NASA's Curious Universe - Curious Universe: Building Highways in the Sky

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

When you think of NASA, you probably think about outer space. But the first “A” in NASA - aeronautics - means we’re busy crafting a lot closer to home. Aerospace engineers Shivanjli Sharma, David Zahn, and Mike Guminsky are hard at work inventing and testing new ways to fly.

I grew up in Hounslow United Kingdom, just outside of London, about 30 minutes outside of London. You could sit on my grandfather's roof and actually watch planes as they came into land at Heathrow Airport. They were so close, not only with a house shake, but you could actually read the tail numbers, the little letters that are on the back of the aircraft. You could actually read them, that's how close they were. I was fascinated by these aircraft. How the heck are these vehicles taking off? and flying. And that's really that curiosity is what sparked my interest in understanding aviation, knowing that the way things are today don't have to be the way things are in the future. We apply it to science, but that's also true for so many different realms of our life.

The fact that we have the power to implement the things that we learn in our daily lives, we can change things. And I think that's really important. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is, our universe, is a wild and wonderful place. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. It's incredible to think about how much transportation has evolved in the past few centuries. A journey that once took months with wagons or ships now takes a few days in a car or train or a few hours on an airplane.

Our cities had to be smaller when everyone walked or rode horses. Now with cars, buses, metro stations, and trains, we can build bigger communities and explore our surroundings more easily. But what about the next step in transportation? In addition to our work exploring space, NASA has an aeronautics division which studies the science of flight. These scientists and engineers are looking at ways to test, improve, and invent new ways to get around. What if, in the future, instead of taking a taxi or subway train to... to get around short distances, you could ride in a flying car. Hi everyone, my name is Chevaljali Sharma.

I am the national campaign deputy lead, and I currently serve as an aerospace research engineer based out of NASA Ames. Chavangeli is working on the Advanced Air Mobility Project, which is partnering with companies across the country to develop and test new aircraft vehicles. In the next few decades, we might be able to take those vehicles from place to place. So this is actually a fairly new project in terms of NASA standards. Several years ago, individuals, researchers, engineers started to see how electric motors could

be utilized for new propulsion systems, new types of configurations for how these vehicles were structured. And we noticed that there were a number of gaps that remained to be addressed to really enable this new type of aviation. It will be a while before these flying electric vehicles are released. We're still not sure exactly what this new system of transportation will look like. But Chevalhely and her team are working to figure it out. As far as this development phase goes, there are a couple of things we do know about how

these vehicles will function. They are runway independent, meaning just like a helicopter, they could take off and land vertically. So you can imagine these vehicles taking off and landing on rooftops. And this new mode of aviation, this evolution in aviation, will really really be able to change the way that we move people and goods. These maneuverable aircraft could mean big changes for how we get around. But with such big shifts in transportation, there are a lot of things to consider. So what is the framework for how they'll operate?

How will they access and integrate into our airspace? What other things will we need to enable these aircraft to fly every day? So infrastructure? Will they need a landing pad? What type of sensors or automation might be needed at the vertiport, the area in which the land on the ground. And how will airspace systems evolve to incorporate these new aircraft? All of those pieces are what NASA is focused on so we can really make this type of aviation transport or reality. Imagine with me what these vehicles mean. A future where we aren't just

traveling along roads, train lines, or long-distance flights. This would be like calling a cab, and instead of a car along the road, a helicopter flies you up into the skies. This idea used to be pure fiction, but with research, planning, and a lot of innovative thinking, it could be our reality. If you are thinking about traveling from your home to some location, whether it's a ballpark or a concert venue, potentially you could take one of these vehicles just like you would get an Uber or a Lyft today. Except you wouldn't be sitting in normal traffic. you would be flying in one of these vehicles. If we think about goods being transported,

if we have autonomous electric cargo vehicles, you'll be able to have goods being transported much more efficiently, and this will change the way in which we receive the things that we buy on Amazon every day. NASA engineers are also testing autonomous flight, or vehicles that can fly without a pilot. This would cut down on some of the risk factors often involved in getting important services, into hard-to-reach areas.

