Featuring Jack Boyd

December 4, 2001

Live at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time

The webcast begins with a video called Flying Through Time. For a list of all the airplanes shown visit

http://quest.nasa.gov/projects/aero/centennial/Flying.html

Susan Lee is speaking on screen.

Hi! Welcome to the NASA Quest webcast Flying Through Time. I hope you enjoyed the video we’ve just showed. This is the first time we have here aired it. It really shows a lot of historical airplanes in a short period of time.

This web cast is a part of a series we are doing to celebrate the 100 years of Flight or, the centennial of flight. We are really happy to have you join us here today.

I want to tell you about some of the other events we have planned. First of all I want you to see the URL space where you can find any of these events.

http://quest.nasa.gov/calendar

The screen shows a slide with the words December events. And the URL listed above.

I want to tell you about a forum, which has already begun. The topic of the forum is what would life be like without airplanes? A forum is like an extended chat. You can enter the chat room any time during the week and post a question. Then you can reenter from time to time to see your answers from the experts. I checked the forum this morning and there is a lively debate going on now. I hope you can participate in this forum.

This screen shows a slide, which reads: Celebrating Flight a forum What would life be like without airplanes? Monday, December 3, 2001 to Monday December 10, 2001.

The next event we have planned is called Flying through time a webcast with Jack Boyd. This is actually today’s event. I am going to introduce Jack in just a minute. But the topic is NASA’s innovations in aerospace design, and Jack has been here a long time and has a great deal to share with us.

The screen shows a slide, which reads: Flying through Time A webcast about Aerospace Design with Jack Boyd.

There will be an opportunity to chat with Orville and Wilbur Wright. Well not really Orville and Wilbur Wright to engineers pretending to be Orville and Wilbur.

The screen shows a slide, which reads chat with oral and Wilbur Wright about how they designed airplanes. Wednesday, December 5th, 2001

10:00 11:00 a.m. PST

11:00 to 12:00 p.m. CST

1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST

We have done this many times in the past. It is always fun. Orville and Wilbur are two brothers who know how to tease each other and have a good time. We will learn a lot about their invention of powered flight.

The next event will be a web chat with Tom Benson of NASA Glenn Research Center.

This screen shows a slide, which reads: Kite Flying Chat, chat with Tom Benson from NASA Glenn. Thursday December 6th, 2001

10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PST

12:00 to 1:00 p.m. CST

1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST

Tom will answer questions about kite flying. As you know, the Wright brothers flew kites when they were children. This peaked their interest in flight. They also made kites. It’s always fun to talk to Tom. If possible please view the archive of the web cast prior to the chat.

The screen shows a slide which reads: webcast with the Tuskegee airmen Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Jefferson USAF about his role in the history of flight. Wednesday, December 12th, 2001

10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PST

12:00 to 1:00 p.m. CST

1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST

The next event will be a very special webcast with the Tuskegee airmen. How many of you know what a Tuskegee airman is? The Tuskegee airmen were the first black military aviators in the United States. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Jefferson will be here at NASA Ames Research Center to tell us about his experience and the contributions made by African American pilots during World War II.

The screen shows a slide, which reads: Centennial of Flight Commission webcast with Debbie Gallaway NASA headquarters Thursday December 13, 2001

10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PST

12:00 to 1:00 p.m. CST

1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST

Finally on Thursday we have a webcast with Debbie Gallaway at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC Debbie is NASA’s representative to the Centennial of Flight Commission. She will tell us what events will be planned for the next two years to celebrate the first flight in 1903.

We have a lot planned and we hope you can join us.

This screen shows Susan Lee and Jack Boyd.

Now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Jack Boyd, the Executive Assistant to the NASA Ames Research Center Director. Jack, you have worked for NASA for a long time. I hope you a share with us some of NASA‘s innovations in aerospace design.

One thing that I would like people to understand is that there was another research organization prior to NASA working on aviation research. Can you tell us about that Jack?

Jack: Yes before NASA was formed, back in 1915, the federal government decided that there should be a lot of research done on aircraft. You know that 1903 was the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Not a lot of research was done between 1903 and 1915 to understand the principles of flight. The Wright brothers were the first to do it. So NACA, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was formed. Langley Research Center was established at Langley field in Norfolk Virginia. This was the first NACA center.

