Atmosphere of Freedom: 

70 Years at the NASA Ames Research Center 

7 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N 

G l e n n E . B u g o s 

National Aeronautics and

Space Administration

NASA History Office 

Washington, D.C. 2010 

NASA SP-2010-4314 
 

Table of Contents 

FOREWORD 1 

PREFACE 3 

A D M I N I S T R A T I V E H I S T O R Y 

DeFrance Aligns His Center with NASA 6 

Harvey Allen as Director 13 

Hans Mark 15 

Clarence A. Syvertson 21 

William F. Ballhaus, Jr. 24 

Dale L. Compton 27 

The Goldin Age 30 

Moffett Field and Cultural Climate 33 

Ken K. Munechika 37 

Zero Base Review 41 

Henry McDonald 44 

G. Scott Hubbard 49 

A Time of Transition 57 

Simon “Pete” Worden 60 

Once Again, Re-inventing NASA Ames 63 

The Importance of Directors 71 

S P A C E P R O J E C T S 

Spacecraft Program Management 76 

Early Spaceflight Experiments 80 

Pioneers 6 to 9 82 

Magnetometers 85 

Pioneers 10 and 11 86 

Pioneer Venus 91 

III 
 

 

 

 

Galileo Jupiter Probe 96 

Lunar Prospector 98 

Stardust 101 

SOFIA 105 

Kepler 110 

LCROSS 117 

Continuing Missions 121 

E N G I N E E R I N G H U M A N S P A C E C R A F T 

“...returning him safely to earth” 125 

Reentry Test Facilities 127 

The Apollo Program 130 

Space Shuttle Technology 135 

Return To Flight 138 

Nanotechology 141 

Constellation 151 

P L A N E T A R Y S C I E N C E S 

Impact Physics and Tektites 155 

Planetary Atmospheres and Airborne Science 157 

Infrared Astronomy 162 

Exobiology and Astrochemistry 165 

Theoretical Space Science 168 

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 171 

Near-Earth Objects 173 

NASA Astrobiology Institute 178 

Lunar Science 183 

S P A C E L I F E S C I E N C E S 

Start of Life Sciences Research 188 

Biosatellites 191 

IV 
 

Gravitational Biology 195 

Autogenic Feedback Training 201 

Space Habitability 204 

Space Station Biological Research Project 206 

I N F O R M A T I O N T E C H N O L O G Y 

Supercomputing 212 

Internetworking 220 

Computational Fluid Dynamics 226 

Computational Chemistry 232 

Intelligent Systems and Telepresence 235 

Center of Excellence in IT 241 

Rebirth of Supercomputing 247 

A E R O N A U T I C A L T E C H N O L O G Y A N D 

F L I G H T R E S E A R C H 

Flight Simulation 254 

Integrative Flight Research 260 

Upgrading the Wind Tunnels 267 

Vertical Take-Off and Landing Aircraft 271 

Short Take-Off and Landing 276 

Rotary Wing Aircraft 280 

Aviation Operations 283 

Green Aviation 288 

C O N C L U S I O N 291 

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S 295 

E N D N O T E S 296 

I N D E X 314 

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Foreword

Ames is the coolest place to work in the federal government. 

That was true when one of us (Jack) joined the laboratory in 1947, 

true when the other (Pete) joined in 2006, and true today. Our 

offices are nearby, and we often trade stories about how well Ames’ 

heritage supports our vision of the future of space exploration. Part 

of what makes Ames so cool is the constant dialogue between past 

and future, between capabilities and potential, between the science 

fiction of yore and the realities of what we do today, and between 

those giants of aerospace engineering who walk our campus and 

those young folk who seek to learn from them. 

One of ten NASA field Centers around the country, Ames is 

located at the heart of Silicon Valley. The organizational culture of 

NASA Ames reflects that of Silicon Valley: collaboration to leverage 

proven strengths, a desire to nurture new disciplines, a willingness 

to work cheap and fast, a need to match demonstration with theory, 

a longer view into the future of space exploration, and the belief that 

we can change the world. 

During its earliest days, Ames researchers broke new ground in all 

flight regimes (the subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic) 

by building increasingly sophisticated wind tunnels, arc jets, research 

aircraft, and methods of theoretical aerodynamics. Extending its 

expertisein human factors and pilot workload research,Ames became 

NASA’s lead center in basic life sciences research, which included 

radiation biology, adaptability to microgravity, and exobiology. 

Some Ames aerodynamicists explored the complex airflows around 

rotorcraft and devised the first tilt-rotor aircraft, while others 

modeled airflows using new supercomputers and internetworking 

to create the field of computational fluid dynamics. Building upon 

its expertise in computational chemistry and materials science, 

Ames pioneered the field of nanotechnology. Ames research in air 

traffic management helped make air travel safer and more energy 

efficient. Ames engineers and planetary scientists managed a series 

of airborne science aircraft, of planetary atmosphere probes, and 

robotic explorers like the Pioneer spacecraft and Lunar Prospector. 

Ames pioneered the “virtual institute” to develop the disciplines 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

of astrobiology and lunar science. More recently, NASA Ames is 

innovating in the engineering of small and modular spacecraft. 

Some of Ames’ greatest contributions to America’s aeronautics 

and space program include the swept-back wing concept that is used 

on all high-speed aircraft today; the blunt body concept, which is 

used on every spacecraft to prevent burning upon planetary entry; 

the management of the Pioneer planetary spacecraft, which was the 

first human-made object to leave the solar system; the disciplines of 

computational fluid dynamics and astrobiology; the Kepler mission 

to find exoplanets, which was one of the first astrobiology-driven 

missions, and the Lunar Prospector and LCROSS missions, which 

confirmed the presence of water at the poles of the Moon. 

Ames has emerged as NASA’s leading center in supercomputing 

and information technology, astrobiology and the space life sciences, 

earth and planetary science, materials science and thermal protection 

systems, and small spacecraft engineering. We’ve drawn new 

types of researchers into space exploration by creating the NASA 

Research Park, a premier space for collaborative corporate research 

and innovative educational facilities to train the future aerospace 

workforce. With more than $3 billion in capital equipment in 2010, 

a research staff 2,400 people strong, and an annual budget of more 

than $800 million, Ames plays a critical role in virtually all NASA 

missions in support of America’s space and aeronautics programs. 

We dedicate this book to the many women and men who have 

dedicated their careers to the success of the NASA Ames Research 

Center, and who make our Center so cool. 

Pete Worden Jack Boyd 

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Preface

As the NASA Ames Research Center approached its 70th 

anniversary in December 2009, there was interest in updating the 

60th anniversary history Atmosphere of Freedom: Sixty Years at 

the NASA Ames Research Center (NASA SP-4314). Much had 

happened in the decade from 1999 to 2009. Ames stayed focused 

on its historical mission of basic research and forward-thinking 

technologies—in information technology, aeronautics, reentry 

systems, space life sciences, and planetary science. Still, the Center 

confronted new challenges and new programs emerged. Notable was 

the growth of astrobiology, the birth and death of nanotechnology, 

the establishment of the NASA Research Park, the LCROSS mission 

to the Moon and the Kepler mission to hunt for Earth-sized planets. 

Perhaps the most important challenge was NASA’s Constellation 

program, a full-bore effort to create a transportation system for 

human space flight to replace the Space Shuttle and return America 

to the Moon. Furthermore, events of the most recent decade shed 

new light on parts of NASA Ames’ legacy. The renewed emphasis on 

small spacecraft, for example, prompted renewed interest in Ames’ 

historical strengthsin spacecraftengineering dating back to the 1960s. 

The renewed emphasis on NASA research to resolve the common 

concerns of commercial space, likewise, prompted renewed interest 

in Ames work to support the information technology industry. 

This update also allowed for a reconfiguration of the text. The 

story here starts in 1958 when the National Advisory Committee for 

Aeronautics (NACA), of which Ames was a part, was incorporated 

into the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

(NASA). The first twenty years of Ames’ history—back to 1939, its 

NACA years—remains relevant. The NACA culture is firmly fixed 

within Ames and often colored its work in the NASA years, especially 

in its continuing efforts in aeronautics and in how it provides research 

support to firms and other Centers pursuing larger projects. For those 

interested in Ames during the NACA years, that story is told well in 

Edwin P. Hartman, Adventures in Research: A History of the Ames 

Research Center, 1940-1965 (NASA SP-4302, 1970). 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

The 60th anniversary edition of Atmosphere of Freedom was 

organized largely chronologically, with topical areas broken into 

large swatches of time. This 70th anniversary edition begins with a 

history of the Center from the perspective of the Center directors— 

there have been ten since 1958. This ties the history of Ames into its 

larger context of space policy and politics, and addresses the impact 

of leadership on the history of the Center. Then the chapters are 

organized by the subjects that persisted throughout Ames’ history: 

spacecraft projects, human exploration, planetary sciences, space 

life sciences, information technology, and aeronautical research. 

Each of these stories has a history dating back to at least 1958, so 

issues of overlap in the narrative remain—in that what Ames has 

done best is explore the fruitful interchanges of disciplines and 

capabilities. Computational fluid dynamics, or example, developed 

from iterative advances in aerodynamics, supercomputing and 

software development, and so will be addressed in various chapters. 

Astrobiology, likewise, grew along the shifting border between the 

space life sciences and planetary science. 

However, the larger themes relevant on its 60th anniversary 

remain relevant on the 70th anniversary of NASA Ames: the complex 

and constant intermingling and convergence of people, tools and 

ideas. Ames people value the perpetual reinvention of their careers 

and the cross-fertilization of ideas. Ames stands as an extraordinary 

repository of high-tech equipment, research laboratories, and 

facilities. That physical infrastructure supports what Ames truly 

is—a growing and evolving community of researchers and support 

staff who have given birth to new technologies, and thus enabled the 

human conquest of the atmosphere and the exploration of space. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

C H A P T E R 1 

Administrative History 

Ames contributed much of the technology that helped NASA 

succeed in the mission that most preoccupied it during the 

1960s—that of sending an American to the Moon and returning 

him safely to Earth. Ames people defined the shape, aerodynamics, 

and ablative heatshield of the reentry capsule. They mapped out 

navigation systems, designed simulators for astronaut training, 

built magnetometers to study the Moon and instruments to explore 

the landing sites, and analyzed the lunar samples returned. Still, 

compared with how it fueled growth at other centers, NASA’s rush 

to Apollo largely bypassed Ames. 

Ames’ slow transition out of the NACA culture and into the 

NASA way of doing things, in retrospect, was a blessing. Under 

the continuing direction of Smith DeFrance, then Harvey Allen, 

Ames people quietly deepened their expertise in aerodynamics, 

thermodynamics, and simulation, then built new deep pockets of 

research expertise in the space and life sciences. They sat out the 

bureaucratic politics feeding the frenzy toward ever more elaborate 

and expensive spacecraft. DeFrance’s gentle refocusing of Ames’ 

NACA culture during the 1960s meant that Ames had nothing to 

unlearn when NASA confronted its post-Apollo years—an era of 

austerity, spin-offs, and broad efforts to justify NASA’s utility to the 

American public. 

This chapter addresses the history of NASA Ames from the 

perspective of the Center directors and of the staff who managed 

the operations of the Center. It was in Ames’ headquarters building 

(now called N200) that the Center’s relations with the larger agency 

were mapped out, funding argued for, and new organizational 

processes imposed. The work done there set the context for all the 

research and engineering work done on Center. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

D E F R A N C E A L I G N S H I S C E N T E R W I T H N A S A 

President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics 

and Space Act into law in July 1958, and its impact was felt most 

immediately in redefining Ames’ relations with its headquarters. 

The NACA was disbanded, and all its facilities incorporated into the 

new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that 

opened for business in October 1958. Eisenhower wanted someone 

in charge of NASA who would take bold leaps into space—bolder 

than NACA leadership had been willing to take—and appointed as 

administrator T. Keith Glennan, then president of the Case Institute 

of Technology. Hugh L. Dryden, who had been NACA chairman, 

was appointed Glennan’s deputy. Glennan first renamed the three 

NACA “Laboratories” as “Centers,” though kept Smith DeFrance 

firmly in charge of the NASA Ames Research Center. DeFrance had 

directed the Center since its founding in 1939. 

Perhaps the first sign that the transition into NASA would disrupt 

DeFrance’s management style was the appearance of organization 

charts. DeFrance hated them, and never did them for Ames. “The 

director believed,” remembered Ames engineer Jack Boyd, “that 

when you put a man in a box you might as well bury him.”1 DeFrance 

wanted everyone at the Center to move easily between research 

projects, and he already knew whom to call on when he needed an 

answer. NASA headquarters staff, though, wanted an easier way 

to directly discover who at Ames was responsible for facilities or 

research projects. So for the sake of headquarters Ames put their 

organization charts on paper. 

DeFrance went a year without making any organizational changes 

to reflect NASA’s new space goals. At the end of 1959, he announced 

that Harvey Allen was promoted to assistant director, parallel to 

Russell Robinson. Robinson continued to manage most of Ames’ 

wind tunnels, some of which were mothballed or consolidated into 

fewer branches to free up engineering talent to build newer tunnels 

for space-oriented research. Allen had participated in many of the 

NACA subcommittees focused on manned exploration of space, 

and understood the research needs of the new NASA. Allen was 

named assistant director for astronautics. Allen’s theoretical and 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

applied research division was reconfigured so that he now managed 

an aerothermodynamics division and a newly-established vehicle 

environment division, both focused on studying the interior and 

exteriors of spacecraft. In addition, DeFrance formed an elite Ames 

manned satellite team, led first by Alfred Eggers and later by Alvin 

Seiff, who helped define the human lunar mission that soon became 

NASA’s driving mission. 

Another major cultural shift in the Center came with the 

departure of Harry Goett. NASA had also inherited the various 

space project offices managed by the Naval Research Laboratory— 

specifically Project Vanguard, upper atmosphere sounding rockets, 

and the scientific satellites for the International Geophysical Year. 

These offices had been scattered around the Washington, D.C. area, 

and Glennan decided to combine them at the newly built Goddard 

Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Goddard would also 

be responsible for building spacecraft and payloads for scientific 

investigations, and for building a global tracking and data-acquisition 

network. Glennan asked Harry Goett, chief of Ames’ full scale and 

flight research division, to direct the new Goddard center. Goett 

had been the architect of Ames’ work in subsonic flight and largescale testing. To replace Goett, in August 1959, DeFrance turned to 

Charles W. “Bill” Harper. Fortunately, Goett resisted the temptation 

to cannibalize colleagues from his former division, and instead built 

strong collaborative ties between Ames and Goddard, especially in 

the burgeoning space sciences. 

The flood of money that started flowing through NASA only slowly 

reached Ames.The NACA budget was $340 million in fiscal 1959. As 

NASA, its budget rose to $500 million in fiscal 1960, to $965 million in 

fiscal 1961, and earmarked as $1,100 million for fiscal 1962. Staff had 

essentially doubled in this period, from the 8,000 inherited from the 

NACA to 16,000 at the end of 1960. However, most of this increase 

went to the new Centers—at Cape Canaveral, Houston, Goddard, and 

Huntsville—and to the fabrication of launch vehicles and spacecraft. 

Ames people had little engineering experience in building or buying 

vehicles for space travel, even though they had devised much of the 

theory underlying them. Glennan, in addition, followed a practice 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

from his days with the Atomic Energy Commission of expanding 

research and development through contracts with universities and 

industry rather than building expertise in-house. The competition 

for engineering staff grew intense, and most firms paid more than 

NASA could. Thus, between 1958 and 1961, the Ames headcount 

actually dropped slightly to about 1,400, and its annual budget 

hovered around $20 million. 

The disparity between what NASA got and what Ames got 

grew greater in early 1961 when President Kennedy appointed 

James E. Webb to replace Glennan as administrator. Glennan 

had pursued a technology development program to move NASA 

quickly into space, but across many fronts—human space flight, 

robotic explorers, and Earth observation and communication 

satellites. Kennedy had campaigned on the issue of the missile gap 

and Eisenhower’s willingness to let the Soviets win many “firsts” in 

space. So in Kennedy’s second state of the union address, on 25 May 

1961, he declared that by the end of the decade America would land 

a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. Ames people 

had already planned missions to the Moon and pioneered ways to 

return space travelers safely to Earth. But they had expected decades 

to pass—and essential infrastructure built—before these plans 

were pursued. Kennedy’s pronouncement dramatically accelerated 

their schedules and brought a compellingly clear focus to NASA’s 

mission. Kennedy boosted NASA’s fiscal 1962 budget by 60 percent 

to $1.8 billion and its fiscal 1963 budget to $3.5 billion. NASA’s total 

headcount rose from 16,000 in 1960 to 25,000 by 1963. More than 

half of this increase was spent on what Ames managers considered 

the man-to-the-Moon space spectacular. 

Again, Ames grew little relative to all of NASA, but it did grow. 

Ames’ head count less than doubled, from 1,400 in 1961 to 2,300 in 

1965, while its budget quadrupled, from about $20 million to just 

over $80 million. Almost all of this budget increase went to research 

and development contracts—thus marking the greatest change in 

the transition from NA¢A to NA$A. Under the NACA, budgets grew 

slowly enough that research efforts could be planned in advance 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

and personnel hired or trained in time to do the work. Under 

NASA, however, the only way to get skilled workers fast enough 

was to hire the firms that already employed them. Furthermore, 

under the NACA, Ames researchers collaborated with industrial 

engineers, university scientists, and military officers as peers who 

respected differences of opinions on technical matters. Under 

NASA, however, these same Ames researchers had enormous sums 

to give out, so their relations were influenced by money. Gradually, 

Ames people found themselves spending more time managing their 

contractors and less time doing their own research. 

Organizationally Ames continued to report to what was the old 

NACA headquarters group—guarded by Dryden, directed by Ira 

S. Abbott, and renamed the NASA Office of Advanced Research 

Programs. The four former NACA laboratories—Ames, Langley, 

Lewis, and the High Speed Flight Research Station—continued to 

coordinate their work through a series of technical committees. 

Even though the organizational commotion left in NASA’s wake 

centered in the East, throughout the 1960s Ames found itself an 

increasingly smaller part of a much larger organization. Gradually 

the intimacy of the NACA organization faded as NASA’s more 

bureaucratic style of management took over. 

Four examples displayed the cultural chasm opening between 

Ames and the new NASA headquarters. First, in 1959, on the day 

Bill Harper reported to work as Harry Goett’s successor in full-scale 

research, NASA headquarters told Ames to send all its aircraft south 

to the NASA Flight Research Facility. Harper insisted that research 

on VTOL flight (vertical take-off and landing) could not be done 

without the aircraft to support it, so those remained, along with one 

old F-86 used by Ames pilots to maintain their flight proficiency. 

Thus started decades of debate, and disagreements, over how 

aerodynamicists got access to aircraft for flight research. More 

specifically, Ames continued to have access to the great runway 

at Moffett Field and Navy hangars, and would continue to acquire 

aircraft used for a variety of flight programs. NASA headquarters, 

though, would continue to yield to arguments that aircraft could be 

more cheaply based at Rogers Dry Lake. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Second, NASA headquarters asserted its new right to claim the 

75 acres of Moffett Field on which Ames sat as well as 39 acres of 

adjacent property that was privately held. DeFrance argued that 

there was no need to change Ames’ use permit agreement with the 

Navy, and he negotiated a support agreement that showed he was 

happy with Navy administration. NASA headquarters, however, 

had money and chose to assert control over its assets. 

Third, NASA renumbered the NACA report series and, more 

importantly, relaxed the restriction that research results by NASA 

employees first be published as NASA reports. With NASA 

engineers building special purpose spacecraft for their own use, 

it was less important that they share the results with everyone. 

Newer employees, especially in the space and life sciences, with 

more academic inclinations, preferred to publish their work in 

disciplinary journals rather than through the peer networks so 

strong in the NACA days. The result was less cooperation between 

the NASA Centers on shared research interests—in that they would 

continue to fight for funding but not over the validity and utility of 

the results. On the other hand, cooperation with university-based 

researchers was more clearly reflected in the published results. 

Finally, NASA headquarters wanted Ames to leap into the 

limelight. DeFrance had encouraged Ames staff to shift public 

attention to the sponsors of its research, and Ames’ biggest outreach 

efforts had been the triennial inspections when industry leaders 

and local dignitaries—but no members of the public—toured the 

laboratory. NASA headquarters encouraged DeFrance to hire a 

public information officer better able to engage general audiences 

rather than technical or industry audiences. Bradford Evans arrived 

in August 1962 to lead those efforts, and soon Ames was hosting 

tours by local school groups. DeFrance and his leadership staff 

remained disinterested in advertising themselves, so Evans went 

directly to individual researchers to find intriguing work to write 

about and younger researchers learned the value of self-promotion. 

The rise of public outreach, the decline of internal peer review and 

publication, the distance growing between wind tunnels and flight 

test aircraft, and central control of assets—all displayed a cultural 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

shift as the NACA laboratories assimilated into NASA. Ames 

explored organizational ways of integrating itself into the Apollo 

program, and in the process demonstrated the skills NASA Ames 

people would display in reinventing their careers, and reinventing 

their Center, to enable changes in how America chose to explore 

space. 

The first organizational change to meet the needs of the Apollo 

program came in August 1962, when Harvey Allen, who had been 

active in the early NASA committees planning a manned space 

program, formed a space sciences division and hired Charles P. 

Sonett to lead it. Sonett was among the most experienced spacecraft 

builders in the country. He had worked for Space Technology 

Laboratories (later part of TRW Inc.) building space probes for the 

Air Force, including Pioneer 1 and Explorer VI. Then from 1960 to 

1962 he led the lunar science program office at NASA headquarters. 

Notably, Sonett chaired a scientific working group on how to 

incorporate science into the Apollo program and report they wrote 

served as a road map for space science over the next decade.2 At 

Ames, by leveraging the extant expertise in instrumentation for the 

wind tunnels and arc jets, Sonett established Ames as the leader in 

solar plasma studies—especially with the Pioneers 6 to 9 spacecraft. 

Later he devised the lunar surface magnetometers flown on Apollo 

12, 15 and 16, and managed the team that led the science on the 

Pioneers 10 and 11. Sonett left Ames as its director of astronautics 

in 1972 and moved to the University of Arizona to establish its 

planetary science department. Largely through his efforts, Ames 

grew directly involved in how NASA pursued its solar and lunar 

research effort, and extended its expertise in instrumentation into 

space experiments. 

The second organizational change was the start of life science 

research at Ames. Like Sonett in the space sciences, Clark Randt had 

worked at NASA headquarters dreaming up biological experiments 

to be carried aloft into space. He wanted to build a laboratory to 

validate the experiments on the ground prior to flight, and run 

control experiments parallel to the flight experiments. Randt sent 

Richard S. Young and Vance Oyama to work at Ames and build a 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

small penthouse laboratory atop the instrument research building. 

In the Bay area, they had contact with some of the world’s best 

biologists and physicians and, at Ames, they got help from a wellestablished human factors group in its flight simulation branch. 

With encouragement from headquarters, Ames established a life 

sciences directorate and, in November 1961, hired world-renowned 

neuropathologist Webb E. Haymaker to direct its many embryonic 

activities. Haymaker proved too focused on his own research on 

radiation affects to be a program builder. In 1964 DeFrance hired 

Harold P. “Chuck” Klein who would lead the Ames life sciences 

division for two decades. Klein broadened the types of space life 

science work done—notably into exobiology and the engineering 

of biology payloads—while bringing organizational focus. By 1963, 

the three major directorates at Ames were defined as aeronautics, 

astronautics, and life sciences. The Johnson Space Center asserted 

dominance over biomedicine and risk reduction related to astronaut 

activity in space, though Ames remained NASA’s lead Center on 

fundamental life sciences. 

In addition to giving Ames expertise in a new discipline within 

NASA, the life scientists also shifted the culture of the Center. This 

new cohort of life scientists shared much with the aeronautical 

engineers who inhabited the Center since the NACA days: polyglots 

in scientific theories, driven to design the apparatus to prove 

their theories, practitioners in rigorous peer-review, and aware of 

their place in the networks that generated usable knowledge. Yet 

these biologists seemed awkwardly grafted onto the Center. They 

inhabited different disciplines, procedures and languages. Many 

of Ames’ leading biologists were women, when women scientists 

were still sparse on Center. Now, Ames people addressed different 

intellectual communities and reorganized themselves accordingly. 

Whereas Ames had historically organized itself around research 

facilities—wind tunnels—by 1963 DeFrance organized his staff by 

either missions or disciplines. 

The third organizational change happened at headquarters. In 

November 1963, NASA headquarters reorganized itself so that 

Ames as a Center reported to the Office of Advanced Research and 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

Technology (OART) while some major Ames programs reported to 

the other headquarters technical offices. DeFrance could no longer 

freely transfer money around the different programs at his Center. 

Headquarters staff had grown ten times since the NACA days, and 

from Ames’ perspective countless new people of uncertain position 

and vague authority were issuing orders. Some of these newcomers 

even bypassed the authority of the director and communicated 

directly with individual employees on budgetary and engineering 

matters. Virtually all of them wanted to know how Ames was going 

to help get a human on the Moon, and return him safely to Earth. 

Ames’ NACA culture was under pressure. 

H A R V E Y A L L E N A S D I R E C T O R 

In October 1965, DeFrance retired after 45 years of public 

service, with elaborate ceremonies in Washington and in San Jose 

so his many friends could thank him for all he had done. DeFrance 

planned well for his retirement and had cultivated several younger 

men on his staff to step into his role. Harvey Allen was the best 

known of the Ames staff, and had the most management experience. 

The director’s job was his to refuse which, initially, he did. 

Alfred Eggers then loomed as the front-runner. Eggers and Allen 

were both friends and competitors. The two had collaborated in the 

early 1950s on the pathbreaking work on the blunt body concept, but 

Allen made his work more theoretical whereas Eggers explored more 

practical applications like the lifting body spacecraft and design of 

facilities like the 3.5 foot hypersonic wind tunnel. 

In January 1963, Eggers convinced DeFrance to assign him to the 

newly created post of assistant director for research and development 

analysis and planning, a platform from which he could move Ames 

more directly into human space flight. A year later Eggers went 

to headquarters as deputy associate administrator in OART. He 

persuaded his boss, Ray Bisplinghoff, to create a group to design 

missions of interest to OART. This mission analysis division (MAD), 

established in January 1965, reported directly to headquarters, was 

located at Ames, and staffed by scientists on loan from the OART 

Centers—Ames, Langley, Lewis and Dryden. The MAD was also 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

tasked to manage the OART advanced studies program, a grantgiving program which funded futuristic studies at universities and 

corporations. But this MAD never got support from the other 

Centers, and within a year, OART abandoned plans for assigning a 

complement of fifty scientists to it. Soon the disarray began to spread 

through the Ames directorate for R&D planning and analysis that was 

originally created for Eggers to manage. Bob Crane assumed control 

of program management and John Foster of systems engineering. 

Clarence Syvertson remained in charge of a much smaller, though 

very active, MAD focused on defining missions specific to Ames 

(which would be dissolved in 1972). A new programs and resources 

office was created under Merrill Mead to plan and fight for Ames’ 

budget. All this organization-building and space flight emphasis left 

Eggers as the headquarters choice to become director. But Allen was 

not convinced so dramatic a shift in direction was best for Ames. 

To prevent Eggers from being named director and to keep Ames 

largely as it was—distant from Washington, with a nurturing and 

collaborative spirit, and focused on research rather than projects— 

in October 1965 Allen took the directorship himself. 

Allen did not distinguish himself as Ames director as he had in 

his other promotions. In personality, Allen differed from DeFrance. 

DeFrance was distant, fatherly, safety-minded and inclined to remind 

Ames people that they were spending the hard-earned money of 

the American taxpayers. Allen was warm, benevolent, close to the 

research, inspirational in his actions and words. Allen, like DeFrance, 

kept Ames as a research organization and worked hard to insulate 

his staff from the daily false urgencies of Washington. Jack Parson 

had served as associate director to DeFrance since the founding of 

the Center, and Allen convinced him to stay to handle the internal 

administration of the Center. Allen asked Loren Bright and Jack 

Boyd to fill the newly created positions of executive assistant to the 

director and research assistant to the director. It would be their jobs 

to review and vet the various research proposals emanating from 

Ames staff. Allen often sent Ames’ ambitious young stars in his place 

to the countless meetings at headquarters. And every afternoon at 

two o’clock, when headquarters staff on Washington time left their 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

telephones for the day, Allen would leave his director’s office and 

wander around Ames. He would poke his head into people’s offices 

and gently inquire about what was puzzling them. “Are you winning?” 

he would ask.3 Eventually he would settle into his old office and 

continue his research into hypersonics. 

Ames suffered a bit during Allen’s four years as director. Ames’ 

personnel peaked in 1965 at just over 2,200 and dropped to just 

under 2,000 by 1969. Its budget stagnated at about $90 million. 

For the first time a support contractor was hired to manage wind 

tunnel operations—in the 12 foot pressurized tunnel—and there was 

a drop in transonic testing and research on aircraft design. Tunnel 

usage actually increased to support the Apollo program and studies 

of supersonic transports, and there was dramatic growth in Ames’ 

work in airborne and space sciences, especially from the Pioneer 

program. But overall, not much new was happening on Center. 

H A N S M A R K 

Two events made 1969 the year to mark the next era in Ames 

history. First, Apollo 11 returned safely from its landing on the 

Moon, signalling the beginning of the end of the lunar landing 

missions that drove NASA almost from its start. NASA had yet to 

decide what to do for its second act, and a flurry of strategic planning 

took place against an uncertain political backdrop. Much of the 

American public—including political conservatives concerned with 

rampant inflation and political liberals concerned with technocratic 

government—began to doubt the value of NASA’s big plans. NASA 

had downplayed the excitement of interplanetary exploration as 

it focused on the Moon. Congress and the American aerospace 

industry, under pressure from a resurgent European aerospace 

industry, began to doubt if NASA really wanted the aeronautics 

part of its name. Into the 1970s NASA had to justify its budget with 

quicker results, better science, and relevance to earthly problems. 

The second major event of 1969 was the arrival of Hans Mark 

as Ames director. Mark, himself, displayed a force of personality, 

a breadth of intellect, and an aggressive management style. More 

importantly, Mark arrived as rumors circulated that Ames would 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

be shut down. Thus, Ames people gave him a good amount of 

freedom to reshape their institution. An outsider to both Ames and 

NASA, Mark forged a vision for Ames that nicely translated the 

expertise and ambitions of Ames people with the emerging shape 

of post-Apollo NASA. Mark fashioned Ames to epitomize what 

NASA called its OAST Centers—those reporting to the Office of 

Aerospace Science and Technology (previously the OART). Mark 

left Ames in 1977, following eight active years at the Center, and 

then became in effect an ambassador for the Ames approach to 

research management during his posts at the Defense Department 

and at NASA headquarters. 

Into the 1970s, NASA increasingly focused its work on the Space 

Shuttle, assuming they would soon render routine human access 

to low Earth orbit. Ames responded to NASA’s mission, first, by 

creating the reentry technologies and control systems that might 

make the Shuttle truly routine and second, by showing that there was 

still a need within NASA for the extraordinary in aeronautics and 

space exploration. This was a time for Ames when what mattered 

most were entrepreneurship, reinvention, and alliance building. 

Ames reshaped itself, so that its key institutional structures crossed 

divisional boundaries, like the Ames Basic Research Council, the 

Ames strategy and tactics committee, quality circles, and Amesuniversity consortia agreements. Ames more consciously developed 

its staff, so that Ames people played ever more prominent roles in 

NASA administration. 

Like Ames directors tended to be, Hans Mark was a practicing 

researcher. But, other than Chuck Klein, he was the first senior 

executive at Ames who did not come up through its ranks. Mark was 

born in June 1929 inMannheim, Germany, and emigrated to America 

while still a boy. He got an A.B. in 1951 in physics from the University 

of California and a Ph.D. in 1954 in physics from the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology. He then returned to Berkeley and, save 

for a brief visit to MIT, stayed within the University of California 

system until 1969. He started as a research physicist at the Lawrence 

Radiation Laboratory in Livermore and rose to lead its experimental 

physics division. He also rose through the faculty ranks to become 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

professor of nuclear engineering at the Berkeley campus. In 1964 

he left his administrative duties at Lawrence Livermore National 

Laboratory to become chair of Berkeley’s nuclear engineering 

department as it shifted its emphasis from weapons to civil reactors. 

When he arrived at Ames,Mark applied many of the management 

techniques he had witnessed at work in the nuclear field. He created 

a strategy and tactics committee that allowed for regular discussions, 

among a much broader group than just senior management, about 

where Ames was going and what would help it get there. As a 

result, Ames people became much better at selecting areas in which 

to work. Tilt rotor aircraft, for example, brought together diverse 

researchers at Ames to tackle the problem of air traffic congestion. 

Ames deliberately pioneered the new discipline of computational 

fluid dynamics by acquiring supercomputers and merging scattered 

code-writing efforts into a coherent discipline that benefitted every 

area at Ames. 

Similarly, Mark created the Ames “murder” board. This board 

was a sitting group of critics who questioned anyone proposing a new 

project or research area, to toughen them up for the presentations 

they would make at headquarters. His style was argumentative, 

which he thought Ames needed in its cultural mix. In a period of 

downsizing, Mark wanted Ames people to stake out “unassailable 

positions”—program areas that were not just technically valuable 

but that they could defend from any attack. 

From his experience at Livermore, Mark also understood the 

power of matrix organization, the predominant management idea 

then underlying all research and development in the military and 

high-technology industry. Though formal matrix organization fitted 

Ames badly—because of its structure around disciplinary branches 

and functional divisions—Mark used the murder board to get 

people thinking about the on-going relationship between functional 

expertise and time-limited projects. Ames took project management 

more seriously, using the latest network scheduling techniques to 

complement its tradition of foreman-like engineers. And Ames 

bolstered the functional side of its matrix, by getting its scientific and 

facilities staffs to more consciously express their areas of expertise. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Ames people insisted that Mark understand that they were 

each unique—willing to be herded but never managed. Mark 

compromised by mentally grouping them as two types. Some 

wanted to become as narrow as possible in a crucial specialty that 

only NASA could support, because academia or industry would 

not. Mark admired these specialists, but took the paternal attitude 

that they were incapable of protecting themselves. The other type 

warmed to the constant and unpredictable challenges of space 

exploration, and constantly reinvented themselves. So Mark created 

an environment of opportunities, perhaps unique in NASA, where 

both types of researchers flourished. And Mark adopted the Ames 

custom of motivation and management by meandering. Like Harvey 

Allen before him, Mark poked his head randomly into offices to 

ask people what they were up to, and took it as his responsibility to 

understand what they were talking about. When he did not have time 

to stride rapidly across the Center, he would dash off a hand-written 

memo (dubbed Hans-o-grams) that concisely presented his point of 

view. When scientists like R.T. Jones and Dean Chapman suggested 

Mark could know a bit more about the work done at the Center, 

they convened a literature review group that met every Saturday 

morning after the bustle of the week. While at Ames Mark learned to 

pilot an aircraft just so he could talk shop with aerodynamicists and 

flight mechanics. Mark made enemies too. After a spat with John 

Dimeff, he dissolved Ames’ renowned instrumentation division and 

scattered those researchers around the Center. 

Mark treated NASA headquarters in the same informal way. 

He encouraged Ames people to see headquarters as more than an 

anonymous source of funds and headaches. Mark showed up every 

morning at six o’clock so his workday was synchronized with Eastern 

time. He travelled constantly to Washington D.C., taking a red eye 

flight there and an evening flight back. He attended every meeting 

he thought important and told anyone who would listen how Ames 

was shaping its future. There, too, he would poke his head randomly 

into offices to chat about how to shape NASA strategy. To head the 

Ames directorates of aeronautics, astronautics, and life sciences, 

Mark picked entrepreneurs who were likewise willing to travel 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

and sell. Their deputies stayed home and manage daily operations. 

From Mark, headquarters got the impression that Ames was more 

involved in deciding how its expertise would be used. They also got 

the impression that Mark had a “stop me if you can” attitude toward 

headquarters and shared little respect for chains of command. 

Mark also made Ames collaborate with broader communities. 

“Ames has always been better at looking outside the Agency than 

inside,” he reflected.4 NASA headquarters was often too rulebound or unimaginative to fund every program Ames wanted to 

accomplish. Collaboration increased the opportunities for direct 

funding. Collaboration also made Ames people think about the larger 

scientific and educational constituencies they served, and increased 

the chances that the best people would aid Ames’ efforts. Mark 

broke open the fortress mentality that DeFrance had inculcated, and 

encouraged everyone to build bridges in whatever way they thought 

appropriate. 

During Mark’s tenure Ames forged on-going ties with 

universities. While Ames had long used individual contracts with 

area universities for specific types of help, in 1969 Ames signed a 

cooperative agreement with Santa Clara University that was openended. Negotiated by Ames chief counsel Jack Glazer, it pushed 

the limits of the Space Act of 1958. The agreement defined an ongoing infrastructure of collaboration so that Ames and university 

scientists only needed to address the technical aspects of their work 

together. Furthermore, students could come to Ames to write their 

dissertations, and many did in the fields of lunar sample analysis 

and computational fluid dynamics. Some students came to write 

papers on the law of space, research, or intellectual property, since 

Glazer had made his office the only legal counsel office in NASA 

with a research budget. Rather than operating under a contract 

with research bought solely for NASA’s benefit, collaborating 

universities shared in the cost of research. Ames signed collaborative 

agreements with universities around America so that in June 1970, 

when President Nixon tried to appoint a government czar of science 

to keep university faculty out of the pockets of mission-oriented 

agencies like NASA, Ames stood out as exemplary on the value of 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

collaboration at the local level. In 1971 headquarters let Ames award 

grants as well as administer them; by 1976 Ames’ university affairs 

office could administer the grants independent of the procurement 

office. By 1978, Ames administered 260 grants to 110 universities 

with annual obligations of more than $11 million. 

Mark also encouraged Ames researchers to interact more freely 

with engineers in industry, and allowed them more freedom to 

contract with the firms most willing to help build products for NASA’s 

needs. Paul Yaggy, of the Ames full-scale and flight research group, 

in 1965 had formalized Ames’ relationship with the U.S. Army air 

mobility research and development laboratory. Encouraged by Yaggy’s 

success in building a research effort on helicopter handling qualities 

and the reliability of propulsion systems, Mark encouraged the Army 

to augment its rotorcraft research office at Moffett Field and broaden 

it to encompass two other NASA centers. He opened dialogue with 

the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on joint programs in 

aircraft safety. Mark put the Illiac IV supercomputer on the Arpanet 

to encourage a wider community to author its code. He was especially 

proud that people nurtured in Ames’ atmosphere were named 

directors at Lewis and Goddard (John M. Klineberg), director at 

Langley (Richard Peterson), associate administrator for management 

at headquarters and deputy director at Dryden (Jack Boyd). 

Mark left Ames in August 1977, having guided Ames through 

the years of uncertainty between the end of the Apollo program and 

the start of Space Shuttle operations. He also guided Ames people 

to shape a long-term vision, which is still evident today. He helped 

match their creative energy with NASA’s larger and ever-shifting 

ambitions. The next three directors of Ames shaped the Center in 

much the same way, but with an evolving palette of personnel against 

a changing canvas of scientific progress and international politics. 

Although none hit Ames with the same amount of youthful energy 

and cultural dissonance, each of these directors learned his approach 

by watching Mark at close range. In fact, Mark’s very first decision as 

director was to confirm the decision by NASA headquarters that his 

deputy should be Clarence Syvertson. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

C L A R E N C E A . S Y V E R T S O N

Clarence “Sy” Syvertson understood the NACA culture that 

had made Ames so great. He arrived at Ames in 1948, after taking 

degrees at the University of Minnesota and after a stint in the 

Army Air Forces, to work with Harvey Allen solving the problems 

of hypersonic flight. Syvertson then worked with Al Eggers in the 

10 by 14 inch wind tunnel until 1959, when he was named chief 

of the 3.5 foot hypersonic tunnel that he and Eggers designed. By 

pioneering theories that could be tested in Ames’ complex of wind 

tunnels, Syvertson outlined the aerodynamic limits for some aircraft 

that NASA still hopes to build—a hypersonic skip glider, direct 

flight-to-orbit aircraft, and hypersonic transports. For the North 

American B-70 bomber, he defined the high-lift configuration later 

incorporated in other supersonic transport designs. Syvertson also 

managed the design and construction of the first lifting body, the M2-

F2, a prototype wingless spacecraft that could fly back from orbit and 

land at airfields on Earth. A successful series of flight tests in 1964 

with the M2-F2 guided the configuration of the Space Shuttle orbiter. 

In 1964 Syvertson led the NASA mission analysis division, based 

at Ames, which charted dramatic ways to explore the outer planets. 

In 1966 he succeeded Harvey Allen as director of astronautics, then 

in 1969 became deputy director of Ames. Syvertson was awarded 

NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal in 1971 for serving as executive 

director of joint policy study by NASA and the Department of 

Transportation on civil aviation research policy that made key 

recommendations on civil aviation and helped move Ames into air 

traffic issues. 

As Mark’s deputy, Syvertson was the inside man. He managed 

the internal reconfiguration of Ames so that Mark could focus on its 

future and on its relations withWashington. He managed renovation 

of the main auditorium so that the Ames community had a better 

setting for lectures. Syvertson was known as a consensus-builder— 

able to step in, forge compromise, and resolve the conflict that Mark 

encouraged, be it policy battles with headquarters or argumentation 

internally. When Mark decided to leave Ames in July 1977, NASA 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

headquarters advertised the job of Ames director. In April 1978, 

the “acting” was removed from Syvertson’s title and he was made 

director because of the superb, quiet job he had done. Plus, many 

people noted, Ames could not survive another Mark. 

Ames grew more slowly during Syvertsons’ tenure, and the 

pace of contracting out support services accelerated. But Syvertson 

broke ground for some important new facilities at Ames—like the 

crew-vehicle systems research facility and the numerical aerospace 

simulation facility—and extended its collaboration in new areas. 

Syvertson accelerated Ames’ outreach efforts, especially to precollege students. The teacher resource center, for example, archived 

slides, videos and other media that science educators could borrow to 

improve their classes. Class tours grew more frequent, so Syvertson 

helped form a hands-on teaching museum, which opened in October 

1991 as the Ames Aerospace Encounter built in the old 6 by 6 foot 

wind tunnel. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge to Syvertson and Ames 

management came in 1981 with Ames’ consolidation of the Dryden 

Flight Research Center. Soon after headquarters had sent Ames’ 

aircraft to Rogers Dry Lake in 1959, Ames started adding aircraft 

back to its fleet at Moffett Field—first helicopters and VTOL aircraft, 

then airborne science platforms. When the Reagan administration 

demanded that NASA cut its staff by 850, acting administrator A. 

M. Lovelace responded with a plan to make Wallops Flight Center 

an administrative unit of Goddard and Dryden an “operational 

element and component installation” of Ames.5 The merger, effective 

October 1981, formalized an already strong relationship. Ames 

aerodynamicists already performed most of their test flights at 

Dryden; and most of Dryden flight test projects originated at Ames. 

Both of the Ames-based tilt rotor aircraft had been flying at Dryden, 

and Ames willingly transferred more research aircraft there with its 

staff ultimately in charge. 

Louis Brennwald implemented this consolidation, as Ames 

director of administration, with consolidation planning led by 

Jack Boyd, then Ames’ associate director and a deputy director at 

Dryden from 1979 to 1980. Both aeronautics and flight systems 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

directorates were reorganized, without requiring reductions in 

force or involuntary transfers. Consolidation meant that Dryden 

administered flight operations locally, where it was ostensibly 

cheaper and safer, and Ames provided technical leadership and 

policy guidance. NASA Ames researchers had done much of the 

basic research on the reentry and landing systems for the Space 

Shuttle orbiter and their insights would help as Dryden (which had 

little experience in spaceflight) was prepared as the landing site for 

the early shuttle flights. 

The renamed Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility sat on the 

edge of Rogers Dry Lake, a vast, hard-packed lakebed near the town 

of Muroc in the Mojave desert of southern California. Its remote 

location, good flying weather, exceptional visibility, and 65 square 

mile landing area all made it a superb test site. Edwards AFB managed 

the entire lakebed, and NASA’s Western Aeronautical Test Range 

provided the tracking and telemetry systems to support research. 

The Ames-Dryden Facility also ran the world’s best laboratory for 

remotely piloted flight, and its flight loads research facility allowed 

ground-based structural and thermal tests of aircraft, as well as 

calibration of test equipment. With better access to Dryden facilities, 

Ames researchers more efficiently moved innovative designs 

from concept to flight. To move from concept to flight, Ames had 

computational power for aerodynamic design and optimization, 

wind tunnels for measuring loads and fine-tuning configurations, 

simulators to study handling qualities, and shops to build the proofof-concept vehicles. The best examples of Ames’ abilities to move 

ideas in to flight quickly and cheaply were the AD-1 oblique wing 

aircraft, the HiMAT remotely piloted high-G research vehicle, and 

the F-8 digital fly-by-wire program. 

Eventually, Ames itself had to address the Reagan administration’s 

demand for staff cuts. In 1983 a program review committee led by 

deputy director Angelo “Gus” Guastaferro decided to cut back on 

new space projects to support existing ones, and to mothball several 

research facilities—like the 14 foot tunnel, the 3.5 foot hypersonic 

tunnel, the transportation cab simulator, and the vertical acceleration 

and roll device. Yet Ames continued to pursue the same broad areas 

23 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

it had staked out as unassailable in the early 1970s. Aeronautical 

research focused on testing methods, safety studies, and slowspeed technologies and VTOL aircraft. Space research focused on 

thermal protection and spacecraft configurations, adding infrared 

astronomy and airborne sciences, as well as extending the Pioneer 

efforts into probes of planetary environments. All Ames research 

efforts were infused with its ability to build unique laboratory 

tools—wind tunnels, test models, and motion and work simulators. 

