A Bit of Optimism - Going To Mars with NASA director Laurie Leshin

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

As the private space industry races to colonize space for profit, where does NASA fit in to the equation?Laurie Leshin is just the person to answer that question. She's the Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the first female director in JPL's storied history. To her, NASA's future is defined by its mission — exploring the cosmos for the greater good of humankind.Laurie and I discuss the role of Space X and Blue Origin in the new space age and why NASA should set its sights on Mars, and flying to even deeper space beyond.This...is A Bit of Optimism.To find out more about Laurie and her work, check out:jpl.nasa.gov 

So I have an admission to make. I am a total space geek. When I was a kid, I went to space camp, and to this day, I still love everything NASA. But we now live in a time where the commercial space industry has completely taken off. And when most people hear the word rocket, they now think SpaceX or Blue Origin. So it begs the question, where does NASA fit into all of this? I sat down with Lori Leshin. She's the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and the first female director in JPL's history.

And when so many companies are trying to colonize space for profit, her job is to help advance NASA's mission. Not for profit, but to explore space for the greater good of all humankind. This is a bit of optimism. Laurie, thanks so much for joining. This is a personal thrill for me. Oh my goodness, me too. Because I've been a space nerd and a NASA nerd my whole life. I went to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama as a 13 year

old and wore my flight suit to school when I got back. Wow. How'd that go over? I mean, they all made fun of me, but I just think that they were jealous. Exactly. Were you a science or space nerd as a kid also? I was, I absolutely was. I grew up in the deserts of Arizona and my very first space memory was the first pictures from the surface of Mars from the Viking landers. And I remember as a 10 year old girl standing in my mother's kitchen in Phoenix, Arizona, and seeing those pictures in Time magazine, and just being totally transfixed and thinking, I want to reach out and touch those rocks. And, and that, in fact, has kind of animated my career. It wasn't that I knew right then I wanted to be a space person and that was it.

It was just a huge spark for me of the wonder of new frontiers, of new vistas and of rocks, which have continued to animate my career since then. And it looks like home. And it looks like home to me. It absolutely looked like home to me. And I do think that was a piece of it. Like, I was like, wow, I want to be there.

Like my home is on another planet. Yeah, that's right. So because, you know, at least for a lot of people, you know, me growing up in the space shuttle era, the older generations growing up in the Apollo era, going to space, being an astronaut was the thing. So your space nerdiness, it wasn't to be an astronaut. It really wasn't. I mean, I was really fascinated by, so Viking was the mission in the mid seventies. Voyager was another that flew by Jupiter, flew by Saturn, just absolutely captivating images. For me, it was about sort of other worlds and that. And then, you know, Sally Ride was super inspiring to me in high school. I was in high school when she first went up.

First female in space. Yes, first American woman in space. First American woman. First American woman in space. Valeni Tina Tereshkova was actually the first. Well done, sir. Well done. Thank you.

Yes. And I'm fortunate to say Sally became a good friend later in both of our lives. She was an amazing, amazing mentor. Oh, that's amazing. She was incredible. I miss her a lot. Okay, so now let's jump forward many, many years. Yeah. And we're at JPL now, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Yes. Which is, it's not really owned by NASA. It's in a partnership with NASA. Is that right? And that's a longstanding relationship. Actually, JPL predates NASA. Partnership with NASA, is that right? And that's a longstanding relationship. Actually, JPL predates NASA. We started in the 30s doing rocket propulsion and actually built and launched America's very first satellite, America's response to Sputnik.

JPL is unique within NASA in that we are in many ways like a NASA center, but we are what's called a federally funded research and development center. We are not directly government employees. So it's a little bit of a both and kind of relationship with NASA. Do people who work there think of themselves as NASA folks? We do. We think of ourselves as part of the NASA family. And we're proud that we're a little bit different, that we can maybe do some things a little bit differently. We can lean forward a little bit more on things like innovation and technology and the way we're able to partner with the world. And so that's a capability that NASA has taken advantage of over

