Boeing talks rocket science and NASA's biggest ever space launch system

NASA is planning on sending the first woman and the next man back to the moon and then sending humans onto Mars as early as the 2030s. But they need to totally re design the rocket that will take them there. So now what [BLANK_AUDIO] My guest today is one of the people helping to design the rocket that will take humans back to the moon and beyond. Mission management and operation manager for the Boeing Company, Matt Duggan He leads operations and real-time engineering planning and support for Boeing's human spaceflight missions including the [UNKNOWN] program. My first question for you Matt, you work in literal rocket science which is very exciting. Tell me what exactly is Boeing building for this new [UNKNOWN] program? So Boeing is building the Space Launch System, which will be the largest most powerful rocket ever built. It's going to carry humans further than they've ever gone before. It will carry humans in the Orion capsule and every human going into space for the Artemis program and for the foreseeable future will be. In being launched on an SLS rocket. And give me a bit of an overview of the Artimus program itself. We know that it's taking the first woman and the next man back to the moon, but why is this such a, a groundbreaking program in terms of space discovery? We're going to go new places that we've not gone before on the moon, if you can say we're going back to the moon, but we've been to a very small number of places on the moon. So there's lots of places that we haven't gone. In particular going to the South Pole will be new. It's unlike any place we've gone before. And that's where the first lunar landing Is planned, and the Artemis program itself is being defined over a number of launches and the first launch will be with SLS to carry a, an Orion capsule without any crew on it. That will be a mission that just goes. Goes around the moon and comes back. And that tests the entire system to make sure it's safe for humans. The flight after that will take humans to the moon. And they will do that same mission to fly around the moon there and back and they'll be the first humans who've been in the vicinity of the moon and close to 50 years now. And then the third Artemis mission, Artemis three will be that lunar landing at the lunar South Pole. And what I sort of forget about is that we obviously had the the moon landing in 1969. But it's been it's been some time as you mentioned, it's been some time since we've been Back to the moon. Is it exciting for you personally, to be working on this kind of this next generation of space travel that will see us go back to the moon for the first time since what the 70s? Right From the since the early 70s. Yeah, it's exciting to go back to the moon. And I think, for me, it's exciting in a way about the distance involved. We've had humans in low Earth orbit for all the time since the 70s. On and off, though, with ISS, they've been in orbit for the past 20 years, but low Earth orbit is really very close to Earth. It's 200 miles. Upwards the moon is 240,000 miles away,so when you think about that this so much further than we have heard,humans going away from earth so it is a brand new challenge,it's a whole new ball game so to speak for humans, Out that far, safely and then and bring them safely back. So, we've done a lot of great things in low earth orbit. But this is a brand new challenge that many of the people of the current generation of rocket scientists, if you will, just haven't had an opportunity to work on, so it's very exciting to be Involved in that kind of endeavor Absolutely. And so I wanna get to the design of the SLS itself this Space Launch System that Boeing is working on. It is a massive and very impressive rocket. Why is it necessary to have something so big? I read that it was the largest most powerful rocket that NASA will ever launch into space. The reason we need larger and larger rockets as we go further and further to space is that we want to take more and more stuff with us as we go. It's similar, you're gonna pack differently if you're going on a month-long trip than if you're going on an overnight trip And so as we go further away from Earth, we need more supplies just to live and eat and breathe. And we needed larger and larger habitats to to live in. You don't want to be cooped up in something the size of a capsule For six months, so just like we built an international space station to stay longer in low Earth orbit, we're gonna need larger and larger structures as we go deeper. And so that's where the SLS comes in. It can carry these huge, huge payloads. That will be an entire module or an entire lander. And include all the supplies that humans need to live and work in deep space. So as we go to the moon and as we go, hopefully, beyond the moon, and tomorrow Stanford SLS is carrying its gigantic payloads all all All in one piece out there and have them ready to go as humans arrive. And so when we're talking about that size and power, I wonder whether you can kind of give us an idea of what sort of power we're talking about and just how big this rocket is. I mean, you see these, you say these rockets when you watch a launch happening at Cape Canaveral, but it's very different to, I imagine get up close and personal with them. So Just tell us about