Xtreme Teams

Extreme Goals

After working at NASA as an aerospace engineer for 10 years, Bobby Braun still hasn't lost the boyish awe that he feels for the space explorers who came before him. On a tour of the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Braun points to a 240-foot-tall, eight-legged steel structure that dominates the skyline. Called a "gantry," the structure looks like a towering, headless insect. In fact, it was built to teach the Apollo astronauts how to land on the moon.

"The instructors hung a lunar-landing module from the top, attached support cables to simulate the effect of lower gravity, and told the astronauts to pilot it down and then land," Braun explains. "Neil Armstrong used to practice here. Today, we're using it to test the prototypes of the capsule that will bring soil samples back from Mars." He pauses and grins, thinking of the link between the historic Apollo project and his own work. "I think that's pretty cool."

Braun is himself likely to become part of NASA's legacy. He was part of the Pathfinder team that sent a land rover to Mars, from which it beamed back the celebrated first pictures of the planet's surface. Today, he is the project leader for one of the units of the Mars Sample Return Mission. NASA, with help from Italian and French space agencies, will do a return trip to Mars in 2003, sending two rovers to gather soil and rock samples. The mission, which will be led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will take five years to complete.

Braun's team is building the space capsule that will return the samples safely to Earth. It is no small task. The capsule has to be strong enough to land on Earth at 80 mph -- without a parachute. It has to endure temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The project is mammoth in scope and ambition. Even now, four years away from the first launch, the team has hard deadlines to meet. "There is no downtime," Braun says. "There are just times that are very stressful and times that are only moderately stressful."

The first deadline that the team faces involves locking in the design requirements for the capsule. The team must decide which materials to use to build the capsule and how the capsule should be shaped. Those decisions must be made with other project units -- because the size and mass of the capsule is predetermined by how much weight the rocket can carry -- and they eventually must go through an extensive independent review.

To make those decisions, the team has relied on prototyping. But this isn't the take-three-months-and-spend-millions-of-dollars kind of testing that NASA was known for in the '70s. Today's team relies on pared-down tests that are conducted with off-the-shelf components. As fast as test engineers can build models of the capsule, the team drops them from the gantry to measure the effect of the impact on both the soil and the prototype. "There is more than one purpose for every test," says Sotiras Kellas, a test engineer for the team. "And most of these initial tests cost less than $40."

Lean testing? At NASA? As it turns out, many of the milestones that the team must hit have more to do with "inner space" than with outer space. The Mars Sample Return Mission is part of NASA's push to execute projects "faster, better, cheaper" -- an agency mantra that was developed seven years ago by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin. With the same amount of money and time that NASA used to sink into just one space mission, it now launches 13 missions. That constant pressure to speed up results using leaner teams -- without taking undue risks -- has challenged a new generation of leaders to test the limits of what's possible. "There are a lot of 'never-been-dones' on this project," Braun says. "But if you're an engineer, this is the kind of project that you wait your whole career for. I'm totally stoked to be a part of it. The 'faster, better, cheaper' mentality is what's keeping me at NASA."

While the team must move quickly and inexpensively (its budget accounts for only $15 million of the entire project's budget of roughly $750 million), it also must make tough decisions about the unknown. For example, even the most advanced mathematical models for predicting how much heat stress the capsule's shield will encounter are only theory. There is no such thing as a "definite" answer.

It's 10 am, and the Langley team is having a teleconference with a team at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The Ames team is designing the heat shield for the capsule, and today engineers from Ames and Langley are comparing heat-testing data for composite materials that are under consideration for use in the shield. To stay on schedule, the team will have to make a choice about materials very soon. "I'm just not sure that I'm comfortable with where the numbers are," says an Ames engineer.