the years. So let's get into the thick of it now. Okay. The question is, is NASA itself, is the NASA mission as popular as it used to be? Because I mean, are kids dreaming, you know, kids are dreaming of being influencers or kids dreaming of being astronauts and scientists and, you know, rocket scientists again? You know, I think they are. I mean, I think, and it's not just because of NASA, but it's also because of the other companies that NASA is partnering with, increasingly places like SpaceX and Blue Origin, so much private investment happening in space. And we are on the verge of space being opened up in a whole new way to generations of people that otherwise would have had to go through the NASA process

and compete against tens of thousands of people for a slot to fly with NASA. Now the ability is there to fly as a private citizen. Or be a pilot or be an engineer. That's right. Or design and build. And so the industry itself is growing immensely. And it's like our economy is growing beyond our planet to sort of envelop near-Earth space,

cislunar space, or the space between us and the moon. And then ultimately, for people like me who really care about the science, what that means is we get to keep our eye on an even farther out horizon, exploring where companies aren't really going to go. That's the $10,000 question, which is, does NASA have clarity of what its mission is? Right. My understanding was that because NASA is a government agency, it doesn't have a commercial interest, which means it can invest in things that don't necessarily have an immediate commercial

return on that investment. You can do it for pure science and pure exploration. That's right. Which would just be too expensive for... Correct. And not profitable. And not profitable. And not profitable. Any company wouldn't do it.

And NASA did. NASA pioneered getting things to the moon. NASA pioneered, you know, the space shuttle became a delivery truck, you know? It was trying to be, yeah. And that seems beneath NASA, dare I say it. Now that NASA opened up that marketplace and private sector said, well, hold on. We can actually make a business out of this and we can sell that service to NASA, which ultimately is actually cheaper for NASA. That's right.

We're doing that now. So the question is, is NASA having a bit of an identity crisis that it's actually still doing things that are the same as or competing with private sector? Like, why are we going to the moon? We've been there. We've done that in the 60s. Right. We don't need to do that anymore. I think you're really pulling on the right thread,

which is NASA has this really interesting role of both enabling a sustainable economic model behind it and then reaching for the next thing where that model doesn't yet exist or reaching for the scientific thing, which no one else is going to do. And then moving away. And then moving on, right? Although in some cases, in the outer solar system,

that's not going to be economically feasible for many generations. And so there's still much more science to do or maybe ever. And so finding that right balance, it's hard. So I think what you're pulling on is that it's hard. I think we've done it with low Earth orbit. We have largely transitioned the transport of astronauts and materials to low Earth orbit to the private sector. NASA has supported that by enabling it and funding it, but not doing it. At the moon, there's a little bit of the government piece. And we're also working with the private sector to quite quickly fill in behind that.

government piece. And we're also working with the private sector to quite quickly fill in behind that. So cislunar space and the lunar surface is that next frontier where NASA is working to do that handoff. And I think we'll see that over our lifetimes. Because you still hear debates in Congress, what their funding priorities are. Right. And there's the debate of, I mean, far space exploration will always be there i'm not that's but literally the debate is do we put all our money and go to mars do we put all our money and you know yeah you know colonizing the moon yeah you know those those policy debates are definitely still there i guess the thing where i'm struggling with this is why is that a debate at all i mean elon is doing a great job of Marsy stuff. I mean,

he's made it clear. He's never been anywhere near Mars, but yet. But he talks about it obsessively. But he talks about it obsessively. And he's got a pretty successful rocket program. He's launching way more rockets than NASA ever did. Absolutely. He's doing amazing stuff, supporting launch for NASA. And ultimately, right now, his focus is on getting people to the surface of the moon, which he's actually been supported by NASA to do. I have no doubt that longer term, he will be a big part of NASA going to Mars. There's still scientific exploration of the solar system, though, that NASA needs to focus on that. Elon won't, that other companies won't.

