Rocket-Fueled Genius with Garry Lyles
Join Sandy and Sandra as they embark on an awe-inspiring exploration of the captivating world of rocket science with the esteemed guest, Garry Lyles, as he shares his personal journey, from a childhood fascination with rockets to becoming a revered figure in the space sector on the podcast today. Garry also reviews the challenges, triumphs, and trade-offs that encompass the design and construction of rockets, with a particular focus on the groundbreaking Space Shuttle main engines (SSMEs) and their evolution into the awe-inspiring Space Launch System (SLS). Through captivating storytelling and insightful anecdotes, this episode will take you on an exhilarating voyage through the intricacies of rocket design and the fascinating developments in the Artemis Program, igniting your imagination and leaving you inspired to reach for the stars.
Together with our hosts, Garry dives into various themes surrounding rocket design, manufacturing, and the future of space exploration, and provides a window into his remarkable journey, discussing the challenges and successes encountered while working on the iconic Space Shuttle main engines. He reveals the transformative process that led to the development of NASA's cutting-edge Space Launch System (SLS) and insights into the visionary Artemis program. With an emphasis on the intricate trade-offs involved in rocket design, the importance of rigorous testing and failure analysis, and the critical considerations when crafting crewed and uncrewed vehicles, this episode unveils the awe-inspiring intricacies of the cosmos and offers a glimpse into the promising future of space exploration. Join us on this enthralling adventure that encapsulates the essence of human ingenuity, resilience, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: In November of 2022, the Artemis 1 mission launched out of the Cape Kennedy Center, headed to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The Space Launch System rocket propelled the Orion capsule out of Earth's gravity well and on a trajectory away from Earth.
Sandy Winnefeld: The SLS, a rocket on par with the powerful Saturn V used in the Apollo missions, is the key to America's return to the lunar surface in the next few years.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Our guest last week was Rick LaBrode, who was the flight director for that mission. Today we talked with Garry Lyles, who recently retired as the SLS Chief Engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Sandy Winnefeld: It really is rocket science, and we'll dig into how NASA engineers manage risks to create the powerful rockets that send humans off the planet.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Garry, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone. I hate to use a cliche, but Sandra and I have always wanted to have a rocket scientist on the show because this is a show about risk. So I'm really happy to have you here today.
Garry Lyles: Yeah, thanks. This is fun. I love talking about rockets. It's one of my favorite things to do.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. And I'm actually looking forward to getting into the guts of the Space Launch System and the Artemis Program with you. But we'd like to start with the beginning of our guest's journey. So can you tell our listeners how you got involved in the space sector and what attracted you to rockets, specifically?
Garry Lyles: Wow. When you grow up near Huntsville, you're kind of automatically attracted to rockets and NASA. I remember sitting and watching the Apollo 11 landing late at night on TV. My uncle worked for NASA. He was in the facilities office at NASA. My dad worked for a contractor for NASA for a while. He did preventive maintenance on the big test stands. And so I got to hear all these stories when he came home about walking around the big test stands and the engine tests. I even got to go out to an open house back when I was about 10 years old and got to see an engine firing.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Those are awesome.
Garry Lyles: Yeah. But I always wanted to be a mechanic. My dad was a mechanic or a carpenter. My grandfather was a carpenter, so that's what I wanted to do. But my dad would have it no other way than for me to go to school because I was the only one in the family that had ever gone to college. So I decided, well, the best thing for me if I like mechanical stuff and building stuff, is to be an engineer. But when I graduated, there wasn't much going on. NASA had gone through a reduction in force fairly recently, and they weren't hiring. The only people that were hiring were big chemical companies or steel companies, and I didn't have a lot of interest in that. So I went off to graduate school for a while, and somehow I just turned in a resume to NASA because I was tired of going to school. And I guess you never know. You can't plan these things the way they happen.
Somebody asked me the other day, what would you do if you were 30 years old? What would you have done different? And I probably would have said, don't worry about planning your life too much, because you can't do that. So it just happened to me. I went in, had lunch with a couple of the managers in NASA. They invited me in, interviewed a couple of guys, and suddenly I got a call one day that said, “Hey, do you want to work for NASA?” And they offered me a job. It turns out they offered me a job that I had never interviewed for, didn't know anything about. I walked into a group, the propulsion systems group, that I didn't know anybody, didn't even know what propulsion systems was all about, didn't know what it meant, and it all got started. I sat at the same desk for ten years doing propulsion and thermal analysis on the Space Shuttle.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Garry, what was your educational background? What is it that you think drew you or them to you? Were you a mechanical engineer, chemical?