In 1939 we formed Ames Research Center here in Mountain View, California. Ames is now 60 years old. Shortly after Ames was established NACA Center was formed in Cleveland, Ohio, named Lewis Research Center now John Glenn Research Center. Dryden Flight Research Center was formed in 1947. NACA worked on aircraft for many, many, years until 1958.

At that time the United States decided we wanted to do some space exploration. In 1957 Russians put up Sputnik a satellite spacecraft that was orbiting the earth. President Eisenhower decided that we needed a space agency and an NACA was the core of that agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, that is where we are today.

Susan: Thank you Jack. Now we would like to see some video about innovations in aeronautics.

I think we are going to see of the innovations in aircraft for more than sixty years.

The screen shows the title Decades of Innovation in Aerospace. Next you see NACA and NASA. The screen goes to a picture of several men sitting at a meeting table. Jack Boyd narrates.

This is a very early picture of Ames Research Center when it was part of the National advisory committee on aeronautics.

This is the committee, which ran NACA made up of several famous men including Orville Wright and Charles Lindbergh.

This screen shows the three men and one has a shovel in his hand.

Here you can see the ground breaking at NASA Ames what is a picture of NASA Ames in its very early days.

The screen shows an aerial view of NASA Ames.

They located NASA Ames at Moffett Field, which was a Navy base.

This screen shows the construction of a wind tunnel you can see the round frame of the tunnel, which moved the air over the aircraft. The screen shows some very large metal buildings and then shows two men working in a warehouse type space at tables.

Here you can see the construction of some of the wind tunnels. These buildings held the wind tunnels some of the largest wind tunnels in the world. This is where you sit when you run a test in the wind tunnel.

The screen shows an airplane mounted on two supports under the wings inside the wind tunnel. The propeller is moving.

This screen shows and aerial picture of a wind tunnel followed by another aerial picture showing another wind tunnel.

This is a model in one of the wind tunnels. This is a picture of one of the subsonic wind tunnels built here. The building on the left their is the 40 by 80 wind tunnel, which is part of the largest wind tunnel complex in the world.

The screen shows Jack Boyd.

We continued to build wind tunnels here at Ames for the next 20 to 30 years testing subsonic, supersonic aircraft and hypersonic aircraft. By hyper sonic I mean last three or four or five times the speed of sound.

Now I think we're going to talk about some of the innovations here at NASA Ames.

The screen reads Swept Wing for Aircraft Design. The video shows models of airplanes with sweptback wings. The last is a model in wind tunnel.

Why do we sweep back wings? We sweep back wings to reduce drag so that the aircraft will fly faster. We tested many plan forms. This is a model with a triangular wing. We were looking to see which designs were the best. We tested these designs in our wind tunnels as you saw in that last picture.

Soon after that we built a large wind tunnels.

The screen reads world's largest wind tunnel 40 by 80 by 120.

We tested models at speeds all the way from 100 mi. an hour. Here in this building is see being constructed the 40 by 80 wind tunnel with the blimp flying by in the background.

This screen shows this steel scaffolding of the 40 by 80 wind tunnel. The next image shows a man dwarfed by the size of the wind tunnel fans.

This is the biggest wind tunnel in the world here if you can see the inside of it. These blades drive the air and push the air through the wind tunnel. We put a model inside it and pushed the air over at to see what the lift, drag and pitching moments are.

The screen shows an aerial view of the air intake.

This is an external view of it. This is the largest wind tunnel in the world with a test space of 120 feet. This is the air intake it is about an acre in size and is where the tunnel draws in the fresh air to move through the tunnel.

The screen shows a model mounted on struts in the wind tunnel.

This is a model mounted in the wind tunnel. This is actually the 1/3 scale model of the space shuttle, which was tested in the wind tunnel before it flew.

Some of the other innovative things we did to reduce the drag on aircraft we had to reduce the drag to make them more efficient. Was shaping the wings. The Wright brothers were the first to shape wings to tell us how to fly at very low speeds. You recall they flew at very low speeds in those days. But we wanted to fly faster and faster as we flew fighter-bombers in the military.

