How Failure Helps Us Succeed: The Agony & Inspiration Of Defeat (live public talk)

Estimated read time: 1:20

AI is evolving every day. Don't fall behind.

Join 50,000+ readers learning how to use AI in just 5 minutes daily.

Completely free, unsubscribe at any time.

Summary

Join the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's engaging talk on the importance of failure in the path to success. Featuring Brian White, Nikki Wyrick, and chief engineer Rob Manning, this final edition of the 2020 Von Karman Lecture series delves into the lessons learned from engineering challenges faced by JPL. Rob shares his experiences of early career failures, the growth that followed, and the spirit of perseverance that propels innovation in space exploration. With insights, humor, and humility, discover how mistakes are transformed into achievements within NASA's ambitious missions.

Highlights

NASA Jet Propulsion Lab shares the role of failure in success 🚀.
Rob Manning's journey from mistakes to major achievements 🌟.
Ownership takes center stage in driving innovative solutions 💡.
Daring mighty things is at the heart of NASA's mission 💥.
The value of humility and learning from errors 🙌.

Key Takeaways

Mistakes are natural and essential to growth 🌱.
Ownership fuels innovation and personal responsibility 💪.
NASA's missions embody daring mightiness and constant learning 🚀.
Open dialogue and humility prepare us for future challenges 🎤.
Perseverance in the face of failure builds resilience and success 🌟.

Overview

Failures serve as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks on the path to success, especially evident in the high-stakes world of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Rob Manning, a seasoned engineer, provides insight into how his early career mistakes shaped his expertise and leadership. Through honesty and accountability, failures become valuable lessons that frame future victories.

The lecture takes us through the fascinating history of NASA's ambitious missions, highlighting key challenges and triumphs. From early mishaps during the Ranger program to the iconic success of the Curiosity Rover, we see how ownership and innovation are critical in overcoming obstacles. The sense of mission ownership cultivates responsibility, driving engineers to keep pushing the boundaries.

Rob Manning shares the human side of NASA's scientific endeavors, reminding us that even at the cutting edge of technology, authentic confidence and humility must go hand in hand. As these space pioneers learn to anticipate and solve problems creatively, their stories inspire a culture of perseverance and curiosity in the face of the unknown.