Garry Lyles: I was a mechanical engineer. It's one of those things where you look out in the industry and you see who's hiring. And I got into chemical engineering, and I hated chemistry.
Sandy Winnefeld: That’s too bad.
Garry Lyles: So, I got into mechanical engineering. I have a degree in mechanical engineering.
Sandy Winnefeld: And so at the time, it seems a little counterintuitive that a propulsion group would want to hire a mechanical engineer, but there's a lot of mechanical engineering that would go into it, I would imagine, in two ways. One is just the mechanics of the machinery that's got to move a nozzle around or something, but also the thermodynamics that mechanical engineers understand so well. Which discipline was it that you used the most out of that mechanical engineering degree?
Garry Lyles: Yeah, well, I was really into fluid mechanics and thermal analysis, and thermodynamics. To me, I guess I was good in that area. I like that area. So within the propulsion systems group is a lot of internal fluid mechanics. You got to keep the propellant in the tank, which is a lot of thermodynamics, especially for cryogenic propulsion. You got to get the propellant down to the engines, which is fluid mechanics, and there's a lot of thermal control in it. So I guess I was relatively good in that area. And it fit perfectly, actually, in the propulsion system.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Garry, I know you worked on the Space Shuttle main engines over there in Huntsville. Today, they're still the most advanced rocket engines that have ever been built. And it was impressive how well they worked during the whole shuttle era. We had a few problems with them, but not too many. So what do you think went into making the SSME so amazing? And as we were learning them as operators, it was impressive how fast those turbines were spinning, and I don't think people realized that one small failure in those turbine blades would have torn the aft end of the shuttle apart. So why do you think those engines were so successful?
Garry Lyles: Well, it started with the challenge. Those engines are what they are because of the requirements of the Space Shuttle, because it was basically an airplane, and the engines had to be relatively small and lightweight. It required a different engine cycle, thermodynamic cycle than we had ever built before. And that was a stage combustion cycle where all of the fuel that went into that engine went through the main combustion chamber and created thrust that put tremendous requirements. And because it was a hydrogen engine, it put tremendous requirements on the turbomachinery.
If you remember, there were probably two major advancements in technology with the space shuttle. One was, of course, the orbiter tiles, and the other was the high-pressure turbo machinery on the space shuttle main engine. So you start with that challenge. That created a lot of other challenges. We had to do things different than we had ever done before. We had always tested components first and then assembled those into an engine system. Well, you can't do that with a stage combustion cycle because the complexity of the test fixture is so much that it's easier just to assemble the engine and put the engine on the test stand. So we started with engine system testing. And the engine, because of its high technology and the turbomachinery, had a lot of problems in the early days. It had rotor dynamic issues, it had thermal issues, we cracked turbine blades. But how we got there was a lot of tests. We went through what we used to call a test-fail-fix cycle, where we had to test and find the problems and fix the problems and go into test again as rapidly as we could. It turned out that the more we tested, the better we got, the more design changes we made. We evolved that engine, though, over time, significantly with new turbomachinery.
There was a couple of technologies during the process of the life of the space shuttle program that really advanced the state of the art in the space shuttle main engine. One of those was silicon nitride bearings. Silicon nitride was a material that we didn't have when we first built the shuttle engines. The other was the casting technique. We eliminated hundreds of miles of welds when we were able to go to the advanced casting methodologies on both the powerhead and the main engine. So those improvements as we went along, as we tested and improved the engine, eventually that engine became so reliable, you don't stop worrying about rocket engines, okay? The old saying goes is you never turn your back on a rocket engine.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I had faith in you guys.
Garry Lyles: We certainly had confidence in it. Me knowing the internal workings of the engine, I had a lot of confidence in the engine. And you can tell I had a lot of confidence in the engine because I selected it for the SLS.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So what lessons did you learn working with the SSMEs that were useful for the design and manufacture of SLS? Because I don't think a lot of people realize that the engines that are going to be long-term on the Space Launch System were derivations of the space shuttle main engines.