Supercomputing permeated everything so that computer codes 

seemed to replace the scientific theory that had earlier guided so 

much of what Ames did. By Syvertson’s retirement in January 1984, 

Ames had bolstered its prominence within NASA and among wider 

research communities. 

W I L L I A M F. B A L L H A U S , J R . 

The inculcation of supercomputing into everything Ames did 

accelerated when Bill Ballhaus, a leader in computational fluid 

dynamics (CFD), became Ames’ next director. By 1984, Sy Syvertson 

had directed Ames for six years, and the Center had flourished under 

his guidance. But the death of some close friends on the Ames staff, 

a series of heart problems, and the tragedy and inquiry following an 

accident in the 80 by 120 foot wind tunnel, all caused him to think 

it was time for younger leadership. He encouraged headquarters to 

look at Bill Ballhaus, who at a young age had already distinguished 

himself as a leader. 

Ballhaus received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the 

University of California at Berkeley in mechanical engineering, 

studying with CFD pioneer Maurice Holt. His father was a senior vice 

president for Northrop Aerodynamics and Missiles in Los Angeles, 

and introduced him to the emergent importance of computing in 

aerospace. Ballhaus served in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1968 to 

1976, earning the rank of captain. He arrived at Ames in 1971 as a 

civil service engineer with the U.S. Army Air Mobility Research and 

Development Laboratory. When Ames decided to form an applied 

computational aerodynamics branch, the Army staff was delighted 

to let Ballhaus become a NASA employee as branch chief. It proved 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

how close a working relationship had developed between the Army 

and Ames. After less than a year as a branch chief, and without having 

served as a division chief, in 1980 Ballhaus became Ames’ director 

of astronautics, succeeding the legendary Dean Chapman. CFD 

underwent explosive growth in the 1970s, and Ballhaus honed his 

leadership skills through almost constant recruitment. Along with 

his younger colleagues in the field—Paul Kutler and Ron Bailey— 

Ballhaus kept abreast of work done in industry and academia, 

learned to quickly size up whether a researcher wanted time to do 

basic research or the excitement of engineering application, and 

teamed them with the best colleagues. 

Jack Boyd met with him a few days before Christmas 1983, and 

said NASA administrator James Beggs wanted Ballhaus to write a 

brief strategic plan for the Center. Without ever referring again to 

that plan, Beggs named Ballhaus director of Ames in January 1984. 

Ballhaus’ first memory of the Center, as a graduate student on a tour, 

had been of the wonderful research facilities. As director, Ballhaus 

helped bring about several new facilities that were key to its research 

future, like the numerical aerospace simulation facility and the 

national full-scale aerodynamics complex. He secured funding for 

the human performance research laboratory and the automation 

sciences research facility, and for the integrated test facility at AmesDryden. Ames’ budget grew by fifty percent during his tenure, 

including $300 million for renovation of facilities. 

Ballhaus initiated Ames’ first comprehensive strategic planning 

exercise, published in March 1988, that suggested information 

technology couldinject new lifeinto every research area at Ames. And 

Ballhaus was skilled in reading headquarters, helping Ames people 

sell their research efforts by describing their ultimate contributions 

to the International Space Station. Funding for Station-oriented 

projects was then relatively easy to secure, and the Ames budget 

grew quickly in the late 1980s. John Billingham, as chief of the Ames 

life sciences division in the 1980s, broadened its purview into all 

dimensions of the study of life in the universe. Billingham advocated 

an integrative vision for the space life sciences, encompassing 

exobiology, gravitational biology, biomedical research, ecosystem 

25 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

science and technology, life science flight experiments, and advanced 

life support systems. During Ballhaus’ tenure the Ames life sciences 

effort increasingly set the agenda for space biology. 

Four years into his directorship, in February 1988, Ballhaus 

was called to Washington to serve fourteen months as acting 

associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Aeronautics and 

Space Technology. This made him responsible for the institutional 

management of the Ames, Langley, and Lewis Research Centers. 

Once NASA named a permanent associate administrator of OAST, 

Ballhaus returned as Ames director, but stayed less than six months; 

in July 1989 he officially resigned. He insisted the press release about 

his resignation cite “inadequate compensation for senior federal 

executives and vague new post-government regulations as factors in 

his decision.”6 This referred to a 1989 ethics law that barred federal 

contractors from hiring federal employees who had supervised their 

competitors’ projects. Ballhaus was one of several NASA officials 

to leave the agency in the week before the new law took effect, 

prompting the newly appointed NASA administrator Richard Truly 

to call a press conference to decry the law as “a crying shame.”7 

Throughout his tenure as Ames director, Ballhaus amplified a 

concern expressed by all previous directors—that Ames needed the 

freedom to hire the best people. Back in October 1961, when vice 

president Lyndon Johnson asked Smith DeFrance what he could 

do to help Ames, DeFrance asked for freedom from civil service 

hiring ceilings. The ceilings remained an issue, and Ames was never 

so constrained by funds or resources as it was by civil servants to 

manage them. By the 1980s, Ames still suffered under the ceilings, 

but now lacked the freedom to pay potential hires competitive wages. 

Ballhaus fought to secure special salary rates that applied to half 

of the Ames workforce, he got limited approval to match industry 

salary offers, and approval to test a more flexible compensation 

and promotion plan. He led his staff in improving the quality of life 

around Ames—opening a child care center, working more closely 

with the local union of the National Federation of Federal Employees, 

getting everyone involved in a regular strategic planning process, and 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

encouraging diversity so that Ames was awarded the NASA trophy 

for equal employment opportunity in both 1984 and 1989. Statutes 

limited what he could do with executive pay, however, and when 

Congress defeated the Reagan administration proposal for a pay raise 

many in Ames’ senior executive service left prematurely. “I would 

have preferred a more graceful exit,” Ballhaus wrote to announce 

his departure. “The Center’s success in the future will depend upon 

our ability to continue to recruit and retain the high-quality people 

that Ames is noted for. In leaving, it is the close association with the 

outstanding people who make up this Center that I will miss most.”8 

From there Ballhaus joined the Martin Marietta astronautics group 

in Denver as vice president of research and development, then rose 

steadily up the ranks of Lockheed Martin Corporation, and retired 

in 2007 as president of the Aerospace Corporation. In retirement he 

joined the NASA Advisory Committee and proved a steady voice for 

the “seed corn” investment in basic research that had made NASA so 

great in its earlier years. 

D A L E L . C O M P T O N 

Dale Compton, who had served as acting director when Ballhaus 

moved toWashington, replaced him as Ames director. Compton, too, 

was a product of Ames. He came to the Center fresh out of Stanford 

University with a master’s degree in 1958, one of the first students 

taught by former Ames aerodynamicist Walter Vincenti. He returned 

to receive his Ph.D in 1969. Compton worked as an aeronautical 

engineer with a penchant for participating on project teams—as an 

aerothermodynamicist for ballistic missiles and NASA’s Mercury, 

Gemini and Apollo human space programs, and as manager of the 

infrared astronomical satellite program (IRAS). In the mid-1970s, he 

reinvented himself in space science. He entered management ranks 

in 1972 as deputy director of astronautics, became chief of the space 

sciences division, then director of engineering and computer systems, 

and was named Ballhaus’ deputy in 1985. Compton was officially 

named director on 20 December 1989—at his request to honor 

Ames’ past—at ceremonies marking Ames’ fiftieth anniversary. 

27 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Victor L. Peterson joined Compton as deputy director in 1990. 

Peterson, too, was a product of Ames. He had joined Ames in 1956 

upon graduating from Oregon State University, and distinguished 

himself through research in aerodynamics, high-temperature gas 

physics and flight mechanics. He was known internationally as an 

advocate of large scale computing across all scientific disciplines, 

especially in computational fluid dynamics. 

Compton, like Ballhaus before him and Syvertson before 

him, understood how Ames nourished innovation and personal 

reinvention. Each had grown his own career at Ames, and each knew 

how to let those under his direction shift and blossom. And NASA 

headquarters provided new opportunities and resources for myriad 

Ames researchers to flourish as the first Bush administration looked 

to space adventures—following the end of the Cold War in 1989—to 

once again display America’s technological prowess. 

In April 1989, early in his term as president, George Bush 

appointed Admiral Richard H. Truly—a former Shuttle astronaut 

and the person most responsible for restoring the Shuttle to viability 

after the Challenger accident—as the new NASA administrator. 

Then, on 20 July 1989, the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar 

landing, Bush made a Kennedy-esque announcement dubbed the 

Space Exploration Initiative, about America’s commitment to return 

to the Moon “this time to stay,” for a human mission to Mars, and 

for the expanded internationalization of the Space Station Freedom. 

These long-term, complex space projects made good use of the basic 

research done at Ames in microgravity, robotics, and planetary 

science, and Ames’ budget grew apace modestly into the early 1990s. 

Yet Compton was seen by some around Ames as too conservative 

in his vision—as a “tunnel hugger”—one who thought Ames’ 

standing within NASA depended on the immovability of the wind 

tunnel infrastructure around Ames. Compton had seen the more 

project-oriented NASA Centers go through booms and busts as 

Congress approved and disapproved major projects and thought 

Ames—fundamentally a basic research organization—would be 

especially disrupted by such cycles. He had doubts about what 

sort of institutional follow-on would come from any of the projects 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

emanating from Ames’ space scientists, and he understood that if 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed work that NASA headquarters 

would send Ames-originated space projects there to be managed. He 

had fought hard for SIRTF (the space infrared telescope facility), the 

Mars Observer, and the Magellan Venus all initiated at Ames, but lost 

to JPL. Moreover, the various wind tunnel and simulator restoration 

projects added $300 million to Ames’ budget in the late 1980s, so 

Compton made sure these efforts were managed well. 

Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the mid1990s, NASA headquarters put Ames through a series of roles and 

mission exercises. The goal, ultimately, was to make all NASA Center 

directors more agile in modifying their Centers’ expertise to support 

changing national needs. While the strategic plans emerging from 

these exercises always reiterated Ames’ interest in aeronautical 

research, the plans seemed a bit empty. A great many people at Ames, 

especially those in life sciences and information technology, began 

to wonder how they fitted into that picture of Ames. Into the 1990s, 

Ames began to directly address the relationship between its future 

and its past. 

Ames underwent more profound change in the mid-1990s than 

in any period since the end of the Apollo era and the arrival of Hans 

Mark. With the demise of the Soviet threat and shrinkage in federal 

research spending, Ames people once again had to face the rumors 

that their Center might be shut down. “Ames has never had a secure 

place in this agency,” Compton reflected. “All directors have tried to 

secure a place; some have succeeded, some not. My years as director 

were not easy.”9 

Like NASA as a whole, Ames was swept up in changes imposed by 

headquarters: downsizing, quality reengineering, program shifting, 

and outsourcing. However, Ames people took this dark period as 

an opportunity for self-discovery—of asking what was unique about 

Ames’ historic strengths in science and engineering. They focused 

on expansive new missions in astrobiology and intelligent systems, 

and cleared away inherited structures to get at the essence of their 

work. By the end of the decade, as NASA as a whole reconfigured 

itself to shape America’s aerospace future, the Ames approach—its 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

cultural climate, managerial empowerment, collaborative spirit, and 

fundamental scientific curiosity—increasingly stood as the model 

for what NASA as a whole wanted to become. 

T H E G O L D I N A G E 

Three years into the Bush administration, Congress insisted more 

firmly that all federal laboratories, especially those in the departments 

of energy and defense, rethink their roles for the political realities 

of the post-Cold War era. Compared with the rest of NASA, Ames 

had lost little as Congress started cutting defense funds. Ames had 

already planned to mothball non-essential tunnels and simulators. 

Half of Ames’ remaining tunnel time went to test military aircraft, 

though civil projects stood in line to buy any time freed up from 

the cancellation of military tests. What military work that remained 

at Ames went toward technologies—like helicopters and navigation 

systems—needed to fight the now-expected strategic scenario of 

many smaller conflicts on many fronts. In fact, the decades of quiet 

collaboration between Ames and the Soviets in life sciences through 

the Cosmos-Bion series of biosatellites was a key resource for the 

rest of NASA as it pursued a wider array of cooperative projects with 

the Russian space agency, especially surrounding the international 

space station. 

NASA headquarters, however, showed no inclination to squeeze 

out a peace dividend from the NASA budget. Concepts for a Moon 

colony and a human mission to Mars were abandoned slowly with 

the realization that the technology was too premature to do either 

safely or cheaply. Congress grew impatient as NASA let the space 

station, the key cooperative project, soak up any funding liberated 

from NASA’s defense-oriented projects. In March 1992 George Bush 

made a surprise announcement—that he had nominated Daniel 

Goldin to replace Richard Truly, whom he had asked to resign as 

NASA administrator. 

Goldin was a vice president and general manager of the TRW Inc. 

space and technology group in Manhattan Beach, California, which 

specialized in commercial, early-warning and spy satellites. During 

Goldin’s five year tenure in that group, TRW had built thirteen such 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

spacecraft—for the Tracking and Data Relay satellite network, the 

Air Force Defense Support program, and the Brilliant Pebbles and 

Brilliant Eyes projects of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office. For 

NASA, TRW had built the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, 

and parts of the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. TRW won 

NASA’s 1990 Goddard Award for Quality and Productivity and was a 

finalist for the George M. Low Trophy for quality. Those who bought 

spacecraft from TRW knew Goldin as a capable manager. Those in 

space policy knew nothing about him. 

Goldin’s early pronouncements showed him supportive of 

a smaller space station, a human landing on Mars, and reliable 

operation of the Shuttle. But mostly, he talked about applying an 

industrial perspective to shake up NASA. “He’s a faster, cheaper, 

better kind of guy,” said a Bush administration official. “He’s obviously 

outside the NASA culture.”10 

“My challenge,” Goldin proclaimed in his first address to 

NASA employees, “is to convince you that you can do more, do it 

a little better, do it for less, if we use more innovative management 

techniques and if we fully utilize the individual capabilities of each 

and every NASA employee.” Goldin also voiced, Ames people noted, 

distaste for how he perceived NASA’s recent work in aeronautics: 

“We have to perform world class aeronautics research. Not leave it 

on the back-burners, not enjoy all the fun we’re having writing TRs 

and TNs [technical reports and technical notes], but what we have 

is an obligation for America. The American aeronautics industry is 

counting on us and let’s ask ourselves, have we really lived up to the 

expectations of American aeronautics?”11 He was obviously a man of 

energy, different views and, Ames people soon discovered, of strong 

personality. 

Not the passage of time, nor the eventual respect for Goldin’s 

leadership—nothing softens the horror when Ames people tell the 

story ofGoldin’s firstvisit toAmes.Thereis novideotape that recorded 

what actually happened, so stories are told. Articles criticizing 

Goldin’s intentions had just appeared in Bay Area newspapers and 

Goldin, one Ames manager remarked, “seem to show up loaded 

for bear.”12 Rather than listen to welcoming speeches, he counted 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the number of women and minorities in a photograph of Ames 

executives, remarking on how few he found. Goldin challenged those 

he happened upon to defend their programs. People hid their name 

badges. In a meeting in the director’s conference room, Goldin sent 

to the perimeter all those sitting around the table—mostly senior 

white males—and asked those sitting in perimeter chairs to take their 

place. Then Goldin heckled director Dale Compton as he reviewed 

Ames’ strengths and goals, until Compton walked silently from the 

room, halfway through his presentation, to compose himself. Only 

then did Goldin’s wrath subside. 

Goldin himself has turned philosophical about how NASA people 

reacted to the force of his personality. One of his first decisions as 

administrator, for example, was to return NASA to the round blue 

“meatball” logo of its glory days. Individuals at Ames quickly started 

removing “worm” logos (the red, linked letters introduced in the 

1970s), because they saw how Goldin reacted when he saw it. Goldin 

denied that finally burying the NASA worm logo was some personal 

obsession, “but if people think it is and it helps to stimulate positive 

change, I’m all for it.”13 Goldin’s visit, in fact, foreshadowed that he 

really would push for a diverse workplace, for opening up the NASA 

facilities to scientists outside the usual groups, for imposing total 

quality management, and for tightening the NASA organization. But 

clearly, there was more than that to his displeasure with Ames. 

NASA headquarters sent a surprise security review team 

that descended upon Ames on the evening of 31 July 1992. They 

sealed buildings, changed locks, searched file cabinets, took 

computers, interrogated more than a hundred scientists, and sent 

ten researchers home on administrative leave. Only Compton was 

told, the day before, who they were, what they were looking for, and 

what prompted the raid. The team pointedly asked everyone about 

“management’s judgment” on technology transfer matters.14 Rumors 

circulated that they targeted scientists of Asian descent, especially 

those in the aerophysics directorate. In the end, the team discovered 

nothing illegal, and Ames altered some minor security procedures. 

But some good people decided to quit, and the Center was left with 

deepened concerns about the attitudes toward Ames that prevailed 

in NASA headquarters. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

Whenever Goldin talked of Ames he used the word “revitalize,” 

which Ames people considered better than “shut down.” During the 

summer of 1992, as Bill Clinton made gains in the polls, Ames people 

thought a change in administration might remove Dan Goldin from 

their list of worries. But Albert Gore, as senator from Tennessee, 

chaired the committee that oversaw NASA matters and liked what 

he saw in Goldin. When Gore became vice president, he asked 

Goldin to stay on as administrator. 

M O F F E T T F I E L D A N D C U LT U R A L C L I M A T E 

Compton won the next round of tensions between Goldin and 

Ames—over the reconfiguration of Moffett Field. The Navy had 

managed Moffett Field since 1931—except from October 1935 

(following the crash of the dirigible Macon) to April 1942 when the 

Army Air Corps ran it. In the 1950s, the Navy based supersonic 

fighters there until the community objected to the noise. In 1962, 

propeller-driven P-3 Orions arrived on base to fly patrols over the 

Pacific in search of Soviet submarines. With the collapse of the 

Soviet Union in 1990, the Navy said it no longer needed Moffett 

Field. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), an 

independent board reporting to Congress, agreed. 

The Bay Area congressional delegation, led by Norman Mineta, 

a San Jose Democrat who chaired the Congressional Space Caucus, 

stepped into the fray. They convinced the BRAC that, even if the 

Navy left, Moffett should remain a federal airfield. Efforts in 1990 

to declare fifty acres at Moffett as protected wetlands, and to chart 

the presence of protected species like the burrowing owl, least tern, 

and peregrine falcon limited other developments at the field. In the 

October 1991 recommendations approved by Congress and the 

president, the BRAC said that NASA, as the next biggest resident 

agency, should become Moffett’s custodian. The Navy had subsidized 

Moffett operations at $6 million per year, a cost NASA then would 

have to include in its budget unless it found other ways to generate 

revenues from field operations. NASA administrator Richard Truly 

understood the opportunities for Ames. Goldin inherited a decision, 

however, that was not initially in line with his change agenda. NASA 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

headquarters was already planning to further trim Ames’ flight 

operations. Furthermore, if Congress ever imposed a BRAC-type 

process on NASA, headquarters might want nothing to get in its way 

of shutting down Ames. Compton and his executive staff understood 

this, marshalled the substantial goodwill toward Ames from its local 

community, and wrested control of the property on which Ames sat. 

Not until December 1992, in a subdued signing ceremony at Ames, 

did Goldin concede that NASA would step up as custodian agency 

when the Navy officially decommissioned its station in July 1994. It 

would be four years after that, though, before NASA Ames could 

move forward with any plans for redeveloping the base. 

“Over the past five years in my prior job, I’ve become a true 

believer in the value of total quality management,” said Goldin. “I 

believe deeply that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, and 

intend to bring this philosophy to NASA.15 Throughout the 1970s, 

headquartershadaskedAmes toundertakeconsultant-driven reviews 

and exercises—like quality circles—to make itself more efficient, and 

it was entirely Goldin’s prerogative to impose this latest fashion in 

organizational improvement. But total quality management (TQM) 

was confusing. It demanded a focus on the “customer,” which in 

Ames’ case proved nebulous. “The space program doesn’t belong to 

us,” Goldin would say. “It belongs to the American people. They are 

our customers.”16 Lots of NASA people did not find that definition 

specific enough to clarify how they would use all the statistics and 

acronyms TQM demanded. But Ames people tried. 

Compton called an all-hands meeting in July 1992 on the Ames 

flightline to say Ames would startimplementingTQM beginning with 

a year of education and training. Meanwhile a quality improvement 

team, chaired by Jana Coleman and Robert Rosen and working 

with continuous-improvement consultants Philip C. Crosby, Inc., 

wrote a report on the whole TQM process. In April 1993, Ames 

posted everywhere its carefully worded quality statement. Ames’ 

management council approved the report in February 1993, and 

set about forming process action teams to reduce the costs of nonconformance.Throughout the Center, teams defined their customers, 

used flow charting and process measurements, tore apart then 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

rebuilt all their procedures, and began to report savings in costs and 

time. For example, in late 1993, the Unitary 11 foot transonic tunnel 

applied a TQM approach to runs for the Navy’s A/F-X competition by 

four contractor teams. By reviewing their procedures and listening to 

their customers, the tunnel group doubled the expected number of 

successful runs. Ames announced a $2 million investment in process 

infrastructure—like electronic forms and purchasing, computer 

peripherals, and a charge-back system for technical support—that 

helped all teams improve their processes. Ames made good progress, 

even though the Crosby literature trumpeted that continuous 

improvement is a cultural process that takes five to seven years to 

change—”so don’t let impatience cloud your view of progress.”17 

Ames undertook the Malcolm Baldridge Self-Assessment in the fall 

of 1993—less than eighteen months after starting TQM—because 

of a Clinton administration initiative to reinvent government. The 

survey showed that, even though Ames people thought their work 

was very high quality, they knew little about Ames’ formal quality 

process. Ames lagged well behind all other organizations actively 

implementing TQM.18 Ames management, presumably, had not 

become true believers in TQM. 

Another cultural review further widened the chasm between 

Ames management and NASA headquarters. In July 1992, Ames was 

visited by a NASA-wide cultural climate and practices review team, 

led by General Elmer T. Brooks, deputy associate administrator for 

agency programs. The team gave Ames a glowing report, calling it 

“the best” of all NASA Centers. Ames employed higher percentages 

of underrepresented groups than any other NASA Center; the Ames 

Multi-Cultural Leadership Council was a model for other Centers; 

participation was strong in the Equal Opportunity Advisory 

Groups—African America, Asian American and Pacific Islander, 

Disabled, Hispanic, Women and Native American; Ames won 

NASA’s Equal Opportunity Trophy in three of the past nine years; 

and Ames’ entire work force felt challenged and satisfied. 

However, there were problem areas.The percentage of minorities 

employed was lower than in the culturally diverse Bay Area as a 

whole. Blacks were especially underrepresented, suggesting Ames 

35 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

had failed to reach into the local community. Ames tended to 

hire experienced researchers rather than those fresh out of co-op 

programs. Any mentoring was too informal, and career development 

was haphazard. Higher wages in local industry made it tough for 

Ames to retain the leaders it did develop. Of forty top managers, 

only one was a woman and only two were minority males. Minorities 

and women perceived the senior executive service as a white male 

preserve. In fact, the Brooks team declared that all problems were 

caused by upper management. Despite being the best in NASA in 

affirmative action, the Brooks team reported, “everyone is looking to 

the Center director for proactive leadership.”19 

Then, in October 1993, Congress pulled funding for the SETI 

program (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), which Ames 

had nurtured for two decades and had stirred up real scientific 

excitement around NASA. Some Ames staff felt that Goldin failed 

to stand up to congressional doubts, and sacrificed SETI to secure 

funding for the space station and for programs at other Centers. 

Goldin later said that NASA would focus instead on the far more 

promising search for dumb, organic life in the universe by developing 

the discipline of astrobiology. Eight civil servants and fifty contractor 

staff were affected by the $12 million cut. As other Ames projects 

were cut, and as Ames prepared for many years of flat or declining 

budgets, Ames opened a career-transition office to move its work 

force into a booming Silicon Valley economy hungry for such 

technical skills. 

Compton and Peterson increasingly felt that, as the lightning rods 

for some unarticulated displeasure from NASA headquarters, the 

best thing they could do for their Center was to retire. In November 

1993, both Compton and Peterson retired—after 36 and 35 years of 

government service, respectively. In declining to speculate on what 

his successor might consider Ames’ major goals and challenges, 

Compton replied: “The long term goals of this Center have survived 

many directors.”20 

36 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

K E N K . M U N E C H I K A

In January 1994 Ken K. Munechika became director of Ames, 

recommended to Goldin by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. 

Munechikawas raisedinHawaiiandearnedadoctorateineducational 

administration from the University of Southern California. He had a 

distinguished career in the U.S. Air Force. He started as a navigator, 

flew 200 combat missions in Southeast Asia, moved into training 

as a professor of aerospace studies, then served as chief of satellite 

operations to recover space capsules deorbited from space. In July 

1981 he moved to Sunnyvale to command the Air Force Satellite 

Control Facility (later renamed Onizuka Air Force Station), where 

he directed contractor teams in launch operations of more than fifty 

defense satellites, and all the defense payloads launched by NASA’s 

Space Shuttle. He was also responsible for planning and budgeting 

a global network of satellite tracking stations. He retired from the 

Air Force in June 1989 to become executive director of the office of 

space industry for the state of Hawaii (where he returned after being 

reassigned from Ames). 

Munechika asked William E. Dean to serve as his deputy director. 

Dean, too, was a newcomer to Ames, having arrived in August 1991 

as special assistant for institutional management. Prior to that, Dean 

served as president of Acurex Corporation of Mountain View, a 

privately held supplier of control and electronics equipment. Before 

then, from 1962 to 1981, Dean worked for Rockwell International, 

serving as group vice president responsible for the Global Positioning 

Satellite and for the operational phase of NASA’s Space Shuttle 

program. Compton had hired Dean to infuse business-like thinking 

into Ames, and Munechika asked him to stay on. 

Though he had spent his entire career managing the highest 

technology in the Air Force arsenal, Munechika was the first to admit 

he was no scientist. His first priority was addressing the lingering 

factionalism from the Cultural Climate and Practices Plan. “Since 

aeronautics and space are for everybody,” Munechika wrote, “I want 

Ames to look like America and the community we represent....Ames 

37 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

must have a work environment where everyone feels empowered, 

included, valued, and respected.”21 Jana Coleman was named to lead 

the newly created Center operations directorate, the first woman to 

head a directorate at Ames. Ames people addressed their diversity 

with seriousness. 

Ames people also put more vigor into their outreach efforts. 

Every summer for two weeks thousands of students gathered for 

the JASON project to explore, through telepresence, the scientific 

mysteries of our Earth. Ames formed a docent corps to staff the Ames 

Aerospace Encounter, the Ames visitor center, and the Ames teacher 

resource center. NASA distributed internet kits to area schools, when 

the internet was still largely unknown, and engineers volunteered to 

share with students the excitement of their work. Ames expanded its 

relationship with the National Hispanic University (the relationship 

began early in 1993 with a space sciences program and would 

culminate in an historic collaborative agreement in October 1997). 

Interns and research fellows came from a wider variety of schools. 

Space Camp California opened just outside Ames’ main gate. 

With Munechika to introduce them, headquarters staff showed 

up more regularly at Ames, praising its revitalization efforts. Many 

of the significant events and program activities that would follow— 

like the Zero Base Review, the information technology Center of 

Excellence, the astrobiology institute, Lunar Prospector, the SOFIA 

restart, and the absorption of Moffett Naval Air Station—were all 

started in a fairly short period of time after Munechika became 

director. Yet bolstered morale and coalescence of support from the 

external community only served to brace Ames people for program 

adjustments and structural changes still to come. The darkening 

funding picture and Goldin’s agenda for change set the challenges 

for Munechika’s leadership. The same day Goldin announced 

Munechika’s appointment, he also announced the appointment of 

three other Center directors (two of whom, like Munechika, would 

be gone within three years). 

He further announced that the Dryden Flight Research Center 

would again become an independent field Center. Managing Dryden 

from afar had not resultedin any significant cost savings. In December 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

1990 NASA headquarters appointed long-time Dryden researcher 

Kenneth Szalai to the position of director of the Ames-Dryden Flight 

Research Facility. Marty Knutson, who had managed the facility for 

five years and guided Szalai’s development as a manager, returned 

home to Ames. Goldin visited Dryden in September 1992 and 

announced that “the right stuff ” still lived there and, indeed, Szalai 

proved adept at bringing new projects to Dryden—from industry 

as well as from other NASA Centers. By March 1994, after thirteen 

years of leadership from Ames, Dryden again became an independent 

NASA Center. In a note to Ames employees, Szalai wrote “Many 

professional associations and friendships were developed and I 

intend to work hard to sustain these....Please consider Dryden as 

your flight research center, too.”22 Ames management expected that, 

as Dryden asserted itself in NASA planning, that programs and 

people would be shifted there from Ames. 

Headquarters let Ames staff know that Moffett Field was their 

burden to bear. Countless details were ironed out in advance 

of the transfer, all coordinated by Michael Falarski and Annette 

Rodrigues of the NASA-Moffett Field development project. Change 

appeared gradually—access rules were rewritten, security guards 

wore different uniforms, the Navy’s P-3 Orions left, the Navy began 

environmental remediation, and historic preservationists surveyed 

the architecture. In 1993, NASA also took control of the small naval 

airfield at Crows Landing in Stanislaus County—which Navy pilots 

had used for P-3 training flights and which NASA would use for lowspeed flight research. The Onizuka Air Force Station took over the 

military housing that Navy families vacated. On 1 July 1994, while 

a Navy blimp and a P-3 Orion flew overhead, a 21 gun salute and 

taps sounded as Navy officers lowered their flags. “From Lighter 

than Air, to Faster than Sound, to Outer Space:” that’s how the Navy 

commander described the changes seen at the Naval Air Station 

Moffett Field. 

NASA renamed it Moffett Federal Airfield to reflect the 

organizational flexibility it now had to serve a wider array of tenants 

and customers—the Naval Air Reserve of Santa Clara, the Army 

Reserve, the California Air National Guard, other governmental 

39 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

agencies like the Post Office and the Federal Emergency 

Management Agency, and private firms executing government 

contracts. Then Ames people started planning to make something 

exciting from this opportunity. 

Ames started by assessing community needs, in the adjacent cities 

of Mountain View and Sunnyvale and in Silicon Valley region-wide. 

San Jose International Airport was congested, with any expansion 

limited by its proximity to the downtown and its location amid 

residential neighborhoods. Moffett Field offered a superb airfield— 

twin runways, 9,200 feet and 8,900 feet long, ample tarmacs, three 

very large hangars, aircraft fuel and wash facilities, and more than 

seventy structures for aircraft operations. It had 24 hour crash and 

rescue service, sixteen hour air traffic control, instrument landing, 

world-class communication links, and easy access to Highway 101. 

What it lacked was air traffic, so Ames facility managers suggested 

using the airfield for business and freight flights. The San Jose airport 

could no longer fit in jumbo jets ferrying electronics back and forth 

from Asia. Furthermore, Bill Dean, Ames’ deputy director and the 

person most responsible for base planning, thought that Ames 

should keep the airfield as the Navy left it. Like so many others, he 

thought that some day soon Russian submarines would again patrol 

the Pacific and the Navy would return its P-3 Orions. Converting 

Moffett Field into an air cargo base, as he proposed, best kept it in 

mobilization shape. 

But local residents had gotten used to quiet (though the P-3 and 

C-130 flights were never very noisy). Rather than decide themselves, 

the Mountain View and Sunnyvale city councils asked for a nonbinding vote on the plan to make Moffett Field a freight airport. 

Voters advised against the plan, Munechika respected the vote, and 

Ames was left to devise another plan while shouldering the costs of 

running the base. Losing the momentum behind the Moffett Field 

plan was a loss, though far greater losses to the Center came in the 

wake of NASA’s Zero Base Review. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

Z E R O B A S E R E V I E W

Goldin arrived at NASA proclaiming that NASA was bloated. 

He imposed a new type of discipline to NASA’s budget process and, 

in time for the fiscal 1994 appropriations, submitted a budget that 

reduced NASA’s five-year budget by $15 billion. Two years later, by 

cancelling programs and redesigning the International Space Station, 

he voluntarilly reduced NASA’s long-range budget by thirty percent. 

He called this process “a fiscal declaration of independence from 

the old way of doing business.” But by 1995 Congress asked NASA 

to cut an additional $5 billion from its $14 billion budget, starting 

in 1997. Goldin realized that the loss of more research programs 

would jeopardize NASA’s leadership in aerospace. So in response to 

the Clinton administration’s call for a national performance review, 

instead of cutting programs Goldin tried to streamline NASA’s 

infrastructure through a Zero Base Review (ZBR). 

Rather than starting with last year’s budget to develop the 

next, zero base budgeting meant starting from zero every year, 

and asking whether each program was essential to an agency’s 

core mission. This was different from the national laboratory 

review of 1992, which focused mostly on eliminating duplication 

of functions. A headquarters “red team” visited Ames in 1994 and 

asked Ames people to ponder the prospect of being shut down. 

The preliminary ZBR white paper of April 1995, drafted at NASA 

headquarters, translated this vague recommendation into a specific 

budget planning document. Nancy Bingham, the Ames manager on 

whose desk the faxed ZBR draft landed, called it “inflammatory.”23 

It presented numbers that dropped Ames’ civil servant cadre from 

1,678 to below 1,000 within five years—below the point of viability. 

Aerospace facilities would be transferred to Dryden, and the space 

station centrifuge project would go to Johnson Space Center. What 

remained of Ames could then easily be shunted into a GOCO—a 

government owned, contractor operated facility. Ames had in the past 

confronted efforts, both real and imagined, to shut it down—in 1969 

at the start of Hans Mark’s tenure and during the 1976 reductions in 

41 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

force before he left. The draft ZBR white paper made it most clear— 

in dollars and headcounts—that if people in Washington wanted to 

rebuild NASA from scratch, they would rebuild it without Ames. 

To stave off the threat that the entire Center would be shut down, 

Ames mobilized support within the community, among California 

legislators and Ames’ friends in Washington. Congressman Norm 

Mineta protested that the people of Ames “are too valuable to be 

left to the underestimation of NASA bureaucrats in Washington.”24 

With the small amount of time they won, they dove head first into 

the challenge of zero-base thinking. NASA headquarters had started 

by defining its five strategic enterprises—mission to planet Earth, 

aeronautics, human exploration and development of space, space 

science, and space technology. They intended to declare each Center 

a center of excellence in some area to help all of NASA execute 

those missions. Each Center would take on lead-center programs, 

and administrative functions would be consolidated agency-wide. 

Deciding which Centers should execute a mission and which were 

“overlap” got intensely political. 

Many at Ames believed their Center did not fare well in the 

grab for assignments. Ames lost its leadership in Earth sciences to 

Goddard, in biomedical sciences to Johnson, in space technology 

to Marshall Space Flight Center, and in planetary sciences to the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Significantly, Ames lost its leadership 

in aerodynamics and airframes to Langley, and Langley might also 

manage Ames’ tunnels and simulators, which were mostly staffed 

by contractors but made up sixty percent of Ames’ budget. Ames 

faithfully eliminated programs declared redundant, and executed 

its plan for 35 percent attrition during 1996: buyouts reduced the 

number of civil servants by 300, layoffs almost halved the number of 

contractor personnel to 1,400. 

Most importantly, Ames finally lost its aircraft to Dryden. In 

May 1995, NASA announced that for cost savings every aircraft in 

the NASA fleet—operational as well as experimental—would be 

consolidated at Dryden.25 Ames had the most to lose. Of the seventy 

aircraft in NASA’s fleet, Ames then serviced twelve of the biggest— 

three ER-2s, one DC-8, one C-130, one Learjet, one C-141, and five 

42 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

helicopters. Moving the airborne science airplanes provoked the 

most controversy. Ames management argued that these airborne 

laboratoriesreliedoninput fromanactivescientificcommunitysimply 

not found in California’s high desert, and that they used equipment 

made and maintained in Silicon Valley. “This consolidation could 

mean the end of valuable environmental programs,” wrote California 

congresswoman Anna Eshoo, “I’m also concerned that NASA is 

fudging its fiscal homework on the consolidation plan. Its numbers 

are incomplete and its economic justifications are questionable.”26 

The flight operations branch, the first branch ever established at 

Ames, was disbanded. Some support staff moved with the aircraft; 

some retired, like long-time flight operations chief Martin Knutson 

and pilot Gordon Hardy; most took new assignments at Ames. In 

November 1997 the last Ames aircraft flew off to Dryden, though 

some helicopters remained. A disconcerting quiet hung over the 

Ames hangars. Researchers at Ames who dedicated their careers 

to improving aircraft and who wanted to see them fly now had to 

shuttle south to the desert and back on a commuter airplane. 

Amid all these program losses, though, Ames constructed a bold 

new strategy. Ames’ active response to the ZBR fell on the shoulders 

of a group of mid-career technical leaders—most of whom had hired 

into Ames during the 1970s and had honed their advocacy skills in 

the strategy and tactics committees called by Bill Ballhaus and Dale 

Compton. Despite the mandate of zero-based thinking, they refused 

to consider that Ames had utterly no history. They knew the people 

on Center, how fluidly they worked together, and how ingeniously 

they used the research tools available. Ames management had not 

done the best job marketing these capabilities; still they existed. 

Coordinating efforts from the Ames headquarters building, Nancy 

Bingham, Bill Berry, Mike Marlaire, Scott Hubbard, and George 

Kidwell pulled together comments from their colleagues around 

Ames, and gradually a strategic response emerged. Ames polished 

this story by talking to community leaders, to the Bay Area Economic 

Forum, and the local press. Largely because of the Ames response, the 

final NASA ZBR white paper of May 1996 showed Ames’ headcount 

at 1,300 and that Ames would lead NASA in information technology, 

astrobiology, and aviation system safety and capacity. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

The Ames response to the ZBR marked another rebirth. In the 

same way that so many scientists and engineers had reinvented 

themselves to address new national needs, by the end of the ZBR 

exercise the Center had also redefined itself. It coincided with the 

arrival of a new director. 

H E N R Y M C D O N A L D 

Harry McDonald remembers that when he first met Dan Goldin, 

Goldin said that he “gave Ames one plum assignment—to become 

a center of excellence in information science—and that Ames 

hadn’t executed it well.”27 Munechika’s plans for the newly-created 

information systems directorate were largely derailed when David 

Cooper, the information system director he appointed to replace 

Henry Lum, left and many of his staff left with him. Consolidating 

all of NASA’s computing and communication systems should have 

shown a savings of 1,200 positions agency-wide, but the systems 

were still burdened by disorganization and redundancy. More 

NASA mission revolved around newer information technologies in 

imaging, robotics, data crunching and internetworking, and NASA 

people had a hard time finding the expertise they needed. If Ames 

expected to grow it had to take a bold stance, especially in serving 

NASA’s information needs. Thus charged with implementing Ames’ 

information technology mission,McDonald arrived as Ames director 

in March 1996. 

A native of Scotland with a doctorate in engineering from the 

University of Glasgow, McDonald had spent the previous five years 

as professor and assistant director of computational sciences in the 

Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. Before 

that, McDonald was president of Scientific Research Associates Inc., 

of Glastonbury, Connecticut, a company he founded in 1976 to do 

contract research in computational physics and gas dynamics. The 

state of Connecticut awarded McDonald its Small Businessman 

of the Year Award for high technology because of a ventilator he 

invented and developed. And before that he worked as a research 

engineer for British Aerospace and then for United Technologies 

where, along with colleagues at Ames, he developed software for 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

linearized block implicit methods for solving compressible flow 

equations. McDonald joined Ames on an interpersonnel agreement 

that allowed him to keep his university tenure, and he kept a house 

in Glastonbury, where his wife had her medical practice. 

McDonald was an expert in computational aerodynamics, and 

though an outsider to the Center, people around Ames knew and 

respected his work. As his deputy director he appointed William E. 

Berry, who had built a strong reputation for management in the space 

and life sciences at Ames. McDonald also brought in new managers 

from the outside—like Robert J. “Jack” Hansen as deputy director of 

research. Steven F. Zornetzer, director of life sciences at the Office 

of Naval Research, was hired as director of information sciences and 

technology, and worked with Kenneth Ford to develop Ames’ center 

of excellence in information technology. McDonald also invited back 

an old hand as his advisor, Jack Boyd. 

Intellectually, McDonald understood the entire range of work 

at the Center and could thus represent it effectively outside. He 

tempered what many perceived as the traditional arrogance around 

“Ames University.” McDonald tapped into the desire of Ames 

researchers to embrace change, and to reinvent themselves by 

applying their skills to new challenges. Most important, McDonald 

focused Ames on implementing the strategic opportunities posed by 

the Zero Base Review. 

The mantra of faster, cheaper, and better fit Ames’ legacy in 

spacecraft management, exemplified by the Pioneer series of space 

probes launched in the early 1970s. This small spacecraft tradition 

combined well with Ames’ ability to craft cooperative arrangements 

with private firms and research organizations. Even in broader 

programs managed by other NASA Centers, Ames was named leader 

of important specific projects—like Lunar Prospector, the X-36 

and SOFIA. Ames had established a center for Mars exploration in 

1992 which, in May 1998, was reconfigured as a cross-directorate 

organization, the Center for Mars Exploration with Anthony Gross 

joining Geoffrey Briggs as co-directors. It supported a re-invigorated 

headquarters desire for robotic Mars exploration and for inventing 

ways to use materials found on Mars to build a settlement. As NASA 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

reshaped itself during Goldin’s tenure it looked to Ames and to the 

leadership style of McDonald as models. 

The history of Ames Research Center is reflected in the projects 

it did and the way it organized its scientific and technical expertise. 

Ames undertook ISO 9001 certification, at Goldin’s insistence, to 

align its tradition of engineering with the international standard for 

quality management. In June 1996, Ames’ deputy director Bill Berry 

saw how certification benefited work at Great Britain’s closest analog 

to Ames, the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency. In January 

1996, the leadership of the Ames aeronautical test and simulation 

division decided that their efforts at total quality management 

would be better channeled into the broader and better-defined ISO 

9001 process. Bob Shiner led the effort; teams including every civil 

servant and contractor employee wrote the manual detailing their 

work processes and methods of quality assurance. This division 

passed their ISO certification audit in June 1998, and soon all of 

Ames embraced the ISO 9001 process as a chance to demonstrate 

categorically the quality they had so long, and often so quietly, 

provided to those they served.28 In April 1999, after an intense review, 

Ames was ISO certified “without condition,” a rare achievement. 

“When Ames needs to step up we can show superior management 

process,” noted Harry McDonald. “We just don’t want too much 

managerial process.”29 

Ames people started seeing Moffett Field as the physical 

endowment on which to build the Center of their dreams. Led by 

McDonald, Berry and Michael Marlaire, Ames’ director of external 

affairs, Ames people began to view Moffett Field not as a problem 

to be managed or a collection of historical artifacts from another 

era of science and technology to be preserved. Instead, they came 

to view the Moffett land as a unique opportunity—as a large, stillunderdeveloped piece of land at the epicenter of the world’s most 

dynamic industrial region. “Our Center’s traditional agenda and 

structure were becoming fundamentally unstable because of the 

change in the world around us,” noted Berry. “Today, no one would 

build huge wind tunnels here, on land this expensive, and where labor 

costs are so high. Nor would they surround a major research center 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

with a fence.”30 The San Francisco Bay area was the most prosperous 

metropolitan area in the nation; the nation’s third leading exporter 

overall, producing more than one fourth of America’s high tech 

exports. One fifth of the hundred fastest growing global companies 

located there—including most of the leaders in computing, 

communications, and biotechnology. For Ames to continue to 

flourish, Center leadership realized it must be firmly rooted in that 

Silicon Valley community. 

Ames held its first open house in September 1997. Thousands 

were expected; nearly a quarter million of Ames’ closest friends 

streamed in. Ames displayed its latest technology at sites around the 

Center,including demonstrations of aMars rover andmany ofits wind 

tunnels. “Partnership” unified the 150 exhibits inside the enormous 

Hangar One, where local schools, companies, federal agencies, and 

community organizations bragged about all they had accomplished 

by working with Ames. Over 1,300 Ames ambassadors helped the 

crowd, describing the science behind the dazzling displays. “We 

all witnessed actions so extraordinary,” effused Lynn Harper, who 

coordinated the space sciences exhibits, “that we thought we’d burst 

with pride.”31 As David Morse and Donald James, the Ames external 

affairs co-chairs who so quickly organized the open house, walked 

around to check on things, people applauded. 

Morale at Ames had sunk low in the early 1990s— budget cuts 

by Congress, the transfer of programs to other Centers, neglect and 

scolding from headquarters, and a lack of technical leadership within 

Ames. As Ames people caught glimpses of the public interest in the 

open house, however, enthusiasm grew. The open house displays 

let Ames shed the trappings of its past and embrace its future by 

declaring—loudly, visibly, and harmoniously—how it was stepping 

up to its missions in information technology, astrobiology, and 

aviation capacity and safety. This time Dan Goldin, who had inspired 

the event after he met with local leaders six months before, had to 

compose himself as he welcomed the throngs so fervently interested 

in all Ames had contributed to its community. Ames director Harry 

McDonald reflected: 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

“September 20, 1997 was a momentous day in the life of 

Ames Research Center—a day when we made history and 

recast the course of our future. Together, as we transform 

this incredible Center, we are reinventing ourselves in 

the process. Our workforce has a new sense of pride. A 

better, more robust Ames will be our legacy; effecting the 

transformation is our reward. Community Day did not 

initiate this process. But, as we look back, it will stand 

as the most visible signpost on the historic pathway of 

change, and the point from which all future progress will 

be measured. Collectively, we have changed both the 

perception and reality of Ames.”32 

In 1998, four years after the closure of Moffett Field as a military 

base, Ames signed memoranda of understanding with the cities of 

Mountain View and Sunnyvale that allowed planning of the NASA 

Research Park (NRP) to move forward. Marlaire and Trish Morrisey 

led creation of an award-winning re-use plan to transform part of 

the former Naval Air Station into a research and development center 

dedicated to serving the nation’s space program. In 2002, a final 

environmental impact report was approved, eventually allowing 4.2 

million square feet of new construction. NASA Ames could act as its 

own master developer. 