The screen reads Development of Conical Camber for Aircraft.

We developed what we called conical camber, which drooped the leading edge of that wing to reduce the drag of that wing. We could fly faster.

The screen shows Jack Boyd as a younger engineer pointing to a chalkboard with some drawings of airfoils with conical camber. Next you see a test engineer watching a wind tunnel test of a delta wing model with conical camber and then you see a model of the space station being tested in the wind tunnel.

This is a model in one of the supersonic wind tunnels which we are blowing wind over at speeds of Mach 2 to 2.5. A B58 bomber was one of the first models incorporating conical camber in its wing design. This picture shows a test of the B58 bomber being tested in the wind tunnel.

We now see Jack Boyd on camera.

This wing design proved to be very, very efficient. We improved the efficiency of the aircraft by about 50% by incorporating this innovation. As we began to think about higher and higher speeds, when we became the space agency; we came to make the aircraft or spacecraft very pointed in shape, or sharper and sharper. It was concluded by one of our researchers here that the way for a spacecraft to reenter the atmosphere without burning up was to make the body very blunt,

The screen reads: Blunt Body and Heat-Shield Design

As opposed to very sharp. And here you can see the model of the Mercury spacecraft.

The screen shows a hand holding two Mercury models. Then one model is positioned to be tested in the arc jet.

And this concept was applied to every one of our spacecraft there after. Including Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Here you can see one of the arc jets testing the heat shield applied to the model.

On the screen you see a blast of light hitting the bottom of the model of the spacecraft.

This is a picture of one of a Saturn rocket being launched carrying the Apollo spacecraft.

On the screen you can see the launch of a Saturn rocket. Then you see the Apollo shape being separated in space.

This is the Apollo shape being separated in space. You can see that the front forward end of it is very blunt; had we not done that it would have just burned up as we entered the atmosphere rather than burning up it shedded the material on the front and successfully entered the atmosphere.

The screen shows a blunt bodied spacecraft entering the atmosphere. As it enters the material on the bottom is burning and shedding material. Then returns to Jack Boyd on screen.

After the successful Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, we wanted to look at new shapes to find a way to send a manned vehicle into space that could reenter earth’s atmosphere safely, land and be reused. To do that we developed tiles to put on the space shuttle that you see being launched here.

The screen shows a video of a daytime launch of the space transportation system.

These tiles which probably took a ten-year period to be developed.

You can see a sample of the shuttle tile material.

They were very fragile but they were very heat resistant. In fact if you took one of these tiles you could poke a whole in it with a pencil.

The screen shows a technician standing outside of the arc jet. Next it shows a technician reaching among hoses feeding the arc jet. Then the screen shows a tile being exposed to extremely high temperatures in the arc jet.

These are arc jets, very high-energy facilities that were used to test these shapes. They could simulate the temperatures generated at the speed of a vehicle coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere. From the moon the speed is about 25,000 miles per hour. This is very, very fast. This is the control room of the arc jets.

The screen shows a video of a technician sitting at the control panels of the arc jet.

We tested many, many materials in these tiles until we got just the right combinations.

The screen shows a tile being heated to very high temperatures. The color of the tile has changed from white to red with yellow highlights. The video switches to a view of the space shuttle about to land on the runway at Kennedy Space Center.

These tiles are still being used on the space shuttle today to keep it from burning up. You might see a picture of the space shuttle landing. This is after it has gone through a very extreme heating environment and it still can land safely.

The screen switches to a picture of Jack Boyd.

Besides wind tunnels and arc jets, we needed to develop another facility here because we wanted to know how the spacecraft and aircraft would fly, [handling characteristics] before we put men into them and sent them out to fly. We built a series of man-rated flight simulators. These simulators would take the data from the wind tunnels whether it was an airplane or a helicopter or whatever and simulate the motions that responded to the pilots flight controls. These are some pictures of various simulators. Inside the cockpit you would see a view of the runway the pilots were to land on.

The screen shows the title Flight Simulation. Then it shows views from the exterior and interior of the flight simulators.

The pilot flying the simulation got the feeling that he was moving as if he were flying the aircraft.