That's the thing that we have to work hard to make sure doesn't get lost in these debates about moon versus Mars and things is that there's still incredible discoveries to be made and nobody else is going to do that. Or at least nobody else in the U.S. is going to do it. Other countries might come in and do it if we don't. And so for us, the opportunity is really about making sure we stay on the scientific and technology frontier in those places that no one else is going to go. Congress will fund, let's be honest, Congress will fund what's popular. They will fund things that benefit their constituents. And if the American public demanded that, loved NASA, then there would be, then questions

of funding wouldn't be an issue. But NASA has lost a lot of funding, which has affected you dramatically. I mean, for the first time in a long time, JPL had layoffs. We did. Which is devastating. Devastating. You know, these are people who are all able to get jobs in private sector from all the space agencies, but didn't because they had a loyalty to NASA

and probably got paid less than they could have in the private sector, but they had a loyalty to NASA. And now they'll go get jobs somewhere else. I'm not too worried about it. But the odds of them coming back are probably slim. I think that people, and this is where your work is so incredible, like the mission of an organization is such a huge draw, right? And a place like JPL where basically we get paid to build things

that nobody else knows how to build because they're incredibly you know complex robots that to go explore other worlds and that we get to make discoveries that are at the forefront of scientific exploration like that is hugely compelling to to a group of folks there are other people who are really compelled by going to be in an entrepreneurial startup yeah cool you know go a million miles an hour kind of thing which is great but yeah we're really fortunate to have that super compelling mission and it's it's really disheartening that cool, you know, go a million miles an hour kind of thing, which is great. But yeah, we're really fortunate to have that super compelling mission. And it's really disheartening that the funding has not always been there to support it. But it's a broader issue than just NASA support. In this case, we've been caught up in what is a federal funding issue. It's not about JPL. It's not about

NASA. It's about the full federal budget environment. It's so, let's say, uncertain and challenging right now. But the point is that when that happens, it has real human impact here locally. I mean, this to me is like, it's one of multiple things, right? Which is, I think NASA, and this is speaking as a supporter and a lover of the organization, so it's not by any means as a detractor. But NASA seems to have lost its narrative, you know is if I asked the average person why do we have NASA they can probably give me explore space and I said but why does it matter to you I don't think my people would be able to explain or say back to me and

sure it was easier during the Cold War I get it yeah it was easier than the cold because it was actually a space race yes you know and it was not only of military value, but of national pride. Yeah. I think this generation doesn't see NASA as a tool of American pride anymore. In the same way. In the same way. I think that's right. And I think it's, you know, as you know, it's very hard to get any message through these days. It's harder to get people to focus on one thing. There's so many different things going on. It's so much media coming at you. And it's, it's a challenging thing to do. But look, I, I think it's, it's hard to disagree. I do think that there's still extraordinary value. We've had more than three dozen countries sign on to go to

the moon with us through the Artemis Accords. And, and it is still a huge tool of US soft power in the world. It, you know, we are right now on the space station with the Russians. It's one of the only places in the world that we are still really collaborating with Russia. It is super important to keep those lines of communication open, right? It's super important. We at JPL right now are building an earth science mission

to look at earth's surface and how it's changing with India. It's the single largest technological collaboration between our two nations. And it's gonna launch from India in a few months time. It's amazing. We've had 40 engineers over there, back and forth, you know, working really closely with their counterparts in India, huge partnership for our nation and NASA's at the heart of it. So I think there are many examples. I think those things are pretty easily lost right now in our conversation. There's no broader narrative that encapsulates all of that.

Right. You know, I mean, again, I go back to sort of like Star Trek, which is one of the things that exemplifies American influence and innovation is that though now other nations are coming with us to the moon and other nations are coming with us and other nations are launching satellites, et cetera, et cetera. It's only American satellites that have gone to the edges of the universe. The edges of the solar system, beyond our solar system now. Beyond our solar system. Built by JPL. And built by JPL. Sorry, just got to throw that in there.

No, no, no, absolutely. And that to me, that to me is, and it goes back to NASA's original charter, right? Which is, it is a civilian organization. Yes, pushing boundaries. That is pushing boundaries, specifically designed that whatever we learn will benefit of all humankind. I mean, that is literally in the charter. It can't get any better than that. And why aren't we talking about that?

