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00:00Our 21st century life is seemingly warp speed.
00:03Every action, reaction and process buzzing along at a mad clip.
00:08Rarely do we stop and take notice, except the odd time and expected event fails.
00:13You're so used to it just being functional.
00:15And as soon as that goes out, we're lost.
00:17Our safety, comfort, sustenance.
00:20Indeed, our very existence is now almost entirely digitally managed.
00:24We're developing new technologies to achieve things that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago.
00:28We've got the best engineers striving to make the impossible possible.
00:32The supersonic advancements that gave rise to our current reality
00:36were accelerated by a force most of us don't even think about, the space program.
00:40We get these spinoffs that help us in society.
00:42There's thousands of examples of that.
00:44People have no idea of how much NASA has impacted their lives.
00:49Innovation and progress were set in motion by the Industrial Revolution.
00:53But a world without NASA would be almost unrecognizable.
01:23This street right now is filled with people figuring out how they're going to get to their next appointment,
01:27where their parking garage is, where their hotel is.
01:30All these people without GPS, they're lost.
01:34GPS signal not found.
01:36The technology in their phones is the great grandchild of technology that was originally built by NASA
01:42to track a satellite flying around the Earth.
01:48The launch of the world's first satellite marks the dawn of the space age and sets the course for competition
01:54between Cold War rivals to prove dominance in spaceflight capabilities.
01:58The Eagle has landed.
01:59But unknown to us then, this single event would become critical to evolving navigation on our own home planet.
02:06In 1957, Sputnik launches into space.
02:09The space race becomes a real thing.
02:11Sputnik shocks the West.
02:13The perceived tech gap launches a nation into action that will forever change our way of life.
02:18I think it would have been extremely difficult to predict that things would change this much this fast.
02:24If you look back at science fiction from the 50s and 60s,
02:28they have the idea that you're going to be able to travel to other planets, but the kinds of computing
02:33power
02:34that they imagine is nowhere near what you have just in a relatively ordinary smartphone.
02:39The pace of technological advance is largely driven by things for the space race.
02:45Immediately, the U.S. government approves funding for the Explorer program
02:50that produces the USA's first spacecraft.
02:53Waterman!
02:57Within a year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, is founded.
03:02NASA and the space race are a huge part of where our lives are today.
03:06That technology is used here as well as for building new spacecraft,
03:11developing missions to go to Mars, doing human physiology research.
03:14All these things come back and impact us right here where we are.
03:17But it's the minor achievement of establishing a mode of tracking Sputnik
03:22using the satellite's audio fingerprint that had one of the greatest impacts.
03:27Sputnik is moving at some constant velocity and it's sending out a signal.
03:32That signal is coming to us at a certain speed.
03:35We know that the Earth is moving at a certain speed.
03:37So in theory, if you can measure when each of those signals come in from a fixed point on the
03:41Earth,
03:42we can back compute when it must have left the satellite
03:45and therefore roughly where that satellite is in space above Earth at any given time.
03:51But how would primitive radio tracking for a lonely satellite give rise to our new way of ordering a taxi
03:57or food?
03:58If you can track the location of a satellite in space from Earth, can you do the opposite?
04:03In theory, it's the same thing, just in reverse.
04:05Then you can compute where on Earth you are based on when the signal was sent from the satellite.
04:11So let's talk about how my vehicle currently knows where it is.
04:16So there's a GPS receiver and that GPS receiver has line of sight right now to at least three or
04:22four satellites, probably more.
04:24So all of those satellites have an atomic clock on them that's perfectly synchronized to each other.
04:29They beam that signal down to Earth and we can triangulate our position terrestrially on Earth
04:35based on where those satellites are in outer space and how long it takes for each of those signals to
04:42reach us in our car right here.
04:44And at this very same moment, that same process is happening to probably 90% of the other cars that
04:49we see on the road right now.
04:50So if at this very moment everyone's GPS stopped working, there'd be an awful lot of confusion on the roads.
04:56You would see a lot of those people pulling over to the side.
04:59We'd probably see a lot of people scratching heads and very confused and maybe going around asking for directions.
05:04My parents would be laughing at me because they had to do that for 40 years and they seem to
05:08have no problem with it.
05:10But at the same time, they've also become dependent upon GPS.
05:12I think everyone really has. We just take it for granted.
05:16GPS plays a really critical role in a whole bunch of everyday activities, right?
05:20If you use your phone to navigate from one place to another, you want to try a new restaurant, right?
05:24You punch it into your phone. It tells you how to get there.
05:27If you order packages to be delivered to your house, the tracking will tell you exactly where they are.
05:32You do ride sharing. It tells you, you know, your driver is just up the block and he's turned the
05:36wrong direction.
05:37We'd still see this scene behind us with that GPS. We'd still see cars moving.
05:41We'd still see people walking around. We would still see financial transactions happening.
05:45The speed and accuracy with which those things happen would be considerably reduced
05:50without GPS. But this seemingly limitless tracking wasn't so easy with the earliest GPS systems.
05:56Navstar was effectively the first global positioning system, a constellation of 27 satellites.
06:01They're synchronized with atomic clocks that are extremely accurate.
06:05If any of those atomic clocks is off from each other by microseconds, nanoseconds,
06:09your computed position on Earth is going to be off by tens, hundreds of meters for just a tiny offset.
06:15The 27 Navstar satellites launched by the U.S. Air Force weighed three to four thousand pounds each.