How Failure Helps Us Succeed: The Agony & Inspiration Of Defeat (live public talk) Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hmm
00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so
01:00 - 01:30 [Music] bye [Music] [Music]
01:30 - 02:00 [Music]
02:00 - 02:30 me [Music] that's [Music]
02:30 - 03:00 [Music] [Music]
03:00 - 03:30 [Music] [Applause] [Music]
03:30 - 04:00 so [Music]
04:00 - 04:30 nasa's jet propulsion laboratory presents the von carmen lecture a series of talks by scientists and engineers who are exploring our planet our solar system and all that lies beyond [Music]
04:30 - 05:00 hello everyone and a very pleasant evening to you wherever you may be i am brian white from jpl's office of communications and education and welcome to our final remote edition of the 2020 von carmen lecture series our series will return in january of 2021 but it's been quite a year and i wanted to take a moment to thank
05:00 - 05:30 all of you joining us from all over the world for this series as we've gone from our public on lab lectures to these remote editions your patience and curiosity fueled us to find ways to continue to connect with you our audience as we say every single week every single month this is your space program over the past 11 months we've said farewell to spitzer we've looked to earth explored how to become an engineer and tonight we talk about the lessons of failure ever try ever fail try again
05:30 - 06:00 fail again fail better i think we could all relate to samuel beckett after this year joining us as co-host this evening is my colleague nikki wyrick hiya nikki hi brian thanks for having me tonight i am very excited to be here and i am excited to take questions from all of you watching tonight we want to make sure that you stay involved with our conversation this evening so if you're watching on youtube or facebook live make sure you ask questions in the chat box and our diligent social media team
06:00 - 06:30 will bring in as many as they can to our talk tonight if you don't see the chat box make sure you re-load and as always we want to remind you that this is your space program so thanks for being involved tonight thanks nikki thanks for joining us as always folks if we run into any technical difficulty or small little failures we ask your patients and stick with us we'll get them sorted out as soon as we can now our speaker tonight discussing this wonderful topic is chief engineer for nasa's jet
06:30 - 07:00 propulsion laboratory as well as chief engineer for jpl's engineering and science directorate and i'm not going to go through all of the missions he's worked on because we'd be here all day and we will be discussing quite a few of them throughout the evening but as an engineering fellow he has been designing testing and operating robotics robotic spacecraft for nearly 40 years including galileo cassini magellan and many mars missions most recently rob helped create a team to design and build an emergency use ventilator specifically
07:00 - 07:30 for the covet 19 pandemic of all of his accolades and there are many my favorite is that he has a minor planet named after him please welcome rob manning hi rob hey brian thank you what a great intro i always like who is that person you're talking about well thank you very much thank you brian and nikki it's so great to be here and it's so great to talk to everybody this is a real treat of course thank you for being with us tonight um particularly on this topic we
07:30 - 08:00 just said your resume is exemplary you've gotten to work so many missions but i want to know particularly for our students watching tonight how did you originally get to jpl ah great question well i was very lucky i i was i always say you know i'm fact luck plays a role for all of our lives of course but but i was very lucky in that i was a student at caltech which is just a few miles down the street from uh from jbl and i was and they were looking in the early 80s they were looking not for engineers because they had plenty of them in that in those days
08:00 - 08:30 they wanted some technicians and i said hey i'm willing to take anything just my just get my foot in the door so i found myself as really literally as a draftsman sitting on a drafting table with big classes plastic vellum uh sheets of schematics where i was drawing with a number two pencil and a nice wonderful electric spinning eraser and drawing and erasing my mistakes on the in these in these electronic circuits that were going to be electronics that were going to
08:30 - 09:00 ultimately fly on a mission called galileo to to jupiter in a few years uh well i want to bring up image number one because we've got a great shot of jpl and also you uh and you're you're letting somebody sit on a model of a rover who is that ah i know that that well with that it's actually a little robot that we put inside our smaller robots this is where we get our taunt i mean we put small people inside small rovers you probably thought probably knew that
09:00 - 09:30 this is the trick behind all of our autonomous systems but no this is my daughter colleen manning and she's she when she was very young i took her into our sandbox uh where we had been testing the curiosity rover and uh little sojourner rover the very first mars rover to explore the surface of another planet uh and uh and i couldn't resist putting her this is just a model uh of the rover but i couldn't resist sitting here there she was so light and uh she'll she'll uh it was just a very it was a lot of fun i mean it was
09:30 - 10:00 we had such an amazing experience very much like the ventilator experience where a small team people did amazing things to make something happen uh where we really tried to dare mighty things on mars pathfinder it was quite an experience well we'll be bringing that phrase up again and before we get into these examples why is this i mean this topic is important for me i know a lot of people it is why do you think this is important for not only our audience but anybody walking down the street well this is a great question
10:00 - 10:30 brian i think one of my one of the things well first of all this is a talk that this is derived from a talk i give to my to engineers and not just engineers but all of our staff at jpl uh to try to remind them that that that this is a very humanistic effort that we do we try to do very hard things i said earlier trying to dare mining things this is one of our modules this is not just jbl it's all of nasa we try to we try to we we're we're working at the behest of all of you taxpayers out there thank you very much but
10:30 - 11:00 our goal is to try to be to try to go out there and try to not just do something new and for the first time for its own sake but try to do something for for great reasons so that we can push both the human and scientific understanding of our world and our universe um but you know in the process though i see a lot of people including ourselves our own engineers and scientists um being really hard on ourselves it's it's interesting um in fact this this seems to be our whole culture right now
11:00 - 11:30 i'm sure all of you uh can comment on it uh well is that is one of a lot of criticism and a lot of a lot of criticism we're really hard on ourselves and i and i really i see that that our expectations for all of us seem to be so high and yet we're always disappointed and people seem to be so disappointed when we turn out to be just normal mortals all of us and it's not talking about engineers and scientists but everybody we put the bar very very high which is you know it's just good but we have to understand our own
11:30 - 12:00 humility and humanity that we are not perfect human beings and that we as human beings need to learn and one of the wonderful things about engineering it's built on the idea of trial and error that you can make mistakes try something and build it again see if you can get it because no one is perfect no matter how smart you think you are or how smart you would love to be you have to understand that we do make mistakes and we have to create
12:00 - 12:30 environments where mistakes can be made before everybody's watching you on cnn well that's that's kind of good to bring us up to our first um talking point today uh there was a time before people walked on the moon and jpl had a big part of of that um those proof of concept early on missions and we'll discuss the ranger missions now these proof of concept robotic missions what were some of the first lessons that we learned from those and we'll bring up our next image on
12:30 - 13:00 that too okay well so so the ranges were really cool and it's funny i like talking about because because it's so long ago people have actually for sorry forgotten with what actually happened and that so so jbl was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time and and was able to build uh the very first american satellite that was put into outer space as part of explorer program that was that was in the very late 50s but but but uh fortunately our the director of jpl