This is for the benefit of humanity. Yeah. You know? Look, I think it's a really noisy marketplace right now, right? It's a really noisy marketplace right now right it's a really noisy marketplace so i i love this concept of a worthy rival and a worthy right i don't you know the idea of competition there's no there's no winners here right it's all about advancing a greater good but worthy rivals i find fascinating which is our other organizations who their

strengths reveal to your weaknesses yeah so somebody who does something so well that you're like, ugh, we could do better. Right. Who are JPL's worthy rivals? Who do you look at and be like, oh, they're so good? And it can be in any capacity. It doesn't have to be scientific. Yeah.

Well, I think the one right now that is kind of animating a lot of activity at NASA is the commercial space sector. It's the SpaceX's of the world, right? And I think they're not really our rivals. They're our collaborators and our partners. And we need to be learning as much as we can from how they operate. So what does SpaceX do so well that, so you could just collaborate with them and you don't need to worry about it, but what do they do better than you or that their strength reveals

to you a weakness that you really, you guys can, can learn from them? I mean, look, I just, I think the, the, the intensity of the focus is really strong. I think the mission is frankly, and this is something I don't love about lumping the two together. The mission is totally different right now. They are building amazing launch vehicles and they're doing it better than anyone in human history ever has. We don't build launch vehicles. So like in that sense, it's in fact, we leverage their launch vehicles, we launch on their launch vehicles, we love working with them. But it's there's an intensity for how fast they've grown and how they've really been able to keep their focus during that. And and how they've just been unwilling to accept the way things have always

been done. Right. So to me, like, that's the nugget. It's the question everything piece. And as a mature organization, we're literally 86 years old at JPL. And you're still a government organization with all the baggage. That's right. We have a lot of the bureaucracy there. And so the whole, like, why have we always done it this way and why can't we do it better?

And to show that you can take risks smartly and learn from them. Again, there are things about working in the government that the amount of oversight that we have, it's just it's very different environment. But even within that, where can we carve out those places? And in fact, we have. I mean, things like the Ingenuity helicopter, the great little helicopter on Mars, was sort of done in spite of the system, right? And so when we find those little places where we can really push on things,

figuring out how do we leverage and scale that is something that I'm excited to be working on at JPL. How are ideas evaluated? And what I mean by this is like, you know, I just know from business, when we're innovating, you know, we put a bunch of harebrained ideas on the table. And there's, you know, whether it's a good system or a bad system, ideas get evaluated and something gets invested in. I mean, how do you choose which harebrained idea to spend billions of dollars on? So I don't get to spend billions of dollars usually, but so I'll give you two answers.

You have to spend billions of dollars usually. You definitely spend millions. To answer, yes. So for the really big things like the Europa Clipper spacecraft that's being tested at JPL right now, which will go out to the Jupiter system and look for whether this ocean on one of Jupiter's moons is habitable, that's a multibillion-dollar mission. Those decisions are made by a broad scientific community that come together once a decade through the national academies here in the U.S. and come up with a list of ranked priorities of science missions to go do.

And so that's the big ones. So the little ones, what you're asking about is how do we do internal investments. Like a helicopter versus some sort of jet. So we do have the ability to make internal investments at JPL and to bring technologies forward. And we do it as a fly off at multiple levels, right? You start with lots of seedlings, lots of little things. From those, we pick a few bigger things to try and pursue and we see how far they can get. And then if there's something that really looks favorable, we work with NASA to try to get a place for it to be flown. So we

build rovers and we now build helicopters and there's rovers and roamers of all sizes and shapes that we have tested over time we have a we have test facilities one that looks like mars one that has ice where we can try out these different ways and we we do a fly off we basically test out and decide which one looks most promising and then we take it a bit further and see how it goes and our job really part of our job is to kind of bring things to a point where we can really confidently say, say to the science community, in one of these once a decade, they're called decadal surveys, say, hey, we have this technology, you have the science goals, here's how we think they come together in a mission concept, what do you think? And so it's, it takes many years, I call these big missions the modern cathedrals. They are generational

quests that we are going on. It takes sometimes 10, 20 years to get to the point of someone saying, great, let's fly that. And then it takes another five to 10 years to build it. And when you're going to Jupiter, it takes six or seven years to get there. So these are really long, long arc of innovation. So, you know, I think a lot of pressure is put on government agencies, NASA, DOD, of what you can learn from private sector, you know, because we're looking at private sector going faster than you, you know, military innovation cycles of 30 years. That's ridiculous. Like that needs to change. That's not valuable anymore. You know, so you're constantly harangued that you should learn from private sector. Can you tell me a specific project that you have worked on that really private sector could learn from you?