06:22Once in orbit, they circle the Earth twice daily. But their data isn't available to everyone.
06:27For a long period of time, GPS was being used by the military mostly and consumers didn't have access to
06:33it.
06:33And even if they did, it wouldn't have been accurate enough for them to do useful things like navigating around
06:38a city like this with it.
06:42But one tragic event in history led to the public use of GPS. Korean flight 007 was targeted for straying
06:51into hostile Russian territory. President Reagan announces the system should be a common good
06:57available for civilian use. The civilian units were limited to about a hundred meter sort of accuracy.
07:04You know, you're trying to meet your ride share. If you can only know within a hundred meters,
07:08just that's like trying to find another person in a football stadium.
07:12As we approach this merge here, there's going to be several exits coming up that are well within
07:17a hundred meters of each other. You miss one exit here and now that's 20 minutes added to your commute.
07:23Nowadays, you know, you can routinely get your position to within a few meters,
07:28but there's a lot of other complications to come in.
07:30It's a radio signal. That radio signal is going to travel at a fixed speed that's defined by the speed
07:35of light, but is slightly impacted by things like going through our atmosphere and changes in density
07:40in the air and things like that. In the mid-90s, NASA's Deep Space Network Program funds a project
07:46out of the Jet Propulsion Lab that calibrates raw GPS data for signal delays by gases in the Earth's
07:52atmosphere. As the system improves, you can get to within inches if everything's working absolutely
07:58perfectly. And that's really led to the absolute explosion of GPS. Now, one of the big things is to
08:03get that reliable enough that you can start to talk about things like automatically landing planes
08:08and automatically delivering packages and all those things, which is enabled by these GPS satellites.
08:15So right now, at this very moment, this park filled with hundreds of people, odds are every single
08:20one of them has at least one smart device on them that is actively currently receiving GPS data
08:25and telling them exactly where they are in Dolores Park in San Francisco right now. I've had this scenario
08:31where my phone is dead. I feel lost because I am literally lost. I don't have my GPS,
08:35and I go around and I have to ask people for directions. Let's say I want to go over to
08:41Lafayette
08:41Park, but you can't have your phone, no GPS. What do we do? Walk. Just start walking in that direction
08:48that way. People take this for granted. It's just like a daily part of our lives. So you take all
08:52that
08:53away immediately. And what's going to happen is a lot of confusion and a lot of people maybe making
08:59new friends and asking each other for directions how to get to the nearest pizza place. It's nearly
09:03impossible to imagine our world without this amazing innovation. But how can we be sure our GPS guided
09:09pizza or any meal for that matter is safe for us to eat? Take it for granted that we can
09:15go into the
09:16grocery store, get whatever we need, and we don't even think about the processing or where that food
09:22came from. We just assume it's going to be safe. Well, it wasn't always the case. The modern day food
09:28industry has a lot to thank NASA for. In the 1960s, NASA developed a complex system to safeguard the food
09:36being sent to space, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System, or HACCP. So the history of
09:43HACCP can be traced back to the ammunitions factories in World War II that had all these
09:47accidents. So what they said is if we had a standard procedure for this, there'll be less accidents.
09:52When it came to the space program, obviously their concern was astronauts getting sick in space. So what
09:57they had to do is assure food safety. But first, NASA had to solve some more basic food problems.
10:05One of the frequent questions we get is how do you eat in space? We do pick our food. We
10:10go through
10:10different tasting sessions before the flight to pick out exactly what we want. They always come
10:15back and tell you to take more vegetables. You can't order out for a pizza and get it there in
10:1930
10:19minutes. So we have to bring all our food, which means we have to store it. We don't take cans
10:23of food
10:24from a grocery store. Theoretically, you could do that, but cans are really heavy. In space, it's all to
10:29do with weight. You know, there's a famous statistic that says every meal in space costs around $10,000.
10:34Most of that being, obviously, to get this food up there. To actually make it safe, acceptable,
10:40nutritious, lightweight, took a lot of food scientists a long time to actually crack what
10:45it should be. When NASA was starting to think about food for the space race, there really wasn't
10:51anything. They had to invent space food. We didn't know if they'd be able to eat,
10:56first of all, in space. Can you swallow food? Would you choke on it in space? Because there's no gravity.
11:01So the first flights, they had like tubes of food that they would kind of use like a toothpaste tube
11:07where you'd roll it up and the paste would come out. So it was some kind of mixture of foods
11:12that
11:12you're supposed to know what they are, but it's kind of this mush that comes out. And the reason why
11:17it
11:17comes in a tube is number one, it's easy to stow. And the second thing is it's easy to digest
11:22and
11:23things. And you can create these mixtures that have high protein, high energy content, meet all your
11:28dietary needs. It's just, it's really not all that palatable to be able to eat that.
11:33They provided them a tube of nutrition and said, here, this is what you need. But from a human
11:40cultural standpoint, you just, you can't take the fun out of food. When you do that, you lose part of
11:48humanity. This meal here could have been found in any household across the United States during the 1960s.
11:55Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and even a little chocolate cake. But this meal
12:01here never would have flown in space with the astronauts. This stuff is going to be floating
12:06around, even the meat, because we're in zero gravity. When you break this open, all of these little crumbs
12:12floating in the capsule become a contaminant and can lead to dangers such as fire and contamination of the
12:20systems. What we're really concerned about with floating particles is things floating into your
12:24eyes like a piece of food. You know, that can be serious damage and getting it out of your eye.