13:00 - 13:30 said we wanted to we don't you know we'd love to get you all the rest of you nasa you can work on you can work on getting people all we want to do is sort of make robots and explore the scientific element and we you can while you're doing humans we will send these little robots out there and and so nasa's okay fine fine fine you can do that so so we started making these relatively ina by today's standards very inexpensive missions and the and the ranger program was the first in a series so now but nasa said listen you guys before you go down the place what we need to do we're going to the moon we want to send
13:30 - 14:00 astronauts to land on the moon by the end but before the decade is out so early in 1960s jpl set out to build um a series of missions called the ranger what they were these ranger spacecraft were intended to aim for the moon no one had been to the moon and or even taking close-up pictures so idea was this spacecraft would be aimed like a bullet to the moon directly and have a camera that was pointed down go click click click click click click taking pictures really quick click click click click and send them back as fast as they can
14:00 - 14:30 up to the point where just before impact the resolution on the images would expect to be very very good but it all but that was a tall order because in those days we didn't have digital cameras there are video cameras they're called vidicon tubes um they were it was it was really a television set very much like the old days in the 1960s and 50s of the big television screens but made much much smaller and and all that had to be put together and work properly and so jpl had never navigated something that all that far across the solar system
14:30 - 15:00 they just really had thrown things out there before and hope they weren't trying to aim but now we were learning how to aim we were trying to learn how to control something from earth and we didn't we really didn't have a lot of control over the joysticking of earth from earth um it was because even though it was it was only three seconds away by speed of light it still required a lot of autonomy on board the vehicle to be able to click through those actions very quickly as it approached the moon so what happened well they build a whole bunch of these jpl built a whole bunch of these and the
15:00 - 15:30 first five over the course of about a little over a year from from late 1961 to late to 62 they set five of these missions up one at a time every few months and every single one of them failed in fact the first one was very you know it would be by today's standards very embarrassing while it was sitting there uh inside the nose cone on this on the rocket pad the solar panels which are both buttoned up like this um they inadvertently send a command or caused a command to happen where the
15:30 - 16:00 solar panels went boom and hit the wall of the nose cone so it's like a almost like a cartoon um fortunately they were able to open take the nose kill off climb up on the rocket restow the solar panels screw them back in and then launch it well fortunately that was the good news but the bad news as soon as it went up there it had all sorts of problems and it didn't make it to the moon that was number one this other problems happen on number two other problems happen number three other problems number four another set of problems that number five and the last one just kind of they keep
16:00 - 16:30 missing the moon in some cases they hit the moon went around the back and bumped into the wrong part of the moon of course the backside of the moon you can't send back to earth so it was a series of of really um horrible disasters and and after you know you can imagine that the lab director um who who came along who's he would he every every few months he would stand up in front of a wall of tv cameras and reporters and come up to the microphone and say well it didn't work again and
16:30 - 17:00 up can you imagine wow at an institutional man those engineers and people who are developing how they felt it was absolutely heartbreaking and frustrating because one of the problems is they didn't really understand why it was failing so after five attempts nasa says stop stop stop you're just wasting taxpayers money what are you doing so jpl said okay what are we doing wrong here and so jpl regrouped and rethought this through and said okay what would it take to be what are the things we're doing wrong
17:00 - 17:30 so jpl said to us towards the engineers and project managers and the directors said to themselves well what could we do differently and they realize there's a lot of lessons we can take even though we don't exactly know why all these things failed we can take we can take this much more seriously than we have so jpl reorganized itself and added things like quality assurance and mission assurance and all sorts of uh patterns for ownership of design among individuals because up to that it's just a bunch of people working together as as
17:30 - 18:00 as my uh as my mentor john cassani told me you know people were falling over each other working on the spacecraft at the same time it just no one was no one knew what they were doing now so jbl reorganized itself re-thought it through and and uh and try to make uh uh rethink the design in fact that's exactly what they did they stood down for a good fraction of a year and reorganized itself um one of the things they did is i know you can see in that picture there is a there is a
18:00 - 18:30 a uh a round ball on top jpl it was very audacious they were going to make a land or a balsa wood lander with a rocket that stopped in midair allowed it to crash on the on the surface of mars and be able to make some seismic measurements on the surface of the moon they got rid of that they simplified listen we don't need that anymore we can just make it keep it simple keep it simple keep it simple and they did and they finally finally after a year of redesigning the laboratory redesigning how we're doing everything from scratch they finally got it to work
18:30 - 19:00 uh it turns out the first attempt they tried after start after the start down actually didn't work everything worked fine except by accident the uh while the vehicle launched the camera took all its pictures early due to a little bit of a spark in one of the connectors and so so another disaster but fortunately there are three more successes in a row that that followed and you know what the jpl breathed this huge sign of relief can you imagine so there are imagine the report the reporters and others are saying you know what you know who are these idiots you know what are
19:00 - 19:30 they doing you know what they do with our taxpayers money why do they think they know what they're doing um and you know what because we didn't we had never done this before we were asking we were being asked and we were audacious enough as an institution to say yes we can can we can we yes we sure we'll do it we'll learn well the trouble with this is we couldn't learn we didn't know why they failed so we worked hard to figure this out and and and made it make sure we understood what was going on and try to understand why it worked and why it
19:30 - 20:00 wouldn't work and and we took this to heart and we and we we were we've started the process of saying listen if we're going to fail let's understand why we feel and not be afraid to stare failure directly in the face and learn and learn from these mistakes so ranger really was the first step in establishing a culture of learning from these moments but something else that you said was talking about taking ownership yeah and that's something i
20:00 - 20:30 think we're going to talk about throughout all these different missions that we're going to talk about but taking ownership of of the mission of the goal rather than just saying do it this way this way in this way you've talked to me about the differences between that well you know we you know as you know i i i'm a parent and so uh one of the things that that's that's so easy to do as a parent in fact not just parents all of us it's we're just wired to do it is to tell people how to do their job you tell them do this okay no now move
20:30 - 21:00 your move your mouse more to the right then click no no not now click again and so so people people we're really really tempted to want to give people you know do the fishing for them rather than teaching them how to fish and take ownership to become a fisher person and so so so so the idea of ownership is to give people the objective sure show them how you do it so show them how it's done they can watch it they can practice it but then give them the space to figure