One lesson I learned in working is that the SSME space shuttle main engine was the process of evolution. There’s nothing that can compete with the process of the improvement, test, improvement, test, improvement. I let a team of rocket engineers that came from the three existing rocket engine companies that at the time which was Rocketdyne, Pratt & Whitney, and Aerojet. And what I learned from that is we looked not only at rocket engines but at airline engines and fighter jet engines. And we found out that they were unbelievably reliable. They operated at temperatures as high as the space shuttle main engine. Not at the pressures but they still were under high stress, high energy operation, and those engines would run forever. And it was because they had to bob those engines over time and help improve them. And they had what they call a technology test bed at all of engine builders and they would run all of their technologies through that technology test bed, ground test engine before they even incorporate it into the engines. That led me to believe that the next vehicle should not be elite in technology if we wanted to actually implement it within the cost ceiling that we had and within the schedule that we want to advance a heavy lift launch vehicle.
So all of that learning about evolution led me to believe that we ought to evolve into SLS. And that’s the reason we have the propulsion system we do, that’s the reason we have RS-25 which is the space shuttle engine, basically, that’s the reason we have the solid rocket boosters. I avoided much of the risk of development by utilizing the propulsion system that has evolved over time. And we already invested all of this learning into that propulsion system.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Garry, I've got a couple of questions for you. One, I know it had to be a real thrill for you the first time you saw the shuttle launch and do it safely because your rocket engine was on that thing. But as an engineer, as a design and test engineer, it probably was almost equally important to you the first time you ran that engine on a stand and it did what you wanted it to do. The test-fail test. It was like, actually a successful test, this thing's ready to go. Which of those moments was more special for you?
Garry Lyles: Yeah. I think seeing the flight, I never will forget STS-1. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen at the time because when it came, cleared the tower, and did the pirouette to fly east, I thought it was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. I guess I still do SLS rivals at SLS produces more power and more noise. It looked like the sun rising that night. I never will forget that shuttle launch.
Sandy Winnefeld: And a shameless plug here. I believe John Young was the commander of that mission, former Navy pilot and Georgia Tech graduate, so a little intersection here with that. So let's talk about Artemis a little bit for our listeners. NASA's most recent Big Kahuna rocket. Can you put that system in context for us? How big is it compared to, say, the rocket that launched the Apollo mission to the moon? Give us a sense for the size.
Garry Lyles: It's comparable to the Saturn V. We actually produce more thrust than Saturn V. We're up above 8 million pounds of thrust. It's certainly a different-looking vehicle. It's evolved in its final configuration. It will be very similar to the payload capability of Saturn V.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The Artemis-1 launch buildup went through several attempts. And I know people were watching in the news and sort of trying to figure out what was going on. So you can walk everybody through why that happened and how you had to manage the risk and unknowns of dealing with the first-time launch because you were learning every launch attempt, there was a new learning point.
Garry Lyles: Yeah, we knew a lot about the vehicle because we had taken the core stage and engines through the green run test and we hadn't had a lot of experience with the propulsion system. We had test fired the solid rocket boosters many times. What is different is when you go to a new facility, I always worry about interfaces where the facility and the vehicle are joined together and you have to operate them as one system. And that being the brand new thing about the first launch, there's always learning involved, especially with, I say especially, it's any vehicle. But with hydrogen vehicles, it becomes very important to have good interfaced.
Sandy Winnefeld: Because hydrogen likes to leak. Little tiny molecule.
Garry Lyles: Yeah. That's what makes it such a good propellant. And so you have to deal with operational problems that it creates. But what we found in doing that and so we planned on tanking tests, a wet dress rehearsal. We had planned to do whatever it takes to get the loading procedure correct. And those are the kinds of things that we had to work. It's not surprising that we had to do it that many times. My experience with shuttle is the launch vehicle had many more problems than SLS had on the first space shuttle flight. But again, those interfaces created problems. And so in this case, on the first launch attempt, we could not show, based on the criteria that we had set using the instrumentation that we had available to us, that one of the engines had actually been chilled down to the point that it could get in its start configuration. That was probably due to the constraint we put on it.
This is what was nice about the first attempt, was we had the opportunity when we couldn't chill the engine to actually go through troubleshooting on the path. And so that first launch attempt became a test for us. And we reconfigured the vehicle and ran several tests, including closing off all the engines except the one that we couldn't prove that we had chilled down. And we showed that that engine was actually chilled appropriately and so we changed our criteria through a lot of past experience with that engine, we knew it was being chilled.