The Ames portion of the base remained fenced and operated as 

before. The airfield remained intact though relatively quiet. In the 

old Navy portion of the base—several million square feet of built 

space—there would emerge a new complex of research buildings. 

The University of California at Santa Cruz and Carnegie Mellon 

University needed space for extension education. UC Santa Cruz 

also formed a university-affiliated research center to take research 

and engineering contracts from Ames, and apply the intellectual 

horsepower of the UC system to serve NASA. Ames also brought in 

industrial partners—mostly start-up companies helping to transfer 

NASA technology—as reimbursable Space Act tenants that paid 

Ames fair market rents to fund base operations. NASA Ames was 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

also allowed to lease buildings in historic Shenandoah Plaza through 

authority granted by the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966. 

While any major construction at Moffett Field would still require 

substantial financing and political support, small improvements 

accumulated quickly. 

Goldin resigned in November 2001, ten months into the 

administration of George W. Bush, having served three presidents 

and as the longest-tenured NASA administrator.33 He was succeeded 

by Sean O’Keefe, who served until February 2005, and then by 

Michael Griffin, who served until January 2009. Both of these 

administrators, unlike Goldin, proved largely indifferent to Ames 

and moved the agency in directions that scarcely relied on Ames’ 

traditional strengths. Bush appointed O’Keefe as administrator 

expecting NASA to fund the aerospace industry to build new rockets 

to replace the space shuttle, a policy Griffin accelerated. Thus, even 

lacking Goldin’s initial anger, Ames people considered the tenures of 

O’Keefe and Griffin more trying times for their Center. 

McDonald retired from NASA Ames in September 2002, soon 

after he turned 65. McDonald had crossed swords with O’Keefe in 

a personal way he never had with Goldin, and both of them sensed 

their working relationship was beyond repair. As a distinguished 

professor of computational engineering at the University of 

Tennessee in Chattanooga he remained quite active in his research. 

McDonald’s deputy, Bill Berry, also retired then went on to lead the 

Ames-oriented efforts of the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

To succeed McDonald, O’Keefe selected one of the young managers 

who had guided Ames through its zero base review. 

G . S C O T T H U B B A R D 

Prior to becoming director in September 2002, Scott Hubbard 

had spent fifteen years in leadership positions at NASA Ames. 

Hubbard earned his undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy 

from Vanderbilt University in 1970, then did graduate work in solid 

state physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He served 

as staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, founded and 

managed Canberra Semiconductor, then worked as senior research 

49 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

physicist at SRI International. During this period he authored forty 

papers, and did research on radiation detection and far infrared 

photoconductors. He joined Ames in 1987 and served as principal 

investigator for detector technology projects; he later served as coinvestigator for the Lunar Prospector gamma ray spectrometer. As 

associate director for astrobiology and space programs in the early 

1990s, he originated the concept behind the Mars Pathfinder, which 

successfully landed on Mars in July 1997. He helped create the NASA 

Astrobiology Institute, and served as its interim director. From 1997 

to 1999 he served as deputy director of the Ames space directorate. 

He was also NASA manager for the Lunar Prospector mission which 

launched in January 1998, orbited the Moon for a year to map lunar 

resources, and found evidence of water ice at the south pole of the 

Moon. In 2000 he was called to headquarters as Mars program 

director, the “Mars Czar,” to reshape NASA’s efforts at the robotic 

exploration of Mars following the high profile failures of the Mars 

Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander in 1999. Under his watch, 

NASA accelerated their plans for Mars Odyssey and the rovers Spirit 

and Opportunity. In 2001 he returned to Ames as deputy director for 

research—third in command—before being named director. 

Four months after becoming director, though, Hubbard was 

called away from the Center for six months. When the space shuttle 

Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas in February 2003, 

NASA’s established protocol designated the director of Ames as 

NASA’s sole representative on the accident investigation board. The 

Ames director would not be as vested in shuttle program decisions 

as were the directors of the Centers more actively engaged in human 

space flight, but would still be able to marshal the NASA resources 

needed for a thorough investigation. Hubbard, with the help of a 

great many people at Ames, directed the testing that showed the 

cause was an insulation foam breach in the shuttle wings. 

Steve Zornetzer, whom Hubbard had earlier moved up to the 

Ames headquarters building as director of research, served as 

acting deputy director during Hubbard’s absence. “In the months 

following the disaster,” remembered Zornetzer, “the entire agency 

was in a holding pattern waiting to learn what would be required 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

on the shuttle program. Our job was to marshal resources to help 

with the return to flight.”34 Zornetzer, assisted by Estelle Condon 

as associate director for programs, led the Center though a time of 

great uncertainty in NASA’s direction. 

When Hubbard returned to Ames full-time in September 2003, 

he refocused on his agenda for remaking Ames. The convergence 

of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology, 

he thought, could best define Ames’ place at the frontier of 

space exploration. He hoped to encourage the emergence of an 

entrepreneurial space industry, and explored new partnership ideas 

with Silicon Valley companies like Google. However, Hubbard 

increasingly found his optimism deflated at NASA headquarters. 

Full-cost accounting and recovery had a major impact on 

how Hubbard was able to run Ames. O’Keefe’s background was 

in government accounting rather than space. After confronting 

criticism from Congress that NASA was not able to pass a financial 

audit, O’Keefe quickly imposed some accounting measures 

intended to display the full cost of the work NASA did. Full-cost 

accounting had been discussed within NASA since the early 1990s, 

as the financial equivalent of total quality management. But Goldin 

thought this financial precision came at too great a cost compared 

with traditional cost estimation. When O’Keefe moved ahead 

with full-cost accounting, Center directors almost completely lost 

control of their finances. Problems arose not simply in the precision 

required in the accounting reports; the problems arose because this 

accounting precision theoretically would allow the recovery of all 

expenses incurred by a particular program. Mission directors at 

NASA headquarters funded programs—like parts of the rocket 

development program—and Center directors begged those 

program managers for work packages that would pay their staff. 

Center directors could not transfer money between program funds. 

With little funds of their own to pay for Center maintenance, their 

only flexibility was in applying overhead expenses at their Centers 

to a program, until those program managers resisted.35 

At the same time Congress, wanting to assure that NASA spent 

money as Congress wished, moved to appropriating funds as often 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

as seven times a year. And NASA headquarters started releasing all 

funds on a task order by task order basis so they could monitor how 

all the funding was spent. Between the encroaching bureaucracy and 

the demands of the Bush administration to focus NASA on building 

a new launch vehicle, Center directors had no way to address the 

imbalances in the skills of their workforce. For example, at Ames, 

when the space station biological research project was cancelled, 

about forty civil servant life scientists found their salaries unfunded, 

and their skills not easily transferred to other space science programs. 

Their salaries were rolled into a Center overheard rate, already 

high at Ames because of the costs of working in Silicon Valley, 

and charged to funded programs. Managers bringing money into 

Ames to support rocket engineering resented having to carry the 

overhead burden of underemployed scientists; and world class life 

scientists either left or found themselves relegated to a pool of 

workers “available for other assignment.” 

Furthermore, full cost accounting imposed extra costs at Ames. 

A human spaceflight center might manage thirty big pots of program 

money (known as WBS funds, for work breakdown structure funds) 

whereas Ames might track a couple different WBS numbers. At an 

operational center, an engineer might charge his entire salary to 

three WBS numbers; at Ames they might charge it to thirty. Lewis 

Braxton led Ames’ finance staff in managing and ameliorating this 

accounting burden, though morale suffered as it became apparent 

Hubbard ultimately had little power to fund Center needs. 

Full-cost accounting, more than anything else, shined a spotlight 

the inequities in funding between the Centers. At the same time 

full cost accounting intensified conflict between Centers over every 

dollar of funding, O’Keefe proclaimed the idea of “One NASA,” 

of eliminating what he considered harmful competition between 

NASA’s ten field Centers. He moved all agency-wide program offices 

back to headquarters, and eliminated the idea that any one Center 

could be a formal center of excellence within NASA. In addition to 

combining infrastructure across Centers—like the shared services 

center which NASA located at Stennis, or the email system located at 

Marshall—O’Keefe wanted to see NASA people moving more freely 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

around the Centers. In August 2003, soon after Hubbard’s return, 

G. Allan Flynt, a program manager at the Johnson Space Center, 

was appointed to a one-year assignment as Ames deputy director. 

Flynt’s primary role was to introduce people at Ames to the program 

managers in the human space flight arena who had money to spend. 

Hubbard also began discussion around Ames, in response to 

rumors from headquarters that O’Keefe hoped to shut down Ames, 

of converting Ames into a federally funded research and development 

center. FFRDCsincluded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,RANDCorp., 

the Aerospace Corp., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 

and the Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. These laboratories did 

fundamental research, could take funds from any part of the 

federal government, and were usually managed by universities or as 

independent not-for-profit institutions. People at Ames thought their 

Center could make a superb FFRDC, but they were not yet willing to 

abandon their place within NASA. More importantly, as the union of 

federal employees at Ames stressed, there was no precedent around 

the legislative difficulties of transferring civil servants to a non-profit 

institution. The FFRDC exercise was useful, like the zero base review 

of a decade earlier, in getting Ames people to think about their core 

competencies and their role in the ecology of aerospace research. 

Still, it only reflected Ames’ troubles with headquarters. 

Hubbard was a masterful public speaker, and his all-hands and 

state-of-the-Center addresses were always well attended. In January 

2004 Hubbard was upbeat about the changes at NASA Ames. He had 

streamlined operations, reducing the number of staff offices from 

21 to 5: legal, equal employment opportunity, the SOFIA program 

office, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and the nanotechnology 

center. He also announced that Cliff Imprescia would lead a new 

Code P, a project engineering and management directorate that 

would report directly to Hubbard. Comprised of elements of other 

codes, it would focus on hardware engineering and management 

of the Kepler spacecraft, the SOFIA airborne observatory, and the 

space station biological research project. Hubbard also opened a new 

business office, led by Wendy Dolci, to focus Ames efforts on writing 

proposals for new spacecraft projects. And he instituted new types 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

of training for a new generation of program managers. Leadership 

Boot Camp trained division directors on how Ames worked, and 

the Ames Project Excellence Program trained engineers in NASA 

methods of systems engineering and project control.36 Building on 

the success of the Lunar Prospector mission, Hubbard wanted to 

emphasize Ames’ skills in spacecraft engineering. 

As the main conduit for news, both bad and enigmatic, from 

headquarters, Hubbard refined his communications with Ames 

staff. Hubbard hired Ingrid Desilvestre as executive officer, to assure 

communication of—and follow through—on planning. McDonald’s 

tendency had been to communicate broadly. For his executive staff 

meetings, he packed the N200 committee room to overflowing with 

are many as forty directorate and division chiefs. Centerwide emails 

went to everyone, whether they dealt with major strategic initiatives 

or meetings of the ham radio club. Desilvestre focused email 

communication so it reached only the intended audience, created a 

Heads-Up to announce events to the entire Ames community, and 

compiled a highlights memo with input from each directorate that 

Hubbard referred to in detailing Ames progress to headquarters.37 

Hubbard’s executive meetings, now twice a week rather than once 

every two weeks, involved only key staff and directorate chiefs, and 

they were expected to disseminate information through the ranks. 

When communication failed and the Ames corporate culture 

broke, Ames employees could avail themselves of an ombuds office. 

In January 2004 Jack Boyd added ombud to his list of jobs. NASA 

headquarters asked all Centers to open an ombud office as they 

sought to improve NASA’s safety culture in the wake of the Columbia 

accident. It served as a confidential channel of communication 

where employees could raise concerns that might affect safety or 

organizational performance. 

That January of 2004, O’Keefe finally found a way to express his 

desire that NASA build a new rocket to replace the Space Shuttle. 

President Bush announced his vision for space exploration, and 

rather quickly things looked even worse for Ames. The vision 

focused on human space flight: completing the International Space 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

Station, retiring the Space Shuttle, building a new set of rockets 

later dubbed Ares, and preparing for crewed missions to the Moon 

by 2020. Robotic exploration got scant attention, as did Ames 

traditional work in aeronautics and space science. O’Keefe created 

at headquarters an exploration systems mission directorate, planned 

for aerospace contractors to design and build the spacecraft, and 

started shifting control of NASA funds toward those Centers, largely 

in the American southeast, working on human space flight. 

Not until November 2004 was it clear if Congress would fund 

this vision. It did, and handsomely with a $16.2 billion NASA 

budget. While NASA’s plans were initially intended to demonstrate 

new technologies, still a stated mission of NASA Ames, little of that 

money was actually spent at Ames. Hubbard created an exploration 

systems office, led by Daniel J. Clancy, to coordinate all the research 

done at Ames to support the vision. NASA Ames did wind tunnel 

tests of rocket and capsule designs and computational fluid dynamics 

on the whole system. James Reuther led the multi-Center group 

developing new concepts in thermal protection systems for the crew 

exploration vehicle, and much of that work was done at Ames. David 

Korsmeyer led a group designing new information technologies, 

notably to monitor the health of the rocket systems in real-time. 

In April 2005, Michael Griffin became NASA administrator, 

and brought a new intensity to the vision for space exploration. 

He oversaw an Exploration Systems Architecture Study, released 

in October 2005, that defined more precisely the technologies and 

timeline he needed to return to the Moon.38 His goal was to minimize 

the five-year gap between the confirmed retirement of the shuttle 

and the availability of NASA’s planned crew exploration vehicle. 

He also added a heavy launch vehicle back to NASA’s planned fleet, 

now called the Constellation program. He decided to bring more 

of the system engineering work in-house to NASA, rather than 

leaving it to aerospace contractors, which further shifted power to 

the Marshall and Johnson centers. He also hoped to minimize any 

advanced technology design to instead use existing technologies, 

which further cut into research funding. The Bush administration 

and Congress were not, however, willing to boost NASA’s budget to 

55 
 

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 		

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

fund Griffin’s dreams for the Constellation program. 

Hubbard repackaged Ames in order to suggest the work it did 

was less long-term technology demonstration and more focussed on 

the specific engineering needs of Constellation. Hubbard created a 

Code T encompassing all the groups—about a quarter of the Ames 

workforce—who were funded to design exploration technology. Led 

by Eugene Tu, the new Code T included intelligent systems, the arc 

jets, and the human factors group. In August 2005, Griffin also moved 

to Ames the robotic lunar exploration program office (RLEP). The 

office had been at Goddard, where the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 

spacecraft had originated, since it was designed to serve NASA’s 

science missions. However, under the vision, robotic spacecraft did 

not do science, but would serve as pathfinders for a human mission 

to the Moon. Griffin expected Ames to ally the RLEP with the 

needs of the Constellation program, and Hubbard named as chief 

Butler Hine who had recently served as the Ames liaison at NASA 

headquarters to the exploration systems mission directorate. In the 

short time before it was again relocated to Marshall, the Ames RLEP 

office brought LRO to confirmation, completed a major trade study 

for a lunar rover, and revised the robotic architecture presented in 

the ESAS study. 

These were all important roles, just not ones that would cover 

capacity, meaning bring in funds to pay Ames salaries. Despite buyouts of employees near retirement, Hubbard warned Center staff 

to expect lay-offs of up to ten percent of the workforce. “Managing 

our way through fiscal year 06 without major damage to our core 

competencies or our strategic future may be the greatest challenge 

in the history of the Center,” Hubbard declared. 

In his January 2005 state of the Center address Hubbard was again 

pessimistic. There was a significant decline in the Ames budget, and 

little hope it would improve. The Ames budget of nearly $800 million 

in fiscal year 2004 dropped by about $100 million, with aeronautics and 

life sciences especially hard hit. Aeronautics suffered from a number of 

unfunded earmarks. Budget forecasts for future years showed additional 

declines because more funding would be subject to competition. While 

Ames traditionally did well in competition, it suffered from the high 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

overhead burden imposed by O’Keefe’s full-cost recovery. 

Perhaps most ominously, the NASA budget submitted that 

April eliminated all funding for the space station biological research 

program. As part of the vision, the space station would be completed, 

in part by eliminating the modules for scientific research. The shuttle 

flight that would have taken the SSBRP to the station, the last shuttle 

flight planned, was cancelled. A big portion of Ames’ budget in the 

early 2000s—roughly $100 million of an $800 million budget—came 

from life sciences work, most of which revolved around the SSBRP. 

Hubbard flew more frequently to NASA headquarters, pressing the 

need to restore funding for the space life sciences. 

Ames had a reputation, around headquarters, and extending 

back decades, for telling NASA headquarters staff what they should 

do rather than actively aligning itself with the goals of headquarters. 

Back on Center, his coworkers grew concerned that Hubbard’s 

tendency to take credit for what was happening at Ames might 

tarnish their programs as Hubbard’s star waned. Hubbard was losing 

credibility with his message of hope. 

A T I M E O F T R A N S I T I O N 

In January 2006 Scott Hubbard announced that he had resigned 

to accept the Carl Sagan Chair at the SETI Institute and continue 

his research in astrobiology. He also took a research position in the 

aeronautics and astronautics department at Stanford University. In 

a memo to Ames staff, Hubbard wrote: “As is often the case when 

there is any change of administration, the new leader wants his 

own team. In discussions with Mike Griffin before the holidays, we 

agreed that the future of Ames should be set by a Center director of 

the administrator’s choosing.”39 

It was not clear who at Ames did have the administrator’s ear. 

Following Allen Flynt’s year as Ames deputy director, headquarters 

named Stan Newberry as Ames deputy director. Newberry had 

served in a variety of positions around NASA, including as director 

of space operations at the Johnson Space Center. Both Flynt and 

Newberry brought insights into how the manned space centers 

worked, and connections to program managers at those Centers. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

However, neither had enough corporate knowledge of Ames to do 

much more than assume some of the director’s ceremonial functions. 

In August 2005 this experiment ended, and Steve Zornetzer was 

again named acting deputy director. Hubbard then named Marvin 

Christensen as his special assistant to supervise efforts that required 

program management experience. 

Prior to becoming an Ames civil servant in September 2005, 

Christensen had more than forty years experience in space industry. 

He had worked at Ames for eleven years as manager of the Lockheed 

Martin contract—which provided engineering support to programs 

such as SOFIA, Kepler, the space station biological research facility, 

and space life sciences payloads. Before that he worked at Martin 

Marrietta, JPL, and NASA headquarters on a variety of spacecraft 

projects. Upon Hubbard’s resignation, Griffin asked Christensen to 

serve as acting Center director with Zornetzer continuing as acting 

deputy director. Christensen never pretended he knew Griffin’s goals 

for the Center. He was, though, an experienced hand in times of 

budget crises and workforce re-alignments. Griffin never searched 

for an internal candidate from Ames to become the permanent 

Center director. 

A month into his tenure, in February 2006, Christensen delivered 

an all-hands address on how Ames would survive its budget 

shortfalls in fiscal year 2007. Hundreds of millions of dollars of 

NASA’s budget had been shifted from more basic research done in 

Ohio and California to rocket design done in Alabama and Texas. 

Since fiscal year 2004, NASA Ames had seen its budget shrink by 

$200 million, from $865 million to $657 million in fiscal year 2006. 

The Ames workforce had also shrunk, from 1,458 civil servants and 

1,475 contractors in fiscal year 2004 to 1,237 civil servants and 851 

contractors in fiscal year 2006. For fiscal year 2007, Ames’ budget was 

expected to shrink further, to $533 million. Overall, NASA’s budget 

was up 3.2 percent over the previous year, but Ames was getting a 

smaller slice of the pie. Due to underfunding, 288 civil servants were 

facing a reduction-in-force notices (RIFs), essentially lay-offs. SOFIA 

had received no funding in the fiscal year 2007 budget, after a thirty 

percent reduction the previous year. Kepler was slightly over budget. 

Astrobiology funding was slashed by forty percent, and aeronautics 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

facilities were dramatically underfunded. NASA headquarters was 

reducing its efforts in education and outreach. “We still have a good 

thirteen months before the RIF,” Christensen noted, “to solve our 

problems.”40 

Christensen announced that Jack Boyd, who had moved out onto 

the Center to work as Ames senior advisor for history, would move 

back into the N200 headquarters building to help develop a strategic 

plan. Lew Braxton’s staff in Center operations had reduced overhead 

expenses by fourteen percent in one year, which improved Ames’ 

ability to bid on work. The Ames storage facility at Camp Parks was 

sold, providing $6 million to fund other facilities, and the funds to 

close out the space station biological research program were ample 

enough to float many engineers on Center overhead funds.The NFAC 

was leased to the U.S. Air Force Arnold Engineering Development 

Center, which reduced institutional costs while keeping it available 

for NASA research. Christensen continued to focus Ames on small 

satellites, defined as those costing less than $250 million, built that 

small satellite group new workspace, and promised to reinvigorate 

Ames’ expertise in project management. NASA administrator Mike 

Griffin likewise encouraged Ames to develop program management 

expertise in small satellites. 

That April, Christensen announced that headquarters had 

selected Ames to build a secondary payload, called LCROSS, to 

launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Christensen had 

been especially active in championing LCROSS. Joel Kearns and 

Carol Carroll led an Ames team responding to an independent 

assessment of SOFIA, and Christensen was optimistic that SOFIA 

funding would be restored. NASA was maintaining its Centers 

through “shared capabilities” funding for facilities of national-level 

significance. Ames’ supercomputing capabilities were already being 

funded through this mechanism, and Christensen hoped to get 

similar funding for the Ames 20G centrifuge and the vertical motion 

simulator. George Sarver was named Ames lead for the Constellation 

work. Largely, Ames was pursuing work packages—scraps—from 

the Centers that had funding for Constellation. Still, by cutting costs 

and identifying the work it could do best, Ames leadership stabilized 

its funding during a very challenging time. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

S I M O N “ P E T E ” W O R D E N 

In April 2006 Griffin announced that the new permanent director 

of Ames would be Simon “Pete” Worden. Worden’s background was 

thoroughly Air Force, though suffused with space science. Worden 

retired in 2004 as a brigadier general after 29 years with the U.S. Air 

Force. He started his career in 1975 as an astrophysicist with the Air 

Force National Solar Laboratory in New Mexico. Over the next three 

decades he remained an active researcher, published more than 150 

papers, and was a noted expert on speckle interferometry. He was 

a co-investigator for two NASA space science missions, notably 

working with Alan Title on the solar magnetic and velocity field 

measurement system deployed on Spacelab in 1985. 

In March 1983 Worden flew to Washington D.C. to look for 

his next job, as luck would have it, on the same day that President 

Reagan made his speech about ballistic missile defense. He became 

the first full-time staffer for the Strategic Defense Initiative Office 

and, through 1994, in a variety of roles, he worked on every technical 

and political facet of the Star Wars program. In 1991, when the SDIO 

decided to develop a single-stage to orbit launch vehicle, Worden 

supervised the work that culminated in the DC-X.41 For about $80 

million, DC-X demonstrated the potential of reusable rockets able 

to do vertical takeoff and landing. 

He twice served in the executive office of the president. While 

staff officer for initiatives in the National Space Council of the first 

Bush administration, he tried to revitalize civil space exploration and 

Earth monitoring, and was an architect of the “faster, cheaper, better” 

approach later adopted by Dan Goldin.42 He was an outspoken critic 

of NASA at the time, and played a role in Richard Truly being fired 

as administrator for tying NASA’s future too closely to the Shuttle. 

Perhaps most relevant to his future post at NASA Ames, from 

1991 through 1993 Worden served as deputy for technology 

with the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, succeeding 

Michael Griffin. There, Worden had billions of dollars to spend on 

development projects. He funded the Clementine mission, a small, 

rapidly deployable satellite designed by a small group meeting in 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

a townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Clementine was ostensibly 

designed to test sensor and propulsion systems for missile intercept 

though, remarkably, Worden succeeded in running these tests while 

Clementine orbited the Moon in 1994. It became the first American 

mission to return to the Moon since Apollo, and made news when 

it detected the chemical signature of water around the south pole of 

the Moon. He earned a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for 

the Clementine mission. 

From 1994 to 1996 Worden commanded the 50th Space Wing, 

the USAF Space Command, with more than 6,000 staff at 29 locations 

around the world, all responsible for more than sixty Defense 

Department satellites. From 1996 to 2002 he held various director 

and deputy director level positions with USAF headquarters and 

the Air Force Space Command in Colorado. Following the terrorist 

attacks on September 11, 2001, Worden was asked to start an Office 

of Strategic Influence within the Defense Department. When the 

New York Times labeled this a disinformation and psychological 

operations effort, the office was closed and Worden was ushered 

toward retirement.43 

Worden capped his career with two years as Director for 

Development and Transformation at Air Force Space Command’s 

Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. “As a general in a 

non-job, in an office which ran pretty well itself,” he managed many 

proposed but unfunded projects. He worked mostly for DARPA, 

and had time to think big thoughts about the Air Force presence in 

space.44 He advocated a broader exploitation of space, like putting 

stations in cislunar orbit, encouraged the Air Force to develop a 

capability for detecting and manipulating near Earth objects such 

as asteroids, and suggested thinking not about weapons in space but 

the command and control of space. “Space is never going to be more 

than a supporting element of warfighting. However, it’s a primary 

element in war prevention.”45 

Worden also defined a major program called “responsive space,” a 

new way of business and engineering that did not rely on the massive, 

expensive,multi-purpose satellites the Air Force had grown to rely on. 

Responsive space incorporated elements of “faster, cheaper, better,” 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

but with the goal of developing the ability to fabricate and deploy 

satellites quickly, in response to specific military needs or scientific 

opportunities.This need became obvious during the Persian GulfWar 

of 1990-1991, when the massive reconnaissance satellites developed 

during the Cold War did not always provide information needed by 

commanders on the ground. To be operationally responsive, rockets 

had to be ready to launch faster, satellites needed to be configured 

quickly, and people had to be equipped and trained to use the data. 

Worden’s agenda included a wider variety of smaller rockets, able 

to reach orbit with eight hours warning, like the Sprite rocket built 

by Microcosm, Inc. He advocated a common aerospace vehicle, 

perhaps winged like the X-37B orbital test vehicle, that could loiter 

in low Earth orbit until called to enter the Earth’s atmosphere. He 

started work on hyperspectral sensors, notably the Noble EYE (for 

Enhanced hYperspectral experiment) which could resolve a greater 

array of features on Earth. 

After he retired from the Air Force in 2004, Worden served 

as research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, 

Tucson where in 1975 he had earned his doctorate in astronomy. 

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory had long 

ties with NASA Ames, stretching back to Charles Sonett’s work 

on magnetometers for Apollo. The University of Arizona hosted 

a leading research group in hyperspectral imaging, and Worden 

worked with that group. He took a detail to serve as chief advisor on 

space issues for Senator Sam Brownback (Republican from Kansas), 

and helped investigate NASA’s dependence on the Shuttle. 

Worden and Griffin were old friends from their days working 

on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Soon after Griffin became 

administrator, Worden talked with him about perhaps joining the 

NASA Advisory Council. Griffin, however, wanted Worden’s help 

within NASA just not, because of the enemies Worden had made, 

too close to Washington. When Griffin asked Hubbard to resign, he 

asked Worden to apply for the post. Worden remembers that Griffin 

gave him the charge: “Fix Ames.” It came as a surprise to virtually 

everyone at NASA Ames when Worden was announced as the 

incoming director. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

O N C E A G A I N , R E - I N V E N T I N G N A S A A M E S 

In Worden’s first address to Ames staff in May 2006 he declared, 

“Ames is the coolest place in NASA.”46 So often thought, but seldom 

articulated, as Ames people struggled to define their “relevance” and 

“value’, Worden’s statement reflected an immediate change in tone. 

“Coolness” was what Worden thought Ames should aspire to, and 

coolness would be the best trait for Ames to have as NASA got its 

groove back. Hans Mark flew out to introduce Worden to Ames, 

reflecting that he first met Worden 28 years earlier when Worden 

was an Air Force captain and Mark was Secretary of the Air Force. 

Mark called Worden “a zen master” able to keep focus with noise all 

around. Worden said he wanted to rebuild Ames’ expertise in science 

and engineering, then build new partnerships—especially with the 

Defense Department. “I’m interested in seeing how we can do things 

quickly,” Worden said. “If we can do that, I think we can succeed 

in space exploration.” When asked to describe Ames, he used the 

words: “Fearless, agile, responsive, creative, inventive, hands on.” 

Within a few weeks of arrival, though, Worden delivered some 

bad news that reminded him that space exploration was still a contact 

sport. The Marshall Space Flight Center had taken the robotic lunar 

exploration program away from Ames. Worden had just started a 

blog, to improve communication with Ames staff, and summarized 

his experience: “Congressional politics (read jobs) often dictates 

what we do more than technical excellence. My first meeting with 

some of the other Center directors made me feel like a little boy at 

the first day of school. Several playground bullies came up to me and 

asked if Mommy had given me any lunch money. When I nodded 

they suggested I give it to them for ‘safe keeping.’ Well one of them 

got some of that money called RLEP.”47 As consolation, Worden 

noted that the RLEP itself generated little money, but mostly passed 

funding on to the project offices like the LCROSS program managed 

at Ames. 

In fact, the politics of RLEP were more complicated.The principal 

goal of RLEP was to measure water ice at the lunar south pole, and 

characterize any other resources useful for a permanent station on 

theMoon. Marshall wanted NASA to develop a complex lunar lander, 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

costing about $2 billion, which it expected would qualify Marshall to 

later build the Altair crewed lander. The Marshall RLEP II robotic 

lander was as big as a crewed lander and used the proposed hydrogen 

engine.48 It carried a rover that was nuclear powered and could 

sample ice from many different craters. Butler Hine and his RLEP 

group at Ames, by contrast, argued for an architecture built around 

low-cost landers, about $200 million each, that would land at various 

places and test specific technologies. To deal with uncertainties about 

lunar dust, for example, the Ames RLEP group designed landers 

that could carry potential astronaut suit seal materials and operate 

on the Moon for a month. In the face of uncertainty, technologies 

are overdesigned, and the extra mass ramified through the design. 

Ames wanted to get data quickly so the Constellation engineers had 

a factual basis for their designs. Marshall won the battle for the RLEP 

office, but it never built the RLEP II lander. By 2008, the program 

office at Marshall was itself closed. 

More bad news came more quietly. Griffin asked Worden to kill 

the Ames’ nanotechnology program because its results would be 

too far in the future. Worden did so, cutting the staff to fewer than 

twenty and rebranding the remaining staff as a center for advanced 

materials. Aeronautics would remain important at Ames, but 

aeronautics represented only five percent of NASA’s budget. “You 

can’t run three Centers on 5 percent of its budget,” Worden noted.49 

As a bit of bright news, in June 2006 NASA headquarters 

announced some new work packages that would fund Ames to 

work on Constellation. Ames would lead development of the 

thermal protection system for the crew exploration vehicle, as well 

as integration of all the information technology. At a second allhands meeting, Worden predicted that there would be no RIF and 

that Ames would continue to find itself in the mainstream of where 

NASA itself was going. 

Two changes in NASA’s financial environment gave Worden 

more control over his finances than Hubbard had. First, full-cost 

accounting and recovery were changed throughout NASA by adding 

a CM&O budget, for Center management and operations. Each year 

Worden got funds, essentially overhead funds pulled out of program 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

funds before they left headquarters, that he could use for director’s 

staff and discretionary funds. Those funds were limited, though, and 

Worden was seldom able to fund all the great ideas he saw emerging 

from Ames. Jack Boyd described Worden as open to any and all great 

ideas: “If you present him with three ways of doing something, he’ll 

want to do all three.” What limited his ambition was the limit of his 

CM&O funds. 

Second, tenants in the NASA Research Park (NRP) began to 

return rents. The legislative mechanism behind these funds was the 

enhanced use lease (EUL), which Congress created to allow military 

bases to rent underutilized land in return for fair market rents or 

in-kind services. Mike Marlaire was actively involved in drafting the 

legislation that extended EUL authority to NASA, in 2003. Because 

of the value of Silicon Valley real estate, the NRP grew into a valuable 

source of alternative funding for Ames. When Worden arrived in 

2006 NRP tenants returned $531,000 in rents and $150,000 in inkind services to the Center.50 

Unfortunately, both NASA headquarters and Congress noticed 

Ames’ success. The NRP underwent, and survived, audits from 

the General Accounting Office and the NASA inspector general. 

In 2006 NASA Headquarters asked for a formal business plan 

that showed how every NRP tenant would contribute solely to the 

Bush administration vision for space exploration. In 2007 Congress 

eliminated the option for NRP tenants to pay their rent with in-kind 

services, and required that any funds earned through EUL go back 

to the treasury for Congress to allocate, rather than remain under 

control of the Center director. Despite these setbacks, Ames was 

recognized as a world leader in public-private partnerships, and 

representatives from other NASA Centers and other government 

laboratories visited the NRP’s Silicon Valley campus to learn how 

they could replicate that success.51 

Worden, over the course of his career, had nurtured contacts that 

now helped him bring spacecraft engineering work to Ames. He used 

discretionary funds to bring some fresh faces to Ames. He hired in 

Peter Klupar and Alan Weston from the space vehicles division of the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Air Force Research Laboratory to build the infrastructure for a small 

satellite effort. Gary Martin, who had worked at NASA headquarters 

on space architecture studies, was hired to manage a new Code V, 

encompassing all of Ames’ public outreach, education and strategic 

partnership efforts. Chris Kemp was elevated to the position of chief 

information officer. Worden brought to Ames a group of young space 

enthusiasts he had met during his travels, including many students 

of the International Space University. His long terms goals included 

reducing the average age of the Ames workforce, hiring more young 

people from around the country and around the world, and hiring 

students from minority universities. These young engineers were 

driven by the desire to get spacecraft into flight. 

Many old hands remained in senior management, though. Lew 

Braxton managed Center operations, Eugene Tu managed Ames 

support of Constellation engineering, Tom Edwards managed its 

aeronautics portfolio, Michael Bicay led the space sciences, and Tom 

Berndt became chief counsel. Worden appointed Steve Zornetzer 

as his associate director for research, Jack Boyd as his senior advisor 

and Marv Christensen, who had served as acting director for more 

than a year, as his deputy director. After a year, though, Worden reassigned Christensen after he interjected himself into decisions on 

senior staff and on relations with other Centers. 

Worden quickly named Lew Braxton as his new deputy. Braxton 

had spent almost all of his career at Ames, rising to chief financial 

officer during a time of rapid change in how NASA did its accounting 

and then moving to take charge of Center operations. (Deborah Feng 

would succeed him in that role.) The division of labor within the 

N200 headquarters building was now clearer. Braxton took care of 

things on Center, leaving Worden free to finesse Ames’ role in space 

exploration at large. 

Yuri’s Night symbolized Worden’s efforts to stoke the space 

enthusiasm among a newer generation. Every April 12th, space 

enthusiasts around the world held parties to celebrate humankind’s 

past and future presence in space. As a Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri 

Gagarin was far better known outside America, and the celebration 

was largely ignored by anyone with ties to NASA. Still, Ames debuted 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

its first Yuri’s Night party in 2007, with many participants masterfully 

coordinated by Lew Braxton, and it attracted wide interested. More 

than 8,000 people attended Yuri’s Night the next year. Worden 

wore a Soviet general’s uniform, and much of his senior staff wore 

costumes reflecting their imagined future in space. The party 

appealled to a younger constituency, showed Ames’ aspirations for 

internationalism, andit was all part of being cool.Worden’s leadership 

style was also evident in the Great Worden Quake exercises of 2007 

and 2008. These were emergency response exercises that involved 

the whole Center and many local communities, and highlighted the 

ingenuity of Ames protective services personnel. To work, it required 

tremendous cross-Center collaboration. 

Worden also reshaped NASA Ames around the work he started 

with the U.S. Air Force on “responsive space,” by accelerating Ames’ 

work in small spacecraft. “Small” might mean light and volumetrically 

compact, like the Ames GeneSat and PharmaSat. More importantly, 

small meant quickly built, which equated to inexpensive. Faster, better 

cheaper as a phrase was no longer in vogue, since during the Goldin 

years it was seen to allow for failure. “Small” and “responsive” instead 

reflected Worden’s new emphasis on spacecraft project management. 

Worden reshaped the Ames Code P office into a program and 

projects directorate. Led by Alan Weston, it focused solely on the 

success of active projects, which included small spacecraft like 

Kepler and LCROSS. Peter Klupar led Code R, an engineering 

directorate, to develop new technologies and mission concepts. 

Over the course of his career, with the aerospace industry and the 

Air Force, Klupar had flown more than forty spacecraft—some big, 

some small. Klupar shrunk Code R to a staff of about 150, all focused 

on spacecraft engineering. He created a mission design division, led 

by Belgacem Jaroux, based on the concurrent engineering strategy 

of Team X at JPL but focused on smaller spacecraft. The mission 

design division focused on developing tools—like thermal analysis 

software—to support the rapid engineer of small spacecraft.The first 

data integrated into the mission design center was from the modular 

common bus built by the Ames RLEP office. 

As soon as he had arrived at Ames, Worden was itching to cut 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

metal and build a prototype. Butler Hine led NASA’s robotic lunar 

exploration office for the year it resided at Ames. When it moved to 

Marshall, Worden funded this group with his discretionary funds to 

continue working on the most interesting project—an inexpensive 

lunar lander. They started by designing a lunar orbiter and lander 

separately. As Worden pushed them to make the designs more 

modular, with components that could be easily swapped out for 

different science needs, the team realized that many of the modules 

could be used for either a lander or orbiter. Soon they had a set of 

modules that could be linked to satisfy a variety of missions: lunar 

lander, lunar orbit, libation points, and asteroid rendezvous. “We 

would drive up opportunity by driving down cost,” noted Hine.52 

NASA contractors had a long history of promoting common buses, 

a history littered with failure. Hine’s group studied them all: the 

THEMIS satellites designed by Swales Aerospace, the CubeSats 

devised largely by graduate students, and sensors and avionics 

components developed for the U.S. Air Force. “Why did we think 

we could succeed?” reflected Hine. “Because we inverted the design 

from a requirements-driven bus to a capabilities-driven bus.” 

They used available parts, like a crash sensor from an automobile 

manufacturer as a motion sensor. They designed it to launch as a 

secondary payload to a larger mission, or to launch on a small rocket 

like the commercial Falcon 1 under development. They developed 

software to manage the thermal environment while the spacecraft 

was operational. Reusable spacecraft often faltered in thermal 

design, which typically had to be tailored to the payload and the 

flight location of the spacecraft.53 They tested early and often, using 

cold compressed air so that they could perform an indoor hover test 

every hour. By the time they were ready to test with conventional 

rocket engines, the flight control software worked well. In less than 

fifteen months, and with a budget under $4 million, a group of 

fourteen researchers at Ames demonstrated that a bus could be built 

for a tenth of the cost of a conventional robotic mission. 

To validate the concept in space flight, NASA asked Ames to 

use the common modular bus as the foundation of the LADEE 

mission to study the tenuous lunar atmosphere. The entire design, 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

and testing apparatus, was also shipped to Marshall Space Flight 

Center for possible use in the international lunar network. With 

the announcement of the Google Lunar X Prize in September 2007, 

many teams approached NASA Ames requesting access to this bus 

technology for their own transportation systems to the Moon.54 

To get right at problems encountered in Ames’ growing portfolio 

of projects, Worden put in place a series of meetings. Worden 

reduced the meetings of key staff to three short “tag-ups:” a project 

tag, an institutional tag, and a strategic planning tag. General updates were relegated to an internal blog, and the tags were meant to 

focus on what changed and what problems senior management still 

expected to work through. 

After Worden retired from the Air Force, its effort in responsive 

space suffered a bit, politically.55 But by 2008, at congressional 

insistence, the Air Force re-emphasized the effort by creating an 

operationally responsive space office at Kirtland Air Force Base in 

New Mexico. This ORSO quickly forged a partnership with NASA 

Ames. In 2009 Ames was named the contracting agent for the ORSO 

rapid response space works, dubbed the Chileworks, which did 

basic research on open architectures, modular payloads, standard 

interfaces, and common ground infrastructure. NASA was one of 

the few agencies of the federal government that had the capability to 

build spacecraft itself, and supporting the Defense Department was 

part of its charter. 

Worden was more vocal about calling itself a “partner,” and 

being proud of its supporting contributions to projects led by other 

Centers—especially with Goddard and Northrop Grumman. He 

was the first senior NASA official to visit Korea, and the result was 

an agreement for more collaboration between NASA and Korea. 

Worden and Gary Martin brought onto the Ames campus, for the 

first time at a NASA facility, the summer session of International Space 

University which further expanded the prospects of NASA Ames 

partnering with nations that did no already have space programs. 

In addition, Ames accelerated its efforts to build partnerships 

with its Silicon Valley neighbors, create educational alliances, 

and develop the NASA Research Park. Worden now managed 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

1,800 acres of Silicon Valley real estate, making Ames the largest 

landholder in the region after Stanford University. The growth of 

the NRP expanded in 2008, when Ames signed two key enhanced 

use lease agreements. University Associates, a consortium of local 

universities led by UC Santa Cruz, would develop seventy acres of the 

NASA Research Park for a campus supporting careers and research in 

science and engineering. 

NASA Ames expanded its ongoing partnership with its Silicon 

Valley neighbor, Google. The agreement with Google first focused 

on making NASA images and planetary data more accessible to the 

public. Ames worked with Google to develop Google Moon so that 

anyone could take a virtual trip to the Moon. Planetary Ventures, a 

subsidiary of Google, drafted plans to develop unused land in the 

northwest corner of the Ames campus for expansion of the Google 

Mountain View campus. 

NASA Ames and Airship Ventures LLC together celebrated the 

75th anniversary of the commissioning of Moffett Field. Airship 

Ventures, a partner of the NASA Research Park, began operations 

of a dirigible at Moffett Field out of Hangar Two. The dirigible was 

available for NASA’s remote sensing and atmospheric research and, 

by providing sight-seeing flights over the Bay Area, it gave insight 

into cleaner and more efficient vehicles for air tourism. Three of 

only twelve remaining airship hangars in the U.S. remained at 

Moffett Field. 

Worden also focused Ames on its entrepreneurial space 

initiatives. Congress designated the International Space Station as a 

National Laboratory in 2005, and NASA Ames hosted a conference 

on its role in the commercial development of space. Biotechnology 

firms were especially keen on access to low Earth orbit. On Center, 

Ames forged a partnership with Life Source Biomedical, LLC and a 

plan to rejuvenate its animal care facility for life sciences research. 

As acting director, Christensen had signed an agreement to create 

a Space Portal in partnership with the Alliance for Commercial 

Enterprises in Space, a trade group supporting space entrepreneurs. 

Led by Dan Rasky, it served as a friendly front door into NASA 

research for the entrepreneurial space industry. In December 2007 

NASA Headquarters asked Worden to downsize the Space Portal, 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

perhaps concerned that privately built launch vehicles would 

compete for attention with NASA’s Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets.Though 

reduced in size and scope, the Space Portal remained at the center 

of discussion on how NASA people might support the commercial 

space industry. 

Ames also served as NASA’s lead for its SBIR/STTR program (for 

Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology 

Transfer Programs). In managed $125 million per year in funding 

for small business to participate in government research projects. 

The NRP division now hosted more than forty industry partners, 

including some high profile firms like Bloom Energy, and more 

than fourteen academic partners. NRP tenants were forging major 

new initiatives in green technology, disaster response, and science 

education.The NRP was beginning to demonstrate in very clear terms 

the value of collaboration—as opposed to funding procurements or 

research grants—with commercial firms. 

Since arriving in 2006, Worden had encouraged Ames people to 

move in many different directions, but to move forcefully. Many of 

these initiatives quickly showed great promise. 

T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F D I R E C T O R S 

It is entirely possible to envision the history of NASA Ames as 

revolving around the directors who have guided the Center—the 

expertise they brought to the position, how they organized their 

team, the challenges they faced. Through their tenures, we can 

chart the ebb and flow of budget and staffing, the facilities built, key 

partnerships, major administrative efforts on quality and safety, and 

relations between Ames and NASA headquarters and other NASA 

Centers. Where the directors have had the greatest impact, though, 

is in repackaging—re-organizing and re-branding—Ames’ extant 

research efforts to fit NASA’s changing strategic visions. 

For example, Smith DeFrance, Ames’ founding director, remained 

Center director from 1958 through 1965 as the NACA was absorbed 

into NASA. DeFrance was often described as conservative, but in 

fact, he positioned Ames well—culturally and organizationally— 

to perpetually develop new fields as NASA shifted its strategy. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

DeFrance started Ames on the path toward becoming NASA’s lead 

center for developing new space-related disciplines as with biology, 

space science, and information technology. Ames developed new 

disciplines even while the Center remained an engineering operation 

supporting the human space efforts of the 1960s. Hans Mark brought 

a new perspective to the Center—of more open collaboration 

with other agencies—and defined more focused research efforts 

in rotorcraft and computational fluid dynamics. Into the 1990s, 

Harry McDonald repackaged Ames work into several areas which 

resonated with headquarters and positioned Ames as the agency’s 

think tank, integrated into the intellectual life of Silicon Valley which 

surrounds it. 