21:00 - 21:30 out really how to get it done for the situation that they are in and that's called for us has called ownership and aligning a group of people along a mission objective and you could do that not just at the top level in terms of where yes we're going to send a mission to mars it's going to drive around another another planet but each piece can be done the same way you can take each piece and say listen what is your mission well my mission is to make a mobility system that can walk
21:30 - 22:00 drive over these complicated rocking slopes in the surface of another planet and so you take that as a mission as opposed to a series of tasks now you're more likely to take ownership with the outcome and be an and own the fact that yes my job is to make that happen yes my job is actually see it through and so that's that is something that um many of us in fact there's a it's a very common belief that we have a jpl that ownership is a key function of how you get something accomplished
22:00 - 22:30 so nasa jpl we're starting to take ownership we're learning from these early lessons we have we have some successes and we're able to start daring mightier and mightier things and the more we dare the higher the risk of failure and i want to go to our next image and let's talk about the mars climate orbiter yes um well that's a great vision um i i i mean it was it's a great example i mean to be honest with you it's actually part as part of two missions there are two
22:30 - 23:00 missions i you know um i had mentioned mars pathfinder earlier but mass mars pathfinder was one of the first of a series that was called at the time faster better cheaper missions where the idea is to reduce the cost reduce the overhead try to be lean and mean and try to do as much as you can with the smallest team you possibly can well here a wonderful team of very talented people mind you were designing two missions an orbiter and a lander at the same time and they were trying to capitalize on the simulators and those
23:00 - 23:30 designs and put them together in the process this the they were both launched in the same launch window remember you can only go to mars every 26 months because you have to wait for the line you can actually you can leave earth orbit anytime you want to get to mars orbit but if you do it if you leave it anytime you want chances are bars won't be there when you get there so you have to time your departure so that mars will be there when you get there and so that means every 26 months you can go and that's the launch window is only a few weeks long
23:30 - 24:00 these two vehicles are on the way this one was was a head of the lander and this is mars climate orbiting it was a wonderful mission it was actually itself um uh a a mission to kind of help make up for uh some some missions another failure that it happened happened even earlier but so so this is what's interesting this is what i love about this is when i talk to young people i said i said listen you know you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist you can just look at this you can look at this picture and says what's about
24:00 - 24:30 this so imagine you're flying this thing from earth to mars and you're and those those are solar panels you see um sticking on the left there it's on my right hand actually yeah there we go um i think we have you see it there okay so look at that picture so what do you see it's asymmetric isn't it so what what do you see you see uh that is that is a a solar panel one side there's a big antenna that's that's that circular thing up on a boom points back to earth um it's
24:30 - 25:00 it's a very uh it's a nice compact design it's very elegant um but this asymmetric so what does that mean it means that if you're facing the sun what does the sun do the sun puts out light and shines on your vehicle well light is like like any other photons of light have have momentum when they hit the solar panels they cause the solar panels to to be a very tiny little force that force just ever so slightly pushes the spacecraft to one side so no problem you just have to round it
25:00 - 25:30 back again right fire your thrusters on the vehicle or or speed up a reaction wheel or one of the two to get the vehicle to straighten out but eventually you have to keep firing these thrusters to keep them keep the vehicle pointed the right way well no problem they were playing this was planned for this was expected there's nothing surprising about that but these thrusters in the process of doing what they were doing not only rotate the vehicle but ever so slightly gave the vehicle the tiniest little push to the left you just move move move move just to the
25:30 - 26:00 left and and so but it's a very tiny amount and and this would happen every few days over time it's the equivalent of force of of literally imagine a toilet paper square on your hand pushing you pushing you to the left ever so slightly every day every all the time just slightly pushing you where over the course of months it turns out that small amount of force will push your beagle to the left well we're not stupid we know those kinds of
26:00 - 26:30 things could happen so we just have to estimate how much that force is so what we did we had the software on board the vehicle tell software on the ground how much those thrusters were firing and how much it was pushing it and we would then transfer that information to the navigation team that which would then figure out how much the vehicles moved well why do they need that why don't they just look at it well this is another little detail this is something that um i try to encourage all of my friends at jbl especially the new people at jbl they all should know how do you know what your spacecraft spacecraft are in
26:30 - 27:00 outer space this is a great question you know how do you know i mean it goes way out there you can't see it you know telescopes you look out there just can't it's not a little dot right it's just you can't even see it no dot it's too small to be a dot um and so do it because we can ask what the vehicle knows well how does the vehicle know it looks back on earth it sees another little dot maybe a little mars maybe you can kind of figure it out but it doesn't have these vehicles this one didn't couldn't have cameras to see where it is no with the trick that we've used we've used the radio so what we do we have a we get
27:00 - 27:30 transmitters on earth and we send a little a little beep boop the boop the beep goes across space bounces off the radio and antenna and the radio inside and bounces back to earth and we time it and you know the speed of light because radio waves move with the speed of light right everyone knows that click okay now we know the speed now we know how far away it is yes oh and by the way i can also send a tone to the spacecraft and it can bounce the tone back if the tone is getting is higher when it comes back it means it's coming toward you if it's
27:30 - 28:00 lower it's going away you can tell how fast it is so those two pieces of information should really help you figure out where your spacecraft is right except for one detail right thanks yeah it's it except except that you you know how far it is but you don't know if it's over there or over there or over there because the radio beams we're sending back are really big and so it's like huh i want but that's okay we can figure out where it is because we've been counting how much has been moving to the left because we've been getting this data
28:00 - 28:30 well um what happened as the vehicle approached mars we discovered and i said i think there's another picture um yeah coming up image five here actually yeah um so as as we're approaching mars this vehicle is approaching mars unbeknownst to us we had mis underestimated the amount the space school had moved to the left and in the wrong direction the left and this to mention this you're coming in from the lower right of your picture there and as the vehicle's coming in it's being
28:30 - 29:00 pushed to the left closer toward mars but you can't see it from earth right what's happened and what happened was as as the vehicle came around got to the planet uh by planet mars it fired its engines just before it got there we could see the engines fire and then it disappeared behind mars early early i thought wait whoa whoa whoa who moved mars mars wasn't supposed to be there mars we're supposed to have plenty of time we know our spacecraft has marcy what's what's going what's going on and so we're like very nervous about