The video shows a view of the Vertical Motion Simulator being flown. The screen shows a pilot flying the flight simulator.

The pilot could also see where he was landing. These simulations have been very critical for testing almost everything we have flown for the past 30 years whether it be a helicopter, a supersonic fighter or a space shuttle coming back to Earth from orbit. Now these are piloted simulations. We can send out unmanned space vehicles without writing simulations for them, but for piloted vehicles we have to know how these vehicles are going to fly in space.

The screen shows the out the window view inside the simulator cab.

The screen goes back to Susan Lee and Jack Boyd.

Susan: Jack I understand the simulators are even used as a design tool now.

Jack: Yes, to get the aerodynamic characteristics we test models in the wind tunnel and then with that data we fly the simulation to get the handling characteristics. The pilots fly the simulation and if it doesn’t fly quite right we redesign the vehicle and put it back in the wind tunnel and get new data to build into a new simulation. You can do this in an iterative way. Of course you can crash the simulator and it doesn’t hurt anybody.

Susan: Saves time and money I guess.

Jack: Yes, it saves a lot of time and a lot of money.

The screens shows the title: Tilt rotor Development.

Another vehicle, which was developed out of the research here at NASA Ames, was the Tilt Rotor aircraft.

The screen shows an XV3 in front of the hangar and then taking off and flying.

Here you can see the XV3, an early version of the tilt rotor. The rotor actually takes off vertically with the rotors tilts forward and flies forward. Again we tested these in the wind tunnels and very close to the ground before we flew it very high until we could assure ourselves that it would fly.

The video on the screen shows an XV15 tilt rotor flying.

Now on the screen you can see a tilt rotor flying. The US Marines are now building versions of this tilt rotor to use in their arsenal. IT is a very quiet airplane. It can fly up to 100 knots and it’s very efficient compared to a helicopter because it can fly forward.

The screen shows Jack Boyd.

Another area of research here at NASA Ames was to make the Air Traffic Controls System safer and to fly more airplanes through the airports.

The screen shows the title: Air Traffic Control Tools. Then is shows a man sitting in front of a monitor and then goes to a shot of a radar screen with the flight information for many airplanes.

As you know if you’ve been to the airport recently it has slowed down considerably. We have the means here to look at all the aircraft flying into a particular airport like Washington or New York and to understand how better to phase their approaches so that we can land them both more safely and more quickly.

The screen shows a woman sitting at a computer then a commercial aircraft taking off.

There are also a number of simulators here that we can run to find out how we can do better with ground control of aircraft getting from the gate to the runway for take off. Using the large computers here we can simulate this whole air traffic environment.

The screen shows an air traffic controller looking out the window of an air traffic control tower and then a very busy radar screen. Then you see a commercial aircraft landing. Then the screen returns to a view of Susan Lee and Jack Boyd.

Susan: Jack that was really quite interesting.

Jack: There is one point I would like to make although we don’t have film for it. We did a lot of work here on planetary exploration. In other words we devised the shapes of spacecraft flying to the other planets like Mars. We had one of our experimenters put the first life detection equipment on the Viking spacecraft that went to Mars in 1976. We also sent spacecraft to Venus, and Jupiter. Most recently in the last three years we sent a little spacecraft to the Moon to look for water on the moon and we think we discovered water at the poles.

Susan: That’s very exciting. This research has changed a lot since Orville and Wilbur used their very small wind tunnel to test airfoils which was a very small scaled effort compared to the research we are doing today on a very large scale.

Jack: Well the Wright brothers were really the ones who figured out how to shape the vehicle so that it could be controlled. Not just to make the plane flyable that also makes the plane controllable. That way you could put a man in it.

Susan: that feeds perfectly into Stefan question. Do you think that the Wright brothers are heroes?

Jack: absolutely they're my heroes and they should be yours. They trained themselves. And that is what you should do. Don't just let other people tell you what they want you to learn. You go out and get your own information. That's why you should do. You can do all sorts of magic things.

Susan: Melissa asks what it was the best invention that NASA made for airplanes?