the design the size the grant in this rocket. So the size is going back to a very similar size for the Saturn five moon rocket. And if you've seen the the vehicle assembly Simply building a KFC for the VAB. It's basically the limit of the size of rockets we have and we're using every bit of it to get the SLS in there. I it's hard to put that in a scale to describe it is so large it's like looking at so Looking up the length of a football field or something like that, in terms of the the rocket engine if it's going to be much more impressive than the space shuttle launches, where there's more engines involved, and it's just going to be impressive. Incredible because I don't I don't know exactly how to. To put it in human terms, because it is such a large, large vehicle with so much thrust and I could, make some comparisons but it's, just kinda beyond comparison in that sense. Yeah, certainly no, you mentioned KFC, the Kennedy Space Center there. I had the opportunity to go out there last year and. If, you really can't get a sense of scale. You feel so dwarfed by these buildings and the size of the machines. That's incredibly impressive. Tell me a little bit about the team that Boeing has put together. You're obviously working with within Boeing itself. You're partnering with NASA. And this is, I imagine, you know, you've got a, kind of a new generation of space discovery. So do you have people who've worked on previous rocket launches where the shuttle, or even before that, or is it kind of a whole new, a new school of, of engineers working on this, working on this project? It's the full mix of people. We have people who are veterans of a space shuttle program, a space station program, and the Delta rockets as well. And they brought in a lot of knowledge for us. But we have so many brand-new people who have not this before, but they're great engineers. And you don't necessary need to have Had passed pro program experience with a rocket to be able to come in and do your engineering jobs. So they're these young people on the programs now and they're doing great engineering work and they're gaining the experience and apply to the next generation. They will be the leaders of tomorrow as we evolve the SLS to be whatever it needs to be in the futures we better explain the better understand what we want to do in deep space and. Maybe even beyond SLS as we go further and further from Earth. Yeah, and I want to talk about those next steps going beyond and further into deeper space. But tell me the practicalities of designing a rocket, I'm really interested in. This isn't something you can throw together in a couple of months. Tell me about the timeline. And the design process that goes into building the SLS with you and the team at Boeing. So first on the timeline, these this is a project that's at the very top end of the The size scale as we were already talking about, it's just it's huge, it's like building an ocean liner or it's like building the space station or the the tallest building ever built. It is at that far end of human endeavour so to speak. And that is one thing that gives you a significant timeline. It just takes a lot of time to design anything that large. And that complicated, and that integrated. And then secondly, it's never been done before quite this way. If you're building a copy of something you've built before, you can have a pretty good idea of how much it takes, and you can have a compact timeline. But if you're having to design brand new, you want to design so much time into that to check everything, and retest, and make sure you know what you're doing. That adds time so you end up with multi year programs for these things. They're not quick and you shouldn't expect them to be quick. If you want to do everything right and have it be be safe at the end. So having a five or six or 10 year development program is Is the norm for these brand new gigantic projects. And then for engineering processes, we're taking advantage of the very best, most modern engineering practices that we have today. And I think that's a huge advantage we have now. Now over the people who successfully of course, but who designed [UNKNOWN] five. That was a paper rocket that was where you had people doing designs on paper and doing calculations by hand and making parts again by hand and we have Computer Aided Design now to get the parts as efficient as possible and we can do as much analysis in a single day as they did on their entire program over the years. And with computer aided manufacturing, we can build parts that are just so precise that it's literally sculpted to be exactly what they need to be and nothing more so you end up with a much more efficient rocket. Overall so we were taking advantage of both the the reliable hardware, the shuttle heritage hardware for the solid rocket boosters and the main engine, but also bringing in those very modern and current engineering design practices to get a great combination overall. And I have to ask, this might seem like a silly question but I'm sure for a lot of people watching this they know Boeing as. An aeroplane manufacturer. They might fly on a Boeing jet. Maybe not right now in quarantine. But, tell me how does it differ when you're designing an aeroplane, and when you're designing a rocket? Or is it Is there crossover? Are there similarities? No, there's