The next attempt, we had a leak. We had also had a leak on some of the filling drain valves and filling drain disconnects. And we could not show– This is a case where you have a criteria, again, that limits the amount of hydrogen that you can leave, and we kept breaking that limit. And so it created a situation where we actually had to roll back, replace some of the seals. We actually, in real-time, changed the loading procedure on the hydrogen side because we determined that we were trying to load hydrogen too fast, and it was not allowing that seal to position itself and seal. And so the crew changed the loading procedure. They called it a softer, gentler loading procedure.
But all that was done, all that learning happened, and it's things that it's almost normal. You have to go through. We won't go through that kind of thing again, but we may have leaks again. But that was a great learning process at first launch.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Garry, let's talk a little bit about the design team. In my humble aerospace engineering education, I was always struck by the trade-offs that are there. The structures folks always want the beefiest, strongest structure, which costs weight. The aerodynamics folks always want the slickest, cleanest exterior in the right shape and all that. And, of course, the propulsion people are stuck in the middle, and everybody's fighting against drag and weight and lift and all that sort of stuff. I'm familiar with that with airplanes. But what about designing a rocket? What kind of trade-offs do you find from your side of the house as the propulsion person? How does that process work when you're doing a rocket instead of an airplane?
Garry Lyles: I think it works very similarly. The big job of the chief engineer, really, as the architect of the design, is to manage all of those trades. We had a unique situation with SLS in that we had existing designs that we were integrating with one clean sheet system, which was the core stage. When you have a situation where your engines, your boosters, your upper stage, even your spacecraft was already designed, you don't only have trade-offs, you got an integration job of making sure that you don't impact an existing design and cause them to change unless you completely have to do that.
We have, for example, more thrust going through the forward attach of the boosters on SLS than we had on space shuttle. And to keep from redesigning that forward attach, we put the forward attach into a structural test so that we tested it all the way to failure to see what its actual margin of safety was. And so the trade-off was, okay, depend on your analysis and redesign the forward attach, or go spend some money on a test article and break it and see what kind of margin of safety you have. Those kind of trades were, I think, unique to SLS because of the way we had to deal with the existing designs.
Sandy Winnefeld: So it sounds like what you're saying in that very interesting example of testing of failure rather than redesigning, that you must have found that the original design was more conservative than they thought. Because if it hadn't, if it failed exactly where they thought it was going to fail, you might not have been able to use it.
Garry Lyles: Yeah, we did. We found out we had a sufficient safety margin, and we normally find that engineers are relatively conservative. And so you have to really push back. Everybody wants to carry a little bit of margin in their pocket. My job as the chief engineer was let's find that margin, let's get it all out on the table and see what we have. Because for launch vehicles, you can't afford heavy. The rocket equation doesn't allow it. You want as much specific impulse as you can get and you want as light of weight as you can get. That becomes a problem with a hydrogen system.
One of the early trades that we made, should I go with hydrogen or should I go back to the Saturn V kind of configuration with a heavy propellant? And a trade always gets to be, can I build a hydrogen tank, propellant tank that big, and is it going to be light enough that it actually will provide me with the performance that I need? When we made those trades, we knew that we were trading some manufacturing difficulties with SLS that we would not have had with a heavy propellant. So what I had to trade in that case was do I want to develop a new rocket engine or redevelop F-1 Saturn engine from 50 years ago knowledge or do I want to develop a kerosene or heavy propellant engine from scratch? Or do I want to reduce the risk on the propulsion system and take the risk in the manufacturing process on the hydrogen tank? And that's an example of a trade.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So let's talk about that for a second because there were some challenges with manufacturing that tank, as a matter of fact, and NASA had to go back and the contractors had to go back and look at the friction stir welding process and how you scale it up. Did you guys have other manufacturing issues and how does that affect risk and safety?
Garry Lyles: Well, you force it not to affect risk and safety. You try to force those kinds of issues into the schedule risk, and cost risk, and out of the safety risk. That's what we do. Yeah. One of the big manufacturing issues was the size of the tank. We had to build a friction stir welding machine the size that had never been built before. We had to weld because of the loads that go into the lock state. We had to friction stir weld, a weld that was thicker than we had ever welded before. And so we had to develop all of those welding criteria, the speed of the RPMs, of the friction stir welder, the speed of travel. All of those things had to be developed basically from scratch. And the alignment of the welding machine had to be unbelievably close and we had to fix that a couple of times.