Jack: the best invention that NASA made for airplanes probably was the swept back wing. The swept back wing has been on every aircraft built to go above the speed of 200 knots per hour. A man who started out at Langley field and ended up here at NASA Ames did the research on this Innovation. That I think was one of the most exciting things.

Susan: Do you want to say the name of who that was?

Jack: well his name was R. T. Jones. He was a self-educated man. He never went to college. He taught himself mathematics. He taught himself calculus. He thought college would inhibit his thinking. That is not true, and but R T thought that.

Susan: speaking of the Swept wing didn't I see a picture of view in the video about Swept wing Design.

Jack: yes that was I about 50 years ago. I was a researcher here starting in 1947.

Susan: did you work on the Swept wing Design?

Jack: yes I worked on the swept wing, the blunt body, and probes to Venus and Mars.

Susan: which was the most exciting for you?

Jack: the most exciting for me was working on the probes to Mars and Venus.

Susan: it must seem like a long time before your projects are realized. The first to make the designs and then they have to be built and when they are launched into space you begin to get the results.

Jack: When I was about 12 years old I went for a ride on a biplane. I figured that was about as fast as we would go 100 mi. per hour. Of course now I now that I was off by orders of magnitude. It is hard to predict the future.

Susan: Julie has a question, what is the best part of your job?

Jack: The best part of my job is talking to students and working with people. I really enjoy that. Writing reports is okay but it can get dull. Working with people is the most fun.

Susan: Do you think working with other people is important in aerospace today? It must be necessary to have good social skills.

Jack: There is no such thing as a loner any more. Event the Wright Brothers there were two of them, they were like one they say, but there were two. You have to work in teams I think. The physics, chemistry and Mathematics have gotten so complicated you have to work with other people.

To build an airplane you need mechanical engineers, structural engineers, aeronautical engineers. You need physicists and chemists; you need people who understand math so they can predict the flow qualities. You need to be a team.

Susan: Tom asks are you a pilot?

Jack: No I am not a pilot, I took flying lessons and I never soloed so I am not a pilot.

Susan: In what ways is your job different now that you are a manager?

Jack: As a researcher you have to do things in a very precise way. Physics is a series of equations. You have to learn math and you can predict what is going to happen using these equations.

When you deal with people in management you’ve got to be much more tolerant of other peoples way of talking and doing things. You have to listen to them. You have to encourage them. You have to be more flexible.

Susan: What do you see in the future?

Jack: NASA is looking far out into the future ten, fifteen and twenty years. Part of the future is the study of astrobiology, is there life in other parts of the universe. What are the possibilities of life on

Earth moving out into the solar system and beyond.

So we are looking at the

For example we have a project that’s called Kepler. The plans are not firm yet but it is to look for inhabited planets around the stars. It is called looking for planets in the habitable zone. Looking for planets where life could exist, and that might have water on them and therefore possibly support life. That’s one thing that’s sort of a far out thing.

We are looking at the technologies to improve air travel to improve the safety as I said before and also to improve the characteristics of the aircraft itself. We have supersonic aircraft already but we have no commercial supersonic transport except the Concorde.

We need to make those more efficient so that we can get more into production around the world.

We are looking at ways to understand more better our global climate and how our climate changes. What affects it? If we can’t control it we must understand it better so we can protect people from cyclones and hurricanes. So we are doing research I would call it looking back at planet Earth to understand how we can live here more effectively.

The screen shows Susan and Jack.

Susan: That sounds very exciting. I have a question for you from Jack. He wants to know what were the Wright Brothers Wings and Tail made of?

Jack: It was a fine cloth. For many years here we had a piece that was given to us for our museum. It’s a filmy cloth almost like a butterfly wing, but I don’t know the exact details of what it was, and then it was wooden ribs.

Susan: Tim asks do they use the swept wing on the X-33?

Jack: The X33 is more like a lifting body. In the video you saw some other lifting body studies we have done here. It is more a shape like the shuttle It is more that kind of shape. Wings provide a lot of lift but the lifting bodies provide enough lift so that it permits you to land but they also provide you with the where with all to renter the Earth’s atmosphere. Sweptback wings would almost certainly burn up completely on reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The X-33 uses the other characteristic of lift, wings are one and lifting bodies are the other.