29:00 - 29:30 that um so but unfortunately some minutes later we're expecting to come around the back and this nice little nice little loop you see here put itself in nice elliptical shaped orbit um because the engines put yourself there or by the way they're just gone straight so we we were turns out we we we actually hit the top of atmosphere this at this lander and this orbiter became a lander by mistake it hit the top of the atmosphere and broke up what happened well within a day we found within a day or two we figured out
29:30 - 30:00 that that that the the the forces we were in estimating from this from the spacecraft were in the units of pounds english units of pounds which is very common for propulsion people because because they use uh english units for for plumbing you know you get a one inch pipe right quarter inch pipe one pound thruster um so so but but we but our navigators do everything in in metric and so we expected that this this team expected to be a metric and so
30:00 - 30:30 did everyone else because but of a very tiny little mistake that they it wasn't corrected properly and and and we were off by the difference between pounds and the metric version which is newton's a factor of four and a half that's that's huge we underestimated the force we were 100 kilometers off course and in the wrong direction and this this again this orbiter became a lander it was very embarrassing it was very big news um we were shocked all of us that we
30:30 - 31:00 how could we make something so stupid i mean it seems like a stupid mistake right but then you start thinking about you know sir what is what's for this mistake what how do we make mistakes like this well it wasn't turns out that's it we make those kind of mistakes all the time it's a miscommunication those kinds of things it's not that we made the mistake that was wrong it was that we didn't catch it because all of us make thousands and thousands of mistakes all human beings that's what humans do including
31:00 - 31:30 the best engineers and scientists of the world we we're all human we're all fallible and so the trick is how do you do something how do you make something a billion dollar mission say land or big billion dollar rover on surface of mars where thousands of things have to work right how is that possible you just hire a bunch of great people no no you don't just hire great people you hire good people the best you can but you can't expect
31:30 - 32:00 being good to be good enough and so what you need to do is test test test check find out before it's too late ask the questions how do we really know that this is working what if it doesn't work do we do we care we really didn't ask those kinds of questions and i felt you know i people like me really were very naive about this and so um i remember those days terribly we were very hard by the way talk about being hard at each other we were very
32:00 - 32:30 hard on each other um we were you know at first people like because can you imagine the emotional attachment of spending years trying to get these things to work but you know we learned and guess what we figured out how to do this better and ever since we have come up with new tricks uh we've come from new tricks that we've used and we'll be using again coming up here in january when mars 2020 the perseverance rover arrives at mars we're going to use new tricks and the new tricks allow us to see where their
32:30 - 33:00 vehicle is in the plane of the sky rather than rather than just guessing where it is over there we can now see where it is exactly because we're going to measure with our radio the angles between that and nearby quasars that have been tracked in the sky so so that's how we do it and it's a new trick and we've been it's been it's it's and it's something we've used ever since it was it had been invented before this mission but we hadn't really put it to use in all of our missions and it was just a wonderful wonderful uh
33:00 - 33:30 addition and now it's become uh just part of our new lessons and we take this forward and that's how we get ahead we learn from our mistakes get ourselves back up on the horse and start again well something you've talked about um when we've been preparing for this show was talk i've always appreciated the the grace and humility which you've talked about you mentioned that jay leno made a joke about your i mean that's that that can't be easy to deal with um but there's also this idea between and
33:30 - 34:00 something you brought up is even with moments like this there needs to be authentic confidence there needs to be humility versus hubris yeah um yeah that's that's that's a tough thing because think about it we're hiring so who are the people we're putting on these jobs first of all you have to say whether they're they're uh they were in their elementary school they were a students a lot of my a students you know you they um their parents uh thought they were they were pretty smart
34:00 - 34:30 and their siblings always would say uh i don't know when it's when a parent would ask a question and the other siblings would say i don't know ask susie she knows all the answers and and then you go um so susie so like on the spot like oh i gotta get over these answers all of us are in the same boat we all try to we all try to know but uh and it's important by the way you can't be afraid of everything you can't be afraid of your shadow you've got to be able to willing to to get up in the morning which is
34:30 - 35:00 probably the hardest part of anybody's day where it's just waking up and getting out of bed right but then once you get going get yours get the energy going see if you can make something happen but don't be don't let that confidence that that that uh become that that that wonderful excitement of being successful turn into hubris and overconfidence and that's that's the balancing act that we do and and and and it's important i mean so
35:00 - 35:30 i have this is one of the reasons i have to talk at jbl because because because we see it but but but even though even though these people they're it's so easy for us to be hard on each other and not just and i don't mean at jpl at nasa and together but just in general um we all have to give people space you know for kids especially for kids growing up today think about this you know think about one mistake on a on a social networking uh is on there permanently you know and they so that so they they they it's like it's like it's
35:30 - 36:00 like uh um bob marley's chains you know and around your neck on on uh on the uh uh what's that christmas show um you'll remember i'm talking about uh it's yeah [Laughter] not the jamaican one no so no it's it's it it's it it's it's these these issues we have that
36:00 - 36:30 in the old days people will forget the mistakes you made now these mistakes feel like they have to wear them on their sleeves and they don't want to and it's something they're afraid of uh and and that's and it's true for all of us we've got to stop being so hard on each other and give ourselves a chance to to make a mistake create an environment where mistakes can be caught um if possible and and don't be hard on people just because they make a mistake listen we don't want incompetence either we don't everyone making mistakes and just know being
36:30 - 37:00 going crazy but but we definitely need uh to to allow people the space to to to fail and be human and learn from those mistakes and try to be better as people because we are not perfect people none of us are no one is we're just people and so uh anyway so that's that's where that comes out and i think the comment you made earlier about you know it was actually after the next this other failure mars polder lander uh i believe is when uh jay leno who is some of you may know as was remember was a as a uh a
37:00 - 37:30 nighttime uh uh i had the tonight show and he and he you know and i watched him one night and i was and trying to trying to get away from my brain away from the stress of work and he said you know well just goes to show you you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist after after embarrassing failures and i and i just like this like diary that he's right first of all he's right you don't have to be rocket science but more importantly at that point is is that yeah he's actually making it sounds it's
37:30 - 38:00 funny but it is we are human as anybody and that's okay and there's nothing wrong with being a human and and so and i think that's you know all of us have to do it and whether you're a student where you're trying to learn and you're getting and you and you get a bad report card or a bad grade on something and you know it's not the end of the world and now you know what mistakes are part of our very being i can tell you i have personally personally damaged i you know i'm not proud of this but i've damaged