12:28Again, you use gravity on earth to clean your eyes out. We don't have that in space. So as a
12:33physician,
12:33when I'm in space, I'm concerned about the health of the crew. And one of the obvious potential sources
12:38of concern would be a foodborne infection, getting gastroenteritis due to contamination of food.
12:44Time when someone's sick in space is really difficult because, for example, if they get
12:49dehydrated, how do you administer an IV? If they have to vomit, what do you do? If they have
12:56bathroom problems, what are they going to do? I mean, the equipment's not really designed for that.
13:00It's all about making sure that no pathogens get into the food. We're talking about things like E.
13:06Coli, Salmonella, and Listeria. I mean, things that we don't even want to get into our system here on
13:13earth. And you can imagine that if you get these microbes up into space, well, sometimes those
13:20microbes become actually stronger. They actually took Salmonella up into space. And what they found,
13:26it became much more virulent, as in you need less numbers to cause illness. Some people suggest the
13:32theory that microbes did come from space originally. So that's why they're so good at adapting to it.
13:36They can survive, certainly in capsules with a nice oxygen atmosphere.
13:40If you're an astronaut, and you're already stressed out, and then you start eating food
13:45that's going to make you sick, well, that can be disastrous. How do we make sure that there is no
13:51way our astronauts are going to get sick? For microbes to grow, they need three things. They
13:56need moisture, nutrients, and they need temperature. So if we take one of those things away, like moisture,
14:04bacteria and microbes don't grow. So what they did is they dehydrated these foods using a process called
14:09freeze drying. All the astronauts need to do was rehydrate them and eat them.
14:13We actually have a lot of water in space because when we generate electricity with hydrogen oxygen,
14:18you get water, H2O. So that's convenient. If you've got really light dehydrated food,
14:23we actually have water to reconstitute it. But there were still some fatal flaws.
14:27Back then, essentially, it was just test a few units and you hope they're going to be safe. There was
14:32nothing preventative about it. So NASA developed a new system of quality control that started with the Gemini
14:38mission. So what they did is said, we're going to figure out what could go wrong. What are the risks
14:43and what could happen? And if we prevent those happening, we should be safe. Food contractors
14:49for this mission, including Pillsbury, were required to follow strict standards for their food to be
14:54allowed on board. How could you make this space friendly? You would trace each of these individual
15:00items from the farm to space. Where was that cow? Who owned it? How was it butchered? How was that
15:08meat
15:08prepared? How was it packaged? How did it end up onto the spacecraft? Every step of the way needs to
15:14be
15:15tracked and controlled. That's the only way it's going to space. They had sometimes 17 control points
15:21that they monitored. And some of the food was actually produced in sort of clean rooms that we associate
15:26electronics with. In-depth microbial tests, as well as temperature and humidity controls, had to be
15:33enacted and maintained throughout the production and transportation process. Well, they take a small
15:38number of samples, could be at different points in the line, could be raw material, and they test them
15:43for pathogens. Now, some of these tests can be sophisticated using molecular methods based on DNA.
15:49Others are more classical, you know, just growing the pathogen up. The Apollo program took these standards
15:54one step further. NASA decided all contractors, not just those dealing with food, would have to develop
16:01prediction models to determine critical failure areas for their products. You have to know what
16:07are the possible consequences if something goes wrong. And then you have to eliminate those consequences
16:13so nothing goes wrong. All these elements came together to form HACCP. NASA developed the HACCP system,
16:21this preventive approach to food safety. The industry tried to adopt it, but nobody wanted it,
16:26nobody was trained for it, and just left it alone. But the industry was really concerned about food
16:33safety, because there was two outbreaks. One outbreak was linked to botulism, which isn't nice,
16:39because it actually does kill you, it's lethal, it's a toxin. And there was another sort of outbreak
16:44due to broken glass. The Food and Drug Administration's ineptitude in responding to these public health crises
16:50meant the public lost faith in these agencies to enforce quality standards.
16:54It actually took people getting sick for us to think about, hey, maybe what NASA's doing over
17:01there is something we can apply here for regular human beings on earth. It's Pillsbury, a NASA
17:08contractor who provided the training for these new standards. So the way HACCP works is that we're going
17:14to predict how pathogens get into a food system. So we know E. coli 157, which is a very violent
17:19pathogen,
17:19this one causes kidney failure. So we know cattle carry this. And we also know cattle carry salmonella.
17:25So what we have to think about is how will that E. coli and salmonella get onto the final product.
17:31And if we can't prevent them going onto the food, we can remove them by washing, cooking,
17:38irradiating, and we can apply that to other sectors. Sometimes a pathogen slips through the system. When a problem is
17:46identified, companies must work quickly to find the source and report the problem to the FDA,
17:51who then issues a recall. UPC codes of recalled items are sent out and most grocery stores have
17:57contaminated products off the shelves in under two hours. So food safety is one of those things,
18:02a bit like aviation safety. We don't know much about it, which is good because that means it's working.
