're doing, we kind of get used to doing it a certain way and just kind of embrace the status quo. Right? So we're constantly trying to look at how we can break that status quo. We're doing an event at the end of November where we get the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine partnered with them to get our whole leadership team together for a day or two and talk about exactly this, you know, about exactly where we at NASA are going, our future vision, and how we can kind of organize the whole team around enabling and inspiring everybody around that vision. So that's a work—it's a constant process, and we keep working at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) I expected the leadership to be great, but it was superb.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:45:37) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:38) Now if you could go back to the beginning of your career and give yourself a piece of advice, what would that be? But only one piece of advice.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:45:46) Yeah. So the thing I actually have the opportunity, not to myself, but to talk to a lot of younger folks coming into the business. And this is gonna sound a little—it's gonna sound a little paradoxical, maybe. A lot of what we do as you get older is we learn all the things you can't do because it didn't work out. Maybe you had a failure.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:46:08) You kind of develop those scars and develop, in fact, sometimes those become officially incorporated in process documents and so on. Here's all the ways you can't do something. I tell people, act like you don't know what can't be done. Just blow it up. Just try something. Right? And you know, the cool thing is we have an organization where we can say that because we've got senior people that can actually—

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:31) Oversight.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:46:33) Right? You know, you've gotta be careful. You don't do something dangerous. We talked about safety. But it's important to realize that the guys and women that you talked about in that film, in Hidden Figures, a lot of those guys were in their twenties.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:46:49) There was no handbook on how to build a spacecraft. There was no database. There were no computers. There was no knowledge capture. They were doing stuff that had never been done.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:46:58) And a lot of what they did, they didn't know it couldn't be done, so they just did it. Right? We're seeing that today in many parts of this industry. We continue to see that by, you know, exciting developments that we're doing here at NASA with our team in the development, advanced technology work. We see that with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin where maybe these people aren't heritage space folks, and they look at the problem from a different angle.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:47:22) They don't know you can't do it this way, and they try something that hasn't been tried. And it turns out sometimes that works really well. So that's probably the advice, you know, I'd give to any person. It's just don't get so intimidated. It's really important to listen to legacy knowledge and to kind of take that seriously, but don't be afraid to try stuff.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:47:44) Right? We've invented, you know—look. We've invented a whole new industry out in Silicon Valley in the last twenty years because there was no handbook. People just made stuff up. Everything you see on the Internet. Right? Everything you have going on with it, it didn't exist. And if you'd asked someone, you know, my age, I might have told you that you can't do that. Turns out you can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:05) And I like the leaders. I had many mentors that, you know—I learned to program very young at the age of eight and then up through thirteen. And so hanging around my father's office, I had some mentors that would teach me things about code and I realized that there was a difference between the good ones and the not good ones. And I found that the good ones, they would know that something that I wanted to do wasn't possible with the code or that was a little bit crazy, but they wouldn't say, no, it's not possible. They'd say, oh, give it a try.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:35) And then I'd get it and then I'd get down a little bit. I'd learn something, and then I'd get down the road farther and I'd learn something. I would slowly learn why it wouldn't work. And I found that that almost can parallel or translate to even the enterprise where you find the more senior leaders in engineering, sometimes they might not just slam it down so fast because they've had a career of finding out the things that they thought weren't possible were possible. So sometimes you let them walk the path if you're up in the air about it.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:49:04) And I think that's one of the, you know, it's one of the most difficult balances to find. Right? Because, you know, you alluded to this before. We have safety concerns if we've got a human crew. And even if it's a robotic mission, you know, a Hubble Space Telescope or something or a James Webb. These are multibillion dollar investments. Right? So it's not okay to just try crazy stuff and wing it and see if it's gonna work. Right. But at the same time, you have to allow a path for those crazy ideas because one out of ten of those might just be the answer you were looking for. Right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:49:36) So that, you know, you asked kind of different parts of this question throughout the talk here. It's important that you have an opportunity for people to really innovate and try new ideas. But it's also important that you have in this place a system that can rigorously, methodically, deterministically evaluate whether there's a problem there or failure mode you didn't anticipate so it doesn't make it onto the final vehicle. Right? But at the same time you wanna give it a fair shot. You wanna get that data to come forward. You don't wanna kill it in the embryonic stages when it's at the idea stage. You wanna give some path for that to develop.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:50:11) And over a period of, you know, you go from a component to bench test to integrated system to system, and as it proves the system all the way onto the vehicle. And we really are—that's a lot of what we're working on in our innovation culture right now is to sort of remove the friction in that system. Some of that is good filters to keep unsafe practices out of a flight vehicle, but some of that's just kind of friction or scar tissue from stuff that used to be true but may not be true anymore. There are a lot of things we literally couldn't do when we didn't have high-speed computers. Right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:50:45) And that now we can do. So, you know, a good example in airplanes. Right? You know, everybody who knows anything about airplanes would tell you you have to design airplanes with a static margin that's stable, meaning you have the CG forward of the neutral point. Right? Because a pilot can't actually fly a vehicle that's unstable. It will, you know, spin out of control and crash. Well, it turns out with fly-by-wire controls and computers in the loop, all those airplanes we talked about are, in fact, designed to be unstable. Right? That would have been a very hard thing to explain to, you know, a generation ago who didn't have access to fly-by-wire advanced computing onboard an aircraft.