“The director can shape the Center in some profound ways,” 

noted Worden. First, they shape the Center in hiring senior staff, 

and encouraging those senior people to take a chance on younger 

people. “Directors can make it known that people should expect to 

be fired. Program managers who make mistakes should be assigned 

to staff, and maybe later reassigned to other projects.” Second, 

they shape the Center in providing a vision and words that inspire 

people. The director takes the gambles for the Center; he decides 

which investments the Center should make. Third, in setting a tone 

of diligence in working through problems: “Show up, pay attention, 

and don’t panic. I may be upset if there’s a problem, but I’ll be real 

upset if there’s a problem and I wasn’t told about it earlier.”56 This 

held true for all directors, starting with DeFrance. 

Still, most Ames people are ambivalent about the importance 

of their directors, even those they liked. Other than DeFrance, who 

served as director for 25 years, the longest tenure of any director 

belonged to Hans Mark at seven years. While Ames accomplished 

many great things quickly, seven years is not much time to shift an 

institution like Ames, which is both governmental in its processes 

and academic in its inclination. Indeed, no director has had more 

influence on the Center than the cumulative impact of the many 

other people who dedicated their careers to it. 

There is no self-evident way to organize a history of NASA Ames 

since 1958. There is no clear single technological trajectory to follow, 

as KSC has with launch operations or Marshall with engine design. 

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A d m i n i s t r a t i v e H i s t o r y 

At Ames, what is so fascinating about its technological trajectories 

is how they branch off and intertwine into new disciplines and 

programs, and how the Center perpetually reinvents itself. To 

organize Ames history chronologically, or according to the tenures 

of directors, would give too much weight to NASA-wide politics in 

setting the agenda for work at Ames. Thus, this history will organize 

the Ames story according to broad and long-standing research areas 

at Ames: space projects, planetary science, life sciences, information 

technology, and aeronautics. 

73 
A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

C H A P T E R 2 

Space Projects 

Project engineering at NASA Ames had a pre-history with the 

NACA, in that the wind tunnels Ames people built were among the 

most sophisticated scientific instruments ever built, with precision 

measurements emerging flawlessly inside massive hulls, generating 

streams of data that needed to be managed, while customers waited 

turns to use the facility.With themanagerial oversight of Jack Parsons, 

Ames people built more than twenty wind tunnels during its years 

with the NACA, and proved very adept at building these quickly and 

to demanding specifications. The people who formed the early Ames 

cadre of space projects engineers—Charlie Hall, Al Seiff, Al Eggers— 

honed their skills as members of Harvey Allen’s high speed research 

division, which built among the most sophisticated wind tunnels, arc 

jets and ballistic ranges. 

This chapter follows the trajectory of Ames’ growing competence 

in building small, effective robotic spacecraft, and the instruments 

flown on them. The Pioneer spacecraft figure prominently, as does 

the entry probes that mapped the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and 

Jupiter. It concludes with discussions of Lunar Prospector, SOFIA, 

Stardust, Kepler, and the many small spacecraft currently being 

designed at NASA Ames. Other chapters will address related topics: 

experiment packages for space life sciences, engineering work to 

support human spaceflight, and the evolution of the planetary 

sciences at Ames. 

NASA Ames’ success in space exploration was built on a triad 

of people, thoughts and things. NASA Ames has not only built 

spacecraft, it has built the careers of scientists and engineers who 

build the spacecraft. Some of the research staff at Ames thrived in 

a matrixed environment. Scientists work in their fields, publishing 

papers, studying the state of the art in their disciplines, and 

advancing new theories. Some persistently involve themselves in 

project planning, hoping to build an instrument that will find its way 

onto a funded spacecraft. The proposal writing process is part of the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

intellectual capital of the Center. If an instrument is not selected for 

a funded spacecraft, the proposer goes back to her disciplinary work, 

and the proposal lingers until another group decides to put together 

a new plan for a future spacecraft.Thus, in understanding the history 

of Ames, it is important to understand not only how spacecraft are 

built, but also how proposals become finished spacecraft and how 

the people who build spacecraft build their own careers. 

S P A C E C R A F T P R O G R A M M A N A G E M E N T 

Smith DeFrance and Harvey Allen both preferred that Ames 

stick to research—either basic or applied to support those designing 

spacecraft—and stay out of what NASA called spacecraft project 

management. Russ Robinson agreed, as did Ira Abbott at NASA 

headquarters. Jack Parsons, though, encouraged the young Ames 

researchers who hoped to try their hand at building spacecraft, as 

did Harry Goett. Early in 1958, Goett and his colleague Robert Crane 

prepared specifications for an attitude stabilization system needed 

for the OAO (the orbiting astronomical observatory), as well as the 

Nimbus meteorological satellite. Encouraged by how well NASA 

headquarters received their idea, Goett persuaded DeFrance to 

submit a proposal for Ames to assume total technical responsibility 

for the OAO project. Abbott at headquarters, though, told Ames to 

stick to its research. Soon after Goett left Ames to become the first 

director of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where 

these meteorological satellites were being built. 

Al Eggers, backed by the expertise pulled together in his new 

vehicle environment division, was the next to try to get Ames involved 

in spacecraft project management. Eggers’ assistant division chief, 

Charles Hall, wanted to build a solar probe to measure the sun from 

outside the Earth’s magnetosphere. By late 1961, Hall had succeeded 

in getting audiences with headquarters staff, who discouraged 

him by suggesting he redesign it as an interplanetary probe. Space 

Technology Laboratories heard of Ames’ interest, and Hall was 

able to raise enough money to hire STL for a feasibility study of an 

interplanetary probe. Armed with the study, DeFrance and Parsons 

both went to headquarters and, in November 1963, won the right for 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

Ames to manage the PIQSY probe (for Pioneer International Quiet 

Sun Year), a name soon shortened to simply Pioneers 6 to 9. DeFrance 

thought a Pioneer-based space flight program might suit Ames: the 

spacecraft concept was understood, the Delta launch vehicle to be 

used was proven, and tracking and data acquisition services could be 

obtained either through the deep space network at JPL or from the 

Goddard satellite network. 

It was DeFrance’s reputation that ultimately earned Ames the 

opportunity to lead the Pioneer program. The Pioneers would not 

be expensive—in fact they were the progenitors of the faster, better, 

cheaper style of program management—but they were important. 

The first set of Pioneers were solar sentinels, orbiting the sun and 

relaying information about solar flares so the Apollo astronauts 

could seek shelter from the radiation. Two later Pioneers would be 

the first to Jupiter and Saturn, and thus show that the way through 

the asteroid belt was safe for the more expensive Voyager mission 

to follow. NASA headquarters wanted assurance that Ames could 

follow through on its commitment to get the Pioneers into space. 

In his history of the Pioneer probes Mark Wolverton recounts 

an interview with Charlie Hall, the Pioneer program manager. Hall 

had traveled back to headquarters to make a final presentation at the 

highest levels of headquarters staff. Everyone noticed that DeFrance, 

who would not fly because of promise to his wife after a very early 

airplane accident, had taken the train from California to support him: 

Almost 40 years later, Hall still vividly remembered what 

happened next. 

“[NASA deputy administrator Robert] Seamans turned 

to Smitty [Smith DeFrance] and said, ‘Smitty, what do 

you think of this?’ And my heart just dropped. I thought, 

God, he could kill it right now, do anything he wanted 

with it.” Even Hall, at that point, wasn’t fully certain of 

DeFrance’s unequivocal support. Would DeFrance, the 

old NACA engineer famous for his traditional ways, 

put his beloved Ames at risk? He did: “He said, ‘Ames 

is 100 percent behind it,’” Hall recalled. “And I knew we 

were going to get the program because DeFrance was 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

extremely admired at headquarters. They knew he would 

be backing me in any way, shape, and form and wouldn’t 

let the thing fail.”57 

Indeed, by backing Hall, and by encouraging the transfer of 

Charles Sonett from NASA headquarters to Ames, DeFrance 

had belatedly but firmly positioned Ames as a leader in planetary 

sciences. A position in planetary science was likely most important 

for DeFrance. Given DeFrance’s belief in management by peer 

review, as was the NACA culture, when NASA gave him a choice of 

expansion through a university model or the program management 

method used by business, DeFrance thought the university model 

gave taxpayers the most value. The Ames space sciences and life 

science programs of the 1960s showed that. 

DeFrance also reluctantly supported the Biosatellite program. 

Biosatellite started when headquarters asked Ames what science 

might come from sending monkeys into space in leftover Mercury 

capsules. When Carlton Bioletti submitted Ames’ proposal to 

headquarters early in 1962, a jurisdictional dispute erupted with the 

Air Force over which agency should control research in aerospace 

human factors. Because the United States was already well behind 

the Soviet Union in space life sciences, NASA won the right to 

bolster its life sciences work. NASA headquarters decided Ames 

would do basic research, using animal models, while the Air Force 

and later the Johnson Space Center would do research applied to 

human exploration. In the meantime, university biologists started 

submitting unsolicited proposals to Ames. Bioletti’s group visited 

each of these biologists to learn more about what specifications 

might look like for a series of biological satellites. Impressed with 

these efforts, in October 1962 NASA headquarters tasked Ames to 

manage Project Biosatellite. 

By 1963, DeFrance recognized that without some specialized 

experience in managing projects, Ames would be left behind NASA’s 

growth curve. In the NACA years, most engineers needing a new 

research facility actually designed and built it themselves. Harvey 

Allen, for a time, jokingly answered his phone “theoretical concrete 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

and reinforced aerodynamics section.” Ames had a tradition of 

successfully hacking together proof-of-concept tunnels from 

borrowed parts, using very little formal management process. Even 

for the larger wind tunnels an engineer only needed the help of Jack 

Parsons to marshal the necessary construction resources within the 

laboratory. 

When projects were launched into space, however, executing 

them got more complex. First, most of the support came from 

outside the Center—from aerospace contractors or from the NASA 

Centers that built launch vehicles, spacecraft, or data acquisition 

networks. Second, nothing could go wrong when the spacecraft or 

experimental payload was so distant in space. Technical integration 

and reliability had to be well conceived and executed. Finally, the 

larger costs evoked greater concerns from headquarters, and thus 

warranted more reporting on how things might go right. Into the 

1960s, program management was a skill taught in universities, 

something any engineers could do but not something all wished to 

do. Spacecraft engineers were increasingly willing to have a project 

management specialist handle these more burdensome tasks in 

network scheduling and systems engineering. 

Ames management began to cultivate program managers. 

Bob Crane was named to the new position of assistant director 

for development and he, in turn, named John V. Foster to head 

his systems engineering division. The sought project managers 

attuned to the scientists that they served, and who would not put 

the machine above the results it produced. Charlie Hall, who had 

built wind tunnels as part of Harvey Allen’s group, managed the 

Pioneer project and Charlie Wilson managed Biosatellite. Both Hall 

and Wilson worked with lean staffs, who oversaw more extensive 

contracting with outside firms than was usual at Ames. Significantly, 

both reported to headquarters through the Office of Space Science 

and Applications (OSSA) whereas the Center as a whole reported to 

the Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART). Project 

management at Ames remained segregated from the laboratory 

culture of the Center even as it, gradually, absorbed that culture. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

E A R L Y S P A C E F L I G H T E X P E R I M E N T S 

Meanwhile Ames staff developed expertise in building 

experiment packages, the smaller black boxes integrated onto a 

spacecraft and able to deliver discrete and usable data to a single 

principal investigator. An instrument to measure solar particle 

flux was the first spaceborne experiment package led by an Ames 

principal investigator, Michel Bader. Bader’s first job at Ames was 

building a land-based research facility—an ion accelerator that shot 

particles against a metal sheet so he could estimate the impact of 

solar wind on spacecraft. Bader built two plasma probes mounted on 

identical early Pioneer satellites (P-30 and P-31). While the satellites 

orbited the Moon, the plasma probes would measure energy and 

momentum distribution of protons above a few kilovolts to study 

the radiation affects of solar flares. Both experiments were built by 

late 1960; neither spacecraft launched successfully. 

Pessimism was the rule in early spaceborne experimentation 

throughout NASA. Ames learned to build redundantly, in series, 

expecting failure of the spacecraft or of an experiment from 

many possible sources. During the 1960s, Ames built 35 separate 

instruments for scientific spacecraft, a good number given Ames’ 

size relative to other NASA Centers. Virtually all of these were 

designed, built and tested by technicians on Center. The failure rate, 

either because of the instrument or its spacecraft, was discouraging 

but consistent with the failure rate throughout the early space age. 

John Mihalov, for example, built five spectrometers for various uses, 

including one to study the biological effects of space radiation. Only 

one reached orbit. 

Carr Neel, notably, enjoyed greater success. Neel started at 

Ames working with Lew Rodert on thermal deicing systems and 

later joined the gasdynamics branch to study reflective surface 

coatings—paint—to keep spacecraft cool from ultraviolet radiation. 

He devised a simple experiment to study the temperature rise 

under various coatings. The OSO-1 (for orbiting solar observatory) 

launched in March 1962 and the OSO-2 launched in February 1965 

carried experiments that returned conclusive results. On OSO-3, 

Neel adapted the laboratory apparatus he had used to calibrate the 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

previous experiments to measure total radiation reflected from Earth, 

called its albedo. His second experiment on OSO-3 was a directional 

radiometer to measure the spectral distribution of sunlight reflected 

from the Earth to better understand its impact on satellites orbiting 

near the Earth. 

The theoretical foundations for Michel Bader’s next experiment 

had been laid by John Spreiter and John Wolfe of the Ames 

theoretical studies branch, who tried to define the limits of the 

Earth’s magnetosphere—where exactly the Earth’s magnetic field 

interacted with the flow of charge particles from the Sun. Most space 

scientists thought that boundary would be at ten Earth radii, limited 

measurements showed it at fourteen Earth radii, and Spreiter’s 

calculations put it at eight Earth radii.58 Furthermore, he expected 

a that tenuous shock wave—not unlike that formed by a blunt body 

travelling at hypersonic speeds—might form at some distance ahead 

of the Earth’s magnetosphere, with weak interactions between the 

fields. 

Bader, working with Tom Fryer of the instrument research branch 

and Fred Witteborn of the physics branch, built an instrument that 

could measure the energy and density of ion trajectories. Their 

electrostatic analyzer was built with a quadrispherical curved 

plate, and with an electrometer as a detector. It was remarkably 

compact for the time. It used 145 milliwatts of solar cell power, 

weighed 1.1 pounds, with a volume less than 2 by 3 by 4 inches.59 

The instrument was one of six carried aloft by the Explorer 12 in 

August 1961. Preliminary results showed no ions were detected, 

so Bader concluded there was no defined proton ring, but rather a 

broad boundary between the solar wind and the geomagnetic field.60 

However, Bader soon realized his results were bad. Because of poor 

communication with the project team at Goddard, the instrument 

never looked directly at the Sun. 

NASA Ames got a second chance to measure the solar wind with 

Explorer 14, launched in October 1962, this time with John Wolfe as 

principal investigator on the electrostatic analyzer. Charles Sonett 

had just arrived at Ames, and Wolfe was one of the first to join his 

space sciences division. (Bader led a science team aboard a DC-8 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

during a 1963 solar eclipse, and soon left spaceborne experimentation 

to devote his career to airborne astronomy.) While structurally the 

same as that on Explorer 12, this detector was more sensitive and 

better positioned on the spacecraft. However, the instrument was 

blinded by solar ultraviolet radiation whenever it looked within three 

degrees of the sun. Wolfe had made the error of not using a vacuum 

chamber while testing his instrument for ultraviolet response.61 The 

only useful data were obtained during a geomagnetic disturbance on 

October 7, 1962.62 Measuring the solar wind generally had proven 

very difficult. Of the ten efforts successfully launched up to then, 

only one instrument, built by JPL and launched aboard Mariner 

2, returned any useful data that even confirmed the presence of a 

solar wind. 

Wolfe flew three more electrostatic analyzers, each with fourteen 

energy channels, aboard three largely identical Explorers 18, 21 and 

28 (also known as IMP-1, 2 and 3 for interplanetary monitoring 

system) launched in November 1963, October 1964 and May 1965. 

The instrument on Explorer 18 worked well for five months, then 

the spacecraft started to degrade. With Explorer 21, the spacecraft 

never achieved its planned apogee, limiting the utility of the data. 

With Explorer 28, the instrument failed at launch, even though the 

spacecraft operated for two years. At the same time he was working 

on the IMPs, Wolf built three electrostatic analyzers for OGO-1 

and OGO-3 (for orbiting geophysical observatory), then the largest 

scientific spacecraft ever built. While the instruments worked, an 

unintended spin of the spacecraftlimited the utility of the data.Within 

four years Wolfe launched six instruments with limited success. Still, 

Ames earned enough data to characterize the solar wind, to confirm 

the importance of continuing with measurements, and Wolfe refined 

his electrostatic analyzer for future flights. NASA Ames’ experience 

with space experiments, especially in the measurement of the solar 

wind, took a major leap with the early Pioneer series of spacecraft. 

P I O N E E R S 6 T O 9 

The Pioneers span two decades in the recent history of Ames, 

transcending efforts to periodize them neatly. The first Pioneers— 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

the 6 to 9 solar observatories—were conceived under DeFrance and 

executed under Allen. Allen asked the same group to plan Pioneers 

10 and 11, and Hans Mark, Allen’s successor as director, presided 

over the execution of the Pioneers as simple, elegant, sciencefocused, and pathbreaking projects. Mark initiated a Pioneer Venus 

project, though Bill Ballhaus spoke at the press conference. Every 

subsequent Ames director—upon the occasion of data returned 

from some encounter on the trip of Pioneer 10 or 11 out of our solar 

system—has had occasion to reflect upon the meaning and value 

of these sturdy little spacecraft. Even in the 1960s, the Ames space 

projects division devised the Pioneer program as a shot across the 

bow of the NASA way of building spacecraft. 

In 1963, largely at the urging of Charles Sonett, who had 

participated in earlier Pioneer flights, Ames was given a block of four 

Pioneer flights, and a small budget of $40 million total. The bulk of 

this funding went to contractors—to Douglas and Aerojet-General to 

build the Thor-Delta rockets and to Space Technology Laboratories 

to build the spacecraft. NASA headquarters expected the program 

to leverage Ames’ scientific expertise in measuring the sun, and let 

the Center try its hand at managing a simple spacecraft program. 

Charlie Hall was selected Pioneer project manager and worked to a 

very short timeline. Each of the four Pioneers was largely identical, 

though each carried a different set of ten of seventeen experiment 

packages. To keep the spacecraft simple, it was kept small (about 150 

pounds and three feet in diameter), powered by batteries and solar 

cells wrapped around the body, and spin stabilized at sixty rotations 

per minute. The Pioneers, in fact, demonstrated the value of spin 

stabilization—as opposed to three axis stabilization—to very simply 

control spacecraft orientation. 

Within two years of project funding, in December 1965, Pioneer 

6 achieved its orbit around the sun just inside the orbit of Earth. 

It immediately began sending back data on magnetic fields, cosmic 

rays, high-energy particles, electron density, electric fields, and 

cosmic dust. Pioneer 7 followed six months later, Pioneer 8 six 

months after that, Pioneer 9 launched in November 1968, and the 

final spacecraft was destroyed in a launch failure. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

These four Pioneers sat in widely separated orbits ringing the 

sun, but outside the influence of Earth, and returned data on the 

solar environment. Until 1972, they were NASA’s primary sentinels 

to warn of the solar storms that disrupted radio communications and 

electricity distribution on Earth. When positioned behind the sun 

the Pioneers collected data to predict solar storms, since they could 

track changes on the solar surface two weeks before they were seen 

on Earth. During the Apollo lunar landings, the Pioneers returned 

data hourly to mission control, to warn of the intense showers of 

solar protons that could be dangerous to astronauts on the surface 

of the Moon. 

In addition to building spacecraft and sensors to collect the 

data, Ames also designed the telemetry to gather the data and the 

computers to process it. Pioneer 6 first gave accurate measurements 

of the Sun’s corona where the solar winds boil off into space. Pioneer 

7 measured the Earth’s magnetic tail as three times longer than 

previously measured, and the plasma wave experiment on Pioneer 

8 provided a full picture of Earth’s magnetic tail. For the Pioneer 9 

spacecraft, Ames demonstrated the convolution coders later used 

for navigation on most deep space planetary missions. Since the sun 

is typical of many stars, Ames astrophysicists learned much about 

stellar evolution. Before the Pioneers, the solar wind was thought to 

be a steady, gentle flow of ionized gases. Instead, the Pioneers found 

an interplanetary region of great turbulence, with twisted magnetic 

streams bursting among other solar streams. 

An adjunct to this program was the solar pointing attitude rocket 

control system (SPARCS) introduced in 1965. SPARCS guided 

Aerobee sounding rockets that carried reusable instrumentation 

for solar observations into low Earth orbit. By 1983 more than a 

hundred Aerobee rockets used the SPARC system to collect data on 

solar activity, and to demonstrate the value of solar experiments that 

would be launched into space. 

As the group that designed and built the early Pioneers then 

turned their attention to the next space horizon, these simple 

satellites continued to send back data. Pioneer 9 expired in May 

1983, well beyond its design lifetime of six months. It had enjoyed 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

its days in the sun, circling the sun 22 times in a 297-day orbit. The 

others remained alive, but their science instruments were turned on 

less often, and they were tracked less frequently as newer missions 

required time on the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network. 

Pioneer 6 was contacted in 2000, and in 2007 was the oldest operating 

space probe. 

M A G N E T O M E T E R S 

Ames space scientists also devised the magnetometers used to 

study the Moon’s composition and structure. These magnetometers 

were designed by Charles Sonett, refined by John Wolfe and Palmer 

Dyal, and built at Ames around an advanced ring core fluxgate 

sensor. Four Apollo missions—12, 14, 15, and 16—flew Ames 

magnetometers to different sites on the surface of the Moon. Two 

portable magnetometers carried aboard the Apollo 15 and 16 lunar 

rovers measured magnetic fields while in motion. These were the 

first Ames instruments that functioned as landers. Paced by a 

stored program, the magnetometers measured the small permanent 

magnetic field generated by fossil magnetic minerals. They then 

measured the electrical conductivity and temperature profile of the 

lunar interior, from which scientists deduced the Moon’s magnetic 

permeability and its iron content. And theymeasured the interactions 

of the lunar fields with the solar wind. 

This data revealed much about the Moon’s geophysics and 

geological history. The magnetometer left on the Moon by Apollo 

12 showed that the Moon did not have two-pole magnetism as does 

Earth, but did have a stronger field than expected.63 It also suggested 

that the Moon was a solid, cold mass, without a hot core like that 

of Earth. But it also unveiled a magnetic anomaly a hundred times 

stronger than the average magnetic field on the Moon. The whole 

series of magnetometers showed that the Moon’s transient magnetic 

fields were induced by the solar wind and that they varied from place 

to place on the surface. Based on this magnetometer data, NASA 

developed an orbiting satellite to map the permanent lunar magnetic 

fields, as well as equipment to measure magnetism in other bodies 

throughout our solar system. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

P I O N E E R S 1 0 A N D 1 1 

During the 1960s, astronomers grew excited about the prospects 

of a grand tour—of sending a space probe to survey the outer planets 

of the solar system when they would align, during the late 1970s, as 

they did only once every 175 years. The known hazards to a grand 

tour—the asteroid belt and the radiation around Jupiter—were 

extreme. The hazards yet unknown could be worse. So Ames drafted 

a plan to build NASA a spacecraft to pioneer this trail through our 

solar system. 

In 1968, the Space Science Board of the National Academy of 

Sciences endorsed the plan. NASA headquarters funded the project 

in February 1969, following intensive lobbying by Ames’ incoming 

director, Hans Mark, and Ames’ director of development John V. 

Foster. Charlie Hall, manager of the Pioneer solar sentinels, led this 

project, Joseph Lepetich managed the experiment packages and 

Ralph Holtzclaw designed the spacecraft. Pioneer chief scientist John 

Wolfe also served as a principal investigator, with an experiment to 

do gamma ray spectroscopy and measure the interplanetary solar 

wind. Upon launch the spacecraft were named Pioneers 10 and 11. 

Spacecraft able to explore the outer giants of our solar system— 

Jupiter and Saturn—had to differ from the many spacecraft that had 

already explored Mars and Venus. Jupiter is 400 million miles away at 

its closest approach to Earth, whereas Mars is only 50 million miles 

away. Since solar panels could not produce enough energy so far 

from the sun, the spacecraft needed an internal power supply. The 

greater distance demanded a larger, dish-shaped high gain antenna. 

In addition to changes demanded by distance, the instruments 

needed radiation shielding to travel near Jupiter—though no one 

knew how much shielding. At least twin spacecraft were needed, to 

optimize the data returned from two trajectories. And because of 

the greater costs in launching a spacecraft so far, NASA would only 

launch two, meaning they had to be tested for greater reliability. 

Added to these more natural design constraints were two early 

engineering decisions Hall made to keep the project within budget. 

Both derived from Ames’ experience with the earlier Pioneer plasma 

probes. First, rather than being stabilized on three axes by hydrazine 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

rockets, Pioneers 10 and 11 were spin-stabilized by rotating about 

their axes. The spin axis was in the plane of the ecliptic so that the 

data antenna, nine feet in diameter, always pointed toward Earth. 

Inertia came from the four heavy nuclear power units—RTGs or 

radioisotope thermoelectric generators—mounted fifteen feet 

from the axis on two long beams. Spin stabilization was cheap and 

reliable, but ruled out high resolution photography. The experiments 

on these flights would emphasize scientific data over visual images. 

The second engineering decision Hall made was to send all data 

back to Earth in real time at a relatively slow stream of one kilobit 

per second. Storing data on board was expensive and heavy. This 

again lowered the resolution of the photographs and the precision 

of some measurements. It also meant that Pioneer would have to 

be flown from the ground. On-board memory could store only five 

commands, of 22 bits each, needed for very precise maneuvers such 

as those to move the photopolarimeter telescope (that served as 

the camera) quickly during a planetary encounter. Each navigation 

command had to be carefully planned, since signals from Earth took 

46 minutes to reach the spacecraft at Jupiter. Hall convinced the 

scientists designing Pioneer experiments to accept these limits. They 

had much to gain, Hall argued, by getting their payloads on a reliable 

platform and getting out there first. 

Eleven experiment packages were hung on the Pioneers, which 

measured magnetic fields, solar wind, high-energy cosmic rays, 

cosmic and asteroidal dust, and ultraviolet and infrared radiation. 

(The two spacecraft were identical except that Pioneer 11 also 

carried a fluxgate magnetometer like the one carried on Apollo 11.) 

Each spacecraft weighed just 570 pounds, and the entire spacecraft 

consumed less power than a 100 watt light bulb. One of the most 

significant engineering achievements was in electromagnetic 

control—the spacecraft was made entirely free of magnetic fields 

to allow greater sensitivity in planetary measurements. To test their 

electromagnetic controls, Ames designed a unique laboratory that 

was completely isolated from Earth’s magnetic field. 

Ames indeed kept the Pioneers within a very tight budget 

and schedule. The entire program for the two Pioneer 10 and 11 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

spacecraft, excluding launch vehicles, cost no more than $100 

million in 1970 dollars. (That compares with $1 billion for the Viking 

at about the same time.) To build the spacecraft, Ames hired TRW 

Systems Group of Redondo Beach, California, the company that 

built the earlier Pioneers. Hall devised a clear set of management 

guidelines. First, mission objectives would be clear, simple, scientific, 

and unchangeable. The Pioneers would explore the hazards of the 

asteroid belt and the environment of Jupiter, and no other plans could 

interfere with those goals. Second, existing technology would be 

used as much as possible. Third, the prime contractor was delegated 

broad technical authority. Fourth, the management team at Ames 

could comprise no more than twenty people. Fifth, their job was to 

prevent escalation of requirements and keep the focus on fast and 

simple construction. 

One other decision ensured that the Pioneers would have an 

extraordinary scientific impact. In the 1960s, NASA scientists had 

begun to explore ways of flying spacecraft through gravitational fields 

to alter their trajectories or give them a boost in speed. Gravitational 

boost was demonstrated on the Mariner 10, which flew around Venus 

on its way to Mercury. The Pioneers were the second spacecraft to 

try such bold maneuvers. Pioneer 10 would fly by Jupiter so it was 

accelerated on its way out of the solar system, to reconnoiter as far as 

possible into deep space. Pioneer 11 would fly by Jupiter to alter its 

trajectory toward an encounter with Saturn five years later. Without 

diminishing their encounter with Jupiter, the Pioneers could return 

better scientific data, for the small cost of keeping open the mission 

room, and would get there years earlier than would Voyager. 

The Pioneers, though, were in some ways meant to be disposable. 

The true Grand Tour would be flown by two Voyager spacecraft, 

managed by JPL and designed as sophisticated platforms with three 

axis-stabilization and higher data transmission rates. The Voyagers 

weighed about four times more than the Pioneers, and cost more 

than two times more to build and nine times more to operate. The 

Voyagers flew much better cameras. The Pioneers encountered the 

asteroid belt and Jupiter about five years before the Voyagers. The 

data the Pioneers returned on the dangers of those encounters was 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

used to refine the trajectory and hardening of the Voyagers, in which 

NASA had a much greater investment. 

Three months before spacecraft launch, Mark got a call from Carl 

Sagan, an astronomer at Cornell University, a friend of Mark’s from 

time spent at the University of California at Berkeley, and a close 

follower of efforts at Ames to discover other life in the universe. Sagan 

called to make sure that Mark appreciated “the cosmic significance 

of sending the first human-made object out of our solar system.”64 

Sagan wanted the Pioneer spacecraft to carry a message—in case 

they were ever found—that described who built the Pioneers and 

where they were from. So Sagan and his wife, Linda, designed a goldanodized aluminum plate on which was inscribed an interstellar 

cave painting with graphic depictions of a man, a woman, and the 

location of Earth in our solar system. It was a simple and elegant 

map, and earned almost as much press as the spacecraft itself. 

Thirty months after project approval, in March 1972, NASA 

launched Pioneer 10 toward the outer planets. Since the spacecraft 

needed the highest velocity ever given to a human-made 

object—32,000 miles per hour—a solid-propellant third stage was 

added atop the Atlas Centaur rocket. Pioneer 10 passed the orbit 

of the Moon eleven hours after liftoff; it took the Apollo spacecraft 

three days to travel that distance. A small group of five specialists 

staffed the Ames Pioneer mission operations center around the 

clock, monitoring activity reported back through the huge and 

highly sensitive antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network. 

Very quickly, Pioneer 10 returned significant data, starting 

with images of the zodiacal light. On 15 July 1972, Pioneer 10 first 

encountered the asteroid belt. Perhaps the scattered debris of a planet 

that once sat in that orbit between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt 

contains hundreds of thousands of rocky fragments ranging in size 

from a few miles in diameter to microscopic size. From Earth, it was 

impossible to know how dense this belt would be. But the Pioneers 

made it through the belt unharmed, and an asteroid and meteoroid 

detector showed that the debris was less dangerous than feared. Next, 

in August 1972, a series of huge solar flares gave Ames scientists the 

opportunity to calibrate data from both Pioneer 10, now deep in the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

asteroid belt, and the earlier Pioneers in orbit around the sun. The 

results helped explain the complex interactions between the solar 

winds and interplanetary magnetic fields. Ames prepared Pioneer 

11 for launch in April 1973, when Earth and Jupiter were again in the 

best relative positions. 

Pioneer 10 flew by Jupiter nineteen months after launch, in 

December 1973. More than 16,000 commands were meticulously 

executed on a tight encounter schedule. The most intriguing results 

concerned the nature of the strong magnetic field around Jupiter, 

which traps charged particles and thus creates intense radiation 

fields. Pioneer 10 created a thermal map of Jupiter, and probed the 

chemical composition of Jupiter’s outer atmosphere. Its trajectory 

flew it behind the satellite Io and, by observing changes in the 

telemetry signal carrier wave, Pioneer 10 provided direct evidence 

of the tenuous atmosphere around Io. Signals from the imaging 

photopolarimeter were converted into video images in real time, 

winning the Pioneer project an Emmy award for contributions to 

television. Most important, Pioneer 10 proved that a spacecraft 

could fly close enough to Jupiter to get a slingshot trajectory, without 

being damaged. 

Pioneer 11 flew by Jupiter a year after Pioneer 10. In November 

1974, its encounter brought it three times closer to the giant gas ball 

than Pioneer 10. Ames mission directors successfully attempted a 

somewhat riskier approach, a clockwise trajectory by the south pole 

and then straight back up through the intense inner radiation belt 

by the equator and back out over Jupiter’s north pole. Thus, Pioneer 

11 sent back the first polar images of the planet, as well as dramatic 

images of the Great Red Spot. Pioneer 11 reached its closest point 

with Jupiter on December 3, coming within 26,000 miles of the 

surface. This mission gathered even better data on the planet’s 

magnetic field, measured distributions of high-energy electrons and 

protons in the radiation belts, measured its geophysics, and studied 

the Jovian gravity and atmosphere. Pioneer 11 then continued onto 

its encounter with Saturn in September 1979. There it discovered 

a new ring and new satellite, took spectacular pictures of the rings 

around Saturn, and returned plenty of data about Saturn’s mass and 

geological structure. 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

Pioneer 10, meanwhile, continued on its journey out of the 

solar system. In June 1983 it passed the orbit of Neptune, which at 

that point was further than the orbit of Pluto. The Pioneer project 

team, now led by Jack Dyer and Richard Fimmel upon Charlie Halls’ 

retirement, eagerly looked for any motion in its spin-stabilized 

platform that would indicate the gravitational pull of a tenth planet, 

but found none. Last contact with Pioneer 11 was in November 1995. 

On its 25th anniversary in 1997, Pioneer 10 was six billion miles 

from Earth, still the most distant of human-made objects, and still 

returning good scientific data. Pioneer was so far from Earth that its 

eight-watt radio signal, equivalent to the power of a night-light, took 

nine hours to reach Earth. Last contact was made in 2003, when it 

still had not detected the plasma discontinuity that defines the edge 

of the heliopause, where the solar winds stop and our sun no longer 

exerts any force. 

The engineering backup of the Pioneers hangs in the Milestones 

of Flight gallery at the National Air and Space Museum since the 

actual Pioneers were, by some definitions, the first human-made 

objects to leave our solar system.They were honored as the spacecraft 

that demonstrated how we could explore deep space. The Voyager 

missions also succeeded, returned stunning photographs and deeper 

data sets, and were widely recognized as one of NASA’s grandest 

achievements. Ames people will always remember the Pioneers, by 

contrast, as spacecraft that flew much the same mission, but faster, 

better, and cheaper. These spacecraft—simple in concept, elegant 

in design, competently executed, and able to return so much for so 

little—served as models for the engineering approach Ames would 

infuse into all of its work. 

P I O N E E R V E N U S 

The Pioneer Venus program was run in the same spirit as the 

earlier Pioneer spacecraft—as a quick and simple way of generating 

data about the atmosphere of Venus. It was managed by many of 

the same team, on the same management principles, with the same 

thirty month schedule, a conservative approach to engineering, and 

a simple set of rules of the road for Pioneer Venus investigators that 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

kept the science paramount and focused. An orbiter mission around 

Venus was already under development when Ames added to it a 

planetary probe to explore the Venusian atmosphere, making it truly 

a pioneering spacecraft. 

Given their work in analyzing the atmosphere of Earth at its 

extremes, Ames people had an abiding interest in the atmospheres 

of other planets. In 1960, Jack Boyd, Pat Peterson and Willard Smith 

filled the Ames supersonic free-flight ballistic range with a gaseous 

mixture of what was then thought to be the composition of the 

atmospheres of Venus (heavy in carbon dioxide) and Mars (heavier 

in nitrogen). They shot a blunt body through it and measured its 

stability and radiative heating.65 This launched more than a decade of 

sporadic work on how to design flight and reentry vehicles for nonEarth atmospheres. 

In the mid-1960s, Alvin Seiff and David Reese began to explore 

the idea that a probe dropped into the atmosphere of a planet can 

determine its structure—density, pressure, and temperature. Data 

on atmospheric structures was needed then, as the Ames’ vehicle 

environments division began studying how to land a human mission 

on Mars through its still unknown atmosphere. Since Seiff’s probe 

would enter at very high speed, and perhaps burn up, it could carry 

no sensors that took direct measurements like you would find on a 

weather station on Earth. Accelerometers, instead, would measure 

changesinair speedswhichaerodynamicistsused tocomputechanges 

in density and atmospheric pressure. Temperature during the entry 

burn yielded data on the molecular weight of the atmosphere, so 

long as the aerodynamics of the probe were calibrated in the Ames 

tunnels over a variety of Mach and Reynolds numbers and in a variety 

of pure gases. Aerodynamicists at Ames were accustomed to starting 

with the defined atmosphere of Earth then designing an aircraft 

configuration to produce the desired aerodynamic performance. 

Seiff turned the problem on its head—defining the configuration 

and performance of a probe in order to understand an atmosphere. 

Work began immediately in the Ames hypersonic free flight facility, 

and with probe models dropped from aircraft. 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

The precursor to all of Ames’ work in planetary probes was 

the June 1971 planetary atmosphere experiments test (PAET). 

Designed and managed by Al Seiff, the PAET inverted all that Ames 

had learned about reentry and hypersonics to push the frontiers 

of planetary science. PAET was a complete prototype of the many 

planetary probes to follow. It carried accelerometers, pressure and 

temperature sensors, two instruments to measure the composition 

of Earth’s atmosphere, a mass spectrometer and a shock layer 

radiometer. A Scout rocket launched from Wallops Station boosted 

the PAET out of Earth’s atmosphere. A third stage rotated it back 

toward Earth, and a fourth rocket stage shot it into the atmosphere 

at 15,000 miles per hour. The data the PAET instruments returned 

perfectly matched what NASA already knew through conventional 

meteorological data on Earth’s atmosphere. Quickly and cheaply, the 

PAET demonstrated the concept of the entry probe and provided the 

confidence to build probes to survey the structure and composition 

of atmospheres of other planets. Rather than adapting the chemistry 

and aerodynamics of a heatshield to the Earth’s atmosphere, Seiff 

would take a heatshield of known chemistry and aerodynamics and 

use it to analyze an unknown atmosphere. 

Following the spectacular results of PAET, in January 1972 NASA 

headquarters cancelled the Planetary Explorer program at Goddard 

which had been pursuing a series of probes and orbiters to study 

Venus. In its place NASA headquarters opened a Pioneer Venus 

group at Ames, two months before the Pioneer 10 launch. Unlike the 

previous Pioneer missions, based on a series of low-cost spacecraft, 

the Pioneer Venus mission emerged as a composite single spacecraft. 

Pioneer Venus, at $444 million, was slightly more expensive to 

build than Pioneer 10 and 11 but only cost $35 million to operate. 

Charles Hall again led the group as Pioneer project manager, and 

Hughes Aircraft built the spacecraft. Among the seven experiments 

selected to be carried on the large probe were four devised by Ames 

researchers: Alvin Seiff on atmosphere structure, Vance Oyama 

on atmosphere composition, Boris Ragent on cloud detection and 

Robert Boese on radiative deposition. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

The Pioneer Venus spacecraft had two parts. An orbiter (Pioneer 

12) carried seventeen instruments, solar cells around its cylinder 

and, like all the Pioneers, was spin stabilized. A multiprobe bus 

(Pioneer 13) carried one large probe and three identical smaller 

probes which it dropped into the atmosphere. The orbiter was 

launched in May 1978; the multiprobe that August. By December 

the two were inserted into orbit and, five days later, the probes were 

dropped. The large probe was most heavily instrumented; one small 

probe entered at sixty degrees north latitude, one entered at the day 

side, the third at the night side. All survived through the dense and 

acid-laden Venusian atmosphere. Even without a parachute, the day 

probe survived for an hour on the surface. Together, they returned 

the most thorough survey of another planet ever made. 

Ames built each probe to known aerodynamic parameters so 

that its motion in flight, at an initial speed of 26,100 miles per hour, 

indicated the density of the atmosphere through which it travelled. As 

the probes heated up and interacted chemically with the atmosphere, 

they relayed data back to Earth on the chemical composition of the 

Venusian atmosphere. The Pioneer Venus science team found, for 

example, that there were remarkably small temperature differences 

below the clouds compared with the differences above, that the 

solar wind shapes Venus’ ionosphere, and that the wavelike patterns 

visible from Earth are in fact strong wind patterns. They quantified 

the runaway greenhouse effect that makes the planet surface very 

hot. They identified widely varying wind speeds in the three major 

layers of clouds and a layer of smog, nine miles thick, atop the 

clouds. Using technology developed for the Viking gas exchange 

experiment, the Pioneer Venus orbiter first discovered the caustic 

nature of the Venusian atmosphere. They found that the surface 

was incredibly dry, and described the chemical process by which 

Venus’ hydrogen blew off and its oxygen absorbed into surface rocks. 

They also measured its electrical activity, looking for evidence of 

lightning. Using these data and data returned from the Soviet Venera 

spacecraft, Ames scientists—James Pollack, James Kasting, and Tom 

Ackerman—proposed new theories of the origins of Venus’ extreme 

atmosphere, which lent insight into the greenhouse effect on Earth. 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

The orbiter, and its seventeen instruments, continued with its 

mission. With the orbiter’s precision radar, the Pioneer Venus team 

drew the first topographic maps of the cloud-enshrouded Venusian 

surface. They discovered that Venus had no magnetic field, from 

which they deduced that Venus had no solidifying core. They further 

discovered that Venus lacked the horizontal plate tectonics that 

dominated Earth’s surface geology. 

Earlyin 1986, Amesmission controllers reoriented PioneerVenus, 

still in orbit around Venus, to observe Comet Halley. It was the only 

spacecraft in position to observe the comet at itsmost spectacular—at 

perihelion, where it comes closest to the sun and is most active. With 

Pioneer’s ultraviolet spectrometer pointed at Halley, Ames scientists 

gathered data on the comet’s gas composition, water vaporization 

rate, and gas-to-dust ratio. Five more times, mission controllers at 

Ames reoriented the Pioneer Orbiter to observe passing comets. 

The Pioneer Venus orbiter continued to circle the planet, working 

perfectly, for fourteen years—over one full cycle of solar activity. 

Its mission ended in October 1992 when, short on fuel, controllers 

directed it into ever-closer orbits until it finally burned up. In doing 

so, it returned the best data yet supporting the theory that Venus 

was once very wet. For a cost averaging $5 million per year over its 

fourteen year mission, Pioneer Venus generated a wealth of good 

science. By 1994, more than a thousand scientific papers had been 

written from Pioneer Venus data, authored by scientists from 34 

universities, fourteen federal laboratories, and fifteen industrial 

laboratories. While planetary scientists continued mining Pioneer 

Venus data, Ames atmosphere scientists turned their expertise to 

exploring the atmospheres of Mars and Jupiter. 

The two Viking landers that settled down on the surface of Mars 

in September 1976 carried an atmosphere structure experiment 

designed by Al Seiff. He had hoped to send a dedicated entry probe 

to Mars, since all that was unknown about atmospheric pressures on 

Mars made planning for future missions difficult. Instead, Seiff was 

asked to build a small set of instruments keyed to the entry heatshield 

of the Viking lander. During high-speed entry, his atmosphere 

structure experiment measured the profile of temperature, pressure 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

and density from an altitude of 100 kilometers to touchdown. Below 

twenty kilometers it took direct measurements of temperatures 

and pressures; higher than that the data were induced through 

deceleration profiles. Winds were derived from Doppler velocities 

and from gyroscope records of changes in the vehicle attitude. After 

it landed, the instruments continued to take readings which were 

matched with data from the meteorology experiments. It returned 

the first sounding of the structure of the Martian atmosphere, and 

provided data that remained useful to NASA’s Mars missions of the 

late 1990s. 

G A L I L E O J U P I T E R P R O B E 

Jupiter’s atmosphere posed a far bigger challenge for Ames 

planetary probe builders. Jupiter’s huge gravity accelerates a probe 

more than five times faster than the gravitational pull of the inner 

planets. Jupiter’s thermal and radiation energy and violent cloud 

layers are ominous spacecraft hazards. Jupiter has no recognizable 

surface; its deep atmosphere just gets denser and hotter until the 

edge blurs between atmosphere and any solid interior. Ames 

scientists expected any Jupiter probe to encounter a hundred times 

the heat of an Apollo reentry capsule—something like a small 

nuclear explosion. Of course, these challenges portended enormous 

scientific possibility. 

NASA Ames managed the Galileo probe, and again Hughes 

Aircraft of El Segundo built it. General Electric Re-Entry Systems 

Division built the heatshield, following the design for the Pioneer 

Venus probe. The Galileo orbiter was massive, and designed by JPL. 

A number of NASA Ames scientists served as principal investigators: 

RobertBoese developeda net flux radiometer,BorisRagent developed 

a nephelometer to measure the scatterings of cloud particles, James 

Pollack and David Atkinson devised a doppler winds experiment, 

and Al Seiff again led the probe atmosphere structure experiment— 

measuring pressure, temperature and density. Ames built a unique 

outer planets arc jet, led by Howard Stine and James Jedlicka, to 

simulate the most caustic and stressful atmosphere a man-made 

material would ever encounter. After computing and testing various 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

exotic materials for their ability to withstand the heat, shocks, and 

erosion from the Jovian atmosphere, Ames chose carbon phenolic 

from which to build the heatshield needed to protect the probe as it 

entered the Jupiter’s atmosphere. 

Hughes delivered the probe on schedule in February 1984, 

expecting an encounter in May 1988. Then it sat in storage for eight 

years. Galileo was designed to be launched from the bay of the 

Space Shuttle orbiter, but the Challenger accident threw that launch 

schedule into turmoil. Furthermore, NASA would no longer allow 

the liquid-fueled Centaur booster to launch it from the orbiter in 

low Earth orbit. In January 1988 NASA sent Galileo, now eight years 

old, back to Hughes for refurbishment and performance checks. 