a huge amount of crossover. The designs are different, but the engineering fundamentals and practices are are very much the same. In fact, that's, Something that we try and apply across our company, so that we can get people to move back and forth. If you need a lot of people to build a rocket, you may pull people from airplanes, and you're not asking them to do something that's fundamentally different to them. They don't have to learn a brand new skill, they're bringing the skill with them and adding to your program. So by having that base of engineering practices, common practices across the program, it allows us to Move people around actually very efficiently between different kinds of aircraft or to spaceflight to satellites and so forth. And so I need to know what it's like to work with NASA. NASA because I imagine when you're putting safety is obviously the prime concern when you're flying people here on earth or whether you flying them into space, but it feels like it would be a whole different ballgame. Someone from Boeing told me that if you drop a nut or a bolt that's designed for one of these rockets. It's lost. It's kind of safety certification. So you kind of have to start over is that the level of intensity of scrutiny and safety that we're talking about? Tell me tell me what it's like to kind of be part of that process. So on talking specifically about losing that bowl, yes, we track each part individually and we know everywhere it's been, every person who's touched it and we know its history, all the way back almost when it was metal being mined out of the ground, it's that level of detail so that you know You have the assurance that each part is safe and it is exactly what it's claiming to be and that nothing bad has happened to it at the higher level, right, that's all going towards human safety. I'm at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and we live and work here with with the astronauts both at work and in our community and that really gives you a strong connection to them. Personally, and you want to do everything you can to keep them safe and that really does find its way into everything we do. Everyone is thinking about that all the time. It's not just a an abstract concept of Yes, of course we want to keep people safe. these are people you know, they're Are your friends they're your neighbors. And so we here in Houston in Huntsville as well, we were certainly applying applying that is a very personal way to make sure that we do the best we can. And so aside from having to know the entire history of an individual nut and bolt, which sounds like an admin nightmare. What are the challenges of building a rocket this size, and one of the challenges that Boeing has had to overcome throughout the design, and manufacturing process. The scale is again what drives so much of the process here. When you have 1000s literally 1000s of people Across the country who all have to cooperate together to build this one machine, this, this one rocket, that requires a huge amount of coordination and integration. And that's one of the strengths that Boeing's brings to this. Being able to sort all of those things out and you end up with. I'd say beyond 10s of 1000s, maybe hundreds of 1000s of pages of requirements that specify every single part, how it relates to other parts, what it's supposed to do and how it has to perform. And by tracking all of those and getting that all together, then you know that you're going in the right direction. And you design a rocket in this case it will, it will do exactly what you want it to do. And I have to mention I mean the the elephant in the room this year at least the process has involved working during a pandemic, as well as there was hurricane zita that hit the south of the United States. States, tell me what it's like to work within those constraints. So we did introduce a lot of differences this year in the way we worked and a lot of people are working virtually, And we, well, we're using zoom right now and that has been a mainstay of our work we we've learned to do that kind of work together and I would say that we've been very successful in Making it work it was different at first it did feel odd that you couldn't have the face to face conversations that we had before but on on the engineering side which didn't need as much hands on work with the hardware. I think we've been able to adapt very well and without really much. Our impact at all, on the manufacturing side more where the people are in the factories, putting parts together that was a little bit larger impact because we need you can't get around having people there to actually put it together and so we implemented safety procedures there to keep People as separated as we can and to reduce the number of people to only the people who absolutely had to be there, again to keep all the people as safe as possible. And so throughout this, this year with COVID, we've at Boeing, we've tried to keep Everyone absolutely as safe as we can whether, if they don't need to be there, they're not there. And if they are there then we have as much safety as we can in there by keeping people separated by wearing masks by washing hands. There's hand disinfectant everywhere there's wipes, everything we can do to keep people safe. It's kind of nice to know that whether you're building a rocket or whether