18:06Oh boy. If you took HACCP out of our everyday system now, I wouldn't want to eat. I'd be growing
18:13my own food and butchering my own cows because I wouldn't trust anything that's being sent to the
18:19grocery store. But it's not only human lives that are being saved by NASA tech. We're looking at a sixth
18:25mass extinction right now on this planet. Our job is to help field biologists track endangered species
18:32across the globe using machine learning to help them get through more photos and more data faster,
18:37following a model that is built on NASA technology. The Hubble telescope, whirling about the earth at 17,000
18:46miles per hour, taking pictures of the cosmos. With its launch in 1990, the human race starts to gain
18:53visual access to some 10,000 galaxies. As grand as this may seem, it's just one 13 millionth of the
19:02observable universe. The Hubble is just one of the most exquisite instruments I think humans have ever
19:09made. The sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope is incredible. If you were Hubble and there was no
19:14atmosphere, you could essentially look at a nightlight on the moon from earth. That's a distance of 400,000
19:20kilometers. That's an amazing amount of sensitivity that one telescope can have. One of my favorite
19:26things about astronomy is that it's essentially a form of armchair time travel. Hubble gets to look
19:33at something that's 13.4 billion light years away. So when you're looking that far away, you are
19:39essentially encountering new stars all the time. And you have to be able to map where those new stars are
19:44without any previous references. You're getting billions more stars than you've ever had access to.
19:49You have to be able to know how to process that data in a way to make sense of it.
19:53If you can't
19:53make sense of your data, then it has no value. To map the heavens, astronomers chart the start
19:59and end points of various star configurations. Patterns are really useful. You're essentially
20:04finding these patterns of triangles, these triplets of stars, and then you'll know points A, B, and C.
20:10As long as you know the length of one side and then two of your angles, you can figure out
20:14the
20:14lengths of those other two sides. That's a really important feature to be able to have. Those
20:19triangle shapes are distinctive and unique. That means that even if Hubble is looking slightly at
20:24a different distance or with a slightly different rotation, the distinctive properties of those
20:30triangles will remain the same. So you can very easily match things up across large data sets,
20:35for example, or across different kinds of observations. And now you're able to combine
20:40data sets and see where are these overlapping triangles occurring between data sets. So now you can
20:45actually create the map that tells you what you're looking at is indeed what you think you're looking
20:50at. A powerful pattern matching algorithm is created to help with the data. The growth algorithm
20:55was a really ingenious way of being able to automate that process by creating all of these triangles and
21:00finding these patterns in a way that just made the data processing step go a hundred times faster.
21:08One human could not look at a massive data set that has millions and millions of stars in it and
21:14be able
21:15to create all these perfect triangles and figure out all of these distances and relations to each
21:20other individually. It's just not feasible. It would take way too long. So you might say to yourself,
21:25well, this is great. We can map the stars. But what does it have to do with me if I
21:29don't ever plan on going
21:30to the stars? Well, there are actually things on Earth that have patterns that remind us of the stars.
21:37Animals also have identifiable patterns, whiskers, stripes, spots. As distinctive as a human fingerprint,
21:44using these identifying features, we can collect data on an animal's history, lifespan, and migration
21:50patterns. One of the challenges of conserving vulnerable, critically endangered, almost extinct
21:56species is figuring out a baseline. How many animals do we actually have? And over time, is that number
22:02getting better or is it getting worse? I'm an avid scuba diver. I decided to go diving in Djibouti. We
22:08were not
22:09supposed to see whale sharks, but we ended up seeing an eight-foot juvenile. And as I saw it,
22:13I sort of fell in love, if you will, with the species itself. It's beautiful. And it has this
22:18beautiful pattern of spots all over the body. And I began to think, well, maybe as an IT person,
22:23my contribution to science can be helping to individually identify them. So I sat down and
22:28began working on, can we identify whale sharks just from photographs? As I began working on that,
22:33I partnered with a friend of mine from NASA, Dr. Zavran Arzamanian, and we stumbled across the
22:39growth algorithm. And we thought, well, that's interesting because stars in the night sky,
22:42white on black, is very similar to the idea of white spots on a blue or brown whale shark swimming
22:48through the ocean. With only a few small modifications, Jason and his team were able to
22:53use the algorithm to identify individual whale sharks across photographs taken in different
22:58locations years apart. What we then did is built an entire platform called Wildbook around that
23:03technology because it's not just matching the photographs. It's making it easy to collect those
23:08photographs from citizen scientists, snorkelers, divers. It's putting those photographs into a
23:13database where researchers all over the world can log in through the internet and curate that data,
23:18compare their data, create a research community around it. With citizen scientists contributing
23:24to the cause, researchers are learning more than ever about this elusive species. People are posting
23:29selfies on their vacations in multiple places across the globe every day. All of those photos and videos
23:34oftentimes contain data that field biologists could use if they had access to it. So what I'd like to do
23:41is identify a new whale shark that's been reported to us by a citizen scientist. So when I see a
23:47photograph of a whale shark like this, I'm looking at the white spots on the colored background of
23:53the whale shark and I'm thinking in terms of triangles. So let's take three spots, this spot,
23:58this spot, and this spot. We create a triangle here and that fixes a relationship in the pattern.
24:04What we create is a list of every possible triangle that we can make from the spots of this whale
24:10shark.
24:10I'm going to map those in and give the computer clues on which it can run this analysis. And what
24:16I'm
24:16telling it is, here are the spots, now go match them. I think it's going to take two and a
24:21half minutes
24:21to compare against 35,426 patterns. Compare that to about a week of human labor. I can see that the
24:29best
24:30match is to another whale shark titled MXA-277. Multiple photographs of MXA-277 matched. This whale shark
24:41has already gotten the nickname shock. The very first sighting of this whale shark goes all the way back
24:47to 2009. Now this long history of sightings and the rapid pace at which we can match photographs of the
24:56same whale shark. This is an unprecedented speed and data processing advantage enabled by NASA technology.