The inner tank is required to take so much load that it is a heavy formed structure that is riveted together or bolted together. And we had a lot of problems assembling that inner tank area that carries all of the thrust of the solid rocket boosters. It was mostly the size. The fact that we had to train a new manufacturing crew that had to build hardware that had never been built before. It turned out that manufacturing was a long pole in the tent, basically when it came right down to SLS.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Garry, I know you mentioned earlier that in the course of doing the space shuttle main engine program that you were able to develop some advanced casting techniques that reduced a whole bunch of welt. And I think our listeners would want to understand that the complex shapes associated with rocket nozzle and engine design are really amazing. Have you found that additive manufacturing would mitigate that even further?
Garry Lyles: Absolutely. That's another technology that has come online since shuttle. And in fact, the next generation of RS-25. We're going from basically the same engines that flew on space shuttle to a design where many of the components can be additively manufactured. One of those, the first component that we're chaining is what we call a Z-Baffle in the pogo accumulator. It's a small component, but it's a very complex shape and very expensive to make. And so we're taking those one at a time as we get familiar and learn more about additive manufacturing, then we take the next step and are able to change some of the components. Some of the valve housings, for example, can be additively manufactured. So it will be a big deal.
One of the big drive on next generation of engines is cost because, as you know, space shuttle engine was built to be a highly reusable, long-life rocket engine. And so its cost of production is higher than you would like because we're expanding the engine. And when you expand that much hardware, you have to get the hardware cost down as much as you can. All of those new manufacturing techniques are driving the cost of that engine tremendously. And so the next couple of iterations of that engine will be much lower cost.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So I've always been curious, how would you describe the differences in design and manufacturing approaches between when you're working on a crewed vehicle versus an uncrewed vehicle? Is it margins mainly?
Garry Lyles: Yeah. Well, yes, that's one of them. It starts with the design. And obviously, I've never worked on anything but human-rated vehicles, so I don't necessarily know what kind of additional risk might be taken in a noncrewed vehicle. If I was designing a noncrewed vehicle, I would put a lot of the same design specifications in it as I would a crewed vehicle because it drives you to reliability. And if I want a highly reliable launch vehicle and not lose a very expensive or maybe a one-of-a-kind payload, then I want a highly reliable vehicle. And that starts with design criteria. We have design standards that set factors of safety on stress. It sets factors of safety on fatigue life, both low cycle and high cycle fatigue. It also sets some criteria on redundancy. There's a lot of systems that, especially in avionics systems, electrical components, where it's very easy to add redundancy to the system. And so you look at fault tolerance. I would like my system to be at least one fault-tolerant and most times two fault-tolerant. Those all go into the selection of the electrical components. For example, you want to have the paperwork and the testing and the proven reliability on those components. And then in many cases, you still have redundancy. We have redundancy in our computers. We have redundancy in all of our operating instrumentation, which allows us to assure that we don't, for example, shut down a good engine. So all of those things go into the design.
Plus, you got to remember that the crew is an asset.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Thank you.
Garry Lyles: And so if you've got a crew on board that can prevent a failure, then you want to be able to use the crew to do that. It works better in an in-space situation where things are happening slower. It's hard to do on a launch vehicle. But for example, on this launch vehicle, we have provided the crew with the ability to change the guidance if they need to. And so they can actually enter into the flight software and they don't have a stick that they can fly the vehicle with, but they can enter and input into that configuration.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And so if I may interrupt real quick because with AI coming on and computers getting more and more, I won't say the word intelligent, I guess, but adaptable to unique situations, how long do you think that the crew is going to be as much of an asset for that purpose as you just talked about?
Garry Lyles: I think as long as we have pilots for the crew.
Sandy Winnefeld: Thank you.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I just had to ask that question.
Garry Lyles: We'll never get there. We always have. One difference in the design process on a crewed vehicle is you got the crew involved. And so the crew sits in all of our meetings. We talk to the crew all the time and we understand what they want. And I asked one of our crew members one time, “You're never going to give up on having the capability to fly this thing, are you?” And he said, No.” And I said, “Okay, I give up then. We can do that.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Sorry, I had to ask.
Garry Lyles: The other important thing is, as a last resort if I have one or two fares and I have an imminent catastrophe, then I need a way to get the crew off. And so having a launch abort system and the ability to send a crew caution and warning from the launch vehicle to tell them what the status is of the vehicle and to recommend abort if the vehicle thinks they need to get off, all of that, you just don't have that in an uncrewed vehicle. And so that's a design parameter that you have to deal with. You don't want abort regions, what we call black regions, where there's no place to abort. In the case of SLS if we lose an engine, for example, which I don't expect, but if we lose an engine on the pad, we can take Orion to a nice, safe location to get off. They don't have to get off right then and do some kind of miraculous abort.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And if I may, I don't think people realize that we had black zones on the shuttle, and we had some very sporty abort scenarios right off the pad that–
Garry Lyles: I remember the crew, including John Young, talking about the RTLS.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. Return to launch site.