38:00 - 38:30 no less than three mars spacecraft before they launched that where they had to be repaired because of me because i messed up i screwed up you know i told this to our hr department and they were like well maybe we should have fired you yeah you know you know that's sort of a we see a trend um but you know it's gary ignity thinks it's hard to get me right and and and and almost all these mistakes are are things mistakes that i wanted that i share with other people that i that i'm not i'm not i'm not a
38:30 - 39:00 i'm not happy that i made those mistakes but but but i'm willing to share them because it just tells the people that it can happen to any one of us you know even if the chief engineer of jpl can make him a dumb mistake then maybe i can't hear but the other hand we've got to learn from these mistakes and try to make mistakes before i don't recommend breaking flight harbor by the way it's very expensive and very time consuming and so i was very embarrassed and very you know it was what didn't wasn't great
39:00 - 39:30 but but but i do tell people you know why not you know you're uh you know are you afraid of making mistakes are you afraid of being wrong you can't be afraid of being wrong that's i think that's that's a great uh segue to our f we're the last mission we're going to talk about tonight because there are lots of questions out there and we want to make sure that everybody as many of you can get as many of those in as possible um i want to go to image seven and it's a it's a successful mission um but curiosity and we want to talk
39:30 - 40:00 about the wheels but really what what you were talking about what is the difference between a lesson and a failure and what is a failure of the imagination yeah so i mean certainly um you can by the way lessons can be positive as well as negative but but but you know one of the things and this is something that you know almost always if we make a mistake or something it's because there's something we didn't know and uh one one of the things that i you know
40:00 - 40:30 i try to remind people is is to is to keep that humility running keep that new humility knob as high as you can go even when you're being challenged to do something that other people aren't being challenged to do and remember by the way is to to listen to the quiet voices and make sure that the people who don't have who aren't as verbose as people like me uh to the they can bring their voices to this to the table and remind us what the right things are to do and uh
40:30 - 41:00 because everybody knows something you don't know in this case we've this is a picture of curiosity rovers wheels now i am a i'm a bit partial to curiosity i was the chief engineer i loved is a great team and it was a huge challenge for project um we had we did make a lot of mistakes but we fixed them and learn from them but one in particular one that i feel personally responsible for um is right there in this picture if you look carefully in that picture i know if you can folks can see it um there's there's the
41:00 - 41:30 wheel on the right um this image was taken by a camera at the end of a robotic arm and so it was able to look underneath the belly and take a picture and we don't do that very often but when we did we looked and said oh my goodness what is going on here those holes in that wheel not that not the kind of the rounded holes but the one the holes on the right should not be there what's going on it's like somebody poked poke a hole poked holes in the wheels and you know
41:30 - 42:00 people like me instantly knew what was going on and because i seen similar things going wrong in testing we had done before we launched it years before but in fact at least a couple of years and and and in time at a time when we i could have done something about it and fixed it but what happened was we didn't use our imagination we didn't this is a case where you know it's hard to be it's hard to be smart and hard to know how to predict the future hardest you
42:00 - 42:30 know yeah you know predicting the future is very difficult i forget what uh yogi berra said a version of that but it's it is it is very uh it's very hard um uh and but but even so we should have put the all the two and two together so what had happened was we had seen that the wheels in our test bed the wheels had been damaged and so we talked ourselves into thinking well well listen our test program for these wheels was pretty darn good we had we had a wheel that was went over these very sharp rocks i don't know if you know this so so
42:30 - 43:00 where curiosity landed in a lake bed um it's it has it's clays everywhere and they're rocks sitting in the clay clay bed and those rocks are sitting there they're bound hard into this lake bed and oh and turns out if even though there's air is only one percent the density of earth's very very thin there's wind on mars it's not huge and it's kind you can barely feel but it's enough to get little tiny particles of dust to bounce along the surface it's called saltation it bounces over the surface and it can wear these rocks into these
43:00 - 43:30 incredibly sharp fine edges almost like knife edges they're called ventifacts that this happens on earth too but these rocks are basalts lava rocks they're really hard and so so uh to but you know we knew that that happened because we could we saw that same thing happen some years back with spirit when it landed on mars we were driving i was like well look at those sharp rocks those are airbag eaters i sold myself told myself and the team and so so we were designing this wheel we wanted to be sharp handy
43:30 - 44:00 we worked fine with these rocks well we tested these things on rocks but guess what in our test bed we put the rocks down we didn't glue them down we didn't glue them down and so and and there's another thing we did we did that's one thing we did wrong the other thing we did wrong i might just grab since i have it here handy i happen to have uh curiosity rover uh a model right here that just happened to have it um yeah um i ca i i sleep with it at night it's kind of nice so so it's it's it is it's got these we got these wheels here and so what
44:00 - 44:30 happens so look at this so these wheels look at how they move around this mobility system these this wheel these wheels go up and down um they move over rocks the whole thing moves but we designed all three wheels to move at the same speed all three thinking that was the right thing to do and that works fine for small rovers but when we scaled up this bigger rover we weren't really thinking were we it turns out it turns out if you're trying to draw what this wheel is trying to drive over a bigger rock and these wheels are these back wheels are going at at a fixed constant speed
44:30 - 45:00 but this wheel isn't isn't is going the same speed this wheel needs to go faster to go over the rock well it but it wasn't it was going the same speed so basically these back wheels are pushing these wheels the front wheel and the side wheels are faster than they can keep up and now if you get these rocks that are buried in clay with sharp edges and sharp like a like a bear claw you're just going to rip these these these aluminum wheels like like a like a coca-cola can and that's that's basically what
45:00 - 45:30 happened uh with us uh and and to to in my dismay and i i was and i was kicking myself for not putting those two pieces together that we really we weren't thinking about we were going to a clay clay we're going to place with water right and that means it's going to be clay's what's clay's do clay's block lock rocks down what do rock locked rocks do they should make sharp points they just don't lie they're in the ground because we drunk we were testing just in the wheels over sharp rocks these rocks would bend over as the wheels turned over the rocks the points would move with it and they
45:30 - 46:00 weren't damaging the rocks and so we miss we underestimated just how bad mars really could be so we did our imaginations were not sufficient we didn't put all the pieces together to allow ourselves to appreciate what this what uh what could actually uh arise when we get to mars and yet all the ingredients for figuring that out were there two years before we launched so i so i i kicked myself for not put thinking that through or making a bigger issue out of it i always appreciate your accountability
46:00 - 46:30 and your acceptance into these um and i think that's a that's a big part of of what you have to do but also in everyday life um we're going to open it up to the audience they've got a lot of questions so i'm going to send it over to nikki how's it looking out there nikki we've got a ton of interest online rob especially with our students i know that's a big passion project of yours we've got quite a few people who are asking for advice how to get jobs at jpl for instance kevin on youtube has asked what are your suggestions for early