Galileo was finally launched in October 1989, with a less powerful 

upper stage rocket and a more convoluted flight plan—one taking it 

by Venus and Earth to pick up speed on its journey toward Jupiter. 

Between design and launch, Benny Chin had taken over as probe 

project manager from Joel Sperans, Richard Young had taken over as 

project scientist from Larry Colin, and John Givens arrived as probe 

development manager. 

After travelling six years and 2.5 billion miles to Jupiter with the 

Galileo orbiter, the probe separated and continued on a five month 

coast—spin stabilized—to Jupiter. It entered Jupiter’s atmosphere 

on 7 December 1995. The probe slammed into the atmosphere 

without braking, travelling 115,000 miles per hour, with deceleration 

forces 350 times Earth gravity. The incandescent gas cap ahead of 

the heatshield reached 28,000 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning to an 

observer on Jupiter it glowed as bright as the sun. Almost half of the 

probe mass was heatshield, most of which ablated away as the probe 

slowed to subsonic speed within two minutes. 

The remainder of the heatshield fell away as the parachute 

deployed to slow its descent to relatively placid speeds. Then the 

instruments were activated. Seven instruments sent data back to 

the Galileo Orbiter where it was stored for relay to the mission 

operations center. But soon after the encounter, the Galileo orbiter 

went over the horizon, then followed Jupiter behind the sun, clouding 

the radio signal with noise. Scientists had to wait three long months 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

for the complete return of data. Data received the following spring 

confirmed that in the hour before it went dead under the pressure 

of the atmosphere, the Galileo probe returned the first direct 

measurements of the chemical composition and physical structure 

of Jupiter’s clouds. The probe survived to a depth of 22 atmospheres 

and 153 degrees C, transmitting for an hour, sending data on 

atmospheric conditions and dynamics the whole way in. The probe 

had unexpectedly entered a hotspot—a gap in the clouds where 

the atmosphere was dry and deficient in ammonia and hydrogen 

sulfide—but still the data was a good representation of the whole 

atmosphere. 

Al Seiff and Ames also assisted in one more major probe project— 

the Huygens Titan probe built by the European Space Agency as part 

of the Cassini mission to Saturn. The Huygens probe entered the 

atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan in January 2005, descended for 

two and a half hours, and landed on solid ground. Probes continue to 

be of great use to planetary scientists, as an efficient way of gathering 

data about atmospheres. All trace their heritage back to Seiff and 

the PAET. Processing data from the planetary probes made Ames a 

leading center in research on atmospheres—both of Earth and other 

planets. But increasingly, Ames managed spacecraft projects derived 

from other questions. Astrobiology, and its focus on water in the 

universe, for example, drove the Lunar Prospector mission. 

L U N A R P R O S P E C T O R 

The origins of NASA Discovery program dated back to 1989, 

when NASA’s solar system exploration division, led by Wesley 

Huntress, initiated a series of workshops to define a new strategy 

for space exploration, highlighting the use of small spacecraft. The 

space sciences had dwindled as NASA funded Shuttle projects. 

To launch the program, NASA’s 1992 appropriations bill directed 

NASA to prepare “a plan to stimulate and develop small planetary 

or other space science projects, emphasizing those which could 

be accomplished by the academic or research communities.”66 Dan 

Goldin used the program to fund focused missions with lower costs, 

shorter timelines, and less risk, by giving the science investigation 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

teams a great deal of freedom. The cost for an entire mission would 

be less than $425 million, time from start to launch could be less 

than 36 months, and NASA planned to have a missions flying every 

one or two years. The Discovery program encouraged focused, 

scientific studies of our solar system by sending robotic explorers 

to the planets, their moons, and small bodies such as comets and 

asteroids. The first two missions in the Discovery program launched 

in 1996: JPL’s MESUR-Pathfinder, for sending a small lander and 

robotic rover to Mars, and the near Earth asteroid rendezvous 

(NEAR). In February 1995, NASA selected the Lunar Prospector as 

the third Discovery mission. 

In the 25 years since Apollo, only a few spacecraft have flown by 

the Moon, and only one had a lengthy encounter. The Clementine 

spacecraft, built by the U.S. Air Force (with scientific input from 

NASA) orbited the Moon for two months in 1994 in an elliptical 

orbit no closer than 250 miles to the surface of the Moon. Clementine 

bounced radar signals off the Moon’s surface to develop a map, and 

returned radar signatures that might be consistent with ice crystals 

at the lunar south pole. Since Apollo era samples showed the lunar 

regolith to be bone dry, scientists thought that water was transported 

to the Moon on comets and asteroids, which created deep craters 

with permanent shadows that shielded the ice from the sun’s heat. 

Spurred by these results, Ames developed plans for a spacecraft to 

lead NASA’s rediscovery of the Moon. Called the Lunar Prospector, 

it would orbit the Moon for a year, in circular orbit at an altitude 

of about sixty miles. The idea for Lunar Prospector initiated at the 

Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Company located adjacent to 

Ames in Sunnyvale. Former Ames deputy director Gus Guastaferro, 

then an executive with Lockheed, guided the project planning. Ames 

managed the Prospector contract, and G. Scott Hubbard of Ames’ 

space projects division led all Prospector efforts as the NASA mission 

manager. The principal investigator was Alan Binder at Lockheed, 

and Tom Doggerty led the team at Lockheed that designed and 

built the Prospector. William Feldman of the Los Alamos National 

Laboratory led the design of three key instruments and the HewlettPackard Company built a custom test system using off-the-shelf 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

components. By contracting for parts and services from 25 other 

Silicon Valley firms, and by designing Prospector as a simple spinstabilized cylinder just 4.6 feet in diameter and 4.1 feet in length, 

Lockheed took the spacecraft from go-ahead to final test in only 22 

months. In addition, Lockheed Martin, at its facility in Colorado, 

built the Athena launch vehicle that was used for its first time to 

send Prospector skyward. It was the first commercially-developed 

rocket ever to launch a lunar mission. The total cost to NASA for the 

mission, including launch, was $63 million. “Prospector has served 

as a model for new ways of doing business,” said Hubbard. “This 

mission has made history in terms of management style, technical 

approach, cost management and focused science.”67 

In 1997, Ames built a Prospector mission control room from 

the operation center that had so long served the Pioneer spacecraft. 

Mission controllersinserted the Prospectorintolunar orbitin January 

1998 carrying five science instruments. A gamma ray spectrometer 

remotely mapped the chemical composition of the lunar surface, 

measuring concentrations of such elements as uranium, titanium, 

potassium, iron, and oxygen. An alpha particle spectrometer looked 

for outgassing events that suggested tectonic or volcanic activity. 

A magnetometer and electron reflectometer probed the lunar 

magnetic fields for clues about the Moon’s core. The doppler gravity 

experiment returned the first lunar gravity map with operational 

specificity. And a neutron spectrometer, the first used in planetary 

exploration, detected energy flux emanating from the lunar regolith. 

Hydrogen has a unique neutron signature that is indicative of water 

ice at higher concentrations. Prospector returned the first direct 

measurement of high hydrogen levels at the lunar poles, which Ames 

scientists claimed could only be explained as the presence of water 

ice. 

Ames held a press conference in March 1998 to announce the 

first science results from Lunar Prospector, only seven weeks after 

it entered lunar orbit. The indication of water ice embedded in the 

permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles made headlines 

around the world. Future lunar explorers could extract this water 

for life support or as a source of oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Rough 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

estimates showed up to six metric tons of water mixed in fairly low 

concentrations. 

After its first year in orbit at sixty miles altitude, Prospector was 

instructed to swoop down as low as 25 miles to map the Moon in 

even greater detail. Ames scientists then refined their scientific data 

and their estimates of water volumes. Mission controllers instructed 

the Prospector—its fuel now exhausted, its design life far exceeded, 

and after its 6,800 lunar orbits had compiled a complete set of data— 

to crash into a crater at the lunar South pole in July 1999. The impact 

kicked up no debris visible by ground-based telescopes, and NASA 

scientists using space-based telescopes saw no real signs of vapor 

that they could analyze for further evidence of water ice. Ames 

would later launch a spacecraft, dubbed LCROSS, optimized for 

this impact mission. 

S T A R D U S T 

Stardust, the fourth NASA Discovery mission, launched in 

February 1999 to return interstellar and cometary particles. In praise 

of the proposal, Wesley Huntress, as NASA associate administrator 

for space science, noted that “Stardust was rated highest in terms 

of scientific content and, when combined with its low cost and 

high probability of success, this translates into the best return on 

investment for the nation.”68 Stardust’s mission cost to NASA 

totaled $199.6 million.69 After passing through the trail of comet 

Wild-2, Stardust stowed its precious cargo of captured particles in a 

sample return capsule (SRC) for the journey home. Reentry through 

the Earth’s atmosphere at 12.9 kilometers per second—the fastest 

reentry ever—demanded a leap in heatshield technology. 

Ames researchers played three key roles in this mission. They 

developed the PICA heatshield used on the Stardust heatshield 

(PICA stands for phenolic impregnated carbon ablator), analyzed 

the captured organic compounds (including analysis of which 

organic compounds were contaminants), and did spectrographic 

observation of the Stardust capsule as it entered the atmosphere like 

a meteor. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

The standard approach to high-speed reentry, from Mercury 

through Apollo, involved filling a polymer substrate with various 

chopped fibers, glass microspheres and even cork. Phenolic 

honeycomb cells provided structural integrity for AVCOAT, the 

heatshield Martin Marietta manufactured for the Apollo missions. 

Martin Marietta continued ablator development into the 1970s 

and produced the super lightweight ablator (SLA), which served 

as the heatshield material for the Viking probe as well as the more 

recent Mars missions Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity.70 Ablator 

development largely stagnated, though, as the Shuttle demanded 

reusable heatshields. 

When Daniel Rasky joined Ames in 1989 as a materials 

researcher, he found ablative reentry methods out of fashion. 

Going against the conventional wisdom, as Ames people like to do, 

he initiated development of a new class of materials called LCAs 

(lightweight ceramic ablators) which included silicone impregnated 

reusable ceramic ablator (SIRCA) and PICA.71 PICA employed a 

fibrous ceramic substrate coated with an organic resin film. Because 

fabrication started with a ceramic substrate, the resulting ablator 

could easily accommodate different mission configurations. 

Upon hearing of Ames’ developments on PICA, in January 

1995 Lockheed asked Ames for help applying PICA to the Stardust 

aeroshell. The Stardust sample return container weighed about a 

hundred pounds and encapsulated 132 blocks of aerogel to hold the 

particles. Though not large, Ames researchers had produced only 

small amounts of PICA. Project engineers Huy Tran and Christine 

Szalai traveled to Lockheed Martin in Denver and, in a short time, 

produced a full-sized heatshield mock-up in time for the Phase B 

presentation of the spacecraft.72 Fabricating this heatshield for the 

actual spacecraft required a source for preformed ceramic fibers. 

Fiber Materials Incorporated became the small business team 

member to join Stardust’s Discovery-class assemblage of university, 

industry, government laboratory and small business partners. With 

funding from a SBIR grant, Fiber Materials produced a single-piece 

PICA heatshield for the Stardust capsule. 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

Two years prior, the failed reentry of another Discovery-class 

mission, Genesis, prompted concerns about Stardust’s reentry 

technology. Investigators found that technicians had installed the 

accelerometers designed to trip Genesis’ parachute upside-down.73 

Still, the Stardust reentry technology was continually reviewed. 

Ablation and thermal performance testing occurred at the Ames 60 

megawatt interaction heating arc jet facility, using 24 models and 

four test conditions. During the flight of Stardust, concerns arose 

regarding uncertainties in the initial arc jet heating rate calibrations. 

Ames aerothermodynamicists Jim Arnold, Howard Goldstein and 

EthirajVenkatapathy formed aninternal review team. They found that 

PICA would “probably” perform well, but to ensure that there was no 

remaining doubt a secondary group at Ames, led by Al Covington, 

conducted new testing on Stardust’s forebody heatshield.74 This 

group, independent from Stardust and the associated Discovery 

budget, found that the heatshield design was “conservative.”75 A 

flawless reentry in January 2006, confirmed these convictions. 

Another uncertainty resolved at NASA Ames related to 

contamination of the comet particles stored in the aerogel by 

particles burned off the ablating heatshield. Not hermetically sealed, 

the sample return container would draw in particles as pressure 

equalized during reentry. These particles could include everything 

from heatshield ablation products to the mud at the Utah landing 

site. Anticipating such contamination, Stardust team members 

installed an air filter between the vents of the aeroshell and the 

canister interior. Stardust co-investigator and Ames astrochemist 

Scott Sandford tested the filter with mixtures of the nastiest possible 

chemicals thought to possibly bombard the craft, and the filter 

tested well.76 Upon opening the capsule in the clean room at Johnson 

Space Center after its delivery in January 2006, the aerogel tiles were 

indeed pristine and in place.77 

NASA Ames researchers also contributed by developing aerogel 

for spaceflight. Aerogel was a lightweight and strong foam of silicon 

bubbles manufactured in carbon dioxide, and worked well for 

trapping dust grains travelling very fast. Other aerogel uses included 

Cerenkov radiation detectors in some nuclear reactors and as thermal 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

insulators on the Mars rovers Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity.78 

For the application of aerogel to the Stardust mission, Scott Sanford 

and Max Bernstein of the NASA Ames astrochemistry laboratory 

devised ways to make aerogel cleaner, largely by burning off organic 

contaminants introduced during manufacture. 

The particles returned from Wild-2 offered insights into the 

materials that coalesced to form our solar system. Long period 

comets originating in the Kuiper Belt, where Wild-2 was believed 

to have originated, remain in relatively pristine condition out on the 

edge of our solar system. Astronomers suspect that comets may be 

the source of organics and water on Earth during its formation. After 

the Stardust encounter, material from Wild-2 now sits embedded in 

small aerogel tiles awaiting continuing extraction and analysis. Some 

of the early results of the organic analysis were far from ambiguous. 

The high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen in labile organics 

looked nothing like organic contamination. Also, the presence of 

deuterium and nitrogen-15 suggested a protostellar heritage for 

some organics.79 Determining the origins of these particles shapes 

our picture of the nebula from which our solar system formed. The 

presence of a range of organics in the Stardust samples supported 

the possibility that the delivery of cometary materials to early Earth 

played a role in the origin of life. Of particular interest was the 

amino acid glycine in the samples.80 Stardust provoked interest in 

more sample return missions. A smattering of particles could not 

reproduce a model of the entire comet. 

Peter Jenniskens of Ames led the observations of the Stardust 

capsule upon reentry. Flying with the Ames video team aboard a 

specially outfitted NASA DC-8, they recorded spectrographic data 

of the light produced as the PICA heatshield interacted with the 

atmosphere. Jenniskens previously had observed meteor showers, 

which required focusing on one part of the sky, whereas Stardust 

had a well defined trajectory across the sky to follow.81 Because 

the heatshield material contained carbon, its reaction with the 

shockwave upon reentry was similar to that of meteoroids. The 

fireballs produced upon entry by asteroids with diameters on the 

order of a meter (similar in size to the Stardust) deposited most their 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

mass in the atmosphere through ablation, spallation, fragmentation, 

and shock layer chemistry. The organic matter strewn throughout 

the atmosphere reacts chemically with the atmosphere in the shock 

layer to produce, perhaps, organic compounds different from 

those found in meteorites.82 While the composition of PICA and 

meteoroids differ significantly, the lack of metal line emissions from 

PICA made possible the study of the much weaker shock emissions 

from reacting organics. 

In addition, the Stardust reentry provided flight-tested proof 

of the PICA heatshield’s ability to protect a capsule at high reentry 

speed. During the time Stardust flew on its mission, NASA began 

the Constellation program to return humans to the Moon. PICA 

would be a possible new ablative material for the heatshield to cover 

the Orion crew exploration vehicle.83 

S O F I A 

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) 

is an airborne observatory, built around a Boeing 747, which will 

study the universe in the infrared spectrum. SOFIA was two decades 

in the making, with more than a billion dollars being spent on that 

one aircraft. In May 2010 SOFIA achieved first light, when the 

instruments were first operational.When in full use, SOFIA will stand 

at the core of the discipline of infrared astronomy. Young scientists 

and educators will train there, and new observational techniques 

and instrumentation will be advanced. Teams of astronomers will 

observe the radiant heat patterns of space from the cold dark fringes 

of Earth’s atmosphere. At its cruising altitude of 41,000 feet, SOFIA 

will fly above 99 percent of Earth’s obscuring water vapor, allowing 

observations impossible for even the largest and highest groundbased telescopes. SOFIA will help answer questions about the birth of 

stars, the formation of solar systems, the origin of complex molecules 

in space, the evolution of comets, and the nature of black holes. 

SOFIA succeeds the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a C-141A 

aircraft carrying a 36-inch infrared telescope that was operated by 

Ames from 1974 through 1995. Named after famed University of 

Arizona astronomer Gerard Kuiper, the Kuiper observatory was used 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

to sight the rings of Uranus, the atmosphere on Pluto, and the disks 

around stars. Astronomers used it to track the formation of heavy 

elements in massive supernovas, and the distribution of water and 

organic molecules in regions of star formation. The first discussion 

of what sort of infrared telescope could fit inside a Boeing 747 began 

in 1984, when the Kuiper was the world’s only airborne observatory.84 

Ames people—Edwin Erickson on the science side and Gary Thorley 

on the program side—spent five years on feasibility studies for the 

aircraft and telescope before serious planning began in 1990.85 A 

747, they calculated, could hold a telescope 2.5 times stronger than 

that on the Kuiper. 

In the mid-1980s Ames researchers used their expertise in 

airborne observatories for the design of spaceborne observatories. 

An international team built the IRAS (for infrared astronomical 

satellite). Ames designed the IRAS telescope, which had a sixty 

centimeter mirror and an array of detectors cooled to near absolute 

zero by superfluid helium. IRAS launched in January 1983 and, 

during its one year in orbit, conducted the first whole-sky survey 

in the infrared region. In mapping the entire celestial sphere in 

four infrared bands from 8 to 120 micrometers, IRAS astronomers 

found 250,000 new infrared sources, almost doubling the catalog 

of infrared sources. They found suggestions of asteroidal collisions 

in the zodiacal cloud, particle rings around some stars, the core of 

our Milky Way galaxy, and the wispy filaments of the infrared cirrus 

covering much of the sky. And IRAS offered valuable experience 

useful in building the next generations of airborne telescopes. 

James Murphy and Fred Witteborn conceived a liquid heliumcooled spaceborne infrared telescope they dubbed SIRTF. The 

acronym initially stood for Shuttle infrared test facility, though, 

once the contamination surrounding the Shuttle orbiter (dust, 

heat and vapors) was confirmed in flight they decided it must be 

detached from the orbiter. SIRTF was redesigned as a free-flying 

spacecraft. Eventually launched as the Spitzer Space Telescope in 

2003, SIRTF became the instrument in NASA’s great spaceborne 

observatories program that covered the infrared portion of the 

spectrum. A unique technology group sprang up at Ames, led by 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

Craig McCreight and Peter Kittel, to develop low noise detectors 

for SIRTF.86 This was an exciting era in infrared telescopy, with 

instruments being designed for the ESA infrared space observatory, 

the second generation Hubble infrared spectrometer, SIRTF, SOFIA 

and a variety of ground-based infrared telescopes. When NASA 

headquarters moved SIRTF program management to JPL in 1991, 

despite Dale Compton’s strenuous objections, McCreight and Kittel 

continued their work. Ames revised plans so that SOFIA capabilities 

specifically complemented SIRTF capabilities. 

As with the Kuiper, SOFIA would have an open-air port for the 

telescope, and Ames aerodynamicists began exploring how to safely 

put so large a hole in the top of the aircraft. During a major upgrade 

of the information systems for the Kuiper, completed in December 

1991, Ames refined the computing and data collection equipment 

that they would include on the SOFIA. Ames opened discussions 

with German astronomers, who agreed to raise funds to build the 

core of the telescope there. Throughout the early 1990s, Ames 

struggled to get funding approved by headquarters and Congress 

as they reshaped the institutional structure to support SOFIA. 

Soon after Harry McDonald arrived at Ames, NASA headquarters 

approved the program. 

In December 1996, David Morrison, Ames’ director of space, 

announced that Ames had awarded the $480 million SOFIA prime 

contract to USRA (Universities Space Research Association), a 

private non-profit corporation with eighty universities asinstitutional 

members. USRA was formed in 1970 under the auspices of the 

National Academy of Sciences to provide a means for university and 

government collaboration in space exploration. USRA led overall 

project management, and would later lead scientific operations. The 

SOFIA contract was a new type of contract—performance based and 

with full-cost accounting. Other contracts specified the resources 

and personnel a contractor would devote to a project; Ames’ 

contract for the SOFIA specified only the scientific work USRA must 

accomplish. “The SOFIA program is a stellar example of NASA’s new 

way of doing business,” exclaimed Dan Goldin. “We have taken the 

parts of a space science program that the private sector can do better 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

and more cost effectively, and had a competitive selection for the 

privilege of performing those duties.”87 

Also unique was the cooperation with the Germans. German 

astronomers were involved in the SOFIA from the beginning. NASA 

funded eighty percent of SOFIA costs, and the German government 

funded the other twenty percent. The infrared telescope, 2.5 meters 

in diameter, was designed and built by a consortium of German 

aerospace companies and managed by DLR, the German Aerospace 

Center. This partnership gave the program impressive momentum. 

In April 1997 the 747SP that would be transformed into SOFIA 

was procured from United Airlines, and dedicated in a ceremony at 

NASA Ames. Modifications to the 747 began in 1998 at Raytheon 

E-Systems of Waco, Texas (which was soon after acquired by L3 

Communications Integrated Systems). The telescope was heavy at 

45,000 pounds. A sixteen foot diameter aperture was cut into the 

aft fuselage, which was covered by a sliding door that opened at 

high altitude. The aerodynamics of this weight and this hole were 

so complex, and unique, that existing CFD codes only clarified the 

concerns. Ames aerodynamicists fabricated a model and put it 

through a hundred hours of tests in the 14 foot wind tunnel, which 

was brought out of mothballs for them. They devised an aft ramp 

and a wind scoop at the back of the aperture. With the aft ramp, 

airflow was smoother over the aperture opening so that turbulent 

air did not drop into the opening, causing vibrations and pressure 

distortions which diminished image quality. 

However, SOFIA soon ran into troubles, and Ames’ solution 

was to bring the work in-house. In April 2001, Ames completed 

conversion of hangar N211—built in 1946 and home to almost 

all aircraft stationed at Ames—into a SOFIA science and mission 

operations center. There, the scientific teams had their offices, and 

instruments would be installed into the aircraft and maintained. An 

alignment simulator could test all their instruments with the aircraft 

on the ground. A data archive would allow for rapid diffusion of 

results. But soon the hangar became the site of engineering work. 

In April 2003, NASA Ames crews led by Dave Ackard and Bill 

Caldwell completed design and assembly of the lower flexible door 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

assembly. They needed to design special assembly tools so the door 

would meet the precision requirements demanded of the general 

airworthiness standards of the FAA. Soon after, in June 2003, the 

Ames aeronautics and space flight hardware division was selected 

to assemble the upper rigid door. Because of the bankruptcy of the 

project contractor, Aircraft Engineering Corp., the door assembly 

tools Ames received were only 75 percent complete. The door was 

massive, measuring 16 by 14 feet, with 4,500 parts. By August 2004 

Ames technical staff had assembled the telescope cavity door, a 

major milestone, and it received FAA certification as flight-worthy. 

Yet by 2005 the accumulated technical challenges took a toll on 

the program. The date of first light had slipped from summer 2001 to 

2006, and the cost had ballooned from $185 million to $330 million, 

and soon to $500 million. In April 2006, as Ames was struggling with 

budget cuts and had no permanent director, NASA headquarters 

sent to Congress a budget that had reduced SOFIA funding by thirty 

percent in 2006 and eliminated it in 2007. The Germans objected 

loudly to NASA’s abrogation of its responsibilities to its partners. 

NASA headquarters launched an independent review, and Joel 

Kearns and Carol Carroll, SOFIA program manager, led Ames’ 

response.The review concluded that, although Ames had done a poor 

job managing its prime contractor, there were no insurmountable 

technical hurdles to the successful completion of the observatory. 

The report went to the NASA program management council, which 

concurred. 

In August 2006, NASA headquarters announced a major 

change in the SOFIA program. SOFIA would now be based out of a 

hangar in Palmdale, California and Dryden Flight Research Center 

became responsible for SOFIA flight testing and operations. Science 

operations were still based at NASA Ames, and managed by USRA. 

USRA still planned for the SOFIA to make about 120 flights per 

year of about nine hours each. Though the change had been in the 

works for months, and was driven largely by the perception that 

it was cheaper to operate aircraft out of Dryden, for Ames to lose 

program responsibility for SOFIA so soon after Pete Worden arrived 

as director was not seen around Center as a good omen. Still, Ames 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

people knew that the aircraft modifications had gone awry, and were 

glad to keep control of the more important science program. 

SOFIA completed its first checkout flight in April 2007 in the 

skies over Waco, Texas. Soon after it was ferried to Dryden, where 

it underwent more complete flight testing. It made a visit to NASA 

Ames in January 2008, where 3,500 people lined up to look inside. In 

December 2009, for the first time its door was opened in flight and 

the aircraft flew well. The science program also hit its milestones. 

In July 2008, on their first try, the Ames science team successfully 

coated the mirror. After several decades of planning, it took only 

twenty seconds to apply the shiny aluminum layer on the highly 

polished piece of glass.88 Ames had opened, in June 2001, a speciallybuilt vacuum chamber in the N211 hangar to coat the mirror which, 

like many mirrors, needed to be recoated often. The challenge was 

to design a mirror support structure, out of carbon-reinforced 

plastic, that did not have to be dismantled before undergoing the 

vacuum needed for coating. The aluminum layer itself was only five 

one-millionths of an inch thick, which weighed only one-seventh as 

much as an aluminum can. The mirror was installed on the telescope 

and the telescope then installed on the aircraft. Soon after that the 

first three members of the science team were selected. 

SOFIA’s six hour “first light” flight, in May 2010, was staffed 

by an international group of astronomers from NASA, USRA, the 

German SOFIA Institute, and Cornell University—who built the 

camera mounted on the telescope. The stability of the aircraft and 

the pointing precision of the telescope were all they had hoped for. 

They recorded images of Jupiter unobtainable in any other way, 

which showed heat pouring out of Jupiter’s interior through holes in 

its clouds. 

K E P L E R 

The Kepler exoplanet observatory was a mission driven 

by astrobiology, matched with Ames’ expertise in scientific 

instrumentation. Launched in March 2009, Kepler was NASA’s first 

mission capable of finding Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits 

around other stars. While 347 exoplanets had been discovered prior 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

to the launch of Kepler, almost all of these were gas giants with no 

solid surface capable of supporting life. Others were ice giants or 

small planets in super-hot orbits like that of Mercury. Orbit in the 

habitable zone means the planet is just distant enough from its star 

that water can exist in liquid form. 

With Kepler NASA may discover hundreds of planets similar to 

Earth; or it may discover none. We may learn that Earth is unique, or 

that our galaxy has the potential to teem with life. Within its first year 

of operation, Kepler had peered at 156,000 stars, and identified 706 

that hosted some sort of planet—most much smaller than Jupiter— 

including five stars that likely hosted multiple planets. Regardless of 

whether we find a planet like Earth, Kepler will teach us much about 

the structure and diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy. 

The heart of the mission is William J. Borucki, Kepler principal 

investigator and chief of its science operations. Borucki joined Ames 

in 1962 fresh from a masters degree in physics from the University 

of Wisconsin. He started in the hypervelocity free flight tunnel, 

doing spectroscopic analysis of the radiation environment of the 

Apollo heatshields. In 1972 he joined the theoretical studies branch 

and developed photochemical models of the Earth’s stratosphere, 

specifically to study ozone depletion. Next he characterized 

lightning in the atmospheres of Earth, Venus, Jupiter and Titan. He 

did laboratory work on the optical efficiency of lightning in various 

planetary atmospheres, coupled with spacecraft observations, which 

he used to deduce the production rates of prebiotic molecules. He 

built instruments to measure the fraction of optical energy of laserinduced plasmas. His work on lightning led him to understand the 

potential of photometers, the instrument at the core of the Kepler 

mission. And fascination with big issues in space exploration led him 

to keep attune to the burgeoning work at NASA Ames in the early 

1980s around the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 

In 1984 Borucki first proposed the photometric transit method 

for detecting other planets.89 His proposal met much skepticism, 

not from doubts about the value of the science, but from whether 

photometry could ever be rendered precise enough. Borucki and 

David G. Koch of the NASA Ames astrophysics branch continued to 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

champion the mission, some say to the point of obsession, over many 

decades, all the while focusing on the engineering of the photometer. 

Ames director Bill Ballhaus funded their early efforts through his 

discretionary funds, as he would over the next few years. Borucki 

convened workshops in 1984 and 1987 to review the state of the art 

in spaceborne photometers. He worked with the National Bureau of 

Standards to determine that discrete silicon dioxide detectors might 

offer precision in tracking individual stars—one photon into the 

detector meant one electron out. In the late 1980s though, Borucki 

shifted his platform toward CCDs—charged coupled devices like 

those found in digital cameras.90 Borucki prefered silicon dioxide, 

but CCDs were improving dramatically and were familiar to space 

scientists. The advantage they offered, other than easing acceptance 

of the mission, was that CCDs could monitor a whole field of stars. 

Eventually, the Kepler would use 42 CCDs, compared with four on 

the Hubble Space Telescope. 

In 1992, Borucki and Koch first proposed a specific spacecraft 

mission, called FRESIP for frequency of Earth-sized inner planets, as 

part of the new NASA Discovery program. It was rejected because 

no suitable detectors were thought to exist. At the same time, David 

Black, John Dyer and Charlie Sobeck at Ames had been working 

on a proposal for an exoplanet mission based on astrometrics. 

The astrometric telescope facility (ATF) would be mounted to an 

arm on the International Space Station and be able to take precise 

position measurements of two hundred nearby stars to determine if 

any harbored exoplanets.91 Design work on the ATF continued from 

1986 until 1993, when it was cancelled because of delays in the ISS. 

Meanwhile, Borucki honed his detector technology. In November 

1993, Ames sponsored another conference on the astrophysics— 

apart from exoplanet detection—that could be accomplished by 

FRESIP.92 The consensus was that FRESIP data would give significant 

insight into our own sun. By collecting data on star spots, FRESIP 

could clarify the composition and behavior of a normal star, and 

thus help us anticipate the sun’s behavior. The conference cleared up 

another issue impeding approval of the mission. If the light emitted 

by stars naturally fluctuated over the course of a day, then it might 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

be impossible to detect the slight drop in light caused by the transit 

of a planet. However, data returned from NASA’s Solar Maximum 

Mission showed that the variability of light from our sun was less 

than ten parts per million—smaller than the twenty parts generated 

by a transit. Another technical uncertainty was resolved. 

Dale Compton, now Ames Center director, continued to fund 

development of the proposal. Larry Webster, a veteran spacecraft 

engineer, was named project manager and tasked with refining the 

engineering. Ames was aware that JPL was investing heavily in a 

space-based interferometer, and thought the FRESIP proposal was 

a good alternative—an elegantly simple spacecraft, inexpensive, 

driven by one highly refined instrument, that could provide high 

impact science. It nicely fit with the new “faster, better, cheaper” 

mantra of Dan Goldin. Still, the Discovery program reviewers with 

NASA headquarters again rejected the FRESIP proposal in 1994, 

on grounds that it would certainly cost more than the proposal 

estimated. The next proposal opportunity would open in two years. 

In 1995, scientists using ground-based equipment at the Geneva 

Observatory announced discovery of the first exoplanet, a gas giant 

in a close orbit to its star in the constellation Pegasus.93 Their method 

focused on doppler velocity measurements to find a periodic wobble 

in a star, and any planet able to cause such a wobble would have to 

be big. Other discoveries from astrometry followed in 1997, though 

all were gas giants in very tight orbits to their stars—so-called 

Vulcans. The French national space agency, CNES, funded a transit 

photometry mission named COROT (for COnvection, ROtation and 

planetary Transits). Though one-third the size of Borucki’s proposed 

spacecraft, and only capable of detecting planets greater than ten 

times the size of Earth, it lent urgency to the American effort. (It 

would not launch, though, until December 2006.) Carl Sagan and 

Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute more vocally championed Borucki’s 

spacecraft, and suggested renaming the mission to honor Johannes 

Kepler as the founder of celestial mechanics. To address concerns 

about cost, the Ames team simplified the mission, by moving it from a 

Lagrange point into an Earth-following orbit. Furthermore, Borucki’s 

team had developed the algorithms that would allow them to make 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

sense of the CCD data. Despite this excitement, and refinements, the 

proposal was rejected again in 1996 because automated photometry 

of thousands of stars remained unproven. 

So in December 1997 the Ames team installed a testbed, called 

the Vulcan camera, at the Lick Observatory near San Jose. The SETI 

Institute, increasingly intrigued by what the Kepler might find, helped 

organize volunteers to staff the small telescope during the night 

hours. Soon the Vulcan proved capable of continuous, automatic 

monitoring of 100,000 stars. Though Earth-based photometers were 

unlikely to detect transits, the Vulcan found one and discovered many 

eclipsing binary stars. (In 2003, this group placed a Vulcan South 

photometer at a research station in Antarctica, where it continued 

to serve as a testbed for Kepler technologies.) 

Still Borucki’s proposal was rejected again in 1998 because the 

ability to handle on-orbit noise remained unproven. This time, 

though NASA put in enough money (a million dollars, half from 

headquarters and half from Ames) for the Kepler team to provide 

an end-to-end demonstration of their technology. Within 88 days 

Borucki’s team developed a laboratory-based photometer, a ten-foot 

tall rack of equipment surrounding a single CCD, installed in the 

basement of the Ames space sciences building. In tests conducted 

between April 1999 and July 2000, against a simulated 1600 star sky, 

it operated with precision and noise control at the twenty parts in a 

million required for the mission.94 By the December 2001 proposal 

review the reviewers ran out of objections to the technology, and 

Kepler was selected as the tenth Discovery mission. Borucki finally 

saw some light at the end of the tunnel. 

Borucki’s patience continued to be tried, however. Weeks after 

the proposal was funded, NASA headquarters told the Kepler team 

that a drop in funding—because of overruns in other Discovery 

missions—would push the launch date back to 2007. Also, JPL would 

be tasked to provide program management through the launch of 

the spacecraft. NASA Ames led photometer design, spacecraft 

operations and data management, and the overall Kepler science 

program. Ball Aerospace of Boulder, Colorado designed and built 

the spacecraft, derived from the Deep Impact spacecraft. The 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

spacecraft itself was simple, little more than a platform to keep the 

photometer steady and to stream data back to Earth for analysis. 

Still, Ball Aerospace struggled with the work at the same time all of 

NASA was hit with full cost recovery. Kodak had started fabricating 

the lens and mirror, but in 2004 Ball Aerospace awarded the work to 

L-3 Brashear of Pittsburgh. Soon after, a crack in the mirror further 

delayed manufacturing.The project started to creep over budget, but 

the financial system set up at Ames in 2001 allowed them to control 

the overrun. The life-cycle cost of Kepler, including three planned 

years of operation, would rise to $600 million. Tens of millions of 

Kepler’s budget went towards building the science operations center 

on the third floor of the Ames space projects facility. NASA Ames 

had built mission control rooms for the Pioneers and for the Shuttle 

biological payloads, but the multimission operations center was 

designed with the flexibility to support any future Ames missions. It 

served as a data reduction and processing hub for Kepler scientists. 

Borucki called Kepler “the most boring NASA mission ever.”95 

The Kepler photometer, essentially a digital camera with a 37-inch 

diameter lens, stared unblinkingly at one small section of the Milky 

Way galaxy, about ten degrees square, in the constellation Cygnus. 

It measured minute changes—about 0.01 percent—in the light 

levels of the 156,000 stars the science team decided to track. A small 

change in the brightness of a star, once all the noise was removed 

from the signal, indicated that a planet was transiting in front of it. 

The frequency of the blip indicated the period of the planet’s orbit, 

and thus its distance from that star, and thus its likely temperature. 

Kepler was funded to isolate such periodic blips for 3.5 years, even 

though it had enough fuel on board to power the mission for a 

decade. 

The Kepler mission included a guest observer program for science 

beyond its hunt for exoplanets. Only data from the stars selected 

by the science team was routinely transmitted to Earth. There was 

bandwidth to track additional targets—3,000 at thirty-minute 

intervals and 25 at one-minute intervals. The Kepler science team 

would review proposals for research related to intrinsically variable 

stars that pulsate, rotate, erupt or explode. Kepler also provided data 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

on astroseismology, the study of fluctuations in the brightness of 

stars. Most often fluctuations arise from sun spots, and the only data 

we had on sun spots came from our sun. Astroseismology explores 

the internal structure of stars and helps determine the mass and radii 

of the stars that Kepler observed. 

First science results were returned in June 2009. The data was 

calibrated at Ames, then archived at the Space Telescope Science 

Institute. Astronomers can then turn their telescopes toward these 

candidates to better characterize them. NASA also planned to use 

other telescopes—notably the forthcoming James Webb Space 

Telescope and the Space Interferometry Mission—to try to detect 

oxygen in the atmosphere of this planet. 

NASA was studying a follow-on mission to Kepler, the Terrestrial 

Planet Finder, using a space-based stellar coronagraph. David 

Des Marais, of the Ames astrobiology branch, played a key role in 

describing how to look for features in the atmosphere of nearby 

exoplanets that might indicate the presence of life.96 Knowing what 

to look for in other atmospheres derives from our understanding of 

how our own atmosphere developed. In 2001, two teams of Ames 

scientists each published a paper that proposed a new explanation 

for the rise of oxygen in Earth’s early atmosphere. The first team—of 

David Catling, Kevin Zahnle, and Christopher McKay—developed 

a theoretical model in which the methane of the early atmosphere 

underwent photolysis and liberated hydrogen. This lead to oxidation 

of the atmosphere as hydrogen from the methane escaped because 

Earth’s gravity could not retain it.97 The second team employed 

measurements ofmicrobialmats. Lead authorsToriHoehler and Brad 

Bebout, working with Des Marais, reported their measurements of 

the cyanobacteria-dominated mats at Guerrero Negro. They found 

that the mats produced lots of hydrogen and carbon monoxide as 

well as a flux of methane.98 Given the contribution of oxygen from 

photosynthetic mats, which were far more numerous in the early 

Earth, the experimental findings of Hoehler, Bebout, and DesMarais 

supported the premise of Catling’s team. Once Kepler identifies 

exoplanets, Ames will have instruments ready for characterizing 

its atmosphere. 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

L C R O S S

The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) 

launched in June 2009 on a voyage to a permanently shadowed crater 

near the south pole of the Moon. In October 2009 it impacted a 

crater named Cabeus, kicking up dust and vapor that was recorded 

by a shepherding spacecraft that flew through the plume with 

cameras and spectrometers. NASA funded LCROSS to discern 

the concentration of water ice on the Moon—the water to dust 

ratio—and confirm data from the Clementine and Lunar Prospector 

missions a decade earlier. Water ice would enable settlement on the 

Moon, and LCROSS found plenty of it. 

Principal investigator on LCROSS was Anthony Colaprete, 

and reviewing his path to the Moon illuminates how the careers of 

planetary scientists evolve at Ames. While earning his doctorate 

degree Colaprete worked with the NASA-funded Colorado Space 

Grant Consortium on many projects ranging from space shuttle 

payloads to small satellites. It proved to be a great environment 

to learn how a mission progresses from proposal to hardware to 

papers, how to work well with project engineers from aerospace 

industry, how to accomplish good science with a small payload, and 

how the heart of any mission lay in its instrumentation. Brian Toon 

recruited Colaprete to NASA Ames. Toon worked at Ames from 

1984 through 1997, as a senior scientist in theoretical atmospheric 

sciences. In 1997 Toon joined the University of Colorado as founding 

chair in their department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. With 

Toon’s guidance, Colaprete focused his doctorate on the formation 

and climate effects of water and carbon dioxide clouds on Mars. At 

the same time, Colaprete collaborated with Julio A. Magalhães of 

the Ames space sciences division on a model of cloud formation on 

Mars using data from Pathfinder.99 When Colaprete graduated he 

earned a NRC post-doctoral fellowship that brought him to Ames, 

to work with Robert Haberle on a climate model. 

As a post-doc, his work remained theoretical. Colaprete took 

advantage of the increasing focus on Mars (during the Pathfinder 

and Global Surveyor missions) and developed a number of 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

microphysical models for characterizing the Martian atmosphere.100 

Colaprete, together with Toon and Ames astrobiologist Kevin 

Zahnle, compared the ages of craters and river features on Mars and 

proposed that heavy bombardment from comets and asteroids in the 

early solar system produced a cycle of rain and flooding across the 

planet.101 In August 2003, Ames hired Colaprete as a civil servant in 

the planetary systems branch. Colaprete worked on transitioning the 

Mars general circulation model onto a computer code that allowed 

smoother fields higher into the atmosphere and included a built-in 

transport scheme.102 Shortly thereafter, in 2005, Colaprete and fellow 

researchers discovered that Mars’ southern polar cap was offset from 

its geographical south pole because of two different polar climates.103 

In joining Ames Colaprete expected to spend half his time 

on space projects, so with Kim Ennico he helped form an 

instrumentation working group. Until the early 1970s Ames had 

a world-renowned instrumentation group, who accounted for 

most of the patents issued to the Center. These instrumentation 

engineers refined precise measurement in the wind tunnels when 

Ames was part of the NACA, they transitioned into biomedical 

instrumentation to support human space flight, then began work 

on spaceborne instruments like those that flew on the Pioneers. 

Hans Mark disbanded the group in 1972 and dispersed its expertise 

throughout the Center. Colaprete’s instrumentation working group 

was a grassroot effort to identify the pockets of instrumentation 

expertise around. They focused on engineering instruments that 

could be used on multiple spacecraft, and thus foster new business 

for Ames. Rather then recreate a central instrumentation shop, they 

fostered collaboration across many research groups at Ames. 

In September 2005, the Ames instrumentation group put out 

a call for proposals hoping to match ideas for instruments with 

those who needed them. One proposal came from Philip Russell’s 

atmospheric chemistry branch to develop the next generation of 

solar photometers, one for a nephelometer to measure saltation of 

grains across a surface, another for a wire impedance monitor to 

check for shorts in wiring harnesses. Other proposals came from the 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

planetary sciences and nanotechnology.The Center made investment 

funding available for promising proposals, and full-cost accounting 

forced the working group to evaluate the proposals according 

to the funding it would return. Without funding of its own, after 

a few years this instrumentation group disbanded. Still promising 

instruments emerged, and Ames people realized that sophisticated 

instrumentation mounted on simple spacecraft could indeed be a 

source of new business. It also demonstrated that Ames did host the 

facilities and expertise to design, build and test such instruments. 

LCROSS was an example of an instrument-driven mission. 

NASA funded LCROSS in April 2006, as a secondary payload 

to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a complex spacecraft 

designed tomap theMoonin advance of the crewedmission promised 

in Bush’s vision for space exploration. NASA moved LRO to a larger 

launch vehicle and thus opened up an extra thousand kilograms 

of throw-weight to the Moon. The Ames RLEP office, which had 

oversight of LRO, got nineteen proposals for spacecraft that could fit 

in that space and be ready to launch in 26 months. Ames’ LCROSS 

proposal was already fairly mature, since it followed the science of 

Lunar Prospector, and won that competition. NASA called it a Class 

D risk-tolerant mission, meaning that the cost was small and the 

timeline so compressed that failure was not unacceptable. 

Daniel Andrew served as LCROSS project manager, leading 

a tight team. Tony Colaprete served as principal investigator, and 

had already studied the suite of nine LCROSS instruments—visible 

light and infrared cameras and spectrometers—needed to analyze 

the plume. The LCROSS science payload was built inside the high 

bay of Ames’ Center for Engineering and Innovation managed by 

Jim Connolly. As payload scientist and co-investigator, Kim Ennico 

traveled to Northrop-Grumman in Redondo Beach to check the 

integration of the instruments with the spacecraft. The backbone 

of LCROSS was the secondary payload adapter ring used to attach 

the LRO to the Centaur. Northrop usually built the ring to carry six 

small satellites, but for LCROSS it was modified to hold modular 

components for communication and navigation. By using flight119 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

tested parts, and working fast, Andrews and his team built the 

spacecraft for $79 million. 

LCROSS had two major parts. The Centaur upper stage of 

the Atlas V rocket remained attached to the LCROSS during the 

ride to the Moon then separated from it about ten hours before 

it was to impact the crater. The Centaur had the mass of a large 

automobile, and would hit the moon with two hundred times the 

energy that Lunar Prospector did. Peter Schultz ran simulations 

in the Ames vertical gun range to demonstrate how the resulting 

plume could be seen as it spread above the crater. The second part 

of LCROSS was the shepherding spacecraft equipped to maintain 

the proper trajectory and to relay data back to Ames. It held a suite 

of instruments to generate multiple complementary views of the 

plume: two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, 

two mid-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer. 

When the plume vaporized in sunlight any water, hydrocarbons or 

organics broke into their basic elements, which could be monitored 

by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near- and midinfrared cameras tracked the total amount of water in the plume. 

All of these instruments had been built before, were understood by 

space scientists, and the companies supplying them were willing to 

work with firm fixed-price contracts. 