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:51:25) Right? So it turns out you can design an unstable airplane and get all the maneuverability benefits of that, and you can do it safely. Whereas their knowledge base would have said, yeah, you get maneuverability, but you will kill a pilot. And it's just not true with new technology. So we always have to evaluate those assumptions and those truisms as technology changes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:44) Yeah. Especially as things get smaller and we have new technologies to now work on different levels. Like, I was thinking the other day about different types of advancements. Like, we'll say, oh, this fuel isn't good, or we can't do this with this specific technology. It's like, well, now what if that becomes very useful now that we can see on—like, we have new tools that can do new things. All of a sudden, we can see it differently, and we didn't even know what was going on there.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:52:10) Yeah. And I'll tell you that's, you know, there's so many areas where that's increasingly true. You could, you know, you could point to very specific technology areas where we're in a very interesting time. Right? Because the other thing that's happening is that it used to take sort of decades for technology to turn over, to refresh, you know, to go from vacuum tube technology to transistor to integrated circuits. So it's a progress over a period of decades that gave a lot of time for those assumptions and those design practices and those qualification practices and all that to evolve along with the technology. What's going on that's quite unique is that technology is updating so quickly. Right? Like, you know, kind of Moore's Law every, you know, eighteen, twenty-four months. Then it's really challenging the ability of our cultural systems and our, you know, processes inside of businesses to really adapt to that. And that's not just about space. That's about every facet of business. Right?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:53:06) One example that, you know, you could obviously, you could talk about all the digital transformation stuff that's going on that's really changing the way we do everything from Wall Street trading to the way we do space flight. You know? And it's amazing how rapidly that's evolving and really challenging our ability to stay ahead of it. You talked about miniaturization. That's another one that's kind of enabled by the digital developments. But we have literally CubeSats that can accomplish, you know, today—and NASA's flown a number of those, both as prototypes out of our Space Technology Mission Directorate, as demonstration articles, but we've actually flown some science missions on CubeSat-type satellites that can accomplish 90% of the objectives that a billion dollar satellite would have taken to do just a decade ago. That's a big deal. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:01) It's a huge deal.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:54:03) So I think, you know, there are a lot of big changes underway, and our challenge is to stay ahead of them. That's my—that's mostly my challenge in this office and our technology directorate. That's where our challenge really is to keep NASA at the bleeding edge of that. And that pace of it is accelerating so rapidly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:22) I love it. And I think you're the perfect person for the job. Like, the way you are able to articulate your ideas and the knowledge that you have and the passion and the energy that you bring to this position. It's—I don't know if it's a votable position, but I vote for you.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:54:38) I'll take that. You know, the cool thing is we've got such an amazing team. Right? And I can't tell you. Like, you know, I told you where I started, so it's just an honor for me to be, you know, part of the team. And I think that's one of the cool things about NASA and probably this business in general is that whatever position you're in, right, like, everybody has a really, really important role to play. We have—you know, I like to say that it's just as important for us to have the finest engineers and scientists, which I think we have world-class people. We literally have Nobel laureates. We have the best people in the world.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:55:24) But that only works if we have also working with them the best human resources people, the best business people to keep this business running. Right? The best public affairs people to enable us to reach audiences and to partner with people like you. The whole thing works together. And, yeah, I'm grateful that I've got hopefully a certain set of skills that let me do my part. But I'm even more grateful that we have such an amazing team, and it's really an honor to be part of this team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:44) Boom. And there you do it, man. Throwing the love back to the team. You, like, if I had a leader checklist, you hit all the—you passed the test.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:55:53) You're doing us well, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:56) This wasn't a podcast. This was your annual review.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:55:59) That's right. Yeah. No. But you know what? It's one of—this is really the thing that I think I appreciate more about NASA than probably anything else. Right? Obviously, I'm just the kind of person that just, you know, this is what I do. Right? If I'm not at work, I'm watching some TED Talk about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:17) Me too.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:56:17) Well, right? So just a nerd, and I love it. Pretty cool to get paid for something you love doing, which is what most of us are doing. But I mean what I said. The other thing that's really cool is to be among a group of people where we kind of share—we have that shared passion. Right? So that makes it fun. That makes it really fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:36) Douglas, was there anything we didn't get to cover that you wanna get out there?

(Douglas Terrier at 00:56:40) Hey. You know, I just wanna—like I said, just thank you for doing this. Yeah. What you're doing—what you're doing, just kind of helping us connect with everybody is really important. So I'm being completely sincere when I'm gonna say you're part of the team and the work you're doing is really important. So we appreciate it. And, hey, it's my pleasure to talk to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:59) Oh, thank you. I'm gonna send you the link. I'm gonna send you some books. And then if you ever need anything at all, don't hesitate. Reach right out if you need to be connected to anybody. Whatever you need, just let me know, and we'll make it happen.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:57:11) Great. Hey. Thanks. Good talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:12) Good talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:13) Have a fantastic day, Douglas.

(Douglas Terrier at 00:57:14) Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:15) Bye.