Yeah. Is there a system, a JPL way in how you find ideas, iterate ideas, invest in ideas that have lessons for young entrepreneurs or big companies, because big companies struggle to innovate. They buy little companies. That's how they innovate. Yeah. And look, we're spitting out a lot of technologies that are launching little companies that then get bought up by the big companies. That's sort of the flywheel right now. I mean, so what can big companies, what can big tech learn from JPL about how innovation works? It's a good question. I'm not sure I've ever actually thought about it specifically.

I really should. So, look, I think we build great teams is one. We try and empower them as much as possible. And try and sort of, I started something when I got to JPL called the Snowplow Team, which is a bunch of us, you know, management types who run in front of the teams that are trying to innovate and clear crap out of their way. Right? Like, I call it the snowplow team. Yes. Your job is to get rid of the bureaucracy out of the way to help the teams be able to do their work effectively. And I think it's sort of like you have to be constantly vigilant that you yourselves are not smothering your best ideas and your best people. It's so easy to say no, right? Yeah. So easy to find all the holes. Well, that's just the way it is. Or it's too expensive. Oh, it's just, you know, well,

I know you need five signatures to get this thing, but, or, you know, I know this, this, this way we do it is not helpful to you. And so it's just about like coming in and saying no, either no to this just specifically, or, hey, let's reorganize this and actually make it work. Well, there are a lot of things like that, where we're just getting in our own way. I mean, it's hard enough. And you talk about this a lot in your books, you know, you're fighting the outside world, like, let's not fight the inside world. Let's just do all we can to clear the decks to support. All right. So snowplow team, which I love, which is basically, it's giving management, giving leadership a very specific role,

which is your job is to clear the crap out of the way. So your teams can, can actually experiment and try things. Okay. Snowplow team. Love, love, love. You talked about great teams. Is there a way in which you create great teams or collaboration in a way that is different than private sector? Like, what's the unique way in which your JPL is doing it that we can learn from you? So look, I think we tend to, you know, we fight against being super hierarchical. We tend to fight for anybody on this team can have a great idea and we need to listen to them. We put tons of value in people contributing to great thinking in teams.

Interestingly, you know, in the long time past, and maybe not that long time, the idea of people who were sort of, you're all dumb, my idea is the best, you know, like the sort of obnoxious way of doing that, to me, and the old white guy, I said it, they were mostly for reasons, but, but just, yeah, the bull in the China shop kind of approach to innovation. And it's really interesting because there are people who think like, that's the way you have to do it. You have to tell people they're stupid to get the right ideas through. And we're trying to turn that on its head. And it's sort of the genius model, right? Yes, the genius model. That's it. Thank you. Yes. To really try and overturn that and be like, no, everybody we hire here is actually super capable. And then we're really

fortunate. We attract great people and we try and put them in teams and empower those teams. Can you tell me something specific that JPL has done where the idea came from someone more junior that nobody expected? Oh, almost everything we do is like that. So give me one. I mean, you know, the sampling system on Mars that, well, actually, I should go back to the helicopter itself, Ingenuity, was built by a group of kids, what you and I would look at and call kids, youngsters, who were, we sort of took off the constraints of, I mean, when you get the constraints only from physics, which is you are trying to fly in an atmosphere that is 1,100th the density of Earth's atmosphere at 100,000 feet, and helicopters on Earth only fly to like 20,000 feet. That means you have to weigh nothing.

So the Ingenuity weighed four pounds. It's the lightest little thing you've ever seen. And so you can't fly a flight computer that already has been space qualified. You have to fly something from a cell phone. Well, that's not allowed. Really? Why not? Well, let's try it. And so like, how do you figure out how you create spaces to give teams permission to fail? Give them permission to do something? So you do something. So you took a cell phone. Yeah. And tried it out in space conditions. Yeah.