After launch LCROSS orbited the moon for four months. This 

gave the Centaur tank time to vent extra fuel so it did not carry liquid 

hydrogen into the impact. It gave the shepherding spacecraft time to 

make simple observations of the chemistry of the lunar atmosphere 

(and it found much sodium). And it gave the LCROSS team time 

to review LRO mapping. Two weeks before impact they selected 

Cabeus as the best mix of topography and hydrogen signature. Ten 

hours before impact the upper stage separated from the shepherding 

spacecraft on a route to the most vertical possible impact. Ken Galal 

had mapped a trajectory that put the impact within 83 meters of 

their target. The plume kicked up about fifteen kilometers. The 

shepherding spacecraft followed about ten minutes behind the 

impactor and flew through the plume as it rose into sunlight. From 

the plume, Colaprete and his team distinguished between the 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

water vapor, water ice, and hydrated minerals like salts or clays that 

contained molecularly-bound water. Jennifer Heldmann coordinated 

an observation campaign with ground-based astronomers. The 

plume was not easily visible from Earth, but the limited data they 

gathered confirmed that collected by the shepherding spacecraft. It 

took many months for Colaprete and his team to analyze the data, 

and puzzle through why all the spectral lines appeared where and 

when they did in the very brief sequence of the impact. Four percent 

of the ejecta mass was water, they discovered, and it held many other 

interesting chemicals. 

Since the Apollo days, the Moon was considered bone dry and 

with no atmosphere. Following the LCROSS impact, a fast-track 

inexpensive mission, the Moon was seen as vibrant and changing, 

and likely able to support human life. 

C O N T I N U I N G M I S S I O N S 

In addition to the science and mission operations center used 

to track Kepler and LCROSS and analyze their science data, Ames 

created a mission design division to more routinely develop future 

missions like them. The first technology Ames fed into that design 

center was the common modular bus, a new spacecraft architecture 

invented at Ames by a group led by Butler Hine. The first mission 

to emerge from the design center was built upon that bus. Called 

LADEE, the lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer, 

it will orbit the Moon, starting 2012, to characterize its tenuous 

atmosphere before the scale-up in any human activity and to study 

electrostatically lofted lunar dust. 

When the NASA robotic lunar exploration program left Ames 

to reside at Marshall, Worden had asked the Ames RLEP group 

to continue work on the modular bus. They had flown the bus for 

Alan Stern, then NASA’s associate administrator for science, who 

was impressed. With the behemoth Mars Science Laboratory 

draining NASA’s science budget, Stern saw the bus as a platform for 

inexpensive missions. He reviewed the priorities for research on the 

Moon, from a report by the National Research Council, and defined 

a scientific mission for the bus that became the LADEE mission.104 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Pete Worden recruited Rick Elphic to serve as LADEE project 

scientist and, as his deputy, Greg Delory from the space sciences 

laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Hine’s core team, which included Mark Turner, moved into a 

LADEE project office. Ames built the LADEE spacecraft in a clean 

room on Center, without relying on a prime contractor. The Ames 

chief engineer, Tina Panontin, issued a procedural requirement 

8070.2 for “Class D Spacecraft Design and Environmental Test” 

that outlined the technical authority for the LADEE team to build 

the spacecraft. Stern specified certain measurements—species of 

dust, grain density and variability—and the LADEE team surveyed 

the industry to discern which instruments could capture that data. 

The neutral mass spectrometer was derived from a design for the 

Mars Science Laboratory. The ultraviolet spectrometer, proposed by 

Anthony Colaprete of Ames, had flown on LCROSS. The lunar dust 

experiment had a heritage dating back to the Galileo, Ulysses and 

Cassini missions. In some extra payload space, LADEE would also 

include a package to validate a laser communication technology. 

Other missions for small spacecraft followed. In June 2009, 

NASA announced that two other Ames projects would be funded 

through the Small Explorer, or SMEX program. SMEX missions 

were capped at $105 million, excluding launch costs. The IRIS 

mission, for interface region imaging spectrograph, will explore the 

sun’s chromosphere using a solar telescope and spectrograph. The 

chromosphere is a thin, hot layer on the sun’s surface that drives 

the transport of energy from the sun to the Earth through the solar 

wind. Recent studies showed the chromosphere to be more dynamic 

and structured than thought, and IRIS will generate data on the 

physical processes behind the temperature rise above the stellar 

photosphere. Data from IRIS will be processed on the ground by a 

new generation of fast scanning imagers, and Ames supercomputers 

will develop models of the transition between chromosphere and 

corona. With its launch in 2012, IRIS will join with a series of 

other NASA heliophysics missions, including SOHO (the solar and 

heliophysics observatory), SDO (solar dynamics observatory), and 

STEREO (solar terrestrial relations observatory). Alan Title of the 

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S p a c e P r o j e c t s 

Lockheed Martin solar astrophysics laboratory in Palo Alto is the 

IRIS principal investigator, and John Marmie, formerly LCROSS 

deputy project manager, and Julie Mikula are managing the program 

at NASA Ames. 

The other funded proposal was called GEMS, for gravity and 

extreme magnetism SMEX. Built around a new type of X-ray 

telescope it will measure the polarization of X-rays, then build up 

that data into coherent images. Thousands of X-rays sources in the 

universe have been observed with older X-ray satellites but only one 

object, the Crab Nebulae, has been measured in polarized X-rays. 

GEMS is a hundred times more sensitive in detecting polarized 

X-rays than any previous observatory. It will be focused on some 

of the most energetic and enigmatic objects in the cosmos, like 

ultra-dense neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes which have 

gravity fields trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. GEMS will 

probe the bending of space and the curving of light near extreme 

gravity. Allison Zuniga and Jeffrey Scargle of Ames will manage the 

spacecraft program, further evidence that Ames’ leadership intends 

to further build upon its legacy of success in creating small sciencerich spacecraft. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

C H A P T E R 3 

Engineering Human Spacecraft 

The NACA heritage of Ames is perhaps most evident in how it has 

supported NASA engineering of crewed spacecraft. Other Centers 

and aerospace firms led the design of the many generations of NASA 

rockets and capsules, while Ames people did the early research 

on materials, hypersonics aerodynamics and human factors that 

enabled those more applied engineering efforts to succeed. Indeed, 

many of the technologies developed during Ames’ NACA years to 

study reentry systems—the hypersonic wind tunnels, ballistic ranges 

and arc jets—remained vital to the work Ames did to support the 

succeeding generations of crewed spacecraft that NASA produced, 

starting with Mercury, Apollo, Space Shuttle and continuing through 

the Constellation program. 

“ ... R E T U R N I N G H I M S A F E L Y T O E A R T H ” 

By far the biggest contribution Ames made to NASA’s human 

missions was solving the problem of getting astronauts safely back to 

Earth. Ames started working on safe reentry in 1951, when Harvey 

Allen had his eureka moment known as the blunt body concept. In 

the early 1950s, while most aerospace engineers focused on rockets 

to launch an object out of our atmosphere—an object like a nucleartipped ballistic missile—a few started thinking about the far more 

difficult problem of getting it back into our atmosphere. Every known 

material would melt in the intense heat generated when the speeding 

warhead returned through ever-denser air. Most meteors burned up 

as they entered our atmosphere; how could humans design anything 

sturdier than those? Some of the NACA’s best aerodynamicists 

focused on aircraft to break the sound barrier; others focused instead 

on the thermal barrier. 

Harvey Allen and Al Eggers—working with Dean Chapman 

and the staff of Ames’ fastest wind tunnels—pioneered the field of 

hypersonic aerodynamics. Though there is no clean dividing line 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

between supersonics and hypersonics, most people put it between 

Mach 3 and 7 where heat issues (thermodynamics) become more 

important than airflow issues (aerodynamics). Allen and Eggers 

brought discipline to hypersonic reentry by simplifying the equations 

of motion to make possible parametric studies; by systematically 

varying vehicle mass, size, entry velocity, and entry angle; and by 

coupling the motion equations to aerodynamic heating predictions. 

Allen appreciated that the key parameter to safe reentry was the 

shape of the reentry body. 

A long, pointed cone made of heat-hardened metal was the shape 

most scientists then thought would slip most easily back through 

the atmosphere. Less boundary layer friction meant less heat. But 

this pointy shape also focused the heat on the tip of the cone. As 

the tip melted, the aerodynamics skewed and the cone tumbled. 

Allen looked at the boundary layer and shock wave in a completely 

different way. What if he devised a shape so that the bow shock 

wave passed heat into the atmospheric air at some distance from the 

reentry body? Could that same design also generate a boundary layer 

to carry friction heat around the body and leave it behind in a hot 

wake? Allen first showed theoretically that, in almost all cases, the 

bow shock of a blunt body generated far less convective and friction 

heating than the pointy cone. 

Allen had already designed a wind tunnel to prove his theory. In 

1949, he had opened the first supersonic free-flight facility—which 

fired a test model upstream into a rush of supersonic air—to test 

design concepts for guided missiles, ballistic missiles, and reentry 

vehicles. To provide ever better proof of his blunt body concept, 

Allen later presided over efforts by Ames researchers to develop light 

gas guns that would launch test models ever faster into atmospheres 

of different densities and chemical compositions. 

Allen also showed that blunt reentry bodies—as they melted or 

sloughed off particles—had an important chemical interaction with 

their atmosphere. To explore the relation between the chemical 

structure and aerodynamic performance of blunt bodies, Ames hired 

experts in material science. By the late 1950s, Ames researchers— 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

led by Morris Rubesin, Constantine Pappas, and John Howe—had 

pioneered theories on passive surface transpiration cooling (usually 

called ablation) that moved blunt bodies from the theoretical to 

the practical. For example, Ames material scientists showed that 

by building blunt bodies from materials that gave off light gases 

under the heat of reentry, they could reduce both skin friction and 

aerodynamic heating. 

Ames applied its work on thermal structures, heating, and 

hypersonic aerodynamics to the X-15 experimental aircraft, which 

first flew faster than Mach 5 in June 1961 over Rogers Dry Lake. Data 

returned from the X-15 flight tests then supported modifications to 

theories about flight in near-space. As America hurried its first plans 

to send humans into space and return them safely to Earth, NASA 

instructed Ames to make sure that every facet of this theory was 

right for the exact configuration of the space capsules. So in the early 

1960s Ames opened several new facilities to test all facets—thermal 

and aerodynamic—of Allen’s blunt body theory. 

R E E N T R Y T E S T F A C I L I T I E S 

The hypervelocity research laboratory became the home of 

Ames’ physics branch and was the site of most research into ion 

beams and high temperature gases. Its 3.5 foot hypersonic wind 

tunnel used interchangeable nozzles for operations at Mach 5, 7, 10, 

or 14. It included a pebble-bed heater which preheated the air to 

3000 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent liquefaction in the test section at 

high Mach numbers. Ames added a 14 inch helium tunnel (hacked 

together at a very small cost) to the 3.5 foot tunnel building, which 

already had helium storage, and opened a separate 20 by 20 inch 

helium tunnel. These provided an easy way of running preliminary 

hypervelocity tests from Mach 10 to Mach 25. Compared with 

air, helium allowed higher Mach numbers with the same linear 

velocities (feet per second). A one foot diameter hypervelocity 

shock tunnel, a remnant of the parabolic entry simulator, was built 

into an old Quonset hut. The shock tube could be filled with air of 

varying chemical composition, or any mixture of gases to simulate 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the atmosphere of Venus or Mars. It produced flows up to Mach 

14, lasting as long as 100 milliseconds, with enthalpies up to 4000 

Btu (British thermal units) per pound. Enthalpy indicated how much 

heat was transferred from the tunnel air to the tunnel model, and 

was thus a key measure in hypersonic research. 

The hypervelocity free-flight facility (HFF), which grew out of 

this hypervelocity laboratory, marked a major advance in Ames’ 

ability to simulate the reentry of a body into an atmosphere. The idea 

of building a shock tunnel in counterflow with a light gas gun had 

been proven in 1958 with a small pilot HFF built by Thomas Canning 

and Alvin Seiff with spare parts. With a full-scale HFF budgeted at $5 

million, Ames management wanted a bit more proof before investing 

so much in one facility. So in 1961, Canning and Seiff opened a 200 

foot-long prototype HFF. Its two-stage shock compression gun 

hurled a projectile more than 20,000 feet per second into a shock 

tunnel that produced an air pulse travelling more than 15,000 feet 

per second. Ames had thus created a relative airspeed of 40,000 

feet per second—the equivalent of reentry speed. Using this facility, 

Canning showed that the best shape for a space capsule—to retain 

a laminar boundary flow with low heat transfer—was a nearly flat 

face. Seiff also used it to test the flight stability of proposed capsule 

designs. Ames next increased the airspeed by rebuilding the piston 

driver with a deformable plastic that boosted the compression ratio. 

By July 1965, when the HFF officially opened, Ames could test models 

at relative velocities of 50,000 feet per second. To vary the Reynolds 

numbers of a test, Ames built a pressurized ballistic range capable 

of pressures from 0.1 to 10 atmospheres. Every vehicle in America’s 

human space program was tested there. 

While the HFF generated an enthalpy (a total heat content) of 

30,000 Btu per pound, the peak heating lasted mere milliseconds. 

These tunnels worked well for studying reentry aerodynamics, 

but the heating time was of little use for testing ablative materials. 

Ablative materials include ceramics, quartz, teflon, or graphite 

composites that slowly melted and vaporized to move heat into the 

atmosphere rather than into the metal structure of the capsule. To 

test ablative materials—both how well they vaporized and how the 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

melting affected their aerodynamics—Ames began developing the 

technology of arc jets. This work actually began in 1956, when Ames 

surveyed the state of commercial arc jets. Under pressure from 

NASA to mature this technology, in the early 1960s Ames designed 

its own. As the Apollo era dawned, Ames had a superb set of arc jets 

to complement its hypervelocity test facility. 

These arc jets started with a supersonic blow-down tunnel, 

which channeled air from a pressurized vessel into a vacuum vessel. 

On its way through the supersonic throat the air was heated with a 

powerful electric arc—essentially, lightning controlled as it passed 

between two electrodes. The idea was simple but many problems 

had to be solved: air tends to avoid the electrical field of the arc so 

heating is not uniform; the intense heat melted nozzles and parts of 

the tunnel; and vaporized electrode materials contaminated the air. 

So Ames devised electrodes of hollow, water-filled concentric 

rings, using a magnetic field to even out the arc. At low pressures, 

one of these concentric ring arc jets added to the airstream as 

much as 9000 Btu per pound of air for an extended period of time. 

Though significant, this heating still did not represent spacecraft 

reentry conditions. Ames people looked for a better way of mixing 

the air with the arc. They devised a constricted arc that put one 

electrode upstream of the constricted tunnel and the other electrode 

downstream so that the arc passed through the narrow constriction 

along with the air. This produced enthalpies up to 12,000 Btu at 

seven atmospheres of pressure. By using the same constricted arc 

principle, but building a longer throat out of water-cooled washers 

of boron nitride, in late 1962 Ames achieved a supersonic arc plasma 

jet with enthalpies over 30,000 Btu per pound and heating that lasted 

several seconds. Expanding upon Ames’ technical success in building 

arc jets, Glen Goodwin and Dean Chapman proposed a gasdynamics 

laboratory to explore in a systematic way how arc jets work. Opened 

in 1962, the $4 million facility accelerated theoretical and empirical 

study into ablation. 

By 1965, Ames had built a dozen arc jets to generate ever more 

sustained heat flows. An arc jet in the Mach 50 facility could operate 

with any mixture of gas, and achieved enthalpies up to 200,000 Btu 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

per pound. As industrial firms designed ablative materials for the 

Apollo heatshield, Ames researchers could test them thoroughly and 

select the best. Nearby an electric arc shock tube was built to study 

the effects of radiation and ionization during planetary entry. The 

individual arcjetswere essentially highly engineered tubes, on average 

twelve feet long and two feet in diameter, heavily instrumented, 

which sat in one of seven available test bays in the arc jet complex. 

What made the complex unique was its infrastructure to support the 

various arc jets. After many upgrades, the DC power supply could 

provide 75 megawatts for thirty minutes or 150 megawatts for fifteen 

seconds. A high volume steam ejector vacuum pump enabled the arc 

jets to match high altitude atmospheric flight conditions. With this 

infrastructure in place, the Ames thermophysics facilities branch 

could repeatedly try out new arc jet designs. 

T H E A P O L L O P R O G R A M 

As with robotic spacecraft, in the late 1950s Ames moved 

tentatively into designing spacecraft for human space flight. Harry 

Goett had served on the NACA and NASA committees that defined 

the structure of a space capsule, and Harvey Allen had served 

on the committee that defined technical approaches to reentry 

and to navigating in space. In the NACA spirit, both committees 

focused on identifying big questions in human spaceflight and the 

best approaches to resolving them. The engineering work they 

did focused on component technologies rather than the complete 

spacecraft. Well beyond the 1960s Ames would continue to manage 

the engineering of vehicles for atmospheric flight—rotorcraft, 

airborne science platforms, experimental aircraft to validate specific 

technologies—but not vehicles for human spaceflight. Newer NASA 

Centers would do that work. 

Ames’ work in lifting bodies took it, briefly, into project 

management and systems engineering for crewed spacecraft. Alfred 

Eggers, backed by the expertise in his vehicle environment division, 

took Ames the furthest into vehicle design. Eggers and his group in 

the 10 by 14 inch tunnel in 1957 had conceived of a spacecraft that 

could safely reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, gain aerodynamic control 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

and land like an airplane. They called these lifting bodies because 

the lift came from the fuselage rather than from wings, which if too 

large were vulnerable to melting during reentry. Using every tunnel 

available to them, Ames aerodynamicists formalized the lifting body 

design, tunnel tested it, and procured a flying prototype called the 

M2-F2 from Northrop for flight tests at NASA’s High Speed Flight 

Station in 1965.These tests, in conjunction with flight tests of the SV5D and HL-10 lifting bodies, gave NASA the confidence it needed to 

later choose a lifting body design for the Space Shuttle. While Egger’s 

work laid a foundation for a future spacecraft, most of NASA work 

in the 1960s on crewed vehicles was driven by the need to get the 

Apollo astronauts to the Moon. 

Apollo was a technological accomplishment as well as a 

managerial accomplishment. The seven years between Kennedy’s 

speech in 1962 and the first landing in 1969, was a time of sweeping 

cultural change for NASA and the American aerospace industry. 

James Webb was a masterful NASA administrator. Not only did he 

marshal the necessary resources for Apollo, but he assured that the 

Apollo program focused on what it was intended to do: land a human 

on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. 

HarveyAllen,completelyimbuedwith theNACA spirit of relevant 

but free research, served as Ames Center director in the years leading 

to the Apollo landing. Ames contributed much to NASA’s Apollo 

mission—in terms of science, technology and engineering culture— 

though Ames people largely envisioned the economy of knowledge 

during Apollo as they would have during the NACA years. During 

the Apollo years, competition between Centers was vigorous and 

heartfelt. The pie of funding was growing, regardless of how it was 

apportioned. Every member of the new NASA felt free to contribute 

ideas and effort to the mission. The culture was competitive largely 

because the intra-agency peer review culture, which NASA inherited 

from the NACA, went into overdrive. NASA people also felt free to 

criticize—constructively, and in scientific reports or around meeting 

rooms—any offered idea. And there was enough money available that 

the thrust-and parry of new ideas encountering peer critique could 

end by cutting metal and strapping sensors to it in order to prove the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

point. Ames representatives to NASA committees especially earned 

a reputation for their show-me attitude. 

Research done at Ames largely determined the shape of the 

Apollo reentry capsule. As early as the mid-1950s, Ames used its 

practical expertise in wind tunnels and its theoretical expertise in 

hypersonics and built free-flight tunnels to determine which precise 

capsule shapes would work best during reentry. They discovered that 

the weight of a reentry body, like its expected trajectory, affected 

its shape. The free flight ballistic range that Ames opened in 1961 

created a relative airspeed equivalent to the reentry speed expect 

for an Apollo capsule. Using this facility, Ames showed that the best 

shape for a space capsule—for both aerodynamic performance and 

heat flows—was a nearly flat face. They also checked these shapes for 

lift, drag and stability—so that a capsule pushing air in front of itself 

would not start to tumble as it flew through the increasing density of 

Earth’s atmosphere. 

Once Ames demonstrated which blunt-body shape worked 

best, work began the best materials for the heatshield to protect 

it. Since no known materials could insulate against that kind of 

heat, NASA researchers at Ames developed an ablative heatshield. 

Ablation meant that the heatshield material slowly pyrolized and 

burned, and as it did it transferred a thin layer of material into 

the atmosphere and away from the underlying metal frame of the 

spacecraft. (Pyrolization means the chemical decomposition of 

a material through heating in the absence of oxygen.) Aerospace 

firms then designed ablative heatshields for the Apollo capsules, and 

these were tested again at Ames. The combined radiative-convective 

heating simulator at NASA Ames provided the most realistic test 

environment of Apollo reentry speeds. Convective heating (from air 

friction) was important for simple satellites, though radiative heating 

(from the glow of superhot air) grew more serious at higher speeds. 

In this simulator, intense radiation was generated by an electrical arc 

while an air stream charged with energy from a separate electric arc 

was driven over the test article. They could vary each type of heating 

independently. The result was superb thermal performance from all 

Apollo spacecraft during reentry into their home atmosphere. 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

In its lower speed wind tunnels, starting in May 1962, Ames 

did many of the tests on the launch aerodynamics of the Apollo 

command capsule coupled with the Saturn V rocket, especially on 

various proposed launch escape systems. North American Aviation 

in Downey, which designed the Apollo capsule, came to rely upon the 

Ames wind tunnels. Using a 0.105 scale model of the FS-2 capsule 

designed by NAA, Ames ran tests in the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel 

at speeds ranging from Mach 0.7 to 2.4 Mach. Additional pressure 

distribution tests of the launch escape system were run in the 2 by 

2 foot transonic tunnel, and tumbling tests were run in the 12 foot 

pressurized tunnel. The escape system design was validated with 

further tests in April 1965, at speeds up to Mach 3.4. NASA Ames 

also tested the forebody of the Apollo command module in various 

launch configurations to assure airflows over it remained smooth 

during launch. And Ames people used their ballistic ranges to study 

what damage might be done to the capsule from meteorite impacts 

on its trip to the Moon. 

In the very early stages of Apollo development, in 1961 to 1963, 

before the decision had been made between touchdown on water 

or land, NASA Ames studied alternative landing and recovery 

systems for the Apollo capsule. This included design and tunnel 

tests of a paraglider, an inflatable afterbody to create a lifting body 

configuration, and a lifting rotor. Perhaps the most photogenic study 

was of a steerable parachute, tested in the 40 by 80 foot wind tunnel. 

These tests validated the utility of a three-parachute system, though 

in the end Apollo sported a simpler parachute design. 

NASA Ames also served as the primary internal critic and peer 

reviewer for the Apollo guidance computer. In 1959, when NASA 

first tasked its Centers to explore the problems of navigating to the 

Moon, Stanley Schmidt recognized the potential for extensions 

to the Kalman linear filter—a statistical technique for correcting 

trajectories. The result was a state-estimation algorithm later called 

the Kalman-Schmidt filter used to calculate midcourse corrections. 

By early 1961, Schmidt and Gerald Smith had shown that a computer 

built with this filter, combined with optical measurements of the 

stars and data about the motion of the spacecraft, could provide the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

accuracy needed for a successful insertion of the capsule into orbit 

around the Moon. They recommended mid-course corrections as 

early as possible in the flight, and built a navigation simulator to 

demonstrate how those corrections might be done. The KalmanSchmidt filter was embedded in the Apollo navigation computer and 

ultimately into all air navigation systems, and laid the foundation for 

Ames’ future leadership in flight and air traffic management. 

NASA Ames also used its expertise in aircraft piloting, human 

factors research and flight simulators to develop backup methods for 

the Apollo astronauts to fly the capsule should the automatic systems 

fail. In doing so, NASA Ames supplied objective advice to the Apollo 

engineers at MIT developing the navigation computer. Ames used 

its Apollo navigation simulator to demonstrate how an astronaut in 

a pressure suit could use a sextant to navigate by the stars if needed. 

Gerald Smith, of the Ames theoretical guidance and control branch, 

demonstrated the value of manual ground-based guidance as a 

backup to on-board guidance. Studies done of piloting options at 

launch and reentry revolved around how the astronaut could move 

a stick under intense G forces and vibration, and how they could 

discern enough data from existing spacecraft displays under those 

conditions. Brent Creer and Gordon Hardy simulated a method of 

manually inserting the Saturn rocket into orbit following first stage 

burnout. At the tail end of the mission, Rodney Wingrove—using a 

spacecraft-like cockpit in the Ames centrifuges and the five-degrees 

of freedom flight simulator—demonstrated how an Apollo astronaut 

could manually navigate a safe reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. 

NASA Ames also applied its expertise in human factors to 

improve the environment inside the space capsule, again working 

closely with North American Aviation. Ames built a capsule mockup, 

and locked test pilots in it for a week to study work-rest periods and 

cockpit performance. This test showed calcium loss to be a concern, 

but also showed that a tiny sixty cubic feet per person was ample for 

an extended mission. The Ames human factors group studied new 

ways of designing a spacesuit. Apollo astronauts would be subject to 

far greater G forces—at both launch and reentry—than any previous 

astronauts. So that the forces were evenly distributed on the body, 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

Hubert C. Vykukal at Ames devised a simple system, a restraint suit 

that enveloped the astronaut’s body and attached to the seat. After 

thorough testing in the 20G centrifuge, his restraint suit ideas were 

included in the ultimate space suit design. 

Recognizing that interiors of all capsules were exposed to 

dangerous heat during reentry, and motivated by the Apollo 1 tragedy, 

in 1967 NASA Ames began a research program on fire suppressive 

materials. It had two quick successes: a char-forming low-density 

polyurethane foam, and an intumescent paint which reacted to 

fire by forming a polymeric coating. While neither materials were 

used in the Apollo program, both were widely used in subsequent 

aerospace projects. 

S P A C E S H U T T L E T E C H N O L O G Y 

In 1971, while Apollo capsules were landing on the Moon, and 

NASA people were thinking about what would come next, Ames 

established a small space shuttle development office to coordinate 

all the people at the Center who had begun working on technologies 

needed for the envisioned space transportation system. Using the 

NFAC, the Unitary, and 3.5 foot hypervelocity tunnels, Ames did 

half of all wind-tunnel tests during the crucial phase B of the Shuttle 

design. Ames people used the expertise earned in lifting body studies 

to refine the Shuttle configuration, and expertise earned in digital 

fly-by-wire to design controls for the Shuttle. 

In1965HarveyAllenopenedanewstructuraldynamicslaboratory 

at Ames featuring a hundred-foot-tall tower with equipment to 

simulate all the forces a missile would encounter during lift-off. In 

a massive pentagonal test chamber, it offered moderate vacuum, 

infrared heating, vibration with variable-frequency shakers, and noise 

as produced by a rocket motor. Allen was especially concerned with 

buffeting in new ballistic missiles with a hammerhead configuration, 

and optimized the building for those tests.105 Albert Erickson and 

Henry Cole, who ran the laboratory and had earlier done studies of 

wing flutter, also did tests there on launch vehicle instability and fuel 

sloshing. The new space shuttle office used it to gather data useful 

in narrowing the choices on the structural strength needed in the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

composite shuttle vehicle. It also proved useful in designing shuttle 

and spacecraft landing gear to withstand landing impact. By 1972, 

however, as structural dynamics research increased at other NASA 

Centers, Hans Mark closed the vehicle environment division and the 

structural dynamics laboratory was put to other uses. 

Ames human factors experts were actively involved in design 

of the shuttle cockpit. Shuttle commander trainees each spent 

about fifty weeks in the Ames vertical motion simulator studying 

handling qualities during landing. Furthermore, Ames people were 

responsible for preparing NASA’s Dryden facility to serve as the 

primary test facility and landing site for all early Shuttle flights. 

Despite the magnitude of these efforts, Ames worked on Shuttle 

technologies, as it had on Apollo technologies, without having the 

program dominate the mission of the Center. And as with Apollo, 

Ames’ primary contribution was solving the problems of hypersonics 

and materials that got the Shuttle astronauts home. 

When the Space Shuttle orbiter Columbia first touched down at 

Ames-Dryden in April 1981, shuttle commander John Young exited 

the orbiter, walked underneath, looked around, gave a thumbs up, 

then jumped with joy. The thermal protection system was the key to 

making the Space Shuttle the world’s first reusable reentry vehicle. 

Heatshields used earlier on Apollo and other single-use capsules 

had been rigid, with ablative materials designed to burn up while 

entering the atmosphere only once. The airframe of the Shuttle 

orbiter, however, would be flexible like an aircraft, with complex 

curves, and had to be built from a system of materials that rejected 

heat without ablating. Once NASA had decided, in the mid-1960s, 

on reusable insulation for the Shuttle orbiter, the airframe firms that 

hoped to build it started showing up at Ames for advice and tests. 

Howard Larson took over Ames’ thermal protection branch in 

1968. Larson had spent most of the 1960s studying how ablation 

changed the shape of bodies that entered Earth’s atmosphere—like 

meteors, ballistic missiles, and capsules—and thus affected their 

aerodynamic stability. Nonablative thermal protection, however, 

required an entirely new class of heatshieldmaterials.To help evaluate 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

these, in 1970 Larson hired Howard Goldstein, a thermodynamicist 

and material scientist then running arc jet tests at Ames for a NASA 

contractor. As the pace of materials testing accelerated Shuttle 

contractors increasingly bumped up against the size and run-time 

limitations of Ames’ 20 megawatt arc jet. But Ames still had the 

largest direct-current power source in NASA, as well an enormous 

infrastructure for compressing gasses. 

In 1971 Dean Chapman, who as director of astronautics oversaw 

Larson’s work, secured funds to build a 60 megawatt arc jet. Materials 

science quickly took on new prominence at Ames. Larson’s group 

directed its efforts to help Johnson Space Center evaluate a new class 

of reusable surface insulation for the Shuttle. Lockheed Missiles & 

Space in Sunnyvale had developed tiles based on low-density rigid 

silica fiber—called the LI-900 tile system—that was selected in 1973 

to cover two-thirds of the Shuttle’s surface. Goldstein led Ames’ 

effort to apply the database built during arc jet tests of this and other 

candidate materials to develop improved heatshields. An early Ames 

product was a black borosilicate coating, called reaction-cured glass 

(RCG), that provided a lightweight and easily manufactured surface 

for the underlying silica tiles. In 1975 RCG was adopted for use over 

75 percent of the orbiter surface. Ames also developed the LI-2200 

tile (at a higher density than the LI-900) that was stronger and more 

refractory. This new tile, adopted in 1976, replaced ten percent of the 

tiles on the orbiter Columbia. 

When the 60 megawatt arc jet came on line, in March 1975, Ames 

could test full-scale tile panels in flows running thirty minutes, which 

was twice as long as Shuttle reentry. Ames ran most of the arc jet tests 

to certify the Shuttle thermal protection system, often running two 

shifts to fully simulate the Shuttle’s hundred flight lifetime. From this, 

Ames scientists gained new insight into the aerodynamic heating from 

plasma flowing over complex heatshields. When Shuttle designers 

grew concerned about hot gas flows between tiles, the Ames thermal 

protection branch devised a gap filler—a ceramic cloth impregnated 

with a silicone polymer. Once adopted in 1981, few Ames gap fillers 

have ever had to be replaced on operating orbiters. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

NASA also hoped to replace the white tiles on the top surface 

of the Shuttle orbiters (called LRSI for low-temperature reusable 

surface insulation) with a material that was cheaper, lighter, less 

fragile, and easier to maintain. So Ames worked with Johns Manville 

to devise a flexible silica blanket insulation (called AFRSI for 

advanced, flexible, reusable, surface insulation). Ames later devised 

a new family of materials, which led to an even stronger and lowerweight tile system called FRCI-12 (for fibrous refractory composite 

insulation) which was adopted in 1981 to replace ten percent of the 

tile system. Into the 1990s, guided by James Arnold, Ames continued 

to developed new thermal protection systems. David Stewart led 

Ames’ basic research in catalycity—the study of how nitrogen and 

oxygen decomposed in a shock then reform on a heatshield with lots 

of energy release—and made catalytic efficiency the basic measure 

for evaluating new insulators. An April 1994 mission with the shuttle 

Endeavor allowed the Ames thermal protection materials branch to 

test out a new material called TUFI (for toughened uni-piece fibrous 

insulation) which was more resistant to impact damage from the dirt 

kicked up as the shuttle landed. Another new tile, called AETB for 

alumina enhanced thermal barrier, was adopted to replace tiles as 

the Shuttle further extended its operational life into the new century. 

The insulation for the orbiters has turned out to be lighter and easier 

to refurbish than expected, and provided an excellent technical base 

on which to build the heatshields for all future hypersonic vehicles. 

The new class of hypersonic vehicles and reusable launch vehicles 

under development in the late 1990s—such as the X-33, the X-34, 

the X-38 and the Kistler K-1—all depended upon Ames’ work in 

thermal protection to extend the life of the Shuttle. 

R E T U R N T O F L I G H T 

On the first Saturday morning in February 2003, Jim Arnold 

was taking a shower when Ames deputy director Bill Berry called to 

tell him that the space shuttle Columbia had broken up over Texas. 

Immediately, Arnold knew that somehow the TPS would be involved. 

On Monday morning, Jack Boyd called to tell Arnold that he needed 

to be in Houston on Tuesday. Arnold joined the Engineering Group 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

of the accident investigation board, whose job was to figure out 

physically exactly what had happened. 

Scott Hubbard, likewise, got a call. The director of Ames 

was predetermined to be a member of any spacecraft accident 

investigation board, likely because of Ames’ distance from any 

specific engineering decisions made on the spacecraft, as well as 

Ames’ history of fundamental and collaborative research across 

many disciplines. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board 

(CAIB), to track the massive amounts of data they generated, used 

the investigation organizer tool developed at Ames. Tina Panontin, 

who had earlier worked on the Shuttle Independent Assessment 

team, advocated the usefulness of this tool to derive the actual cause 

of the accident. 

Arnold assembled a team of experts on tiles and carbon-carbon 

technology. For tiles, Howard Goldstein, then retired chief scientist of 

the Ames space technology division and retired chief of the thermal 

protection systems branch, provided his expertise and D.J. Rigali, the 

retired director of the aerospace systems center for Sandia National 

Laboratory brought his knowledge of carbon-carbon systems to the 

group. They worked with Don Curry, the reinforced carbon-carbon 

(RCC) lead engineer at Johnson Space Center. 

Once the shuttle data recorder was recovered, it confirmed that a 

temperature increase propagated through the left wing—consistent 

with exposure to a superheated airflow entering through a fissure 

in the thermal protection system. Arc jet testing at JSC a few years 

before the accident supported this conclusion. Reconstruction of 

the debris revealed such damage in the RCC around panel eight 

of the wing. Independently, a Boeing team converged on the same 

answer. The testing conducted at the Southwest Research Institute 

(led by Hubbard) demonstrated that a roughly briefcase-sized piece 

of insulating foam striking the wing during launch would cause a 

fissure able to produce the sequence deduced by Arnold’s team. 

Once all these pieces were in place, the reconstruction of the tragedy 

unfolded self-evidently.106 

In the months after the accident, NASA Ames set up a Shuttle 

liaison office much as it had done in the early 1970s, this time led by 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

John Allmen. Allmen helped JSC or the CAIB find Ames researchers 

to solve the puzzles identified by the investigation, and also helped 

Ames see the whole picture in the technical puzzles. Indeed, this 

response by Ames was a cultural remnant of its NACA origins—an 

appreciation for critical peer review, for basic research in supporting 

technical decisions, for the art of problem definition, and innovation 

in experimental validation. 

The CAIB Report made two observations that shaped how NASA 

Ames would participate in the return to flight efforts leading to the 

launch of STS-114. First, the CAIB noted that the Shuttle operation 

centers had lost touch with the research work done at the Centers, 

and specifically noted that the Shuttle team should have involved 

Ames experts in thermal protection systems before clearing the 

Columbia for reentry. Second, that while NASA knew a fair amount 

about the thermal properties of the shuttle tiles, other than the effect 

of rocks kicked up during landing, it knew little about the mechanical 

properties of the tiles. 

BuildinguponAmes’capabilitiesincomputational fluiddynamics, 

Ames teams developed a model of the aerodynamics around the full 

ascent stack. This was used to understand and then modify parts of 

the external tank. Using a combination of CFD and wind tunnel tests, 

Ames quickly generated loads data on the protuberance air loads 

ramp prior to its removal. Stuart Rogers lead a team that developed 

debris transport analysis software and models. Rogers started with 

an overflow code developed at Ames and applied it to the entire flow 

field. With this model they showed that any shed foam would trim to 

a high drag configuration, then ran ballistic range tests to prove the 

point. With Ames’ supercomputers on standby following the launch 

of the Shuttle, this software allowed Shuttle engineers to model what 

sort of impact damage might have been done to the orbiter from 

debris shed during launch. 

One contribution driven by Ames was an effort to correlate arc 

jet data using CFD and calorimetry. JSC operated their own arc jet, 

which they used to certify TPS materials for use on the Shuttle. The 

JSC and Ames arc jets environments differed, as did their testing 

methods, and both differed from the heat environment of actual 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

reentry. So that both arc jets could be used complementarily to 

improve TPS materials, or to test scenarios quickly during a Shuttle 

flight, an Ames team led by David Driver developed codes through 

which arc jet data could be correlated. Ames also developed an 

optical technique, called laser-induced florescence, to correlate 

enthalpies in the arc jets. 

As JSC declared interest in new ideas on how to repair the shuttle 

thermal protection systems in-space, Ames researchers offered many 

ideas. James Reuther led Ames’ efforts to create an in-flight repair 

capability. Ames helped develop an orbiter boom sensor to do a final 

check of the leading edge after separation from the Space Station 

but before orbiter reentry to Earth. Ames also developed inspection 

tools for Shuttle processing on the ground. In August 2007, Ames 

introduced a high-speed 3D scanner to detect cracks in the 24,000 

tiles that covered the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Previously, workers 

had inspected each tile manually, measuring all cracks and dings 

with scales. The wireless handheld scanner checked a tile in three 

minutes and archived a tile image that so engineers—visually or with 

computer analysis—could track any expansion in the flaws. 

In addition to solving the problems identified by the CAIB, 

Allmen’s group also created the ability to solve unforeseen problems 

in real time. Ames’ problem solving capabilities were all at work with 

the second Shuttle mission (STS-121) following the return to flight. 

The Ames damage assessment team ran and resolved their debris 

impactmodels, documented the thermal analysis code and monitored 

the leading-edge check before orbiter reentry. Even while solving the 

problems specific to keeping NASA’s shuttle fleet operating, NASA 

Ames continued to do fundamental research in thermal protections 

systems. One such research effort put NASA Ames, for a time, on 

the leading edge of the emerging field of nanotechnology. 

N A N O T E C H N O L O G Y 

For roughly a decade, from 1996 to 2006, NASA Ames was at 

the center of nanotechnology research. Nanotechnology at Ames 

focused on devising new materials, sensors, and devices from the 

bottom up, taking advantage of the unique properties of matter 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

at the molecular scale. The Ames effort started in computational 

nanotechnology, moved to carbon nanotube manufacture, then 

applications of nanotubes, and the convergence of nanotechnology 

and biotechnology. Like astrobiology and other discipline-building 

efforts at NASA Ames, nanotechnology served an integrative 

mission. NASA called upon Ames management primarily to 

coordinate efforts at defining the state-of-the-art in nanotechnology, 

before pushing it forward. 

The rise of Ames as a powerhouse in nanotechnology began 

with the arrival of Meyya Meyyappan in 1996. Within two years, 

the NASA Ames Center for Nanotechnology—with 55 permanent 

research staff, not counting the many postdoctoral and graduate 

students clamoring to work in their facilities—had emerged as the 

federal facility with the largest research effort in nanoscale science 

and engineering. Rather than simply adding staff, which would have 

been difficult to fund, Meyyappan leveraged the resources extant at 

Ames. Earlier in the 1990s, most of those researchers had simply 

been working on the nanoscale—in chemistry, biology, computing, 

or electronics. With the Center’s help, they repackaged their work 

to fit the emergent understanding of nanotechnology. Ames was not 

unique in that regard. Such repackaging was the case with almost 

every research effort in nanotechnology. 

Meyyappan had been a colleague of Harry McDonald’s for 

twelve years at Scientific Research Associates in Connecticut. 

While at SRA, Meyyappan focused on computational modeling 

of microelectronic devices and material processes, primarily on 

Defense Department research contracts, and held various senior 

management positions. McDonald foresaw the importance of 

nanotechnology to NASA. As McDonald considered new areas in 

which Ames could distinguish itself, he suggested to Jack Boyd and 

Jim Arnold that Ames’ computational powers be turned toward 

new technologies, such as electronic devices. They agreed, and 

in 1996 McDonald tapped Meyyappan to build the NASA Ames 

Center for Nanotechnology (NACNT). This was one of the first 

research centers focused on nanotechnology. 

Meyyappan first worked on building facilities capable of research 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

at the nanoscale. Jim Arnold, from the start, was the facilitator and 

godfather to Meyyappan’s group. Arnold put Meyyappan in touch 

with Ames computational chemists such as Deepak Srivastava, 

Charlie Bauschlicher, Al Globus and Richard Jaffe. They were already 

highly regarded among nanotechnologists, having won the 1997 

Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (Theory) from the Foresight 

Institute for their paper on novel traits of carbon nanotubes. 

Stephen Walch of the Ames thermoscience institute won the 1998 

Feynman Prize for his work with Ralph Merkle of Xerox PARC on 

computational methods of placing atoms on diamond surfaces.107 

Srivastava’s work initially focused on comparing mechanical 

properties at the nanoscale with those at the macroscale—like 

elasticity, stress, and conductivity. He focused his computational 

work on strain, developed models to simulate the chemical effects of 

mechanical strain, and showed that multi-walled carbon nanotubes 

were especially resilient to deformation. Computer models had, 

by 2000, done far more to validate the properties of nanotubes 

than actual physical work. Nanoscale simulations were becoming 

predictive. Using their SGI supercomputer, the Ames computational 

chemistry branch had generated some well-regarded models of 

nanoscale gears and switches. 

Together, they started thinking about how to apply existing 

tools to future electronic devices and space exploration.108 

Meyyappan used his limited hiring power to fill out a computational 

nanotechnology group, which he considered the foundation for 

any meaningful experimental work. While chemists had developed 

software able to depict complex molecules on the atomic scale, it 

required supercomputing to depict the structures that nanoscientists 

hoped to build. Not only did computational nanotechnology allow 

investigations of structures on the molecular level, it also allowed 

scientists to envision what such structures might look like. 

About a half a year later, in spring 1997, Meyyappan received 

a call from Mihail Roco of the National Science Foundation. Roco 

wanted to pitch a program to the federal government on data devices 

built on a nanoscale. Roco had already included a representative of 

the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and of the Naval Research 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Laboratory. Roco wanted a fourth representative from NASA, as 

well as a computational perspective. Meyyappan obliged. The four 

called themselves the interagency working group on nanotechnology 

(IWGN) and shared a small planning budget. Early on, the research 

they discussed was abstract, so other agencies were slow to join. 

Still, the funds enabled researchers to travel and network across 

the world with nanotechnologists. As the IWGN expanded to 

include Nobel laureates, eminent professors and chief technology 

officers in industry, the NSF held workshops devoted to the use of 

nanotechnology in materials, electronics, and military and space 

needs.109 Some of the most concrete work was already taking place 

at NASA Ames. 

Meyyappan’s early work at the Ames NACNT came to the 

attention of Dan Goldin. Meyyappan recalled sitting beside Goldin at 

a dinner, when Goldin told him that if his work focused on short-term 

applications he would cut his funding. Goldin wanted Meyyappan to 

look at technology decades away; technology that companies did not 

have the resources to develop.110 Meyyappan’s approach had to be 

big, bold, and futuristic. First, though, Meyyappan knew he needed 

some nanotechnology in hand. 

A defining moment for Meyyappan came in a 1997 Rice 

University workshop led by Nobel laureate Richard Smalley. There, 

Meyyappan began to see where the NACNT could differentiate 

itself from nanotechnology work at the universities. Meyyappan 

realized Ames was uniquely positioned to advance carbon nanotube 

(CNT) production. Nanotubes, related to “buckyballs,” were the 

first structures understood on the molecular level. When carbon 

atoms were rolled into tubes ten atoms across, they acquired 

extraordinary traits. Carbon nanotubes had a hundred times the 

tensile strength of steel with one-sixth the weight, were forty times 

stronger than graphite fibers, were excellent conductors of heat 

and electricity, and could be either conductors or semiconductors. 

Theoretically carbon nanotubes could be used in space exploration 

as a tether for a space elevator, as wires for nanoscale electronics, 

and rods and gears for nanoscale machines. Making enough tubes 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

to use, however, proved problematic. 

At that time, most nanotube production used arc synthesis, which 

passed a large current through a graphite block. A hydrocarbon 

catalyst was mixed with the graphite, which meant nanotubes 

were produced among many other amorphous carbon materials.111 

Smalley had recently developed laser ablation; a much cleaner mode 

of production in which a laser beam struck a graphite block mixed 

with a catalyst such as nickel or iron. The resulting plume contained 

the nanotubes. There was (and had been) another method.112 

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) was a cornerstone of Silicon 

Valley production for silicon wafer computer chips. While CVD had 

already been used to grow other carbon structures, like diamonds, 

nanotubes needed much smaller catalysts to grow thinner tubes. 