Susan: Good question Tim. That leads right into Ann’s question, what is a lifting body?

Jack: Well it is a body that provides lift. Did you ever put your hand out the window of a car? You find it wants to go up right? A lifting body does the same thing it’s just a more compact vehicle that allows you to reenter the atmosphere and land. A winged airplane does not need to reenter the atmosphere it only takes off, fly and lands.

Susan: Could a rocket be a lifting body Jack?

Jack: Any body could be a lifting body you just have to put it at the correct angle of attack. Generally it is a shape that will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.

Susan: We have another question here from Sandy. She asks how important are computers to aerospace design?

Jack: Right now they are absolutely critical. We use computers from the beginning to the end. You use a computer with your mind to think about what the airplane design should be. Right from the beginning. Wind tunnels are the second step. Simulators are the third step and flying is the final step. Computers are critical to the design of an aircraft. The more complicated the design the more sophisticated the computers you need and we have some very sophisticated computers. Computers are also mandatory for air traffic control to pinpoint where the aircraft is so that you can land it safely. Computers have a broad spectrum of uses in the aerospace community.

Susan: They really increase the speed with which you can do the calculations for the design.

Jack: The speed and the accuracy. Get proficient in computers no matter what field you want to go into whether it is aerodynamics, physics or chemistry or business.

Susan: We have a question from Stewart how can I become aerospace or airplane designer?

Jack: One thing I haven’t said to you, you’ve got to read a lot. Read everything you can get your hands on about whatever subject you are interested in. You must read that will teach you how to do almost anything you want. Second thing you need is a good mentor. It could be a teacher, a father, and a mother whoever it is that understands the subject you want and often it is a teacher outside your home. I have grandkids that love space and airplanes and I am teaching them as they go. They are probably going to become aeronautical engineers and their parents aren’t so happy about that. Read whatever else you do, READ.

Susan: Thank you, we haven’t had another expert that has pointed out the importance of reading before. You also mentioned social skills for the kind of work you do.

Jack: You can start out as a nerd if you want to. I think I did. Eventually you will have to learn how to deal with people so you might as well learn it as early as you can.

Susan: Chantel asks why do we care about space?

Jack: Well if you care about the future of the human race, you should probably care about space, about where we are going, where we are headed. And also for preserving the living conditions on this planet. It’s useful to look back from away from Earth. Weather satellites and communications satellites are very import to our current life. Weather satellites in particular, can look back and help us predict the weather hazards before they happen so we can move people away from the danger zone.

Aside from that intellectual pursuit, it’s also interesting to wonder is there anyone out there besides us. That is an exciting question. Now we can pursue it at your leisure, we don’t have to go to the Mars in 2003, or to Europa in 2020. We want to eventually get there to see what kind of life may have formed.

Susan: You were mentioning about satellites. What is NASA’s role in the deployment of satellites.

Jack: We put the satellites up for other people to use. NASA has done the research in this area to permit the other businesses and industries to put satellites up to do the various tasks like receive and send communications. Actually NASA is a research agency by and large. We are doing research to improve aircraft to improve spacecraft to have the ability to go farther into space to another planet if they wanted to. But by and large we are a research agency not building things particularly, because industrial companies do that.

Susan: So NASA’s research precedes commercial development?

Jack: NASA is a government agency that does long team research, which generally the companies can’t afford to do, but they eventually use. Our work is generally leading 10-20 years ahead of the actual development of these ideas by industry. For instance we are doing nanotechnology and information technology research that leads what others will eventually do with it.

Susan: You mentioned Nanotech, some people might not know what that is.

Jack: Nanotechnology is new to me. I am an aerodynamicist incidentally. It’s looking at very very small versions of things we can build in order to make them light weight in order to make them fault tolerant. We need to build new computers that will last 15 to 20 years if we are going to send probes out to Jupiter and Europa; we need computers that will not fail. Small nanotech devices that we can use to put into these computers and incidentally to use for medical research. If you make things small enough you can have them almost non-obtrusive instruments that can be used. Nanotech is name that has been used for the research of small things. Its applications are for medical research, space, and computers.

Susan: Jim wants to know which is NASA’s best plane?