you're shooting video at home, [LAUGH] A lot of people are doing the same things right now. Yeah, exactly. So do you think though I mean, there's a lot of talk about Artemis making it for 2024, you've had a lot of curveballs thrown your way. You still feeling confident that you're making your timelines and and that You'll be set for this for this next exciting mission. Yes, I think SLS will be ready for for the Artemis missions. SLS is not going to be the the long pole, so to speak for for the Artemis missions. The first two are easy, though getting the human lander ready. In time for 2024 I think more talent because they're much farther behind. Let's say I don't know that that's not really fair. They just not started. But they have a lot more work to do in For years that we have to do, certainly we've we've had more time to do it. And then those landers have, so SLS will be ready to go for the Artemis one next year and organise two in 2023. And Artemis three in 2024 for that moon landing. And so what are the next steps you have to test the rockets, right I mean, how can you Can you do that kind of testing before you have that initial blast off and you fly into space? Yes, so right now we're in what's called the SLS Green Run, which is a series of tests to assure that everything is ready. For flight to make sure that everything functions exactly as it should in the rocket in the fully assembled rocket. And we of course test each piece individually well before it goes into the rocket but you also want to know that everything functions together. So in the, The SLS green run the first thing we'll be doing next is the wet dress rehearsal. It's called which is putting all of the fuel into the rocket, and following the procedures that will actually follow the fuel the rocket minutes at the Cape, and making sure that we understand everything that happens there and then every Part in there, everything functions as it should. That's putting the liquid hydrogen and the liquid oxygen into the rocket. In the interesting fact, there is that that's going to be the most liquid hydrogen that's ever been together in one place on earth. In the history of the world. It's a huge rocket, we've never had this much liquid hydrogen together before. So that will all be fully tanked. And we'll see what it tells us and it should go fine. And then the next test after that will be what's called the hot fire test and that is actually firing the main engines for the full duration that they would normally fire during a mission. So The rocket is, is held down, it's not going to go anywhere, but you fire those engines and you burn through all of that liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen in the tank and it's going to be quite an impressive show. A lot of smoke and fire as we say. It'll be great to see but the test there then is you've now proven that the rocket can function as it should for the full duration of admission and. And you're ready to go then, ready to press on the launch I'm sure everyone is going to be watching that hot-fire test with a lot of excitement. And then obviously the subsequent launches. That's, I mean, everyone likes that they say things, blow up, get on fire, smoke explosions. I mean it's a controlled explosion. But I certainly get excited for that sort of stuff. Even in the best case, it's going to be impressive to see with this with the engines firing and all that. Excellent, excellent. And so looking forward, I guess as we sort of look forward towards deeper space and things like Moz is the SLS really going to enable us to get humans onto Mars. We're going to become a Multi planetary species. Well, I hope so. I am personally very much pro Mars. That's the goal I've been working towards for a while now. And in my professional life, but personally as well, I'm just excited about that. I'm a space enthusiast in general. I think getting to Mars will just be Be such a huge thing for us. Inspirationally, as a species in terms of the science we learn there and that's just the future of When humans landed on the moon 50 years ago now, that was a defining moment for a lot of people for a generation almost. And that was not just a celebration as an individual or as a nation, but it was all the way up to the species. Everyone could get behind that. And I think, Mars will be the same thing, that kind of challenge. And then, beyond that Mars, Mars is the place where there might be life or might have been life, at least, right? Mars had all the ingredients at one point in time as we understand for the emergence of life on Earth. And so going there and finding probably extinct life, maybe, maybe something still alive, but even extinct life would just be again, so meaningful to us to know that we're not alone out there. And then again, on the future Mars is the closest planet to us that has the resources and the environment where humans could. Possibly live so we will go to Mars and we will find a toehold there and then expand that toehold like we have everywhere else. So just being part of that first effort to get us there the very first time is exciting to me. [MUSIC] Well look thank you so much Matt Duggan mission management and operation manager for the Boeing Company. I'm very excited to see this rocket finally launch. I know you are too. Thank you for joining us at CNET. Thank you very much.