46:30 - 47:00 career scientists and engineers wanting to pivot towards getting involved in future space related projects oh well a little luck doesn't hurt okay but i tell you i think i think i think there is something about people in this line of work that is important first of all uh you you're unlikely unless you start your own company to get rich doing this work um but you will be
47:00 - 47:30 greatly enriched with with with the magic of exploration the magic of trying hard things and being at least attempting to be successful um i think the biggest thing i would recommend for anybody and they all seem to have this all the people who come to this whether it's jpl or nasa they all share something they share a deep passion and interest in curiosity and how things work they want to be part of it they they're they're patient they're willing to learn they're they're not afraid of of not knowing
47:30 - 48:00 uh at least at least at first uh and i think i i think that uh a a a a a a career that starts off where i mean obviously it's the kind of work we do it's really hard to get a take a class on how to build these things and how to do these kinds of missions however there is plenty of room to to really you can learn that on the job the hard part is learning the fundamentals knowing the math physics understanding uh communications theory understanding
48:00 - 48:30 uh thermal dynamics understanding the basics of how how physics works uh and and the lowest level of engineering works uh how electronics works how computers work fundamentally uh not just not just that how the apps work but what's going on inside these complicated machines that we build and try to understand those and get trying to get an authentic understanding of that lower level because because it will take a lifetime to really learn about all these details about these things that's okay you'll learn that on the job
48:30 - 49:00 they'll pay you to figure that out we'll our we'll pay you to do that but but we but we really need you to be a person of curiosity and passion and interest with a spark and a willingness to learn and ask questions that's really great to hear and you know some people online have also been asking a little bit more specific questions for instance jeremiah was asking about what type of programs we use and how jeremiah can learn more about
49:00 - 49:30 those launch programs or other types of projects how do we do those calculations and those simulations for those type of things how how do we yeah good question i actually i've wondered that for years um but it's the wonderful thing about understanding how things work is that once you understand you can create models of these worlds you know for example the whole the incredibly exciting sequence of steps that requ that require that you that you that the vehicle needs to transform in
49:30 - 50:00 automatically all by itself on landing day to land these big expensive missions on another planet um is is almost impossible to test here on this planet it really is you can test pieces i can take i can go up to 130 000 feet or higher and and inflate a a full-scale parachute in front of a rocket and test out the parachute that way um i could i could uh i can take these wheels and drive them on an environment
50:00 - 50:30 that that looks a lot like mars and do it right um and we do it right now um and do the testing properly um we can we can do almost all these things in bits and pieces but we can't really test all these things as a system you can't do entry descent landing on a mars entry set landing on this planet why because it's not just the gravity but the atmosphere is so much thicker it's a very different system on mars the atmos is equivalent to try to land on a mountain that's really 130 feet
50:30 - 51:00 high above the surface there are no mountains that high that's many times higher than mount everest and so there's no real way to do it so instead we have to build computer simulations and we have to use the laws of physics interacting with models of the atmosphere of the surface of how understanding how how radar signals come out of a radar radios come out of a radar and how it bounces off of rocks and slopes and back into the radar and simulate all
51:00 - 51:30 those pieces to try to really get yourself a good understanding of whether or not you think this thing's going to work or not it's very dangerous because because we can't test it i mean mention this imagine the first time you flew an airplane is when you floated up with all the passengers now don't do that um but we have no choice so so we have to have models we have to have computer simulations we have to understand the mass properties of a spacecraft in space it's momentum how much its angular angular momentum it has in space
51:30 - 52:00 so we can fire simulated rockets that push it this way and push it that way so it can aim its it's it's solar panels properly at the sun and you can do those kinds of things but it is it does take it's very tedious work i'm telling you this stuff is tedious work all the almost all the engineers that come here very excited first thing we do is to give them something massively tedious to do because this because because it's so easy to get it wrong they have to they have to go through this this this this detail to figure out and have the perseverance which is a key attribute
52:00 - 52:30 of success in in this business to go through and struggle through it and struggle through it and fight fight fight you know with so many opportunities and points of failure possibility it's astounding how much success that you and jpl have had and canon on youtube wants to know how does it feel to have a mission in which thousands of things can go wrong and have it turn out to be a complete success how does that feel well it's usually a big surprise
52:30 - 53:00 every so i'm tell you i tell you so i i like to tell people all this all the time and so you know you've seen us you know uh there in our in our in our in our uh polo shirts you know our case of curiosity elena was these light blue shirts we're all like going screaming up and down your faces are turning red people are crying is it are they relieved no i mean are they happy no they're not happy they're relieved they're they're they it's just like because because even up into that very moment in fact for me sometimes for days after um you you are constantly what did i
53:00 - 53:30 forget what did i miss what are the what's the piece of the puzzle that i that i didn't think of and so so but that's what we want people to do we want them to be constantly think about what did we miss what did i not do right what mistake did i make and so so so when you put all these pieces together um in fact it's really even hard to know as you're getting closer and closer you think am i done well you never really done until the thing lands you're constantly thinking about those things and um and that's a good thing
53:30 - 54:00 it's it's a good thing you sort of know i have to admit people i people ask me so rob how do i know when we're actually done we seem to be testing and testing testing how are we getting done he says well here's a question are we learning anything new if if we're still testing and we're not learning anything new and it seems to be doing what we wanted to do we might very well be on the plateau it's very much like you mentioned you're climbing mount everest right you're climbing the mountain going up higher and higher and higher and but it's but you can't see what the summit is it's it's all murky and there's clouds everywhere
54:00 - 54:30 but but but but the slope is sort of leveling off you're getting up this it's getting it was still very steep but eventually gets flatter and flatter and flatter and you go like which you really can't see if there's another peak ahead of you but you just say you know what i think i might be there it's we're at the flat spot we maybe we're at the sweet spot maybe we maybe we were there but you never know for sure you know it's great that we can have these conversations about all this knowledge that you're passing on and all the information that you're
54:30 - 55:00 learning from your own experience at jpl and teo on youtube wants to know how does jpl and nasa work to pass on generational knowledge and make sure new employees don't make the same mistakes as their predecessors oh what a great question i we have a chief knowledge officer who works works with me and and she is uh she's chartered with figuring out how we do that i tell you it's really hard because it's a lot of it is story storytelling i mean a lot and a lot of things we do for example we