25:03Whale sharks are just the beginning. The model can be used to identify markings on sea turtles,
25:08manta rays, giraffes and zebra. It can also ID whales, dolphins and sharks by the shape of their tails and
25:14fins and even polar bears by their whisker spots. And Wildbook has developed other ways to make the process
25:20go even faster. And we have the technology that will in an automated fashion every night wake up
25:25and go and look for whale shark videos on YouTube, find the whale sharks in the videos and individually
25:31identify them. And when we can't figure out where or when that whale shark was seen, this agent will
25:37actually interact with the public, ask questions and listen for the answer. People get really excited
25:42about their whale sharks. The most common question we get when we tell somebody who's submitted data to
25:47us which whale shark they swam with is, can I nickname it? And it's a great request because what it
25:52does is
25:53it creates a bond between that individual animal swimming, you know, at great depths across the
25:58ocean and this human being who had that rare opportunity to actually be in the water at the
26:02same time and to coexist. In the early days of NASA, the computers required to accomplish this task would
26:09have filled several rooms. That changed thanks to the Apollo program and the results have had a major
26:15effect on our daily lives. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before
26:23this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. We know
26:30about
26:30the moon landing, but did you know this iconic event had an effect on the way we make purchases?
26:41If we didn't have that core NASA technology, we would come to a standstill.
26:47So how did NASA affect your credit card? The competitive nature of the space race was
26:53inseparable from the incredible pace of innovation it launched. The first spacecraft was Mercury with
26:58one person and the next step was to be able to take more than one person. So we made the
27:02spacecraft bigger and it was
27:03called Gemini, but that wasn't going to get us all the way to the moon. The Mercury and Gemini capsules
27:08were tiny. It's hard to believe people would spend time inside of those, but also the systems were
27:13very simple. Pre-flight checkout of the spacecraft did not take that big of an effort. You just had
27:18hundreds of wires connected to the spacecraft. To go to the moon, to go 240,000 miles away, we get
27:23a much
27:24more complicated spacecraft called Apollo and there the number of wires and computers etc grew into the thousands.
27:32When the space program was in its infancy, computers were very new and they were gigantic. They were the
27:38size of rooms. So the spacecraft is of course in one part of the building and these giant computers are
27:44in another part of the building. And these wires are connecting the two so that the checkout of the
27:49spacecraft can occur. And these checklists are designed to make sure that you go step by step,
27:54system by system, to make sure that when you put the astronaut on the rocket and shoot them into space,
27:58that the spacecraft will work. The spaceships were much smaller than the computers but had to in some
28:05ways be more powerful and more robust. Eventually we'd have to make computers smaller than the
28:10spaceships and so that's that technology path that America took towards Apollo.
28:16The Space Task Group set to work dreaming the impossible, then building it. The result was the
28:22first automated checkout station and the most complex computer system in the world at the time,
28:27known in short as ACESC. So now we take a spacecraft that was as simple as Mercury and Gemini and
28:34replace
28:34it with this massively complicated vehicle called Apollo. Many more systems starting to have its own
28:40computers on that side of the test. And so the number of cables going back and forth now has grown
28:45exponentially. The complication of a machine actually operating on its own now has entered the equation.
28:51It's not the astronaut just doing things, it's actually the spacecraft processing its own information
28:57and responding and then sending that information back to the ground checkout. If you were to go to
29:02Kennedy Space Center before the launch of a Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo spacecraft into space,
29:07you would go into these massive buildings where room after room you've had these giant computers,
29:12computers, and then on the other side of the wall you had the operators operating them. So you would have
29:16row after row after row of people working at their consoles to make sure everything was okay.
29:23The computers that NASA developed for those spacecraft, they are the basis for the computers we have now
29:29today for our cell phones. You know, where a computer prior to the Apollo program was the size of a
29:35room,
29:35they were able to get it down to the size of a toaster. Now we have these tiny little phones,
29:39so no matter where you are on the face of the earth, you're going to have high-speed internet access
29:45and
29:45a high-speed phone access. But just how did this innovation affect your wallet? TRW was a company
29:52that was a pioneer in systems engineering and built a number of spacecraft and systems for NASA,
29:58including components of the Apollo lunar module. TRW was interested in developing the credit checking
30:05systems so that you could use a credit card, some remote place, and they'd be able to check if it
30:10was okay to use your credit card. And that requires transmission of information over long distances.
30:15So they worked with NASA to develop their own system using the Apollo heritage technology,
30:21so that we could use credit cards wherever we wanted. And it was really the precursor to
30:25the ability to have financial transactions occur instantaneously. At the time it was conceived,
30:31it meant that a central computer could contain some 10 million credit records, allowing customers to
30:38submit credit card and other non-cash payments. Clerks verified credit by punching your credit card
30:43number into a keyboard, resulting in a 75% reduction in fraud and a 95% reduction of purchases made
30:50on bad
30:52accounts. Say you're buying your groceries for example, the card that you're physically holding is
30:56attached to an account. When you make that purchase, the computers would have to check your checking
31:01account to make sure that the funds are there so that the transaction goes through and you can
31:04complete your purchase. And that should be completed with only two or three seconds. Americans made almost
31:0970 billion debit card transactions in 2015 alone. More than half of credit card holders used their card for
31:16everyday purchases. And the number of those using it as their sole method of payment is on the rise.