However, there was no known way to remove the resulting amorphous 

carbon byproducts, such as methane and acetane, and still produce 

the nanotubes. From when he first arrived at Ames Meyyappan, 

working with Helen Hwang, pursued a solution based on plasma 

enhanced CVD (PECVD).113 With PECVD electrons supplied the 

energy rather than heated hydrocarbon gas. Meyyappan used CFD 

techniques to model and refine the plasma deposition process for all 

materials, and with T.R. Govindan, he authored a CFD code called 

SAMPR, for simple analysis of materials process reactors. Only after 

this work in reactors did he turn his attention to carbon nanotubes in 

1998, working with John Finn and K.R. Sridhar.This pioneering work 

turned Ames into one of the world’s preeminent nanotechnology 

centers. From 1999 onward, most of the researchers Meyyappan 

hired focused on either the production of carbon nanotubes or their 

application. 

Meyyappan also started configuring new laboratory space for 

this new work. He struck a partnership with Dave Blake, chief of 

the Ames exobiology branch, who had great laboratory space but 

then lacked funding to pay for maintenance. Meyyappan agreed 

to pay the maintenance bills in return for access to an electron 

microscope. A new scanning electron microscope would have cost 

about a million dollars. Through thoughtful networking, Meyyappan 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

got access to the electron microscope he needed for roughly $25,000 

a year. In addition, the Ames advanced thermal protection branch, 

Arnold’s group, had some high temperature growth reactors used for 

thermal protection systems. He made these available to Meyyappan, 

who tailored them as growth reactors to nanotube manufacture. 

Meyyappan then hired Alan Cassell from the University of South 

Carolina whose research required such a growth reactor. Cassell 

spent two years testing the various catalysts used to grow both singlewall and multi-wall nanotubes.114 Optimizing this manufacturing 

process presented problems because of the complexity of the reacting 

particles. Sometimes those tubes grew like spaghetti and other times 

like a tower. Plasma-enhanced CVD produced an electric field that 

caused the nanotubes to grow individually and free-standing—like an 

array of pickets.115 Carbon nanotube pillars were localized, vertically 

aligned, and well-ordered groups of multi-walled nanotubes. They 

were useful. With nanotube manufacture now predictable, NACNT 

researchers turned their attention to how best to use them to advance 

space exploration. 

In 2000, nanotechnology became a boom science. President 

Bill Clinton authorized $500 million in 2001 for a National 

Nanotechnology Initiative, with funding set to grow through 2006. 

Most stateandlocalgovernments,alliedwith universityandcorporate 

partners, launched a variety of similar nano-initiatives to define their 

capabilities, forge potential collaboration, and capture this NNI 

money. Venture funds focused specifically on nanotechnology— 

but were hard pressed to find viable business plans. Other nations 

launched their own nano-initiatives. Nanotechnology became a 

familiar way of framing research and stitching together scientific 

communities. 

NASA Ames became a policy leader in the promotion of 

nanotechnology around the Bay area. Scott Hubbard made a 

commitment to nanotechnology and to “bio-info-nano” convergence 

as the centerpiece of Ames’ connection with Silicon Valley. Hubbard 

served as chair of a blue ribbon task force on nanotechnology, 

convened in December 2004 to assess the state of nanotechnology 

in California. NASA Ames organized general conferences 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

on nanotechnology, including the Nano2005 and Nano2006 

industry conferences. Ames also hosted meetings of the Bay Area 

Nanotechnology Forum, and partnered with the Northern California 

Nanotechnology Initiative. Meyyappan started spending more of his 

time clicking through PowerPoint presentations, explaining what 

nanotechnology was and could be. 

Two Ames scientists easily migrated their work from astrobiology 

and information technology into nanotechnology, becoming symbols 

of the power of this convergence. Jonathan Trent was an ocean 

biologist who spent his career working on extremophiles—bacteria 

that lived in very hot or acidic areas, analogous to those that might live 

under the surface of Mars. He arrived at Ames in 1998 to work in its 

astrobiology group. From one of those extremophiles—archea living 

in a near-boiling sulphuric acid hot spring—he isolated HSP60 (heat 

shock protein 60). He induced HSP60 to self assemble into double 

ring structures called chaperonin, which then formed filaments with 

nanometer accuracy. Because they were stable at temperatures up 

to a hundred degrees Centigrade, the filaments served as a support 

structure for gold and for semiconductor particles, advancing the 

goal of molecular manufacturing.116 

Charles Bauschlicher was a computational nanotechnologist, 

and the binding properties of carbon was a constant theme in his 

work. He began his career in computational chemistry, modeling the 

efficiency of thermal protection materials for spacecraft. In the 1990s 

he applied his computational skills to astrobiology, by computing 

the possibilities of life in the universe based upon the chemical 

composition of interstellar matter. After that, he turned his attention 

to the binding properties of carbon nanotubes, and specifically how 

carbon nanotubes might bond with other surfaces. The images 

generated by him and other Ames computational nanotechnologists 

gave the public the first glimpse of the structures at the heart of 

nanotechnology. 

In August 2004 Meyyappan convened a workshop on 

nanotechnology in space exploration.117 The topics covered an 

enormous range of shorter-term possibilities, in nanomaterials, 

instrumentation, microrobotics, and astronaut health monitoring. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Many of these had already been developed through work done 

at Ames. The NACNT built a sensor platform based on carbon 

nanotubes, which was among the most promising early applications 

of nanotechnology. Nanotubes have a large area of surface to their 

volume, and the binding of a target molecule to a nanowire made a 

clear change in its electrical conductance. Being able to detect fuel 

leaks prior to launch would greatly improve the reliability of rockets. 

NASA Ames collaborated with KSC to build a nanosensor unit, a 

five inch square box, which was flown in 2006 aboard an Atlas V 

rocket launched by the U.S. Navy. The sensor looked for nitrogen 

dioxide, a signature of common rocket fuel, while in microgravity. KSC 

continued developing the sensors to detect hydrazine leaks aboard the 

Space Shuttle. 

Chemical nanosensors also could provide a sensitive and energy 

efficient means to monitor air quality in the Shuttle cabin, and detect 

harmful chemical gas on manned spacecraft. Carbon nanotube 

sensors could be used in a life support system for monitoring water 

quality and detecting bacteria. Carbon nanotubes then could be 

used to remove those impurities and filter the air and water aboard 

a spacecraft. Four grams of carbon nanotubes have the same surface 

area as a football field. On rovers and probes, the sensors could 

detect water vapor on Mars as well as greenhouse gases in the 

Earth’s atmosphere. This sensor platform was also being developed 

into a “lab-on-a-chip” to monitor the health of the astronaut crew. 

It required innovations in microfluidics to handle liquid samples of 

body fluids in the small, precise amounts required. This biosensor 

platform was initially developed for cancer diagnostics with funding 

from the National Institute of Cancer. 

And the NACNT also made some headway on its initial goal of 

applying nanotechnology to improve electronic devices. Nanowire 

arrays on infrared detectors and spectrometers might allow them 

to operate at room temperature, significantly reducing the weight 

of cooled detectors.118 For existing infrared detectors, such as those 

on the Hubble space telescope, Ames developed a nanotube thermal 

interface to improve cooling. Though it was never used for that 

purpose, NACNT adapted the same vertically-aligned nanotubes to 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

conduct heat away from microprocessors in a computer. In 2004, 

NANCT licensed its patents in this cooling application to a local 

start-up named Nanoconduction Inc. NACNT developed a process 

to generate a large flux of high energy electrons. Using this process 

Oxford Instruments, an Ames small business collaborator, developed 

an X-ray tube that fit in the palm of a hand. David Blake of NASA 

Ames led the effort to include this instrument on the Mars Science 

Laboratory as CheMin, an X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence 

instrument for definitive mineralogical analysis. 

NASA Ames also began developing a three-in-one system for 

manned spacecraft for protection against heating during atmospheric 

reentry, radiation from solar flares, and micrometeor and debris 

impact. Traditionally, spacecraft have used three shielding systems 

for these threats. Jim Arnold worked with Mark Loomis on a material 

that could resist meteoroid impact, and Huy Tran began work on a 

self-healing ablative material that foamed on impact and thus sealed 

any holes prior to reentry. Arnold and Meyyappan investigated using 

carbon nanotubes inside a heatshield, to about one percent total 

weight, to improve its mechanical strength.119 Radiation shielding 

was more problematic, in that radiation can hit a spacecraft in any 

orientation. The current solution, in case of a solar flare, called for 

astronauts to pull Teflon blankets over themselves. For a true threein-one solution, building on the PICA material invented at Ames for 

heatshields, Ames added hydrogen-rich polyethylene for radiation 

protection, and sheets of Nextel and Kevlar for impact protection.120 

Heatshield materials were becoming more precisely engineered. 

In 2002, the NACNT suffered a blow to its rapid progress. 

Since 1996 its staffing levels were fairly constant, peaking at 65 

from 2001 to 2003. However, Sean O’Keefe, interested in more 

immediate engineering results, shifted NACNT funding to NASA’s 

exploration directorate. NACNT no longer had a mandate to explore 

technologies decades in the future, as Goldin asked. Furthermore, 

competition for nanotechnology funding grew intense. Funding 

for the National Nanotechnology Initiative went from virtually 

nothing to $464 million in 2001, and had more than doubled to $1.1 

billion in 2005. Other NASA Centers wanted to expand their efforts 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

in nanotechnology, and now people from NASA headquarters 

represented the agency at policy planning meetings. The Bush 

administration decided to fund basic research in nanotechnology 

through the National Science Foundation, and NASA employees 

could not get NSF grants. Meyyappan began cutting computational 

chemistry staff, which was a natural step since the NACNT had 

moved into exploring production and application. Eventually, 

funding for that research was threatened too. 

Hubbard made an effort to promote funding for nanotechnology 

within the Constellation program, but with few results. From 2003 to 

2006, funding for NACNT dropped from $8 million to $1.5 million. 

The University of California at Santa Cruz, the principal academic 

partner of NASA Ames, stepped up its efforts in nanotechnology— 

in part to fill the void left by the decline in NASA funding, in part 

to take advantage of nanotechnology money flowing into academia. 

UCSC chancellor Denise Denton promoted a vision for a Bio-InfoNano Research and Development Institute (abbreviated BIN-RDI 

and pronounced Been-Ready). Its goal was to fund research in those 

three fields, looking for convergences, and develop a laboratory at the 

NASA Research Park. The goal was to get nanotechnologies across 

the so-called funding valley of death, the five years between when a 

technology is new enough to qualify for basic research funding, and 

widely used enough to attract funds from venture capitalists. 

But without core funding from NASA, and competition from 

industry, it proved difficult to retain staff. By 2005 the NACNT 

became a more modest operation, with about a dozen civil servants 

and an equal amount of students. Meyyappan spent more time 

writing grants, and got funding from outside sources such as DARPA, 

the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and 

companies through Space Act agreements. Some of his staff went on 

to found companies. Deepak Srivastava helped Nanostellar use CFD 

models of deposition to coat platinum on catalytic convertors to 

reduceautomobileemissions. JieHan formed IntegratedNanosystems 

Inc. to manufacture nanosensors. Early Warning Inc. developed water 

quality sensors under a NASA license to commercialize a NACNT 

nanotechnology-based biosensor developed for space applications. 

When Worden was appointed director of NASA Ames in 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

2006 Mike Griffin asked him why Ames should continue to fund 

nanotechnology research in the face of more urgent engineering 

needs. Meyyappan’s service as director of NACNT ended in 2006, 

and he transitioned into a senior scientist role. Nanotechnology work 

at Ames moved into a new organization without nanotechnology in 

its title, the NASA Ames Center for Advanced Aerospace Materials 

& Devices, led by Harry Partridge and then Minoru Freund. Green 

technology initiatives offered some interesting applications for Ames’ 

nanotechnology expertise, in building better substrates for solar 

cells, lightweight materials for wind turbines, and new ways to store 

energy. Research was still being done on materials at the nano-level. 

But this work had been repackaged at Ames into nanotechnology a 

decade before, and no longer was that packaging viable. 

Just as quickly as it had emerged as a powerhouse within Ames, 

nanotechnology declined. Nanotechnology remained a tools-driven 

discipline rather than a question-driven discipline, as astrobiology 

had been. As such, researchers could work actively in both fields. 

Even from the beginning of the NACNT, NASA Ames approached 

nanotechnology as if its life cycle would look more like such toolsbased disciplines as computational fluid dynamics or gravitational 

biology, where the prospects for theoretical insights will diminish as 

the tools mature, become more pervasive, and are commercialized. 

C O N S T E L L A T I O N 

In the months following the announcement of the vision for 

space exploration in January 2004, NASA refined plans for its 

Constellation program—a comprehensive system of launch vehicles 

and spacecraft that would allow humans to return to the Moon as 

a stepping stone to Mars. NASA Ames supported Constellation as 

it had the Apollo and Shuttle programs before it. There were wind 

tunnel tests, CFD modelling, and strucural dynamics issues to 

address. Ames also worked on several key safety issues. In February 

2006, Ames ran tests on 0.5 percent scale models of the Orion crew 

exploration vehicle in the 11 foot wind tunnel. But most of Ames’ 

work on Constellation, as with earlier vehicles, involved reentry 

systems, information technology, and human factors. 

Pete Worden grew fond of saying: “It doesn’t matter how you get 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

into space; if you want to come back you have to come talk to us.” 

Ames remained one of the few institutions able to engineer radical 

new reentry vehicles, which would be a big part of Constellation. 

There were other arc jets around the United States, but only the arc 

jets housed at Ames could test in the most realistic circumstances. 

Led by Charles Smith, in 2008 NASA Ames upgraded all of its arc 

jets with new electrical and cooling systems to be ready for this new 

work. 

Relying on these arc jets was an agency-wide group of about a 

hundred researchers, led by James Reuther, funded with $150 million 

and charged with developing the heatshield for the Orion crew 

exploration vehicle. In some ways, the Orion heatshield was simpler 

than that for the Shuttle since it would not be reusable. But because 

Orion would return directly from the Moon, it would experience 

heating five times greater than the Shuttle orbiter returning from 

the Space Station. Furthermore, ablative material had not been 

manufactured for many years. 

As the primary heatshield material for Orion, the Constellation 

program office selected the new PICA material developed at Ames.121 

PICA was used on the Stardust return capsule, which successfully 

entered the Earth’s atmosphere in January 2006 at the fastest reentry 

speed ever by a human-made object. The Stardust heatshield was 

only three feet in diameter, however, and made from a single block 

of PICA. The Orion heatshield would be more than sixteen feet in 

diameter, so Reuther commissioned a unit to prototype methods 

of manufacturing and handling it. But as the Orion design overall 

grew overweight, NASA challenged Reuther’s group to make the 

heatshield lighter. They studied eight ablative materials made by five 

commercial vendors, and in the end revived the Apollo-era Avcoat 

heatshield material. However, the research done on PICA proved 

immediately useful in a redesign of the heatshield for the Mars 

Science Laboratory, which had suffered a catastrophic failure during 

arc jet tests. PICA was later adopted as the ablative material for the 

Dragon capsule built by commercial rocket firm SpaceX. 

A key factor in a human-rating a rocket is that failures can be 

anticipated with enough time to resolve them or escape. The Ames 

intelligent systems division, led by Robert Mah, was tasked by the 

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E n g i n e e r i n g H u m a n S p a c e c r a f t 

Constellation program office to work on integrated vehicle health 

monitoring systems (IVHMS)—algorithms that diagnosed glitches 

in the electro-mechanical subsystems of aircraft and spacecraft. 

The IVHMS group at Ames developed vehicle monitoring software 

named Livingstone, which was successfully tested on the Deep 

Space 2 spacecraft in May 1999.122 Ames project manager Sandra 

Hayden successfully uploaded the next iteration, Livingstone2, to 

the spacecraft Earth Observation-1. After EO-1 ended its mission 

in 2002, it was recast as a testbed for evaluating autonomous 

procedures. A reasoner function drove Livingstone. Contradictions 

between predicted and actual performance, based on readings from 

sensors throughout the spacecraft, identified root causes of the 

problems. Ames expected Livingstone to be most useful in rendering 

distant spacecraft autonomous, though they also discovered uses in 

most complex systems. Ames released Livingstone as open source 

software and launched DASHLink, among the first social networking 

sites in the federal government, to build a community of researchers 

applying IVHMS to a variety of industries. 

Specifically for Constellation, Mark Schwabacher developed 

a ground diagnostic system to monitor the thrust vector controls 

of the Ares 1-X flight test.123 The Ares 1-X system incorporated 

three software tools, one developed at Ames by David Iverson, 

one developed using Ames SBIR funding, and one developed at 

JPL. The Ames human computer interaction group, led by Alonso 

Vera, developed a suite of four quality assurance programs used 

for Constellation. The Ames team leveraged the open-source 

community, partnerships with Silicon Valley companies, and inhouse expertise to develop a single code base to support a suite of 

system analysis and quality assurance software. Regardless of the future 

of Constellation, like CFD, the IVHMS movement looks to become a 

major feature of all aerospace engineering. 

Of course, there was more to Constellation than the launch 

vehicle, like an ultimate goal of a human presence on the Moon 

and Mars. In June 2009 Michael Wright was named principal 

investigator of entry, descent and landing technology development 

to support human exploration of Mars. Wright had been at Ames 

since 1998, working on computational aerothermodynamics and 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

margin definition for thermal protection systems. He was a primary 

developer of DPLR, an aerothermodynamics code named the 2007 

NASA Software of the Year. He marshalled Ames expertise to the 

problem of landing humans on the surface of Mars. 

The Ames “green” building—officially known as N238 and 

unofficially called Sustainability Base—reflects a return to the 

ways NASA Ames traditionally supported human spaceflight. The 

building models a lunar outpost on Earth and will be the most 

environmentally efficient building in the federal government. It 

started out though, as a rather usual building. The Ames facilities 

group had won a competition for NASA funds intended for replacing 

old buildings. While the 14 foot transonic wind tunnel was being 

torn down, Ames prepared plans for a new office building on the 

site. Steve Zornetzer, Ames associate director, attended an early 

design review, after six months of time and money had been spent 

on it. “I was underwhelmed,” he reflected. “It was a very conventional 

building; not what you should expect of NASA Ames.”124 Soon after, 

he happened to attend a talk by renowned green architect William 

McDonough, and his ideas crystallized. Zornetzer started with a 

blank sheet of paper, and took ownership of the project. Headquarters 

had given Ames a strict budget and schedule, and the green building 

design team came in under budget and ahead of schedule when ground 

was broken in July 2009. 

The building will be a platform for testing new life support 

technologies. One key technology is an intelligent control built by 

Ames computer scientists atop a commercial environmental control 

system. Sensors are distributed throughout the building, will measure 

load factors in every room, and conditions outside the building. Every 

occupant will know how his or her behavior affects resource use in 

the building, be it energy or water. The building’s environmental 

controls will learn how to operate with utmost efficiency, a tool that 

will prove useful in any habitat whether on Earth, on another planet 

or on a spaceship heading that way. 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

C H A P T E R 4 

Planetary Sciences and Astrobiology 

Planetary sciences underwent a major shift in the mid-1960s 

as robotic spacecraft began to return new types of data from our 

solar system. Because of their relationship with the instruments and 

spacecraft that returned this data, NASA Ames quickly emerged 

as a leading research center in the planetary sciences, and has 

remained so. The planetary sciences at Ames has also remained 

small, but with great impact on the discipline. Three Ames scientists 

have been awarded the Gerald P. Kuiper Prize of the American 

Astronomical Society, for career achievements that most advanced 

our understanding of the planetary system—James Pollack (1989), 

Dale Cruikshank (2006) and Jeff Cuzzi (2010). The work of these 

planetary scientists, like that of the many other scientists at Ames 

who have won awards from their professional societies, reflects an 

enormous range of personal ability: an overlapping combination of 

theory, laboratory experimentation, spaceborne instrumentation, as 

well as a record of publication and a dedication to training future 

generations of planetary scientists. 

There are many useful approaches to the history of the planetary 

sciences at Ames. Biography, even of select individuals, shows how 

theory, experiment and publication overlapped. The development 

of new tools, like airborne science platforms, showed how Ames 

scientists established their place in the ecology of scientific 

knowledge. But perhaps the most fruitful approach is in looking at 

topics of interdisciplinary inquiry, most importantly exobiology and 

astrobiology—the study of life beyond Earth and in the universe. 

I M P A C T P H Y S I C S A N D T E K T I T E S 

Among the earliest topics in planetary science studied at Ames 

were those related to aerodynamics. For example, for clues on 

reentry aerodynamics, Harvey Allen suggested that his colleagues 

at Ames study meteorites, nature’s reentry bodies. Using their highspeed guns and ballistic ranges, Ames engineers explored the theory 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

of meteor impacts by hurling spheres of various densities at flat 

targets. Ames built a vertical gun range optimized for impact studies 

with a test section on the horizontal plane. At the highest impact 

speeds, both the sphere and target would melt and splash, forming 

a crater coated with the sphere material—much like lunar craters. 

Ames then turned its attention to lunar craters with radial rays of 

ejected materials by shooting meteor-like stones at sand targets like 

those on the Moon. This was all useful to lunar scientists debating 

whether lunar craters were caused by meteors or volcanoes. Also, by 

showing how much material was ejected from the Moon with every 

meteor impact, they paved the way for lunar landings by suggesting 

the surface of the Moon was mostly settled dust. 

One stunning example of what results when Ames’ raw scientific 

genius is unleashed was the work of Dean Chapman on tektites— 

naturally occurring glass that had entered Earth’s atmosphere. In 

early 1959, Chapman used the 1 by 3 foot blowdown tunnel (as it was 

about to be dismantled) to melt frozen glycerin in a Mach 3 airstream. 

In the frozen glycerin he first photographed the flattening of a sphere 

into a shape similar to Allen’s blunt body. The ball quickly softened, 

its surface melted into a viscous fluid, and a system of surface waves 

appeared that were concentric around the aerodynamic stagnation 

point. On his way to England for a year of research, Chapman visited 

a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who saw 

some similarity in the wave patterns on the glycerin balls and the 

wave patterns on glassy pellets of black glass called tektites. Tektites 

had been uncovered for centuries, mostly around Australia, though 

geologists still vigorously debated their origin. When geologists 

asked the Australian aborigines where the tektites came from, they 

pointed vaguely up to the sky. 

Chapman applied the skills he had—in aerodynamics and 

ablation—and learned what chemistry he needed to. He cut open 

some tektites and found flow lines that suggested they had been 

melted into button shapes, after having been previously melted into 

spheres. From the flow lines he also calculated the speed and angle at 

which they entered Earth’s atmosphere. He then melted tektite-type 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

material under those reentry conditions, in Ames’ arc jet tunnels. 

By making artificial tektites, he established that they got their shape 

from entering Earth’s atmosphere just as a space capsule would. 

Chapman next offered a theory of where the tektites came from. 

By eliminating every other possibility, he suggested that they came 

from the Moon. Ejected fast enough following a meteor impact, he 

suggested these molten spheres escaped the Moon’s gravitation field, 

hardened in space, then were sucked in by Earth’s gravitation. Harvey 

Allen walked into Chapman’s office one day and egged him on: “If 

you’re any good as a scientist you could tell me exactly which crater 

they came from.” So Chapman accepted the challenge, calculated the 

relative positions of Earth and Moon, and postulated that they most 

likely came from the Rosse Ray of the crater Tycho. In October 1963, 

Chapman won NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement. 

But only a single sample returned from the Moon, during Apollo 

12, bore any chemical resemblance to the tektites. The community 

of terrestrial geologists turned against Chapman’s theory of lunar 

origin. While geologists accepted that tektites had entered Earth’s 

atmosphere at melting speeds, most think they are terrestrial in 

origin—ejected by volcanoes or by a meteor crash near Antarctica. 

But before Apollo astronauts returned samples from the Moon, 

Chapman’s scientific sleuthing had accelerated curiosity about the 

composition of the Moon and the forces that shaped it, and in the 

process validated some theories about ablation and aerodynamic 

stability in entry shapes. 

P L A N E TA RY AT M O S P H E R E S A N D A I R B O R N E S C I E N C E 

The study of planetary atmospheres fit the skill set of Ames since 

it merged work in the life sciences, atmospheric entry, aerodynamics 

and instrumentation. By the mid-1970s, a space science renaissance 

was born of the incredible diversity of data being returned from 

the planets of our solar system—from the Pioneers to Jupiter and 

Saturn, the Pioneer Venus atmospheric probes, and the Viking 

lander. Meanwhile, Ames scientists turned their gaze to Earth with a 

fresh set of questions and instruments. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Ames rebuilt its on-Center fleet of aircraft, and outfitted them 

as flying laboratories used to conduct research in airborne science 

and Earth observation. Ames’ medium-altitude aircraft included 

a Learjet, a Convair 990 named Galileo II, and a Lockheed C-130. 

The Learjet, though most often used for infrared astronomy, proved 

useful in atmospheric studies of low-altitude wind shear in the 

1970s. The Lockheed C-130 most often looked downward on Earth 

resources—in support of agriculture, meteorology, and geology— 

and carried sophisticated equipment for mapping cropland, soils, 

and nonrenewable resources. The C-130, equipped with a thermal 

infrared mapping sensor, was often called into service throughout 

the western United States to locate hot spots obscured by the dense 

smoke over forest fires. George Alger of Ames’ medium altitude 

missions branch led the C-130 crew through a variety of meteorology 

missions looking, for example, at biogeochemical cycling—how land 

interacted with the atmosphere. 

Galileo II was the fastest aircraft in the fleet, and accommodated 

teams of up to 35 researchers from around the world. This made 

it especially valuable for atmospheric research. Observers aboard 

Galileo II explored the origins of monsoons in India, interactions 

between ice, ocean and atmosphere off the northern coast of 

Greenland, and global atmospheric effects from the eruption of the 

Mexican volcano el Chicon. In 1990, Galileo II flew a research team led 

by Charles Duller that verified the discovery of a crater rim along the 

Yucatan peninsula. This provided evidence for a cometary or asteroid 

impact on Earth that might have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

Ames’ first high-altitude aircraft, capable of flying to 70,000 feet, 

were two Lockheed U-2Cs that arrived in June 1971. As with many 

research tools acquired during Hans Mark’s tenure as director, the 

U-2s were grabbed as surplus from another agency. The U.S. Air 

Force had announced that it would make the U-2s available for basic 

research. NASA was then in final preparations for the Earth resources 

technology satellite (ERTS), managed by Goddard, and scientists 

were concerned that infrared and spectral-band photographs 

obtained on ERTS might be distorted because they would be taken 

through the entirety of Earth’s atmosphere. The Air Force tasked 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

Martin Knutson, one of the first U-2 pilots, to evaluate Ames’ ability 

to fly and maintain the U-2s, which were notoriously slender and 

sensitive aircraft. Knutson then retired from the Air Force to lead 

Ames’ airborne sciences office in simulating the data collection 

process from the ERTS satellite. When delays meant the ERTS would 

miss its opportunity to survey chlorophyll levels in American crops 

during the summer 1972 growing season, Ames leapt to a plan and 

with three months of flights completed the entire benchmark survey 

with the U-2s. From there, research uses for the U-2s branched in 

many directions. In 1972, NASA headquarters designated Ames 

its lead center in Earth-observation aircraft and as a liaison to the 

scientific community. In response, Ames established an atmospheric 

experiments branch. 

In June 1981, the U-2s were joined by a Lockheed ER-2 (for Earth 

resources), a civilian version of the U-2. In May 1988 Ames acquired 

a second ER-2, and retired its thirty year old U-2C. (Before being 

retired to static display at an Air Force base, this U-2C shattered 

sixteen world aviation records at Dryden for time-to-climb and 

altitude in horizontal flight, to 73,700 feet. These records were 

the first official acknowledgment of the U-2’s previously classified 

altitude capability.) NASA and Lockheed Martin would later share a 

Collier trophy for development of the ER-2. Compared with the U-2, 

the ER-2 was thirty percent larger, carried twice the payload, had a 

range of 3,000 miles, had a flight duration of eight hours, and had 

four pressurized modular experiment compartments. In addition, 

Ames modified a DC-8 airliner into a flying laboratory for Earth and 

atmospheric sensing and for other key roles in NASA’s mission to 

planet Earth. Ames often teamed the DC-8 and ER-2s on specific 

missions to study the planetary atmosphere of Earth. 

Ames scheduled the ER-2s flexibly enough, and built basing 

alliances with 42 airports around the world, so that Ames pilots 

could use them for quick-response storm observation, atmospheric 

sampling, and disaster assessment. Instruments aboard the Ames 

U-2 measured how the ash cloud dispersed following the May 

1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington state. Life 

scientists at Ames and the University of California at Davis used 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

remote-sensing data on vegetation growth, collected between 1984 

and 1988, to devise a model that actually predicted the spread of 

mosquitoes that carried malaria. Similar remote spectral scanners 

were used in April 1993 for Project GRAPES, an effort to plot the 

spread of phylloxera infestation through California vineyards. The 

ER-2s proved especially useful in calibrating new remote-sensing 

equipment flown aboard LANDSAT Earth-observation satellites 

and the Space Shuttle. In 1989 and 1990, the DC-8 flew the global 

backscatter experiment (GLOBE) to survey airborne aerosols in the 

Pacific basin and test out new experiment packages designed for the 

Earth Observing System satellite. In February 1993, Rudolf Pueschel 

and Francisco Valero of the Ames atmospheric physics branch led 

the DC-8 and an ER-2 to Australia to map the interior of a tropical 

cyclone and explore the coupling of the atmosphere and a warm 

ocean. 

Perhaps the most significant research done by Ames’ airborne 

scientists was the many-year exploration of Earth’s ozone layer. In 

August and September 1987, operating from Punta Arenas at the 

southern tip of Chile, Ames scientists used the ER-2 and the DC-8 to 

make the first measurements that implicated human-made aerosols 

in the destruction of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. During 

the winter of 1989, the ER-2 and DC-8 team, led by Estelle Condon 

and Brian Toon and based in Norway, completed an airborne 

campaign to study ozone chemistry and distribution over the Arctic. 

The ER-2 and DC-8 returned to the Arctic in 1992 to map changes 

in stratospheric ozone, and their work laid the foundation for the 

Montreal Accord on limiting chemicals that deplete the ozone. 

NASA’s most recent airborne science platforms were a series 

of UAVs—uncrewed aerial vehicles—built by General Atomics 

near San Diego, and developed for NASA’s ERAST program (for 

environmental research aircraft and sensor technology). The UAVs 

envisioned for the ERAST program, started in 1994, would fly at 

high altitudes carrying instruments to measure aerosols and trace 

gases in the stratosphere. As UAV design progressed, the Earth 

sciences branch at Ames used a Piper Navajo aircraft as a platform to 

validate the technologies of the sensors and of an over-the-horizon 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

telemetering system that would enable extended voyages. The first 

operational UAV, acquired in 1996, was an Altus UAV notably used 

in a study of the interactions between clouds and radiation. A unique 

solar-powered UAV, the AeroVironment Pathfinder, was used in a 

high-resolution imaging mission over coffee fields in Kauai to help 

guide the harvest.125 

In September 2001, an Altus II UAV carried sensors designed 

by Vincent Ambrosia, Steve Wegener, and James Brass in the FiRE 

experiment (for first response) to support wildfire fighting. FiRE first 

demonstrated the calibrated use of multi-spectral thermal imaging, a 

high-speed satellite data link, image processing computers, mapping 

software, and distribution of data over the internet to involved 

disaster response agencies.126 They also integrated video cameras 

into the UAV so it would be more useful in responding to disasters 

like floods and earthquakes, and used global positioning system data 

to track firefighting units as they moved around the fire field. 

The Ikhana, acquired in November 2006, was a civilian version of 

a military MQ-9 Reaper UAV with advanced avionics so it could fly 

in domestic airspace. Ikhana is the Choctaw word for intelligence or 

aware. It flew at high altitude, above 40,000 feet, carried 400 pounds 

of instrumentation in internal bays, and 2,000 pounds in external 

pods. Its control station fit in a trailer, so it could be deployed around 

the globe. Most important, it flew missions that could not easily be 

flown by pilots, more than thirty hours long, over complete daynight cycles, and over remote areas like oceans and ice caps. 

The Ikhana quickly proved its worth when NASA helped 

firefighters battle some of the worst wildfires in California’s 

history.127 In September 2007 NASA pilots flew Ikhana over the Lick 

wildfire near Gilroy. NASA Ames, through its partnership with UC 

Santa Cruz, developed the autonomous modular sensor-wildfire 

instrument, a thermal infrared camera that could see through thick 

smoke to locate hot spots. In less than five minutes, that data was 

relayed to NASA Dryden by satellite data link then sent to NASA 

Ames and overlaid on Google Earth maps made available via 

internet to fire commanders to assist them in allocating firefighters 

and equipment. Several times, this data allowed firefighters on the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

ground to be warned before their positions were engulfed in flames. 

In October 2007, NASA pilots again flew Ikhana over wildfires raging 

in southern California. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger 

visited to thank Ames for their work in stemming the blaze. Ames 

scientists, meanwhile, used this experience to improve their methods 

of tracking changes to the Earth as a planet. 

I N F R A R E D A S T R O N O M Y 

The other airborne platforms in Ames’ fleet looked skywards, 

mostly to support the discipline of infrared astronomy. The SOFIA 

was the latest in a line of airborne observatories built and managed 

by Ames. Until the 1960s, the main reason telescopes were mounted 

on airplanes was to follow solar eclipses. The invention, in 1961, of a 

germanium bolometer able to detect infrared radiation up to 1,000 

microns in wavelength opened a new age of infrared astronomy. 

The ancients gazed into the night sky and saw a majestic canopy of 

points of light. Optical telescopes and spectrographs of great power 

further unveiled the immensity and complexity of the universe but 

within a small window—wavelengths that were both visible and 

made their way through Earth’s atmosphere. Balloons, then aircraft 

and spacecraft, let astronomers place instruments far above the 

obscuring water vapor of the atmosphere where they could see all 

the messages that the universe was sending us—all the radiation, 

from all the sources, at all the wavelengths. Infrared (or heat) 

radiation conveys information about the composition and structure 

of Earth-bound solids and gases. It also penetrates the dense clouds 

of dust that obscure regions where stars and planets are forming. 

Infrared observation became our best source of information about 

the chemical composition of remote planets, stars, and nebulae. 

Ames started its work in infrared astronomy in 1964, soon after 

Michel Bader, chief of the Ames physics branch, returned from a 

successful airborne expedition to observe a solar eclipse. Ames 

purchased an old Convair 990 aircraft, named it Galileo and began 

converting it into an airborne science platform. Along the upper 

left side of the fuselage, Ames mechanics installed thirteen 12 inch 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

apertures for optical-quality glass in time for the solar eclipse of 

May 1965. From the beginning, Ames made its airborne science 

expeditions open to scientists from around the world. The Soviet 

Union participated in observations over the Bering Strait. Aboard 

Galileo astronomers observed three solar eclipses, the comet IkeyaSeki, Mars during opposition, and the Giacobinidi meteor shower. 

Using a telescope with a gyrostabilized heliostat for precise pointing, 

one team of scientists obtained a remarkable set of near-infrared 

spectra for Venus, showing that the Venusian clouds were not made 

of water as suspected. Later flights showed that they were made of 

sulphuric acid droplets. In April 1973, the Galileo, returning from 

a short flight to test instruments for an oceanography observation, 

due to a fault of the air traffic controller, collided in mid-air with 

a Navy P-3 on approach to Moffett Field. All eleven passengers on 

board died. It was replaced by another Convair, named Galileo II, 

though it was used primarily for Earth science. 

In October 1968 Ames’ Learjet observatory made its first flights. 

Its apertures were larger than those on the Galileo and opened to 

the sky without an infrared-blocking quartz cover. Flying above 

50,000 feet, teams of two observers aboard the Learjet discovered a 

host of bright infrared sources.They measured the internal energies 

of Jupiter and Saturn, made far-infrared observations of the Orion 

nebula, studied star formation regions, measured water in the 

Martian atmosphere, and generally pioneered astronomy in the 

wavelength range of 30 to 300 microns. Ames also used the Learjet 

to observe events around Earth, like eclipses and occultations. 

Encouraged by the success of the Learjet, Ames built the much 

larger Kuiper airborne observatory (KAO). The KAO platform was 

a military jet transport (a Lockheed C-141A Starlifter) housing 

a 36-inch reflecting telescope in an open port. Soon after its first 

observations in January 1974, it was renamed in honor of Gerald 

P. Kuiper, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the 

University of Arizona and a leading light in infrared astronomy. The 

KAO flew only as high as 45,000 feet, yet was a big advance over 

the Learjet. It accommodated up to twenty scientists, flew missions 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

more than seven hours long, and averaged seventy missions per 

year. Carlton Gillespie, mission director for the KAO, always put the 

interests of the science team foremost and young astronomers around 

the world finished their dissertations through his encouragement. 

The KAO telescope balanced on a 16-inch diameter spherical 

air bearing (the largest ever constructed) and was completely 

gyrostabilized so it would not bounce around from air turbulence. 

Light from the telescope passed through the air bearing and into the 

many instruments attended by scientists in the pressurized cabin. 

Observers on the KAO made many significant discoveries: 

they found the rings around Uranus; mapped a heat source within 

Neptune; discovered Pluto’s atmosphere; detected water vapor 

in comets; explored the structure and chemical composition of 

Supernova 1987a; mapped the luminosity, dust, and gas distributions 

at the Milky Way’s galactic center; and described the structure of 

star-forming clouds. Jesse Bregman developed a spectrograph used 

with the KAO telescope that in June 1993 detected water molecules 

on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. (Laboratory work in 1988 on 

planetary ices by Farid Salama first suggested the presence of water 

on Io.) They also discovered 63 spectral features—atomic, molecular, 

solid-state—of interstellar materials. Before the KAO, astronomers 

had identified only five molecular species; KAO observers 

identified 35 others in the galaxy. As important as all these scientific 

breakthroughs, a generation of infrared astronomers trained on the 

KAO and expected to improve upon it. 

Ames researchersapplied theirexpertiseinairborneobservatories 

to the design of spaceborne observatories, including the IRAS and 

the Spitzer space telescopes. With its infrared astronomy and 

planetary probes, Ames scientists had gathered huge data sets on 

the molecular dynamics and chemical composition of the universe. 

With the airborne science experiments, Ames calibrated that 

universal data with all we knew about Earth. Ames people wanted to 

make sure that those hard-won data were well used and, in sorting 

through every nuance, they advanced both planetary science and 

our understanding of life in the universe. 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

E X O B I O L O G Y A N D A S T R O C H E M I S T RY

In the mid-1960s exobiology emerged as the most visible 

planetary science program at Ames. Exobiology then pondered 

what life might look like if it appeared beyond Earth. Exobiology 

research focused on the chemical origins of life, based on what was 

known about the composition of the universe and the formation 

of our early solar system. Ames biologists, led by Chuck Klein, did 

important laboratory work on primordial life on Earth, planning 

for eventual robotic experiments on other planets. An important 

engineering adjunct to exobiology was planetary protection, or 

sterilizing spacecraft so that microbes from Earth would not harm 

other planets before we knew if they harbored life. 

Cyril Ponnamperuma arrived at Ames in the summer of 1961 in 

the first class of postdoctoral fellows under a joint program between 

NASA and the National Research Council. The excitement over 

planetary science he saw at Ames led him to join the permanent staff, 

and for the next decade he infused Ames’ exobiology efforts with a 

fresh outlook to the question of how life began at all. Geologists had 

learned much about primordial Earth, and planetary scientists had 

used chromatographs and spectroscopes to detect minute amounts 

of organic compounds in extraterrestrial bodies, like meteorites. 

From this, Ponnamperuma’s colleagues in Ames’ chemical evolution 

branch elucidated a theory about the inanimate building blocks and 

natural origins of life. Like many biochemists, they suspected that life 

was a property of matter in a certain state of organization, and that if 

they could duplicate that organization in a test tube then they could 

make life appear. If they did, they would learn more about how to look 

for life elsewhere in the universe. By the end of 1965, in apparatus to 

simulate primitive Earth, Ponnamperuma and his group succeeded 

in synthesizing some of the components of the genetic chain—bases 

(adenine and guanine), sugars (ribose and deoxyribose), sugar-based 

combinations (adenosine and deoxyadenosine), nucleotides (like 

adenosine triphosphate), and some of the amino acids. 

A breakthrough in exobiology came when the Murchison 

carbonaceous meteorite fell on Australia in September 1969. In the 

Murchison meteorite, Ames exobiologists unambiguously detected 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

complex organic molecules—amino acids—which suggested 

prebiotic chemical evolution. These amino acids were achiral 

(lacking handedness) thus unlike the chiral amino acids (with left 

handedness) produced by any living system. The carbon in these 

organic compounds had an isotope ratio that fell far outside the 

range of organic matter on Earth. The organic compounds in the 

Murchison meteorite arose in the parent body of the meteorite, 

which was subject to volcanic outgassing, weathering, and clay 

production as occurred prebiotic Earth. 

Because of the expertise Ames people had developed in the 

chemical composition of nonterrestrial environments and in the 

life sciences, NASA headquarters asked Ames to build one of two 

lunar sample receiving facilities. Apollo astronauts spent a total 

of 340 hours on the lunar surface and carried back to Earth more 

than 840 pounds of lunar rock. To prevent any contamination 

of the samples, this facility had to be very clean, even beyond the 

best of the Silicon Valley clean rooms. The lunar receiving facility 

at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center looked the lunar samples to 

characterize its geology and to identify any potential hazards to the 

Apollo astronauts. Ames scientists—led by Ponnamperuma, Vance 

Oyama and William Quaide—studied the overall composition of the 

lunar regolith (the term for its rocky soil). They closely examined the 

carbon chemistry of the regolith and concluded that it contained no 

signs of life. But this conclusion opened new questions. Why was 

there no life? What kind of carbon chemistry occurred in the absence 

of life? Continuing their efforts, Ames researchers discovered that 

the lunar regolith was constantly bombarded by micrometeorites 

and the solar wind, and that interaction with the cosmic debris and 

solar atomic particles defined the chemical evolution of the surface 

of the Moon. 

The Viking landers, which alighted on Mars in July 1976, carried 

Ames’ first exobiology experiment to another planet. After Earth, 

Mars was thought to be the most likely planet in our solar system 

to support life. The Viking mission, like JPL’s Voyager mission to the 

outer planets, was complex. NASA’s strategy in the 1960s of launching 

many smaller spacecraft expecting failure let them refine their 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

engineering practice so that by the early 1970s they felt confident in 

building single spacecraft with many components. Viking cost more 

than $3.2 billion and included twin spacecraft, each with an orbiter 

holding four instruments and a lander with thirteen. Most of the 

instruments on the lander dealt with geological, meteorological and 

imaging data, but four comprised a biological experiment. Chuck 

Klein, head of the Ames life sciences division, led that team. That too, 

in retrospect, was complex in that rather than searching for water or 

carbon they searched for the metabolic activity then so central to 

exobiologists. 

To search for the biosignatures of life, Vance Oyama built a gasexchange laboratory. An arm extended to collect soil, dropped it in a 

sealed metal receptacle, the Martian atmosphere was replaced with 

inert helium, the soil mixed with nutrients, then with water, a gas 

chromatograph measured concentration of emitted gases, and the 

data was relayed back to Earth. Oyama thought any metabolizing 

organisms would consume or release one of six gases measured. 

The gas-exchange experiment worked flawlessly, but measured 

no metabolic gases. The other three experiments also worked, 

but all together returned inconclusive results. In a labeled release 

experiment, seven nutrients tagged with radioactive elements were 

droppedintoMartian soil.The first nutrient elicited a steady stream of 

radioactive gas, but other nutrients did not. A similar pyrolitic release 

experiment looked for evidence of photosynthesis and biomass. A 

very sensitive gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer measured 

no organic molecules in the Martian soil, which contained even less 

carbon than the lifeless regolith returned from the Moon. That came 

as the biggest surprise, given the presence of carbon throughout 

the solar system. Plus, the null result from the gas chromatograph 

voided any prospects for life indicated by the other experiments. In 

the decades that followed, most scientists interpreted the data as 

evidence of the highly reactive chemical structure of the Martian 

soil. A few interpreted it as the presence of life. Questions about 

what the lander found motivated planetary scientists for years. 

Exobiology continued as a major focus at Ames, tied more closely 

to planetary science and developing into what became known as 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

astrobiology. Donald DeVincenzi, the exobiology program manager 

at NASA headquarters, asked Ames to host workshops and write 

papers that redefined the scientific core of the discipline. Sherwood 

Chang led the planetary biology branch and, along with Ted Bunch, 

did pathbreaking work on organic material and water in meteorites. 

Christopher McKay studied the intricate lives of some of Earth’s 

most primitive microorganisms, while Jack Farmer, David Blake, 

and Linda Jahnke studied fossil markers for extinct microbial 

life. This led to bold explorations to find organisms in extreme 

environments—hot springs, Antarctic deserts, and frozen lakes. 

Finding organisms in those places was good practice, they thought, 

for finding life on Mars. Exobiology started as the science without 

a subject matter, though Ames exobiologists found good proxies. 

Extremophiles on Earth showed the chemical and physical limits of 

life, and that life is less limited than once thought. 

T H E O R E T I C A L S P A C E S C I E N C E 

James B. Pollack, a radiative transfer theorist in the planetary 

systems branch of the Ames’ space sciences division, arrived at 

Ames in 1970. He was hired by Ray Reynolds who, as early as 1964, 

had done theoretical work at Ames on the formation of planets 

and built a world-class theoretical studies branch to complement 

Ames’ work in spaceborne instrumentation. In the 24 years Pollack 

worked at Ames before his death, he earned a solid reputation as a 

theoretician and wrote nearly 300 articles on all facets of planetary 

science. Postdoctoral fellowships offered by the National Research 

Council fed much of the scientific vigor at Ames, especially in the 

planetary sciences. The best young scientists came to Ames for 

two-year projects, often to work with Pollack, and the best of those 

hired on. A great many others came to hang experiments on NASA 

spacecraft or to mine NASA data. 