And it totally worked. As opposed to saying, oh, it's not space qualified. You can't fly. You can't do it. So saying no before you've tested it. Saying no before. So again, trying to create places where we can really just try things. So it's questioning the no. Like that won't work.

Well, do we think we do? We know we know that. Yeah. Right. Or is it. And again, you don't you don't question it on a multi billion dollar spacecraft, you question it on something that costs less. And you and you do those things. And again, that team, it was, you know, 50 100 people, it wasn't, it wasn't 1000 people working on the helicopter, right? And most of them were fresh outs or recent hires,

like a lot of them were quite junior. That's super inspiring, right? To be fresh out of grad school or fresh out of, you know, and give the opportunity to invent. Invent a Mars helicopter. A Mars helicopter, as opposed to serve the genius and one day I'll get to invent something. Exactly. And look, what we have at JPL is a mix of those kind of smaller, faster projects with some of the larger, sort of a bit more bureaucratic things that are probably too big to fail kind of things, right? And so to me, the interesting thing is how you make a culture that can handle both and can succeed with both. And I think it's challenging. That's such an interesting thought, right?

Which is these things that are too big to fail. But the problem is, the problem with science is... There's just one? No. Yeah, right. But there are many good things. The problem with science and the problem with innovation is that failure is a part of it.

It's required. And there's no such thing as no risk. Absolutely. You can only mitigate it at best, but at the end of the day... Right. And I've seen this, again, I've seen this in DOD, and I assume it's the same at NASA, which is they become so risk-averse, where they're literally not letting test pilots who understand the risks and have actually signed up for the risks fly things because

they're afraid it might not work in flight. And so even the test pilots are like, let me fly the thing and find out. I will tell you. And so in its old age, has NASA become more too risk averse? Yeah. I think we have. I mean, again, and probably get fired for saying it. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the big challenges is getting that balance right within NASA as a whole. We try and really do it at JPL, but again, sometimes it's we're sort of almost fighting against the system that we work within, right? You know, we preceded astronauts to the moon. At JPL, we flew the robotic missions that were the precursors to the moon. The first six of them either missed the moon

entirely. I mean, blew up on the launch pad, missed the moon entirely. It's a pretty big target. I mean, like, so literally we have this tradition and I think if you visited JPL, you might've seen it with the peanuts in the mission control because on the seventh try it worked. And the only thing they could think of as well, the guy was eating peanuts at the mission control station. So that's our good luck charm still to this day, 60 years later. And back then it was, yeah, we, oops, we missed the moon. Sorry. What happened? But even your joke, like I'm going to get fired for saying this, means it is a sensitive topic.

It is. And so what happened culturally at NASA where a very high risk tolerance organization became a lower, dare I say, low risk tolerance organization. So there was a time in the 90s, even, where we were working on trying to sort of embrace a more of a model of more like we did in the early NASA, fly a bunch, they're not all going to work. And guess what, a couple of them failed, and everybody lost their minds. And that's when it really changed, is that, well, these are taxpayer dollars. You can't fail. And so it was less about NASA itself and more about the system that NASA operates within. Okay. So this, all right. And we also lost lives, by the

way, on Challenger and Columbia. And that also is huge, right? So it's a different thing when there are people on board. I get the risk aversion. But Gus Grissom and that crew lost their lives too. Absolutely. And it incentivized people to try harder. That's right. I mean, everybody who straps onto a flying bomb, and that's what the space shuttle was,

and that's what the Apollo rocket was. It's a flying explosion. It's a flying explosion with the ingredients of a hydrogen bomb as your fuel cell. There are risks. Now, what we want to avoid is negligence, obviously. And gross negligence is unacceptable. Totally. But at the end of the day, these are highly dangerous missions. Absolutely. And all the astronauts know that. Sign up for that. Yeah. That's part of the game. And so what is it about, and their families didn't demand that we stop the missions, you know, and their colleagues didn't demand that they stop the missions. Right. So I'm so curious about what it's, what's happened to America

that we, that our, because our politicians will reflect us, hopefully. Well, not always these days. Yeah. I don't think they do, but. No, but I think you're, I think that's a fair point. Like, Well, not always. These days, I don't think they do. No, but I think that's a fair point. Like, where did we lose our moxie? Right. You know?