Jack: NASA doesn’t really have a plane. They do research to help companies build planes. My favorite plane is the Blackbird, a mach 2 vehicle, because it looks good, it’s a mean looking airplane. I guess the most interesting or useful plane or spacecraft is the shuttle orbiter. It has been used over and over again now since it first went into orbit in 1981 so it’s now 20 years old. We celebrated it’s 20^th year of flight this April.

Susan: Ann is asking does NASA help make planes safe?

Jack: Absolutely, we have a very large research effort at the Langley Research Center in structural dynamics. I haven’t mentioned much about the other centers but Langley does much of the work in the structural dynamics research in the field of aeronautics whether it is aircraft or space. Glenn Research Center, on the other hand, helps make propulsion systems more reliable. When you put all this together, the shape, plane structure, the propulsion system, we, NASA, contributes to almost every system of an aircraft and then how they fly, an area we call flight controls is done both at Langley and at Ames. This is another area concerned with airplane safety. That’s another reason why we need to have fault tolerant computers, so that computers don’t fail and airplanes can fly safely.

Susan: I know you worked at Dryden Research Center. Can you tell about the research being done there?

Jack: Well, Dryden is a small research center in the desert. They fly hypersonic and supersonic aircraft there. It does all the flight research for the agency. Dryden does the fourth element of aircraft, design: 1. computer design, 2. wind tunnels, 3. simulators and 4. flight test. In fact in looking at the flight characteristics of an aircraft they give feedback into the whole aircraft design cycle in terms of efficiency and safety.

We have other centers in the agency that are focused on other things, Marshall Space Flight Center is the center where we do research on advanced boosters for upcoming missions we may have for future rockets, Kennedy Space Center is where we do all the launch for the space program. The lunar missions Apollo, Mercury and Gemini missions were all launched from Kennedy.

Goddard Space Flight Center is where we do research about satellites. I mentioned we use satellites to look back at Earth to research climate and other problems. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is an arm of NASA, not a civil servant agency, but it does most of the research regarding planetary probes. The recent vehicle, which is now in orbit around Mars, was managed by JPL and they will manage the future Mars missions and other outlying planet exploration missions. Johnson Space Center is where all the human space flight work is conducted and where the astronauts call home.

We do some astronaut training here at NASA Ames Research Center as a matter of fact. They come up here about two or three times a year.

Susan: We are launching today. You can see that also on NASA Quest’s live stream and you can follow up with that later today.

Jack: I went to Russia last year to see the first launch of the spacecraft up to the space station. The first crew went up from Kazakhstan. It was a very interesting place to get to and to watch a launch from. It is much more remote than our launch site. They have launched a lot of vehicles from there, very effectively too.

Susan: Did you enjoy being in Russia? Was it very different from here?

Jack: It was different but I enjoyed it. I had never been there before. It was in November and it wasn’t as cold as I expected. I took all sorts of clothes. The Russians were very friendly. The Russians have had remarkable achievements in space. In fact they are probably the reason that we are as far along as we are. They launched Sputnik in 1957. That’s when we really jumped on board the space program.

Susan: Now the Russians are our friends and we are working together.

Jack: Yes we are working together a lot on the International Space Station.

Susan: Ryan asks, "Are there any plans to replace the Space Station?"

Jack: The International Space Station is a long-term investment. It will be there for many years and it was built to be there for many years. Many countries are participating in the station. There will be astronauts from many more countries and it is supposed to be a laboratory for doing long-term research in space, on the effects of gravity and living in space. It will be there for a long time.

Susan: How about the shuttle will that be replaced in the future Jack?

Jack: I have a hunch the space shuttle will be around for a long time. We have a program that plans for vehicles to replace the shuttle. The shuttle has been around for 20 years. It’s probably got another 20 years of life in it. We have plans to make some modifications to it and we have upgraded the control systems. It’s a long-term investment as well.

Susan: We have a question from Will. "Would you like to go into space?"

Jack: I would always like to go into space. John Glenn beat me to it though. We are about the same age but he had more political clout.

Yes, I would love to go!

Susan: Why would you like to go?