31:22So what would happen if the system went down? I think because we expect technology to work all the
31:28time, the time we really notice it is when it stops working. People don't carry much cash anymore,
31:33and the banks are fully integrated into the system. Before long, we would all have to go back to
31:39primitive methods. I had my paycheck for my employer, I would go to the bank, I'd go and see the
31:44teller I
31:44would see every two weeks. She would give me, you know, a portion of that, let's say $100. We'd go
31:49to
31:50the grocery store, we'd pay with a portion of that $100, receive the change and keep track of that and
31:55bring it with me the next time. Back in the old days, you had to go to your bank because
31:59your money would
31:59actually be in that building. Now, of course, you can actually take a card, stick it in a wall
32:04somewhere, type in four numbers and money comes out of the wall and your money can be tens of thousand
32:10miles away. It's not in that building. Even after credit cards were introduced, things were still
32:15complicated. So in the early days of credit card use, it was kind of a trust system. They'd just
32:20make an imprint of it and then you'd sign it. So that was kind of a promise that you would
32:24pay.
32:25They used to receive large books that would come once a month that in the book it had a list
32:31of all
32:31the credit cards that have been stolen and they would leaf through it to make sure your credit card
32:35number wasn't in that book. And so clearly that is not going to work effectively in the long term.
32:41This development of this financial system that allows immediate transaction to occur really is
32:47the basis of our entire worldwide economy now. Now we are even using our phones to swipe. I have no
32:53doubt that someday it'll be biometric data that allow you to spend money. And all that comes from
32:58our push to go to the moon. Think about how integrated that system is into our lives. And without
33:05that society comes to a halt because we're so dependent on these systems working. When they
33:11were rushing to answer President Kennedy's call to go to the moon by the end of the decade, they could
33:16never have imagined all the things that have come out from that. Never. Some of those applications are
33:23literally lifesavers. One quarter of the American population is affected by heart disease. In the early
33:311980s, the rate of survival of coronary bypass was at 58% for a single bypass.
33:40In 1983, three doctors in California came up with a way to improve that survival rate. But this story
33:47starts a decade and a half earlier in 1968 when we went to the moon. We went to the moon
33:53on Apollo 8 to
33:54make sure that we could send a crew out there and go around and come back. And what we hadn't
33:57anticipated is
33:58that we would see the Earth from a distance as this blue and green fragile island. The Earth from
34:05here is a grand oasis of the big vastness of space. And that really changed our perspective on the human
34:12race and this island that we were living on. In the early 1970s, NASA's Nimbus satellites are sent
34:19on the first Earth-oriented missions, collecting data about the atmosphere. Scientists begin to see
34:25imbalances in the ozone layer, the region of the stratosphere that absorbs much of the sun's radiation.
34:31The sun's quite remarkable. I mean, we all love to see a sunrise and a sunset and arguably the energy
34:37from the sun grows crops, keeps us alive here on Earth. But one of the challenges is the radiation from
34:43the sun. Years ago, before we knew the dangers of the sun, we actually would go outside to get
34:49vitamin D according to our parents' advice. Some young people would even use baby oil to increase
34:54the effects. But we learned eventually that some was bad for us. Fortunately on Earth, our atmosphere,
35:00the ozone layer in particular, protects us from space-borne radiation. And without that,
35:05we would see a much greater incidence in skin cancers and other forms of cancer. So we're very lucky to
35:11be
35:11able to live on a planet where we do have an atmosphere that protects us here on Earth.
35:16Ozone, crucial for life on Earth, is a relatively unstable molecule made up of three oxygen atoms.
35:22When man-made chemicals like chlorine ions are released into the atmosphere, they easily corrupt
35:28delicate ozone. A seemingly small reaction actually replicates like a raging virus.
35:34So on a beautiful day like this, everything seems imbalanced, but it's really fragile in many ways.
35:39Just a small change in the amount of ozone in the air can really ruin all this.
35:44But if the ozone layer was literally destroyed, I mean, the biggest problem is we'd have a
35:48significant increase in radiation in our environment, and that would have
35:51health consequences for all living organisms on Earth. We're not
35:54talking solely about humans. You know, this is something that would affect
35:57all living entities on Earth. The health of the ozone becomes a national issue,
36:02and the US Congress requests NASA's help in monitoring Earth's delicate shield.
36:08When you see the Earth from space, you realize it's this one integrated system. So it's the oceans,
36:13the clouds, and this very thin layer that goes around us that's very important.
36:18For me, that was this awareness that I really needed to contribute to taking care of the Earth
36:23and teaching other people to be aware of that.
36:25For many years, NASA's been doing a lot of really exciting Earth observation research.
36:30Part of the challenge in measuring the ozone layer is it's very high up. So we have to develop
36:36technologies, new instrumentations, to be able to measure very subtle changes in the ozone layer.
36:41Through the use of lasers, which are really magical instruments, we can actually use them to measure
36:48the constituents and their quantities in the atmosphere. NASA pioneers an ultraviolet
36:54eczema laser to monitor ozone concentrations. Unlike many of NASA's developments, this tech
37:00doesn't do its work from space. It lives at the Table Mountain facility in Big Pines, California,
37:06where its data is used to complement that being sent to scientists from ongoing missions like Nimbus.