Yeah. I think it's a great question. And I think there are things that we can do in a sort of smaller, cheaper model. And I think NASA is working towards that. And again, that also helps bring in the private sector. If you look at intuitive machines, which currently, you know, recently almost landed successfully on the moon, it landed successfully, it landed, it didn't land upright, and it's not working exactly the way they'd hoped. But that's our first try. Yeah. But I mean, again, I think that's a great example of exactly that, right? And that is NASA supported, they would not be doing

that mission without NASA. But when you're trying to do, and so this is, it's a slight difference, right? That I try and sort of a thread I try and pull on is at JPL, we are very interested in Mars and beyond, right? Those deep space exploration things where there is not this ability to go, you know, every few months, you can just turn around and do it again. Like, it takes six years to get to Jupiter, right? It takes two years. You have to wait six years to find out if you failed. Right, right. So it's not amenable to the Elon Musk,

launch it, blow it up. If it blows up, you'll launch it again in a few months. But NASA is getting better at making smaller, cheaper things. You bet, you bet. Which allows us like, all right. Which allows that. But again, it's still for deep space exploration.

Isaac Newton is still in the driver's seat and you still have to sort of get there. And so it's not as amenable to try and fail and try and fail. And so I think to me, it's okay. We can go back to the moon and we need to prove to ourselves that we can do it and we should do it in a more sustainable way. And then we should pretty quickly move on to Mars, I think. And that's just Lori's opinion. And at the same time, we need to not let go of the scientific exploration of deep space. We need to not let go of those things that create wonder in kids everywhere by looking at rocks on the surface of Mars or looking at the outer planets.

Can I be contrarian just for fun? What have you been so far? Fair. Okay. Can I be contrarian for more fun? The obsession with putting a person on Mars, I don't understand it. I think people think it's going to be an easier place to live than the moon in many ways. Longer term, it's got water, it's got an atmosphere, it's got days and nights that are Earth-like, it's got temperatures that are more manageable. There's many things about it that are actually somewhat easier. It's further away, which makes it harder. But long-term, the idea is not just about flags and footprints, right? It's about setting up other places for human civilization to be in the long haul. And by the way, Mars, I mean, we've literally,

we've been there, we've landed, we, JPL have landed there successfully seven times in the last 25 years. Isn't that amazing that we've been to Mars seven times? We've been there we've landed we dpl have landed there successfully seven times in the last 25 years isn't that amazing that we've been to mars seven times we've been to mars more than that but in the last 25 years so the two vikings were before that but but in the last 25 years since mars pathfinder the cute little rover that yeah that matt damon went and found in the martian um you know since then in 1997 we've landed successfully seven times yeah so we have sorted out how to do it what we've never ever done is come back we've landed successfully seven times. So we have sorted out how to do it. What we've never, ever done is come back. We've never even robotically brought anything back.

Never done it. And that's our next big mission at JPL is to do that round trip for the very first time. To me, if you can't bring back something the size of a volleyball containing some very valuable rocks, by the way, that will answer questions about life on Mars, how are we going to send people there and back?

We've got to, it's time to start taking those next steps. So even as we are sending humans back to the moon we need to be taking the next steps and thinking forward about about humans to mars what is something specific that you've done in your career that if every project went like this one whether it was successful or not could have been an abject failure yeah but if what's something specific you've done in your career and it doesn't have to be in your current role, that if everything you did was like this one thing, you'd be the happiest person alive, like something that really stands out. Gosh, there's a lot of things. But but, you know, the first time I built and worked with a really large, diverse team, I was actually working on a NASA mission idea. In the end, we were not successful. It did not get funded.

But we kind of took it all the way to the end. And what we were told is actually we came in the closest possible second. So we didn't win. What was the idea? It was actually the first round-trip mission to Mars, believe it or not. The first robotic mission. It was going to go and fly through the atmosphere and sweep up dust and gas and come back. Not land.