Jack: Just to get the feel of it, and to see what the Earth looks like from up there. I think it would be very humbling to see the Earth from up space. We think of ourselves with a limited perspective down here, we can only see so far. But to look back at this "small blue dot" as Carl Sagan calls it I think would be very exciting.

Susan: Cecilia asks, "How do you keep coming up with new ideas?"

Jack: We keep hiring bright young people out of college. That’s what you folks are supposed to do for us twenty years from now. Go to school get a good education and your mind will start coming up with new ideas. We need new ideas so I hope you will go do it, get an education!

Susan: I was thinking about this question a little bit. Do you think that new ideas come out of trying to solve problems?

Jack: Well it’s been said that no problem is a failure. You always learn something. The more you learn the more like you are to take off on different paths.

Try not to think in a box. Your teachers and your instructors and your professors are going to teach you certain things based on the way they see things but you have to think beyond the things they teach you. They teach you the fundamentals you need. But education is only complete when you die. You get a degree but you never stop learning, you keep learning the whole seventy years or however long you are lucky enough to keep learning.

Talk to everybody. You’ve got to talk to a lot of people, and you’ve must read a lot of books. Then get some time to think.

Susan: It doesn’t seem to be a problem coming up with new ideas here at NASA.

Jack: Well the fellow who invented the swept back wings, R.T. Jones, people thought he was crazy. They said you never see a bird with sweptback wings. He replied "No but I’ve never seen a bird fly very fast either." So he prevailed, published a report and became famous.

Susan: Jose asks, "Which is more important to NASA airplanes or space? And how come?"

Jack: Well you can’t say which is more important. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Spacecraft do space exploration. Airplanes are for transporting us around our globe. One of these days we may even have an aircraft that will fly around Mars, we have thought about that before. They have two different purposes. We can’t pick one above the other.

Susan: Jack which NASA innovations in space were highlights for you and you think will continue to be built on.

Jack: Well highlights for me, I’ll never forget it was going to the first space shuttle landing in 1981.

Of course we had sent men into space, into orbit and had them land again. We had the ballistic missile reentry vehicles; I had seen a Mercury launch, a Gemini launch and an Apollo launch.

For some reason, the shuttle landing maybe because it had three astronauts on board, was more exiting. It was at Dryden Flight Center and I remember everyone was looking for it, the senators, the congressmen and the movie star, the fellow who played superman, Christopher Reeves. He took glider lessons at Dryden and he wanted to learn how to fly. All of a sudden there were two quick bangs. It was the sonic booms coming from the nose and the wings. It was at about 25,000 feet and all of a sudden everyone knew right where to look. It was very exciting and then the landing too.

Susan: Wow! Was it pretty loud?

Jack: It was very loud. It startled everyone even though we knew it was going to happen.

The fourth landing of the shuttle was when President Reagan came down to Dryden. It was on the Fourth of July. We opened the gates at one o’clock in the morning and there were between 200,000 or 300,000 people there. That was when Reagan announced that we had to have a permanent presence in space.

Susan: You mentioned the Mars probe, what is the mission, and what will we learn from visiting Mars?

Jack: Well I think we will find whether if life can exist in environments other then our own. The main thrust is to understand how life was formed and how it can be supported. The other thing we learn is about Planet Earth. It is a very fragile planet and we need to learn how to keep it alive.

Susan: One area of research is the study of the ozone layer which protects our atmosphere. Another area of research is global warming.

Jack: We can’t predict very reliably what is going to happen to the weather from one week to the next. And we need to understand all the other things that go with that. We see local events but I am not sure we really know if that’s really significant with the ozone layer over a long enough period of time. This is a tough thing to predict, and to understand. I think that space exploration will help us understand that.

Susan: It’s amazing to think that this started over 100 years ago with Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Jack: I don’t think so. I think it started long before that. I think it started with DiVinci. He built models of helicopters. I understand that before that the early Egyptians knew how to design wing planforms and wing shapes in 4 BC.

Susan: I have one last thing to announce to everyone. We have a surprise present for every one who attended today we have a career card about Jack Boyd that you can download and collect. The URL is in the chat room but I will read it to you. It is http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/aero/chats/cards/CC-boydj2.pdf

Thank you so much for joining us today Jack.

Jack: Thank you and get reading.