- I want to welcome you to the showcase
of Innovation Challenges.
I'm the NASA Chief Technologist.
My name is David Miller.
I want to start off today because I want to thank
my Deputy Chief Technologist Jim Adams.
He couldn't be with us here today.
But Jim's been leading our open innovation effort
here at NASA headquarters.
He's been instrumental in creating this showcase
and has been foundational in guiding our team
as we chart new waters at the agency
to break down barriers to innovation.
So we are here today because of his hard work
and his leadership.
As you know, over the past seven years,
NASA has changed the course of exploration,
recognizing that without new,
innovative partnerships with industry,
we're not going to be able to achieve a journey to Mars
and deep space exploration.
NASA is no longer using last decade's model
of stovepipe NASA-only missions.
We realized that we must innovate to explore,
and that means NASA and industry,
not NASA or industry.
So through our innovative partnerships
with companies like yours, we're going to create
the new knowledge and capabilities needed
to enable our future missions while American industry
benefits from new products and services
that support our nation's new technology economy.
So NASA's mission is to drive advances
in science, technology, aeronautics,
and space exploration
so that we can advance knowledge,
education, innovation, economic vitality,
and better stewardship of the Earth.
NASA does this through four mission directorates:
human exploration, science-- which has four divisions
of Earth, heliophysics, planets,
planetary, and astrophysics--
through the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate
and through Space Technology Mission Directorate.
I want to tell you a little bit about
the office of the Chief Technologist...
primarily serves as an advisor to the administration.
But there are six other functions that we perform.
We provide agency-level policy direction
and strategy for technology portfolio.
We provide leadership for policy and strategy
for innovation and prizes and challenges.
Through events such as this showcase,
we engage with government agencies,
industry, and academia.
We also track and analyze
technology investment across the agency.
One of the tools that we use for this is TechPort.
It's an online searchable database
that's open to the public.
I encourage you to go take a look.
The second round of technology roadmaps
was completed in 2015
and now encompasses the entire agency
through 15 technology areas.
That's also available online,
so you can download that if you go to nasaoct
and then look for the 2015 roadmaps--
you'll find that.
So OCT also helps to manage NASA's technology portfolio
by using the roadmaps that tell us what we could do
using the STIP which is
the Strategic Technology Investment Plan
that tells us what we should do,
the Budget Process, naturally, yearly,
that tells us what we will do,
and then TechPort, which helps us to see what we are doing.
So while Mars is our horizon destination,
there are a number of potential intermediate destinations.
We need new technology
to help us make these destinations achievable,
technologies such as robotics and mobility,
deep space habitation,
advanced space suits,
advanced space communications,
advanced propulsion,
resource utilization,
and human-robot systems.
Where it makes sense, we should take the opportunity
to develop technology that enables multiple destinations.
If we develop technology
that's only tuned to one destination,
then we make the architecture brittle.
This is an easy thing to say but often a hard thing to do.
But we need to look around at the possible destinations
that we have in exploration
as well as science and aeronautics
and we need to think about,
"Where can investments have multiple customers?"
So I want to suggest three example challenges
that require innovative technology
to make new missions possible.
I'll start with spacecraft autonomy.
We need autonomy-- NASA sees that we need autonomy
when three conditions exist:
changes in the environment
and the impact that that environment has
on our vehicles, when that cannot be predicted,
when the required response time is shorter
than the communication to Earth sidereal time,
and when no fixed plan of action can be prescribed.
Basically, that's when we don't know what we're gonna see.
When we see it, we need to be able to react
and capture it and understand it.
A second area is big data analytics.
We're swimming in data, yet we need better ways
to extract and use the information contained therein.
We need this for large model data correlation
in our science,
for interplanetary vehicle health maintenance,
for marrying operational data
with model-based system engineering,
and for making better use
of available communications channels.
NASA's mission also has no limit in range to target.
I guess there is a limit,
but it's far beyond other imaging needs.
This leads to the need for ever-larger apertures.
As you've probably seen and probably some of your companies
have been instrumental in developing,
the James Webb Space Telescope, the optical telescope assembly,
fully assembled, and along with the instrumentation,
the optical telescope assembly--
optical telescope assembly
has been assembled at NASA Goddard.
That 6 meters in diameter,
it exceeds the launch vehicle dynamic envelope,
the fairing dynamic envelope, which is an Ariane 5,
so it's gonna unfold on orbit
through a myriad of different deployments.
But as these apertures get larger and larger,
we're gonna be challenged to be able to unfold them.
We have to think about new ways
in order to deploy these systems.
In fact, the payloads we launch
may not be able to launch on a single vehicle.
So how do we innovate in the area
of autonomous in-space servicing, assembly,
and manufacturing?
So I'd like to... take a moment to remind us
that all the technology we develop serves customers.
And this--to that end, we need to think about
what our customer needs, tell us,
and work to address those.