Not go into orbit. Just fly by and come back. It was called SCIM. SCIM through the Martian atmosphere. This was about a little more than 20 years ago now. I was a young professor and the team that we built and the way that we were just kind of getting to see how a big team of really capable people where everybody does the thing they're good at can be, it was like magic. And we had a big thing, I kind of at the end of the competition, you do what's called a site visit where the review team comes and they you're with them for eight

hours. And they're like, ask throwing questions at you and you people scurrying off to back rooms and answering the questions and you're trying to make your case. And, and it was just such a special experience. And even though we didn't win, and a lot of people on the team kind of took the not winning really hard, because we know we kind of crushed it. But it's like, you know what, we kind of left it all on the field. Like we did our very best, we have a ton of pride in what we did. And I can live with that. And so to me, again, there's something about that power of great teams that has really animated my whole career from that point forward. Like it was kind of the one of the things that really sort of led me to start stepping out of the lab and into leadership was seeing what that was like. But you've worked on great teams that have done great things before.

What was it about this one that really makes it stand out so much? It was the most diverse team in terms of types of background. Engineers and scientists really working together from lots of different types of organizations and different types of background engineers and scientists really working together from lots of different types of organizations and different types of backgrounds. It was the most diverse team I had worked on in that sense. As opposed to like a small group of the same kind of scientists who were working on, you know, similar scientists. Yeah. Yeah. Which I also loved by the way, but, but this was like, cause I would wake up in the morning, you know, this was like a couple of year long process of getting to this point of not winning. Um, woo. Yeah. And I would wake up in the morning, you know, this was like a couple of year long process of getting to this point of not winning.

Woo. Yeah. And I would like wake up every morning. I'd be like, I'd call up some of the engineers at JPL. I'd say, I thought of this thing. And this is a whole reason like the mission isn't going to work. And they would say, oh, that's an engineering problem. Let us go work that for a couple of days. We'll get back to you.

And then they would call me back and say, okay, we figured out this little tweak we can make or this adjustment to the design we can do. And like I did this every day, like every week for, for months. So a rock scientist could call an engineer and say, I've got a problem. They didn't say, well, you don't know what you're doing. They said, Ooh, let us go look at that. Let's look at that. Oh, we hadn't thought of that. Real collaboration. Real collaboration. And just like knocking down one problem after another until it's done. Yeah.

And until it's as good as it can be, it's never done. But it was inspiring just to know like, hey, I don't have to figure it all out myself. There's all these other people that can help and they want to help. They're excited about it. They're inspired by the mission. They're inspired by the idea.

It was great fun. You talked about the magic and the beauty of all these different people coming together. It's like the flow, right? Right. The flow, right? Right. You feel the flow. And I think this is the thing that seems to inspire you, which is the pursuit of magic and beauty. Definitely.

And I think what you've learned as a leader is that you have to create these environments. And I love, I'm going to go back to the snowplow, which is magic can't happen if you're bogged down in packing the car. Insightful. That you're bogged down in packing the car. Insightful, yeah. You know, that you're bogged down in like, do we have enough gas? It's like somebody else figured that out. Let's just get to the magical place where magic can happen.

Right. And I think that you sort of made a career out of bringing people together that allow magic to happen, creating environments in which you can cross-pollinate so magic can happen, and clearing away mess and debris so that the gold nuggets, the magic is there, the glowing, shiny things are there.

That's very insightful, actually. Thank you. That's amazing. That's one of the things I think JPL embodies under your leadership, which is that there is magic in this place. Yeah. And I want to see the magic return to NASA like in the days of old. Appreciate the magic. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's competition, right? Like competing egos and competing things. But if you can put all the egos aside, the magic will happen. If you get rid of all the genius top-down, magic will happen. If you are open-minded,

if you clear the bureaucracy, all of this... By the way there's no magic to this formula it's pretty obvious get rid of mess and noise and the music lies create space create space for magic create space for magic yeah yeah yeah just like yeah laurie i love what you're doing at jpl I can't wait to come back again and visit because it is a magical place. And I'm so glad you came and visited to share some of that magic. Thank you.

I'm thrilled. That was a great conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha,

and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.