37:12The idea behind the laser is that ozone can be measured by absorption of ultraviolet light,
37:18which means we can use different UV wavelengths to calculate ozone levels.
37:23The longer the UV wave, the less it's absorbed. If we shoot two wavelengths, one long, one short, up into
37:30the atmosphere,
37:30we can watch these waveforms bounce back towards us as light and calculate the amount of ozone
37:36by comparing these two different signals. So scientists began to discover that there were
37:42imbalances in the ozone layer and that, in fact, some of the activities that we're doing on the planet
37:46are affecting the ozone layer. I mean, if you look at CFCs and the utilization of CFCs, it's a great
37:52example of
37:53how these chemicals over time begin to accumulate in the atmosphere and they, in turn, have changes
37:58that will affect how we live on Earth. And I think one of the important elements of that is an
38:04understanding that perhaps the changes that we're seeing in the ozone layer are due to things that
38:09we're doing today, but we can change those things to protect the planet for the future.
38:13So we reacted to that emergency as a global effort and stopped the use of harmful chemicals and the ozone
38:20recovered. And because of that, we can now go outside and not worry about the sun's effects as
38:26if the ozone was decreasing. But NASA's new tech was about to change your life in a way no one
38:32could
38:32have imagined at the time. One of the greatest applications of space technology is in the whole
38:37area of heart surgery. Everybody knows somebody that's got heart disease because it's so prevalent.
38:43The typical problem that we're focusing on in heart disease is a heart attack, which is caused by the
38:48blockage of the arteries to the heart muscle itself. So the blood flow decreases over time.
38:54In 1983, doctors at Cedars-Sinai Hospital hear of the space technology monitoring the ozone
39:01and reach out to NASA's JPL Laser Physics Group. They're interested in what this laser might do for
39:07the heart. More specifically, could it break apart blockages without harming the heart's tissues?
39:14Now, laser, generally people think of it as being hot. It produces higher temperatures when it interacts
39:20with whatever it's burning because the laser actually does destroy tissue that way. But the
39:25development of cold laser allowed us to have medical applications that were precise and that would reduce
39:31the damage to the adjacent tissues. Partnering with NASA, these surgeons designed a treatment that involved
39:37inserting a tube through the artery and using a laser at the tip of the tube to send pulsating beams
39:42of light to vaporize the plaque. The laser makes precise holes in the arterial plaque without burning
39:49the area around it. What used to happen is we'd stick a big catheter into the artery, go into the
39:56artery
39:56itself and blow up a balloon, essentially to stretch the artery and make it bigger and hope that that
40:02would allow the blood flow to come around it. Procedures like the balloon method risked pushing blood
40:07clots into the bloodstream. These clots can go to the brain and cause aneurysms and strokes.
40:13You fast forward to using NASA developed laser technology and then all of a sudden you've got
40:18the ability to essentially destroy the obstruction and create a smooth path for the blood to be able to
40:24flow in. So it's really exciting looking at this and it's not just how we revolutionized doing cardiac
40:30surgery for patients who have heart disease. Medicine is looking at new applications of laser
40:35technology in other areas of clinical practice like in orthopedics. We can use laser technology
40:40to be able to do eye surgery. The application of laser technology and surgery has totally transformed
40:46the way in which we're able to care for patients. That's really a good example of NASA technology being
40:52used for a specific purpose long time ago. Now it's a normal part of scientific analysis.
40:58And arguably one of the most important contributions of the Apollo program
41:02was not just sending humans to the moon, it was giving us an opportunity to understand the world in
41:08which we live. Improving heart surgery is only one of the ways NASA has enhanced our health.
41:14You probably wouldn't even think that your average smartphone or watch is a biomedical monitor,
41:19that it can monitor your sleep patterns, your heart rates, your steps. All of these things provide
41:25information about your health status which can be used by your health practitioner but also for
41:30yourself to monitor your own goals. The roots of today's wearable medical devices really comes
41:37from the space program. Back then it was very simple system, very few parameters. Now the number of
41:43devices that are available and the future of wearable medical devices is blossoming but it all comes from
41:49those early days of the space program. Prior to the first manned missions scientists wondered if the
41:55human body could even function outside of earth's atmosphere. Early in the space program people
42:00understood that if we're sending humans into space we need to monitor what's happening in their body
42:05because we didn't know how humans were going to react to being in space. We didn't understand what
42:10would happen to the heart, what would happen to breathing in space. Would your blood pressure become too high or
42:15too low? Could you simply swallow in space? After the success of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin,
42:21the first man in space, scientists decided what they really needed was the assurance they could
42:26support their astronauts and return them safely back to earth. Flying in space is hard on the body,
42:31no gravity, radiation, etc. But it is what it is and it really is the limiting system right now to
42:36go to
42:37Mars. When you're really far from earth you really want to make sure you stay ahead of any medical problems
42:42so that's why they're constantly checking us. How's the person's blood pressure? How is their heart rate?
42:48What's their temperature? That's why we wear sensors. We want to know right away if something's wrong because
42:54there's no hospital nearby. A lot of the flights have no medical doctors on board and so we really need
43:00to stay ahead of the curve. When initial in-flight planning began in 1959, the biomedical equipment that
43:07was available wasn't capable of transmitting data from space. NASA brings together the medical staff
43:13and engineers who developed tech that would. And back in the 60s it started off with fairly large
43:19electrodes that were stuck on the astronauts' chests to record the electrical activity of their heart.