Garry Lyles: Return to launch site, yeah, and that was sporty.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I would never have wanted to fly one of those.
Sandy Winnefeld: We'll probably get into that someday. We’ll interview Sandy, and she can tell us all about the things that we didn't know were happening.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But anyways.
Sandy Winnefeld: We're getting close to being out of time. I did want to ask you, Garry, about the future of rocket design. There are a number of applications in space for rockets that don't rely so much on chemical reactions, for example, which prevents you from having to carry a lot of heavy fuel things like electrical power to accelerate xenon ions to very high speeds. That sort of thing. What do you see? Not just for the sort of maneuvering and control of little things, but for the big things. Are there any major technologies coming down the road that could fundamentally change the business of putting heavy objects into space, or are we pretty much stuck with what we've got?
Garry Lyles: It is hard to beat a hydrogen combustion when you want to go take heavy things very fast. You're taking me back to some years that I spent managing what we call advanced propulsion, and we thought of all kinds of things. We thought about lasers, laser propulsion to shoot the vehicle into space. We thought about augmenting the lift-off with a magnetic rail, for example, to get it up to speed so that you don't have to carry the big boosters. One of the big technologies that we spent a lot of effort on that is still out there is air-breathing combined cycle propulsion. We had the National Aerospace Plane program back in the early ‘90s. We had X-33 and VentureStar in the ‘90s.
Single stage to orbit is still you got combustion, but you're leaving one propellant on the ground. You're breathing air. I think combined cycle going to hypersonic propulsion is one of those things that will eventually happen. We took it on earlier than we should have. We were a little bit optimistic about how lightweight we could make a vehicle, what kind of thermal protection we would need because we're traveling through the atmosphere at Mach 7 or 8 or whatever it turns out to be. All of those technologies will come along someday. I think the nearest term non-combustion kind of technology, though, will be nuclear propulsion. And I think if we've really got our mind on Mars and we don't want to spend forever in CIS-Lunar space if we really want to go outbound into the solar system and beyond, I'm a believer that nuclear propulsion or a hybrid of solar electric propulsion and nuclear propulsion will be what gets us to Mars.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The nuclear is getting a fresh look. I saw Pam, who is one of our listeners, the Deputy Administrator of NASA, announced that NASA and DARPA are going to work on a nuclear program for engines.
Garry Lyles: I'm happy about that. I'm really an advocate because the moon is hard. Mars, in order of magnitude, harder. And the big deal with Mars, we have to protect the crew, limit the radiation environment, and actually take people to Mars. We have to get there as fast as we can. Now, I'm all for taking cargo and pre-placing resources on Mars with solar electric or anything we can. It can be a slow boat, but I would be for putting the crew on the nuclear system and getting them there as fast as possible. Plus you can go anytime with a nuclear system. You don't have to wait for the two-year cycle.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: When the planets align.
Garry Lyles: Yeah. You have to wait for the planets to be aligned. Otherwise, with a nuclear system, you got so much performance, you can go direct.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. Well, maybe we'll see it in our lifetime. As we wrap up, Garry, first of all, thank you for your time. Secondly, congratulations to you and the whole team. The Artemis-1 launch was flawless. We heard a little bit today about all of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making it look so easy, and it's not. We look forward to Artemis-2, 3, 4, 5 and beyond as NASA continues its campaign to develop some CIS-Lunar activities in preparation for Mars. So, I think you can be very proud of you and your team and what you guys did to put us on that path. And it was just delightful talking with you today.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, it's great to talk, cut through the media and all that kind of stuff and talk to somebody who really has their hands on it. It's really fun, so thanks.
Garry Lyles: Well, thanks for inviting me. Like I said, you could take either one of those subjects and I could talk an hour on. So, I'm sorry if I went long-winded, but I would like to say that I am very proud of the team. This was a great design and operations team that we put together over the last ten years, and I'm very proud of them and happy for them
Dr. Sandra Magnus: As you should be.
Sandy Winnefeld: And we wish you and the team continued success.
Garry Lyles: Thank you.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was Garry Lyles, former NASA Chief Engineer of the Space Launch System Rocket. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. Join us next time for another episode of The Adrenaline Zone.