But there's other, I think, real important aspects of advanced air mobility, and those are associated with emergency medical services and fire services. Having these vehicles fly in, being able to transport for a medical purpose and individual or some sort of medical equipment or goods, that's going to be a key factor of advanced air mobility. The other factor is firefighting. So I'm based in California, and we've had quite a fire season as of late. Being able to fight fires with these types of new vehicles that may be able to fly into fire areas without potentially putting pilots' life at risk is going to be a key innovation.

So I think there's a number of areas that this will change our lives, whether it's thinking about us going from point A to point B, but also in terms of our community and our safety services and our public services that we rely on every day. When you think about it, there are a lot of things that keep us safe when we're driving our cars down the road. Driver's licenses, crosswalks, traffic lights. We'll need similar safety precautions while navigating through the air, too. Without lanes and road signs, and with the added dimension of height or elevation that we don't have to worry about on the ground,

how will we keep vehicles on track as they fly through the sky? My name is David Zahn. I work in the, uh, Mike Minroni Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma, Oklahoma. I function as a bit of a liaison between NASA and the FAA for their expertise and resources for our research in urban air mobility. So I build roadways in the sky. So when we talk about airspace architecture,

those on and off ramps from the highways to landing sites, they have stop signs, they have speed zones, we have street lights, there's license plates, right? and driver's license for vehicles, and we make all these vehicles not hit each other. David and his team are designing all of those systems that we currently use for cars on roads and thinking about how that translates to airspace.

They are mapping out the sky to make flying safe. This aspect of aerospace, planning for safety and organization, isn't new to this project, but it is the first time it's being done in collaboration with a new vehicle. If you can imagine everything in aviation has been done in one axis at a time. So either we had flight or we had airspace management. You know, first thing you had was the Wright brothers

creating aircraft and people were flying them around. That's one axis. And then we created air traffic control. We had this guy in a field with a green flag and a red flag. And so every stair step of aviation has been done in, again, one of those axes. So when we're looking at this autonomous travel, we're actually cutting that stair step in half. We're simultaneously introducing new vehicle technology with airspace management techniques. David and his team are working to make this technology easy and accessible. In order to facilitate such a big shift in day-to-day travel, it needs to be tested again and again. And saying, hey, when you do see that app or you do see that ticket that you can get on a ride-sharing service, know that it was

very vetted. We've, you know, put years and years of research into make sure that it's safe. Mike Giminski is the Advanced Air Mobility Project Manager. He's been able to provide another idea of what using these vehicles could look like and what they could mean for public transportation. I think if you think of it more like, you know, when you get onto maybe a subway system, you would go park in a parking lot, right? And then you would get up on a platform and you would get on a subway stop that would take you somewhere. That's how we do it in the ground right now. You come in and you park your car and you get out and you go into maybe a little part of a terminal like a really small condensed airport and then somebody walks you out and maybe with four or five or

six other people. And you get in and it just takes you like a like a taxi cab over a city or into a city or out of a city or things like that. Making this future a reality has taken a lot of creativity and innovation. In order to make something we can only imagine turn into a reality, you have to find somewhere to start. And you have to expect that not everything will go perfectly the first time. That's where trial and error can be science's best friend. In order to solve problems, we need to realize what works,

and just as importantly, what doesn't work. You got to understand that we're doing research and development, technology development, so we're constantly learning. We're taking on things where we don't know all the answers, so we're doing research and development to try to figure things out as we go. So I think you need to be curious. You know, one of those people that likes to solve problems and tackle situations, and there's really no such thing as anybody that's perfect in this. I came into NASA and I'm working on things that I couldn't even imagine having worked on even seven, eight years ago. So people that are working on this will be working on things that we can't even think about today, probably. And you'll be working as a team.

So a lot of times the solution comes up through different people who figure things out together. An important factor in such a huge project like this is teamwork. With more people involved, you get more perspectives and areas of expertise to find solutions. Again, this is Chevaljeal-Lie Sharma. So teamwork is really essential. There is no way that a complex project like the national campaign could be accomplished by an individual. We have folks on our team that are engineers, yes, aerospace engineers, but we also have programmers or computer science developers. We also have pilots.

Pilots play a huge role in trying to help us understand how traditional aviation functions today and how that needs to evolve. We have individuals that are focused on human factors. How a person, whether you're a pilot or someone who's maybe running an airspace service, is going to interact with their computer display in front of them in a way that makes sense. Testing is a crucial aspect of aeronautics engineering, and all science for that matter. Scientists try out their ideas, products, and theories over and over again in order to make changes and figure things out. We have a maxim that we use fly-fix-fly, meaning there's things that we learn from every flight.