55:00 - 55:30 we do because we're engineers right okay well we learned this lesson so um we write down new rules right new rules a whole little rule book that goes longer it's longer and longer longer and longer all the of all the other things will you know remember you can't do this you got to do this you can't do this you have to do this and but there was trouble with that style and we d and that's something we do a lot is that it misses the story the narrative that that and and in some sense the way that we really learn is by
55:30 - 56:00 living vicariously through the experiences of others previous generations standing on shoulders of giants of people who tried and succeeded and those who tried and failed and that's and it's really hard to do because guess what we also have real jobs to do and we don't have a lot of time and it's really now in this time in the time of zoom and and webex and other and uh teams it's very difficult to to to have those those uh those uh casual uh water cooler conversations that allow people to tell the stories so
56:00 - 56:30 this is a really difficult time and so it's really hard i'm honest with you i'm not sure we know how to answer how to answer that question we're still figuring it out well i love that your attitude is that we're still figuring it out we still get to work together on these things and make improvements and learn together um ryukachu on youtube asks us what's a project that's on the horizon that you're incredibly excited about either something right now or something that's not built yet that's coming in the future
56:30 - 57:00 oh we have a bunch of them it's really exciting the great thing about being the lab chief engineer i can see all the things that are going on one there's there's there's a there's a there's one mission we're building which is going to go visit a uh a an asteroid on the asteroid belt called psyche and this is a this is a rock in outer space that we think was once a planet testimony a small planet and something you know if you know most planets have an iron core right with something we think we can tell from our telescopes on earth
57:00 - 57:30 we think that that's that something wiped away all the rock and left this big iron ball this massive iron ball in the middle of space and we think that's what it is we're going to send a spaceship out there to go visit and confirm that's exactly what that is that if that's the case that's the largest chunk of available iron you would find anywhere in our in our solar system it's amazing we have another mission that's going to go to in orbit around around jupiter jupiter a very scary
57:30 - 58:00 place to fly around it turns out because it's got radiation from from this jupiter has this amazing magnetic field which is beautiful and that and powerful but this also got moons that squirt up atoms from volcanoes io in particular and that those those those particles get accelerated because they're charged up and they got start racing around around from pole to pole on in around jupiter making this a very dangerous place to fly it's very dangerous for people
58:00 - 58:30 it's even more dangerous for people but you can if you're lucky you can make electronics and put them inside vaults of lead and send them to jupiter but we're going to do is go to go to orbit and zone jupiter but not to see jupiter we're we're we want to go visit and fly by europa europa is this moon it's a very large moon it's smaller than our moon but it's a it's it's unlike any other place with a possible exception enceladus it it's it's it's a big iceberg a giant ball of ice
58:30 - 59:00 that but underneath kilometers many kilometers of ice are these massive oceans and below the oceans is a rocky center so it's like it's almost like like antarctica except it's the whole moon in fact there's more liquid water on that little moon than all of earth in fact maybe three times or more water on that little moon than earth in fact that water could be a very habitable place could very well be a habitable place for life as we might
59:00 - 59:30 know it on this planet where the inside's nice and warm heated from the tidal forces of jupiter and the outside is very cold but protects the life the ice protects the life inside from that horrible radiation environment so that's a very exciting mission of course we get another one get a mission on its way to mars right this second um mars 2020 perseverance rover i mentioned this before is on its way june uh uh february 18th i believe right um is landing on mars in the in the around around lunchtime and uh uh
59:30 - 60:00 and and i'm gonna be watching uh and i hope all of you will too it's a rover look very much like curiosity but unlike curiosity this vehicle is going to collect samples pristine samples and put them very carefully in these very specially designed tubes to hold them seal them tight and and and with with very with no trace of human contamination or biological or chemical contamination because of how we're doing it
60:00 - 60:30 very surgically on the surface of mars once those tubes are collected another emissions which is just starting now uh called mars sample return is going to land another vehicle it's going to it's going to go collect go send a a rover built by europe to go collect those sample tubes bring them back to a rocket made by nasa's marshal space flight center and launch it into space and will be then picked up by another system built by nasa's goddard and and is attached to a big european space biggest spacecraft ever sent to
60:30 - 61:00 mars uh that will then fly back to earth and drop off a space capsule that nasa langley and nasa ames research center have put together and drop these samples back to uh back to earth this is the later part of this decade um in the early 20th around 2030 but that's our hope and uh this is what's going on so incredible excitement lots of amazing things it's just that's just the tip of an iceberg too well looks like we've got time for one last
61:00 - 61:30 question nikki one last question for rob so last question of the night owen on facebook asks loved your book rob are you planning a sequel about perseverance oh oh thank you very much i'm glad you liked my book but i'm not allowed to advertise it but i tell you it was it was a uh uh it was it's a joy to capture these stories and i i'm i don't know if i'm to write i'm not going to rhyme for perseverance i'm going to leave that to uh the t the perseverance team uh to to tell their stories and uh
61:30 - 62:00 uh but it's but you know capturing these stories is just so essential um for not not just for the public to see what really goes on behind the scenes but also to to share with our own staff and the next generation of future space explorers that many of you are i presume thank you for sharing your stories with us tonight rob sure that is all the time we have for questions i want to thank rob for joining us and discussing this often neglected topic
62:00 - 62:30 um as a reminder to our audience we do not have a lecture in december but we will see you again in january when we discuss spacecraft origami i'd like to give a huge thank you to everyone on our crew every single person who is involved in these talks for their ingenuity and their drive and keeping these monthly talks going this past year my final thank you does go out to you the audience from all over the world this is your lecture series we're happy
62:30 - 63:00 to bring it to you every month thank you for the time for joy thank you for taking the time to join us and if you missed one of our talks uh you can revisit our von carmen talks from the past five years they're all on our available on jpl's youtube page there's a whole playlist for them so you can go find them before we go i'd like to pass it over to rob one last time to give us a reminder of why we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves well brian this is great nikki brian this is fabulous thank you for inviting
63:00 - 63:30 me i i have to say i i learned one thing from uh uh my my uh mentor john cassani who told a story about one of jpl's or the early nasa pioneers named homer stewart um who said he said there you know remember there's 10 most important words that they retire they told each other one is i don't know uh i don't know i'm sorry we can fix it and so it it it's i i think
63:30 - 64:00 i think those kinds of those kinds of uh uh expressions are very important i think you need to know that we don't know and and by the way it's not just individuals that we should be unafraid to be to be honest about our own mistakes but we but our bosses have to also remember to let the people who work for them uh give we need to give them the space to succeed and all of us need to give us this place to succeed by learning testing trying things out and before make the mistakes before
64:00 - 64:30 it's live in front of millions of people on national television thank you again for joining us rob and thank you folks stay safe stay kind and we'll see you in january [Music]
64:30 - 65:00 you