43:25They had to develop signal conditioners that were going to go in the suit in the spacecraft to be able
43:29to
43:30record these signals and then ultimately of course for Apollo on the surface of the moon we were able to
43:35look
43:35at their heart rate on the surface of the moon. So NASA contributed to developing telemetry technology
43:40which of course was used by paramedics for many many years where they would take electrocardiograms and
43:46send it to base hospital physicians like myself work in an emergency room. In those early flights they had
43:51their heart monitors on the entire time. They also had temperature probes on them the entire time.
43:57I'm sure those weren't too comfortable and so until we figured out if the body was okay in space
44:03those guys had to put up with a lot. And over the last 50 years of human space exploration we've
44:08been able to monitor and understand the adaptation of humans to space. So today in fact when I go to
44:14space I'm generally uninstrumented. I'm not wearing a lot of sensors today compared to what would have
44:20happened 30 40 years ago. In the current spaceflight missions the only thing we really monitor is the
44:26heart rate during spacewalks. Otherwise for the launch and the landing in the middle of the flight
44:32as a space shuttle astronaut I didn't have anything monitored. These forms of monitoring not only
44:37allow NASA to identify issues but come up with solutions for both current and future explorers.
44:43On my first spaceflight NASA said to us we want to monitor your core body temperature throughout a 24
44:49hour cycle. So NASA developed a pill the size of a big vitamin capsule but the pill was actually an
44:56AM
44:57frequency radio hooked up to a thermistor a temperature sensor that we swallowed. So that opened the door
45:04to a whole new area of using biosensors to understand human physiology. I think that's so important to
45:11have that biofeedback that you can monitor someone in space for a long period of time and you can see
45:17if
45:18there are certain vitals and certain internal biomarkers are changing into a potentially hazardous
45:24state and so then you can possibly change up to address those issues. The ability to provide support
45:31on dangerous flights where what the explorer will encounter is unknown is essential to future missions
45:36but when it comes to a person's health there are an equal number of unknowns. I think it's really
45:42important to try to be proactive or have a pre-habilitation plan instead of always being in the
45:47rehabilitation. Here what we try to do is we get the biofeedback and we try to be preventative of a
45:54potential overtraining issue or even a health issue and identify it early before it causes a problem.
46:00Before this technology we would have a symptom go into a physician get a blood pressure heart rate
46:06check but now we can do that on a daily basis and we have it strapped to us and so
46:11this information
46:12allows us to be proactive in identifying some issues before it becomes a problem.
46:18In medicine we use telemetry quite a bit and one of the things that we're doing is using
46:23different sensors on the body and nowadays of course these sensors can not only be on the body
46:28they could actually be in the body ingestible sensors or sensors that are placed subcutaneously
46:33to collect important information on the body and send that somewhere else. So in an intensive care unit
46:39for instance we have cardiac monitors that are attached to all the patients that information is sent to
46:45a central area in the critical care unit where the nurses and doctors are able to look at the heart
46:50rate
46:50and rhythm of all the patients. What's exciting about this though is thinking about using these new sensors
46:56and connecting new sensors to medical devices to help keep patients out of the hospital.
47:02Imagine a spirometer which patients with asthma would use or patients with COPD that's a smart
47:08spirometer that not only collects the information about the drug being used but allows us to collect
47:14some aspect of pulmonary function and send that to a smart artificial intelligence enhanced software
47:22package that will then say hey Dave your asthma is getting a little bit worse maybe you need to talk
47:28to
47:28your doctor and that way we can intervene much earlier so people are not going to the emergency
47:33room with diseases that are out of control we can fine tune and adjust while patients are at home.
47:39Where I think the technology will go is to better calibration to ensuring that you have a valid
47:44measure of what the internal environment is like and I think that will just improve as the technology improves.
47:52These technologies could also be used to help people with dangerous jobs like hazardous material workers
47:58or firefighters. One of the problems with firefighters is they get overheated in things and you could
48:04swallow a thermistor that would measure their core body temperature be able to send that signal to the
48:10team outside monitoring say hey Williams is in there he's getting overheated we need to tell him to get out
48:15of
48:15the building for a second. Those early devices that the astronauts wore now have really developed into
48:20a much broader range of products we can use where we can monitor various signals from our own body so
48:26think about people running can monitor their heart rate their temperature etc we've got telemedicine now
48:32where remote patients can wear certain devices and the information can be sent through the computer
48:36system to doctors that are 100 miles away and in fact maybe that's how we'll do medicine when we go
48:40to Mars.
48:41When I trained as a doctor it was all about health and disease now it's all about wellness and optimizing
48:48our ability to live with whatever conditions we might have as we age and using these smart sensors
48:54that are integrated with software packages that use artificial intelligence is the direction of the future.
49:00The extreme challenges NASA had to address in order to continue exploring the great unknown have pushed our
49:07daily life on earth farther than we ever imagined. The space race lit the beacon for the Bezos, Musks and
49:14Bransons of the world who picked up that torch and are now running further. The quest to explore space gave
49:20us
49:20the very tech woven seamlessly and fully into our daily lives. What tomorrow will bring is fueled by continuous
49:28inspiration provided by NASA's push for the stars.
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