And the things that we learn make the next flight even better. Being able to learn and iterate and progress is really essential to any research or engineering activity. If we think about the scientific method, right? So the scientific method is come up with a hypothesis, come up with your experiment. There's a number of other steps that I'm glossing over. The key aspect is that scientific method is a circle or a cycle. It always has to feed back into itself because you're going to learn something that impacts your hypothesis and actually changes your hypothesis. And that scientific method, I think, is really at the core of all NASA research.

We don't state that we have all the right answers. In fact, we are explorers. We are curious individuals who know that there's answers that we don't have. And that's, I think, a really key aspect of not only flight activities, but also any research activity that we conduct across the board. One of the guys on our program says, NASA is only into doing things that have not been done before. By nature, trial and error is probably the only way to figure that out. Again, this is David Zahn. Luckily, that's where you trust but verify, and you have multiple people that are cross-modering your performance,

whether you're in the cockpit or in a control room or even in a simulator. NASA's aeronautics team has been testing different technologies for these new flight vehicles. One of the ways they do that is by getting a test pilot into the cockpit of an aircraft and monitoring how the vehicle performs. Let's tag along on a recent test flight. On this mission, test pilots are trying out different helicopter mechanisms. We need to our hit check, and we're ready to take my job. The report and re-position to 0-01 hotel?

Nothing one-combing-all? Go for that. For one, strike a one-three? Go ahead. Let's go ahead. Just get the Higian Holtz and ammo assistance. The results of tests like this will serve as building blocks for all these new vehicles and transportation systems.

Testing is so important, not only to check on the progress and safety of a project like they're doing here, but also to see what doesn't work and make adjustments. It might seem uncomfortable or frustrating to not get the project frustrating to not get things right all the time. But in fact, these setbacks often show you're on the right track for an exciting new idea. I think it's the 80-20 rule. You want to succeed about 80% of the time, but if you're getting 100% success all the time,

you're not pushing the edge. And if you're getting 50% of the success, you're probably pushing too much into the edge. There are lots of roles in any aerospace project. It takes a team with different skills. perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses to come together and make these grand ideas a reality. So I think aeronautics is much like the NBA. A lot of people love basketball, and they only focus on the players. And so they think, oh, if I can't be a player or if I can't be a pilot,

there's no other jobs for me to do in this industry that I would just love to be a part of breaking the physics of the planet and flying fast or hovering or flying in the air. But just like basketball, there are several other supporting things that can allow you to be in that industry without being a shooter. You could be a coach. You could be a referee. You could be a manager. You do all these things that support that industry. And I think that's the biggest takeaway from aviation. There's still some aerospace engineering programs. There's still some structures. There's still all these supporting things that you can be a part of this process and live the aeronautics dream of looking down on the earth and flying. So if I would encourage anybody that has a passion or an inkling to be part of aeronautics, again, there's more jobs than just the pilot role.

Humanity took a huge step in 1903 with the first recorded flight. Now, over 100 years later, engineers like David, Chavangeli and Mike are imagining a whole new kind of flight, a sky highway with electric autonomous flying vehicles, delivering our packages, keeping us safe, and taking us from place to place. Being able to reflect back on how far we've come and dream big about the opportunities that still await us in aerospace is a testament to perseverance,

trial and error, and teamwork. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Kate Steiner, and Michaela Sosby. with support from Emma Edmund and Priyemital. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santa Guida of System Sounds.

Special thanks to Ryland Heggy, Jamie Turner, Eric Land, David Mead, and the Advanced Air Mobility Team. If you have a question about our universe, you can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious Universe at mail.nastassah.gov. Go to NASA.gov slash Curious Universe for more information. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing with a friend. So, for instance, there was a NASA study for a microwave landing system called an MLS in 1983 that had very similar flight profiles to ours. And some data deliverables a little different. This is maybe not at all where the podcast will go, but a microwave, landing system like with microwaves?

Yeah, it's a great. No, no, no, it's a, it's an old, old system. But it's just a ground-based landing navigational aid. So something on the ground that an aircraft receiver can ping to and then navigate towards that point. Got it. That makes much more sense than what I was imagining.