Pollack’s drive to understand the origins of planets and the 

evolution of their atmospheres—especially for the habitable planets 

like Earth, Mars and early Venus—led him to use any variety of 

numerical, observational, or experimental tool. Pollack worked with 

Richard Young and Robert Haberle to develop an entire suite of 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

numerical models of the climate and meteorology of Mars. These 

models comprised a unique resource—used to plan Mars missions, 

analyze the data they returned, and advance theories on how the 

climate of Mars changed over eons as the sun warmed up and Mars’ 

atmosphere escaped. The Ames team devised similar numerical 

models to explain the greenhouse-gas climate of Venus, its high 

surface heat, its current lack of water, and its acidic atmosphere. 

Pollack inevitably teamed with other environmentally concerned 

researchers exploring the atmosphere of Earth. With James Kasting 

and Thomas Ackerman he initiated some of the first studies of 

atmospheric aerosols in the evolution of Earth’s climate. Brian Toon 

contributed his expertise on the microphysics of clouds on Earth, 

thus bridging efforts in the planetary sciences and Ames’ Earthobservation aircraft. Pollack and these colleagues led the team that 

later wrote the famous paper on “nuclear winter,” suggesting that 

dust and soot kicked into the atmosphere by a nuclear war would 

degrade the habitability of Earth as much as the comet impacts that 

reshaped the climates of other planets and that might have led to the 

demise of the dinosaurs.128 

Voyager’s grand tour of the outer solar system, coupled with data 

returned from the Pioneers and observatories, drove a revolution in 

planetary science focused on the evolution of Jupiter, Saturn, and 

their moons. Pollack, Reynolds and their collaborators wrote stellar 

evolution codes to explain the residual internal heat of these gas giants, 

their growth by accumulation of planetesimals, and the subsequent 

capture of hydrogen envelopes. Jeff Cuzzi and Jack Lissauer unraveled 

puzzles in the rings of Saturn and the other gas giants, including spiral 

waves, and their rapid evolution under meteoroid bombardment. 

Dale Cruikshank was among the first to identify frozen sulfur dioxide 

on the surface of Io, the only body in the solar system other than Earth 

to have intense volcanic activity. Saturn’s large moon, Titan, with its 

smoggy haze and possible ethane oceans, was studied in detail as a 

fossil of the primordial soup which led the Ames group to suggest the 

Titan probe that later flew as the Cassini mission. 

Pollack also fueled interest in the origin of other planetary 

systems. David Black, who first discovered signs of interstellar 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

material in a meteorite, came to Ames and, along with Patrick 

Cassen, built a Center for Star Formation Studies. The center was 

a consortium of Ames and two University of California astronomy 

departments (at Berkeley and Santa Cruz) and greatly advanced 

the astrophysical theory of protostellar collapse. The center 

used supercomputers well: they modeled systems ruled by selfgravitation, like galaxies, protostellar clouds, and solar nebula; ran 

three-dimensional, n-body calculations that followed the motions 

of billions of stars in their own gravitational fields; calculated the 

collapse of rotating interstellar clouds to ten orders of magnitude in 

density; demonstrated that the true shape of elliptical galaxies was 

prolate rather than oblate; and showed how galaxies collided. Black 

led the early studies of how to find planets around other stars, which 

presaged NASA planetary detection efforts like Kepler. In addition, 

Ames planetary scientists did early studies of the gravitational and 

fluid dynamics of protoplanetary disks. 

Life is made from organic material. Into the early 1990s a unifying 

theme in Ames planetary science was to chart the path of organic 

material from its origin in the interstellar medium (where infrared 

astronomy revealed it was formed), through primitive meteorites 

(available for chemical analysis), and into Earth’s biosphere. David 

Hollenbach and Xander Tielens studied the physical evolution of 

grains in space. Lou Allamandola picked up the critical question 

of the chemical evolution of organic materials. It took him many 

years to piece together laboratory equipment to mimic the space 

environment and show how organic material could be produced 

from hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen formed first in the big 

bang and then subsequently in stars. Allamandola’s group showed 

how polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons evolved from elementary 

carbon, and dominated infrared emissions from the Milky Way. 

The unique atmosphere at Ames allowed all this work to crosspollinate—in planetary formation, the evolution of planetary 

atmospheres, and the chemical, thermal, and gravitational evolution 

of the solar system. It also coupled Ames’ early pioneering work in 

exobiology and the chemical origins of life with the broader discipline 

later called astrobiology. 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

S E A R C H F O R E X T R A T E R R E S T R I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E 

In the late 1960s, John Billingham of Ames’ biotechnology 

branch began to move Ames into SETI, or the search for 

extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI was a natural area of interest for 

Ames. It combined the exobiology quest for life beyond Earth, with 

the insights of planetary theory on where to look for it, and radio 

astronomy and computation as the means to search for it. In 1971 

Billingham teamed with Bernard Oliver, a former vice president for 

research at the Hewlett Packard Company and a technical expert in 

microwave signal processing. They proposed Project Cyclops—$10 

billion for a circular array of a thousand telescope dishes, 100 meters 

in diameter, to do a full-sky survey of coherent microwave signals. 

NASA headquarters would not endorse so expensive an effort in 

such uncertain science. 

Billingham then sketched more modest steps that NASA could 

take to help the many university astronomers engaged in SETI. 

Collectively, they decided to start searching for nonrandom radio 

waves in the microwave portion of the spectrum (microwaves 

travelled well in space and earthlings were already propagating 

them around the universe). They also decided to search between 

the natural spectral emission of hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical 

(OH)—dubbed the water hole—since water is essential for life. 

Hans Mark appreciated the value of a comprehensive SETI 

program, not only for what it might discover, but also for what it could 

teach us about pulses in the universe and as a way to excite children 

about science. In July 1975, Mark asked NASA headquarters to fund 

a second international SETI meeting. Fletcher instead obliged Mark 

to find money from the National Academy of Sciences, but to hold 

the meeting at Ames. Fletcher did not want NASA to fund SETI prior 

to a formal commitment authorized by Congress. Over the next five 

years, and with Sy Syvertson’s encouragement, Ames and JPL (which 

ran NASA’s Deep Space Network) contributed a total of $1.5 million 

to design signal processing hardware and algorithms and to hold a 

series of workshops to map out the best scientific strategy for SETI. 

Billingham organized the series of multidisciplinary workshops 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

that brought together a range of scholars—from astronomy, 

electronics, biology, psychology, and philosophy—to debate the 

once taboo subject of contacting life beyond our solar system. Two 

regular attendees were Frank Drake and Philip Morrison, the first 

astronomers to lend credence to the subject by calculating the 

probabilities of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

NASA began to fund SETI more seriously in 1981—at an average 

of $1.9 million per year over the next decade—but its value was 

constantly challenged. Senator William Proxmire had bestowed a 

Golden Fleece on the SETI program in 1978, and in 1981 Proxmire 

passed an amendment deleting SETI’s fiscal 1982 funding. Carl 

Sagan met with Proxmire to argue the merits of the science, and 

Proxmire agreed to no longer oppose the program. SETI backers 

became more politically active. They founded the nonprofit SETI 

Institute near Moffett Field, encouraged university astronomers to 

turn their ears skyward for focused searches, and got Soviet scientists 

to release data on their efforts. The FAA showed an interest in using 

frequency analyzers developed for SETI, and the National Security 

Agency learned about code breaking. SETI was small, well-managed, 

on budget, and returning interesting science—if not yet evidence of 

intelligent life, at least far better knowledge about the energy patterns 

in the universe. 

On the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, 

NASA formally launched a SETI program. Renamed the high 

resolution microwave survey, it was funded out of the NASA 

headquarters exobiology program, located at Ames and managed by 

project scientist Jill C. Tarter of the SETI Institute. It received $12 

million in fiscal 1992 against a $100 million budget over ten years. 

After two decades of arguing over the mathematical probabilities 

of other intelligent life, Ames researchers finally got a chance to 

actually look for it in a systematic way. While scientists at JPL geared 

up for a lower-resolution sky survey of the full celestial sphere, Ames 

developed the equipment and algorithms for a targeted search of 

solar-type stars. Devices built at Ames would resolve 10 megahertz of 

spectrum into 10 million channels, simultaneously and in real time. 

The resulting coverage would have 100,000 times more bandwidth 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

than devices used in previous searches, and was a billion times more 

comprehensive. 

Yet less than a year later, Congress killed NASA’s high resolution 

microwave survey. It died from fervor over the federal deficit and 

a history of unfounded associations with UFOs. The scientific 

community did not lobby consistently for it—SETI was an exobiology 

effort that used the tools of radio astronomy. To make it politically 

palatable, NASA had moved SETI from its life sciences to its space 

sciences directorate, which gave it low priority. SETI was small 

enough to sacrifice, and headquarters already felt bloodied from its 

1992 budget encounter with Congress. The SETI Institute continues 

its work in radio astronomy with private funding. It collaborates 

closely with NASA Ames, and with NASA funding on a great many 

research topics in astrobiology. 

N E A R - E A R T H O B J E C T S 

NASA Ames researchers, from a wide range of perspectives, 

had long done important work in near Earth objects (NEOs), which 

include asteroids and some comets.HarveyAllen had studiedmeteors 

for insights into how they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, as had Dean 

Chapman with tektites. Ames opened its vertical gun range in 1960s 

to study asteroid impacts on the Moon, and also meteoroid impacts 

on spacecraft. Ames exobiologist Ted Bunch spent his career focused 

on comets and asteroids, first in using impact history to understand 

the geological history of planets and later on their composition. In 

the late 1960s Cyril Ponnamperuma and Sherwood Chang studied 

the role of comets in seeding Earth with the precursors of life. In 

the late 1980s, Kevin Zahnle began to include impacts in his models 

of the evolution of planetary atmospheres. None of these efforts, 

though, considered NEOS as a threat. 

In 1980 physicist Luis Alvarez published geochemical evidence 

that the extinction of the dinosaurs coincided with a major asteroid 

impact—know as the K-T impact or Cretaceous extinction event. 

“This was very cool,” noted Ames astronomer David Morrison. 

“It marked a revolution in our understanding of the relationship 

between Earth and the cosmos.”129 The TTAPS paper on nuclear 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

winter, published in 1983, drawing on the work of Jim Pollack and 

Brian Toon, deliberately compared the global devastation of a nuclear 

attack with an asteroid impact—noting that soot from fires would 

block far more sunlight from Earth’s atmosphere than dust.130 Then 

in 1991, Charles Duller of NASA Ames, using the remote sensing 

equipment on an ER-2, mapped a series of sinkholes in the northern 

Yucatan peninsula that clearly defined an impact crater at the same 

time of the dinosaur extinction.131 Asteroids had entered the field of 

human concern, and thus perhaps the field of action as well as study. 

David Morrison, though, is the Ames person most identified with 

work on NEOs. While still at the University of Hawaii and working at 

the Keck Observatory, Morrison helped develop a technique of using 

thermal infrared imaging to detect the sizes of main belt asteroids. 

He was part of a team that discovered the fundamental difference 

between the evolved, high albedo (reflective) asteroids of the main 

belt and the low albedo, dark asteroids of more primitive material on 

the further edges of the solar system. Asteroids had different histories 

and to make sense of them Morrison published on the taxonomy of 

the asteroids. In 1978 he edited a volume on what was known about 

the structural and chemical composition of asteroids that would be 

useful in planning a mission.132 

Concerned with how little public policy addressed the 

threat of asteroid impact—a low probability event but with 

grave consequences—in 1989, with Clark Chapman, Morrison 

published a well-received popular book on asteroid impacts, Cosmic 

Catastrophes.

133 Later that year, NASA announced that asteroid 

Asclepius came within 700,000 kilometers of Earth, that it had 

passed through exact position where the Earth was six hours earlier, 

and it was only discovered nine days after it had passed that spot. 

In 1990 Congress instructed NASA to take the NEO threat 

seriously, starting with planning workshops. Morrison, who had 

arrived at Ames in 1988, chaired the workshop on detection. 

Brian Toon calculated how big an impact would cause an “impact 

winter” that plunged Earth into starvation. Using what was known 

about the composition of asteroids, Morrison then calculated that 

asteroids larger than one kilometer carried enough energy to do 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

global damage. His group proposed a Spaceguard survey, a catalog 

of every Earth-crossing NEO larger than one kilometer, using a 

network of six new ground-based telescopes, costing about $8 

million each, competitively funded by NASA and managed by 

university observatories.134 NASA refused to fund this survey. Using 

existing telescopes, with modern detectors and database technology, 

astronomers nonetheless started surveying. They soon discovered 

that there was a third fewer one-kilometer class NEOs than they 

estimated in 1992. With total funding of less than $1 million per year, 

the survey still made good progress. 

The prospect of an asteroid hitting Earth was the subject of two 

Hollywood films released in 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact. 

Morrison and Zahnle both consulted for the films. In May 1998 

Congress again asked Morrison to testify on NEOs. “The first week’s 

gross from Deep Impact,” (of $41.0 million) lamented Morrison, 

“would be enough to implement the Spaceguard Survey.”135 Perhaps 

because of the heightened political presence of NEOs, in June 1998 

Carl Pilcher of the NASA science mission directorate stood before 

Congress and committed NASA to open an NEO program at JPL, 

with funding of about $3 million per year. This office coordinated 

data detected by two Air Force telescopes, called NEAT and 

LINEAR, and used it to characterize the orbits of discovered NEOs. 

Morrison also continued his research on the structure and 

chemical composition of asteroids. Once the Spaceguard Survey 

discovered new asteroids, astronomers working in more traditional 

radar and optical telescopes characterized their composition and 

orbits. Astronomers also began to learn a great deal more about the 

structure and composition of asteroids through a series of small but 

effective spacecraft. Galileo had flown by two asteroids—951 Gaspra 

in October 1991 and 243 Ida in August 1993—on its way to Jupiter. 

Deep Space 1 was a flyby mission to the asteroid 9969 Braille in 

July 1999. NEAR, NASA’s near-Earth asteroid rendezvous, orbited 

asteroid 433 Eros for almost a year in 2000, before touching down 

in February 2001. Stardust, which returned samples from a flyby 

of the comet Coma, also flew by the asteroid AnneFrank in 2002. 

Hayabusa was a Japanese mission which imaged asteroid 25143 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Itokawa in September 2005, and collected a sample to return. Rosetta 

was an ESA comet mission, which also flew past the asteroids 2867 

Steins and 21 Lutetia in September 2008, enroute to a landing on 

a comet. Dawn launched in 2007 to flyby the asteroids Ceres and 

Vesta beginning in 2011. These missions, done at small cost, taught 

scientists a great deal about the composition of asteroids—some 

were piles of rocks, some were half void—and thus clarified what 

sort of force could be used to divert them. Nuclear weapons could do 

nothing, for example, if the asteroid collapsed on explosion. 

PeteWorden’s appointment as director further raised the salience 

ofNEOs atAmes.136AsWorden worked on the ballisticmissile defense 

effort he advocated a program on planetary protection (meaning 

from asteroid impact, not from microbial cross-contamination as 

exobiologists thought of planetary protection). He considered the 

Air Force responsible for protecting America from any spaceborne 

threat, natural or human made. Furthermore, the technology used 

to detect satellites and to shoot down ballistic missiles could also 

be used to detect NEOs and divert the dangerous ones. Worden 

worked to make Defense Department assets available for science. He 

declassified military satellite data relevant to the NEO threat.Worden 

championed the use of the Air Force GEODSS (ground-based 

electro-optical deep space surveillance) network and the LINEAR 

(the Lincoln near-Earth asteroid research) telescopes to catalog 

asteroids, and indeed these military programs have had by far the best 

success in identifying NEOs. Worden also championed exploitation 

of microsatellite technologies to identify smaller NEOs.137 In 1993, 

while at the Ballistic Missile Defense Office, Worden co-organized a 

workshop on NEOs as part of the Erice seminars on nuclear war and 

planetary emergencies and invited Morrison to speak.138 Of course, 

the proposed use of nuclear weapons angered civilian scientists 

in NASA dedicated to the non-militarization of space. To bridge 

the deflection dilemma gap between the civilian scientists and the 

defense community, Morrison and Edward Teller co-authored a 

paper on asteroid hazards.139 

Worden used the NEO threat to justify his small satellite efforts. 

The Clementine I spacecraft, in 1994, after successfully surveying 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

the Moon and finding a chemical signature for water, was targeted 

at the asteroid 1620 Geographos. However, a thruster malfunction 

rendered Clementine crippled before it encountered the asteroid. 

As deputy director of requirements for the U.S. Space Command, 

Worden then championed the Clementine II microsatellite. It would 

launch in late 1999 and fire autonomous camera-tipped impactors 

at asteroids. Clementine II was an unclassified mission, designed to 

clarify the structure and composition of asteroids and demonstrate 

what sort of force might deflect them. In October 1997 President 

Clinton did one of his first line-item vetoes on the $30 million 

project, perhaps thinking that Clementine II was not appropriate for 

the Defense Department. NASA’s Deep Impact mission, started in 

1999, did an impact experiment with an autonomous satellite, firing 

a 500 kilogram projectile at the Comet Tempel 1 in July 2005. 

Worden continued to work on planetary protection. In February 

2000,Worden issued a personal opinion that the Defense Department 

should also take international responsibility for tracking the 

Tunguska class asteroids (100-meter class). Such an asteroid breaking 

apart in the upper atmosphere, as the Tunguska one did, would look 

enough like the explosion of a nuclear weapon that it might provoke 

a misguided military response. Worden recommended a series of 

microsatellites to probe each recognized asteroid and populate a 

database on asteroid structure. Perhaps because Worden tried so 

hard to move NEO research into the Defense Department, in 2002 

Congress clarified that NASA should have NEO responsibility. 

By 2003, Spaceguard had found 800 NEOs, three-quarters of 

the estimated total. A NASA study team outlined the next step, 

$25 million to fund a deep sky survey using Earth-based and spacebased telescopes optimized to identify smaller and fainter NEOs— 

the 100-meter class, below the threshold for global catastrophe but 

still damaging to a region.140 Congress required NASA to respond to 

the report, but NASA administrator Mike Griffin refused to, perhaps 

concerned about the cost. Morrison began to spend more time 

abroad, trying to convince other governments to fund the survey 

since they would be affected as much as the United States—the only 

nation to have invested any meaningful work in NEOs. This survey 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

would be done with telescopes similar to the Large Synoptic Survey 

Telescope, optimized for detecting small NEOs. Another reason 

NASA underfunded work on NEOs was that it fell into no clear 

budget: the science mission directorate hesitated to fund research 

with defense applications and the operations mission directorate, 

which tracked orbital debris, hesitated to fund science missions. 

Working with Morrison and Jill Bauman, Worden tried to make 

NASA Ames a program office in NEOs, with funding authority to 

develop spacecraft missions. Morrison developed a proposal for 

the MAAT spacecraft, using the common modular bus technology 

developed for the LADEE spacecraft, to rendezvous with asteroid 

Apophis and fly with it while NASA honed its orbit measurements. 

Apophis was discovered in June 2004, and was once thought to 

be a threat. In October 2007, Worden asked Morrison and Ames 

chief scientist Stephanie Langhoff to convene a workshop on lowcost missions to explore NEOs.141 They recognized that, given the 

potentially large number of NEOs worth exploring, that more but 

cheapermissions could boost the science return. They also recognized 

that the desire to explore asteroids would only increase—not only in 

the interest of planetary protection, but also to study what asteroids 

could teach us about the far reaches of our solar system. 

N A S A A S T R O B I O L O G Y I N S T I T U T E 

During the tenures of Dan Goldin and Harry McDonald, in 

addition to leadership in information technology and air traffic 

control, Ames accepted the lead center role in astrobiology. 

Astrobiology is the multidisciplinary study of life in the universe. It 

incorporated issues earlier explored as exobiology—the origin of life 

within evolving planetary systems, and how life and biospheres would 

look different on other planets. Whereas exobiology focused on the 

origin of life, astrobiology also looked at the evolution, distribution 

and future of life in the universe. A key difference between exobiology 

and astrobiology was that exobiology was largely laboratory based 

and hypothetical in that objects had not yet been found to study. 

Astrobiologists made a paradigm shift in claiming they had objects 

to study, starting with life on Earth. Astrobiology addressed how life 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

shaped Earth as they co-evolved, how life thrived in Earth’s harshest 

environments, and how life ends as it did in at times in Earth’s history 

and as it may have on Mars or Venus. It addressed the destiny of 

life, how life might adapt to environments beyond Earth, and thus 

overlapped with topics in fundamental gravitational and radiation 

biology. Astrobiology was also massively interdisciplinary in that it 

encompassed any scientific approach to these issues—observational, 

experimental, and theoretical. 

The term “astrobiology,” as well as revolutionary plans to pursue 

it, were sparked to life in the intense pressure and complex chemistry 

of the primordial zero base review in the early 1990s. The future 

of space science at Ames looked bleak. NASA headquarters had 

decided to support only two Centers pursuing space exploration— 

and that Goddard was best established in Earth orbit missions and 

JPL in planetary missions. NASA chief scientist France Cordova 

chaired discussions on the role of science within NASA, which were 

very sensitive to the excellent work done at Ames. She suggested— 

given the chronically, and now acutely, threatened status of the space, 

Earth, and life sciences at Ames—those scientists be privatized 

outside of Ames in association with a local university. 

The idea of a privatized institute, however, hit roadblocks. David 

Morrison contributed to an agency-wide review, led by Al Diaz, of 

possible forms for such an institute. Each encountered problems over 

how to move civil servants into a private institute. Congress balked 

at passing legislation that eased post-employment restrictions for 

NASA employees or allowed them to transfer their pensions.Without 

it, universities balked at the task of integrating an entire research 

directorate with 600 civil servants and 1,000 support contractors. 

More important, the institute plan lacked a coherent vision. It would 

be called, simply, the Institute for Space Life Sciences. 

In meetings to define a forward-looking agenda for this institute, 

NASA associate administrator for space science, Wesley Huntress, 

suggested the term astrobiology. “Astrobiology” appeared in 

the NASA 1996 Strategic Plan, defined as “the study of the living 

universe,” and this was the enabling document that gave Ames the 

astrobiology mission.142 Exciting scientific announcements in 1996 

179 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

cemented interest in astrobiology—the discovery of new planets 

around other stars and hints of microbial fossils in a meteorite 

from Mars. In August, data from the Ames-managed Galileo probe 

returned data on Jupiter’s climate drivers. The Galileo orbiter 

returned photos that showed Jupiter’s moon Europa may harbor 

warm ice or even liquid water—both key elements in sustaining life. 

Goldin considered biology a science with a future, named Ames 

as NASA’s lead center in astrobiology, and tasked it to promote 

collaboration through an institute. 

Astrobiology stands as a prime example of how NASA managers 

at Ames re-integrated NASA strategic enterprises around a bold 

new mission. The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was in essence 

creating a new discipline. Ames people had created the discipline 

of computational fluid dynamics in the 1970s, driven to theorize 

the experimental work they had begun. Based on that experience, 

they took a more deliberate approach to creating astrobiology. A 

series of astrobiology roadmap conferences identified the holes in 

the discipline they would need to fill, and established an inclusive, 

virtual institute that linked universities and research organizations 

across the United States. 

Scott Hubbard was named acting director of the NAI, and David 

Morrison as senior scientist. In June 1998, the brick-and-mortar 

institute opened at Ames, though it was a small office with superb 

teleconferencing and a good digital archive. One of their first tasks 

was to pick science teams. From among 57 applicants, they selected 

eleven teams to build astrobiology research and training programs. 

One of those teams was at Ames, led by David Des Marais as principal 

investigator and Lou Allamandola as lead co-investigator. This 

extended Ames’ tradition of research into organic astrochemistry, 

planetary habitability, and early microbial evolution. To recognize 

the integrative role of astrobiology on Center, in August 1999 Harry 

McDonald renamed the Ames directorate overseeing all space, Earth 

and life sciences to the astrobiology and space program directorate, 

led by Hubbard. 

McDonald decided that the NAI should be led by a scientist 

with a global reputation as sterling as what the institute intended 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

to accomplish. In May 1999 he announced that its new director 

would be Baruch S. Blumberg, who shared the 1976 Nobel prize in 

physiology and medicine for his work on the origins of infectious 

diseases that led to the discovery of the hepatitis B vaccine. Blumberg 

would be the first Nobel laureate employed by NASA. Goldin turned 

Blumberg’s appointment into an opportunity to make a major address 

on NASA’s vision of exploration, and capped the day by signing an 

agreement between NASA and SGI, Inc. on a plan to develop new 

supercomputers. Goldin exclaimed, “It doesn’t get much better than 

this.”143 

Along with roadmap documents defining the essence of 

astrobiology, given its interdisciplinary nature conferences were as 

important. NAI organized annual general meetings where all team 

members could meet, summer schools offered specialized training 

to graduate students, and a biennial AbSciCon or astrobiology 

science conference attracted thousands of scientists. At the earliest 

conferences the papers presented focused on techniques, hoping 

to draw researchers from disparate fields into the discipline of 

astrobiology. Soon papers coalesced around topics that defined 

the core of astrobiology. Blumberg decided that the classification 

scheme for their papers should map to the astrobiology roadmap, 

to better show how well the NAI was pursuing its plan. In 2003 a 

competition for a new cohort of NAI teams attracted even more 

proposals, reflecting the continued growth of the discipline. 

Astrobiology, like all science in NASA, was affected by the 

shift in NASA funds toward Constellation. Paleontologist Bruce 

Runnegar from the University of California at Los Angeles, who had 

succeeded Blumberg as NAI director when he retired, struggled to 

engender cooperation among the teams after they had competed so 

hard to be selected. In 2006, NAI was asked to cut its budget in half 

and so eliminated many of its fellowship programs and meetings. 

Carl Pilcher, science program director for solar system exploration 

at NASA headquarters, was named NAI director in September 2006 

and stabilized funding. In 2007 NASA allowed a competition that 

brought the number of science teams up to sixteen, comprising 

more that 700 researchers at universities and research organizations 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

around the world. More than twenty NAI members were members 

of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Significantly, NAI stands for NASA’s astrobiology institute and 

not a national or international institute. NAI’s work explicitly helps 

NASA better plan its missions and many of NASA’s recent missions 

are driven by an astrobiological agenda. Members of the NAI are 

frequently included on science teams for mission proposals, or 

asked to build instruments for planetary missions. NAI members 

collaborate to design drilling tools for astrobiology missions. Ames 

astrobiologists Nathalie Cabrol and David Des Marais provided the 

crucial insights that guided the MERs’ (Mars exploration rovers) 

traverse across Mars in search of water. With Lunar Prospector and 

LCROSS, Ames generated data to find water on our Moon. Infrared 

astronomy, as done with the Spitzer space telescope and SOFIA, 

provides data on the chemical composition of the universe and the 

origins of our solar system. 

The Kepler mission—with its science program managed at 

Ames—is explicitly astrobiological, in that it is looking for planets in 

our galaxy that might harbor life. The first Pale Blue Dot Workshop 

held at Ames in June 1996 focused specifically on spectroscopic 

means of detecting life on the growing numbers of extrasolar planets. 

The second workshop in May 1999, organized by Larry Caroff and 

David Des Marais, reflected the impact of the NAI in broadening 

astrobiology. NASA astronomers could now study extrasolar planets 

with insights from atmospheric chemistry, gaseous biosignatures, 

and the early habitability of Earth.144 By the third Pale Blue Dot 

meeting in 2006 at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the MER 

rovers had followed the trail of water on Mars and more than 200 

extrasolar planets had been cataloged. The meeting emphasized 

science communications, helping both scientists and journalists 

explain these advances in astrobiology. 

TheNAIwaswidelyconsideredasuccess.Thenumbersofscientists 

working in astrobiology, or at least those calling their work that, had 

exploded over the decade. By leveraging information technology, 

all the infrastructure of a scientific discipline—meetings, seminars, 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

journals, peer-review, fellowships, education and training—were 

in place and for relatively little cost. The organizational form of the 

NAI, the virtual institute, was ready for application elsewhere. 

L U N A R S C I E N C E 

At a conference in October 2007, Alan Stern, who led the 

science mission directorate at NASA headquarters, announced the 

creation of a NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI). Its goal was to 

re-invigorate the lunar sciences in preparation for NASA’s return to 

the Moon. It would be modeled on the NAI and be based at NASA 

Ames. The announcement surprised everyone at Ames, and Stern 

gave almost no guidance on what he expected. 

Krisstina Wilmoth, who led outreach at the NAI, led a group to 

structure the institute, and Pete Worden named as interim director 

DavidMorrison, whose eminence in planetary science spanned many 

fields and who had been involved with NAI since its start. Joining 

his NLSI staff were others who had worked with NAI—like deputy 

director Greg Schmidt, and Estelle Dodson and Joe Minafra who had 

built the tools for videoconferencing and web collaboration. While 

Morrison reported to Worden as Ames director, he held weekly 

teleconferences with the program office at headquarters. Stern 

resigned from NASA in March 2008, and headquarters oversight 

of the NLSI moved to Jim Green, director of the planetary sciences 

division, who remained supportive of NLSI at Ames. 

Morrison moved quickly. NLSI opened its website first, updated 

it to be a center of all information related to science “of the Moon, 

on the Moon, from the Moon.”145 The small institute office opened 

its doors in April 2008, in renovated space in the old Admiral’s office 

on historic Shenandoah Plaza of Moffett Field. Drawing on the NAI 

model, they formulated a five-year budget and drafted a cooperative 

agreement notice, or CAN, to shape the competition for potential 

teams. The first NASA Lunar Science conference—held in July 2008 

and organized by Chris McKay—drew more than 500 participants, 

far more than expected, many looking to build or promote their 

teams. The conference proved that the Moon was still active terrain 

for scientific exploration. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

In response to its CAN, the NLSI received 33 applications. Each 

team addressed some element on the National Academy of Sciences’ 

report on The Scientific Context for the Exploration of the Moon, which 

served as a roadmap for the NLSI.146 After intense peer review, in 

March 2009 they selected seven multidisciplinary teams of scientists 

distributed at universities and think tanks throughout the country. 

Each team was funded at about $2 million for four years. None were 

based at Ames, a situation Worden expected to resolve by the time 

of the next competition. Education was an important part of each 

proposal, in that each team had to involve graduate students and 

allocate five percent of its budget to education. NLSI also created 

a program for international partners, and the first selected was the 

University of Western Ontario. Their team got no funding from 

NLSI, but got access to its collaboration tools in return for funding a 

lunar science effort. 

The second Lunar Science forum, in June 2009, was even better 

attended than the first. This time, there were results to announce: 

from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Chandrayan, Selena, and 

Chang’e orbiters. Other nations clearly had active lunar exploration 

programs; this marked the first time the leaders of the Chinese 

mission to the Moon presented results in theWest.The NLSI hosted 

Moonfest 2009, a public event to celebrate the 40th anniversary 

of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. More than 11,400 local 

residents showed up—making it the largest public event since the 

1997 open house. 

Fresh data from theMoon continued to make it a more interesting 

place. Carle Pieters at Brown University, a principal investigator with 

both the NLSI and the Chandrayan orbiter mission to the Moon, 

announced that water pervaded the surface of the Moon as the 

hydroxyl molecule. NLSI principal investigator Bill Bottke revisited 

the bombardment history of the Moon and proposed a model of our 

early solar system with a huge debris disk, like astronomers were 

beginning to discover in the solar systems of other stars. 

A sense of history was also important, in that all the teams in 

some way revisited data from the Apollo missions. In November 

2008, the NLSI unveiled a remastered iconic image of Earth taken 

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P l a n e t a r y S c i e n c e s a n d A s t r o b i o l o g y 

in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1. The Lunar Orbiter image recovery 

project, located at Ames and managed by Dennis Wingo and 

Keith Cowing, restored the image using lovingly refurbished tape 

drives and modern digital technology. These images had twice the 

resolution and four times the dynamic range of the original Lunar 

Orbiter images. It showed objects as small as a meter, comparable to 

the data being returned in 2008, thus generating insights into how 

the lunar surface has changed over the past four decades. Specifically, 

it will help measure the rate of impacts on the Moon so NASA can 

plan for the proper amount of shielding on future colonies.147 

The NLSI, while built upon new technologies for collaboration 

and the organizational form of the virtual institute, reflected how 

Ames in the past opened fertile new fields in the planetary sciences. 

Over the past fifty years, Ames scientists established positions in 

studies of astrobiology, NEOs, planetary atmospheres, SETI, and 

infrared astronomy. Each new field of expertise reflected the ability 

of Ames scientists to combine theory, laboratory experimentation, 

spaceborne instrumentation, a record of publication, a willingness 

to partner, and a desire to train future generations in space science. 

185 
A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

C H A P T E R 5 

Space Life Sciences 

Perhaps the first wholly new activity at Ames following its 

transition into NASA was the fundamental space life sciences, 

meaning research into extending life beyond the environment of 

Earth. NASA quickly set about studying how humans would adapt 

to spaceflight, and tasked Ames to develop animal models and 

laboratory experiments to answer specific questions. As the Manned 

Spacecraft Center near Houston formalized its responsibility for 

the astronaut corps into the 1960s, NASA moved there the more 

applied, risk-reduction work on human space medicine and capsule 

environments. Over the ensuing decades Ames continued to pursue 

its more fundamental and future-focused work in space biology. 

By the late 1990s, more doctorate-level biologists worked at 

NASA Ames than at any other NASA Center (though their numbers 

dwindled drastically in the decade that followed). Biology at NASA 

Ames was dispersed and integrated intomost every research program 

at the Center, including information technology and aeronautics. 

The two most prominent areas were astrobiology and gravitational 

biology, which often overlapped.Many scientists workedin both areas 

and the two were often conjoined organizationally. Astrobiology at 

Ames, though, shared an intellectual framework with the planetary 

sciences while gravitational and the space life sciences traced a 

lineage to Ames’ work in human factors dating to the NACA. 

Furthermore, experimental practices differed. Life scientists enjoyed 

reasonably good access to low Earth orbit—from Biosatellite to 

Cosmos/Bion, and the Space Shuttle program—meaning their work 

revolved around building flight-qualified experiment packages for 

living things. Astrobiologists worked with more restricted data sets. 

Over the years biology at Ames has been fundamental, integrative 

and collaborative. Biology at Ames mixed the entire range of work 

in the discipline: the concurrent development of theory, veterinary 

care, bioinstrumentation, fieldwork, comprehensive spacecraft 

missions, unique spaceborne experiment packages, data analysis 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

and education. At Ames, biologists enjoyed the freedom to define 

for themselves new research agendas, so the engineering impact of 

their work was profound. 

The work Ames did in the 1950s in aircraft handling qualities 

and pilot workload led to the design of research-oriented flight 

simulators, on which they validated new ways to test the interaction 

of human with machine. With the launch of America’s human 

space program, Ames did early work in capsule design, crew life 

support, and the manual control of spacecraft. As NASA shifted to 

the Space Shuttle in the 1970s, Ames continued to find new ways to 

optimize crew performance—with studies in cockpit design, visual 

perception, and crew life support for longer missions. The Ames 

instrumentation group invented biomedical sensors, its aviation 

systems group pioneered methods of safety reporting, and its 

information technology group tested tools to make astronauts more 

intelligent and capable. Biofeedback to reduce space sickness was 

one example of how Ames improved the performance of astronauts 

in space. The space life sciences at Ames enjoyed a broad scope. 

S T A R T O F L I F E S C I E N C E S R E S E A R C H 

In November 1961, soon after the arrival of James Webb as NASA 

administrator, several new research responsibilities were assigned 

to Ames, most notably the life sciences. Of all the former NACA 

laboratories, Ames’ leadership in simulator design and cockpit 

usability studies earned it the largest contingent of researchers 

working with human subjects. NASA first imposed on Ames the 

life sciences program—reporting to headquarters but housed in 

DeFrance’s shop. The first life science chief at NASA Ames was 

Webb Haymaker, an eminent neurophysiologist who had done 

some important experiments on radiation effects on the brain using 

high altitude balloons. Haymaker recruited a world-class team of 

biologists—mostly working on radiation and microgravity effects— 

but he was no manager. Furthermore, Haymaker did not really fit 

the culture of the Center in fashioning fundamental research derived 

from engineering needs. 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

One of his early hires was Harold P. “Chuck” Klein. Klein’s initial 

interest in exobiology was sparked as a professor at the University of 

California at Berkeley, when one of his graduate students regaled him 

with glowing reports on a series of lectures by astronomer Carl Sagan 

on the prospects for extraterrestrial life. As the task was first given 

to Ames, exobiology focused more narrowly on how to identify any 

life encountered beyond Earth and how to sterilize early spacecraft 

to protect Earth and other planets from unknown biocontaminants. 

After moving to Brandeis University, Klein researched the 

possible biochemical processes which might be displayed by nonterrestrial life. Informed by a colleague that Ames was looking for 

someone to head its new exobiology division, Klein took the post. He 

arrived at Ames in 1963 to head the exobiology branch and guided 

construction of Ames’ superb collection of gas chromatographs, 

mass spectrometers, and quarantine facilities. He continued with his 

own research, while also supporting the seminal work of other Ames 

exobiologists such as Cyril Ponnamperuma, who synthesized organic 

molecules under conditions simulating primitive Earth. A year after 

he arrived on Center, DeFrance asked Klein, who had experience 

as chairman of the Brandeis biology department, to become 

director of Ames’ life sciences directorate which would encompass 

both exobiology and human spaceflight research. Klein brought 

intellectual coherence to Ames’ efforts, fought for both support and 

distance from Washington, and did a superb job recruiting scientists 

from academia. Klein led Ames’ life science work for more than 

two decades, building a world-class research group in gravitational 

biology and astrobiology. 

One key to DeFrance’s trust in Klein was their agreement on peer 

review. The NACA aeronautics publications system transitioned 

easily into a NASA publication system for space and materials 

scientists, and maintained its high level of quality through internal 

peer review, tiered publication and public distribution. However, 

NASA publications did not naturally reach the community of 

biologists. Klein insisted he could not recruit good biologists unless 

they could publish their NASA work in outside, proprietary and 

academic journals. Furthermore, many of the principal investigators 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

on the experiments were university employees, and expected to 

publish in ways appreciated by tenure review boards. DeFrance 

appreciated that Klein needed good feedback because he was 

setting the research agenda for this new field, and was performing 

experiments in new environments and with new types of controls. 

So that DeFrance could best represent his agenda at headquarters, 

Klein kept DeFrance abreast of how the results of his division were 

received by professional biologists. 

In the early 1960s, as in the early 1940s, Ames was a construction 

zone. Not only were new arc jet and hypervelocity tunnels being built 

at top speed, but the life sciences division had to build numerous 

facilities from scratch. The first life scientists to move out of their 

temporary trailers and off-site space, in 1964, moved into the new 

biosciences laboratory. There they worked on instrumentation and 

enclosures for spaceflight experiments. This laboratory included an 

animal shelter, where Ames housed a colony of pig-tail macaques 

from southeastern Asia for ground-based control experiments prior 

to the Biosatellite missions. In December 1965, Ames dedicated its 

life sciences research laboratory primarily for exobiology research. 

It was architecturally significant, within the Ames compound of 

square, two story, concrete-faced buildings, because it stood three 

stories tall and had a concrete surfacing dimple like the Moon. On 

each floor were wet laboratories, surrounded by offices along the 

windows. It cost more than $4 million to build and equip its stateof-the-art exobiology and enzyme laboratories. 

These new facilities were designed to help Ames biologists 

understand the physiological stress that space flight and microgravity 

imposed on humans. The Manned Spacecraft Center screened 

individual astronauts for adaptability and trained them, and Ames 

developed the fundamental science underlying this tactical work. 

Mark Patton in the Ames biotechnology division studied the 

performance of humans under physiological and psychological 

stress to measure, for example, their ability to see and process visual 

signals. Other studies addressed how well humans adapted to longterm confinement, what bed-rest studies showed about muscle 

atrophy, and what sort of atmosphere was best for astronauts to 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

breathe. Ames’ growing collection of flight simulators was used 

to study human adaptability to the gravitational stress of liftoff, 

microgravity in space flight, and the vibration and noise of reentry. 

All this data was used to define the shape and function of the Gemini 

and Apollo capsule interiors. 

Ames’ environmental biology division studied the effect of 

spaceflight on specific organs, mostly through animal models. Vance 

Oyama pioneered the use of centrifuges to alter the gravitational 

environment of rats, plants, bacteria, and other living organisms, 

and thus pioneered the field of gravitational biology. In conjunction 

with the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Ames used 

animal models to determine if the brain would be damaged by 

exposure to high-energy solar rays that are usually filtered out by 

Earth’s atmosphere. To support all this life sciences research, Ames 

asked its instrumentation group to use the expertise it had earned 

in building sensors for aircraft to build bioinstrumentation. Under 

the guidance of John Dimeff, the Ames instrumentation branch built 

sophisticated sensors and clever telemetry devices to measure and 

record physiological data with minimal impact on the subjects. 

B I O S A T E L L I T E S 

One constant to all life as we know it is gravity, and biologists 

at Ames developed many of the tools central to understanding 

how gravity affects life. Ames managed the Biosatellite program in 

the late 1960s, the first coordinated effort to use living organisms 

in experiments on gravitational biology. NASA launched three 

Biosatellites between December 1966 and June 1969, each built 

from repurposed Mercury capsules. The first two Biosatellites 

carried thirteen experiments using fruit flies, frog eggs, bacteria or 

wheat seedlings. The first Biosatellite was never recovered because 

its retrorocket failed to ignite, but information gleaned from orbit 

showed it was working well.The second was scheduled to orbit for 72 

hours, but was recovered after 45 hours due to an impending storm 

in the recovery area. Still, it accomplished its primary objective of 

determining if organisms were more sensitive to ionizing radiation 

in microgravity than on Earth. NASA headquarters cancelled the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Biosatellite program, which would have included six spacecraft, 

in 1969 just before the third spacecraft was launched. Since the 

Biosatellites offered the only expected opportunity for flying 

experiments, the headquarters offices for basic bioscience and 

for astronaut-focused research fought bitterly over the program’s 

research goals. Added to that was opposition from the Air Force, 

concerns in Congress about raising costs, and a feeling at Ames that 

they could not properly control design of the spacecraft. 

The third Biosatellite, in addition to the previously flown 

experiment packages, carried a small pig-tail monkey to study 

the effect of spaceflight on performance, cardiovascular health, 

hydration and metabolic state. This experiment was led by a principal 

investigator from the University of California at Los Angeles and 

Charlie Wilson, the Biosatellite project manager at Ames, did not 

properly limit his scientific ambitions.This Biosatellite was scheduled 

to orbit for thirty days, but was deorbited in nine days because the 

health of the monkey rapidly declined. It died soon after landing, 

from a heart attack caused by dehydration. 

The Biosatellites, compared with the Pioneers, were considered a 

learning experience. Most of the experiments worked well, returned 

valuable data, and gave Ames biologists the confidence to build 

autonomous biological experiment packages. The few experiments 

that did not work showed the need for more advanced testing and 

more focused objectives. Regardless of what they learned, Ames 

life scientists faced the prospect that they would have no future 

opportunities to experiment in space. Biosatellite was cancelled, 

power failures crippled Skylab in 1973 making it unable to host 

experiment packages, and the Shuttle would not open its manifest to 

experiments until the early 1980s. The Soviets came to the rescue. 

A good example of Ames’ ability to do pioneering science quietly 

and on a small budget was the Cosmos/Bion missions. Every two to 

four years, between 1975 and 1997, the Soviet Union shot a Cosmos 

biosatellite into space carrying an array of life science experiments, 

many built at Ames, to study how plants and animals adapted to 

microgravity. The Cosmos/Bion program quickly became the single 

best source of data on the effects of weightlessness on earthly life. 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

A unique spirit of cooperation underlay the success of Cosmos/ 

Bion. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War—following the Soviet 

invasion of Afghanistan and the Reagan presidency—life scientists 

from Ames, western and eastern Europe, and the Institute for 

Biomedical Problems in Moscow collaborated on basic research. 

The Soviets, like NASA, had prepared for their early human space 

flights by flying animals in space. They continued their life sciences 

flights into the 1960s and had already flown two Cosmos biosatellites 

before inviting NASA to join the third, to be launched in November 

1975. Delbert Philpott, who had long done research on the effect 

of radiation on eyesight, launched an experiment on a high-altitude 

balloon that drifted into Soviet airspace. This started a conversation 

that led to the Cosmos/Bion invitation. Ames scientists jumped at the 

chance. While Ames had a superb set of ground-based centrifuges 

for use in studying the biological effects of hypergravity, the only way 

to study microgravity was in space. In addition, the Soviets offered to 

pay the entire cost of the spacecraft and launch; NASA need only pay for 

design and construction of experiment payloads to fly on board. During 

the 1970s, this never cost NASA more than $1 million per launch. For 

this relatively small cost, Ames produced some superb data. 

The first launch, Cosmos 782, landed nineteen days later in central 

Asia. For security reasons, Soviet scientists recovered theexperiments 

and returned the samples to Moscow. Eighteen institutions from five 

countries did studies on every major physiological system in the 

rat. Many of these experiments were designed by people at Ames: 

Delbert Philpott of the Ames electron microscope laboratory studied 

radiation bombardment to the retina; Emily Holton measured bone 

density and renewal; Joan Vernikos studied gastric ulceration; 

Adrian Mandel evaluated immunity levels; Henry Leon measured 

degradation of red blood cells; and Stanley Ellis and Richard 

Grindeland charted hormonal levels. As experimental controls, 

the Soviets built a biosatellite mockup that stayed on the ground 

simulating every flight condition but weightlessness, as well as a 

small centrifuge for the biosatellite that kept a small control colony 

at 1G of artificial gravity. Ames scientists concluded that the stress 

on the rats came from weightlessness rather than from other flight 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

conditions, that space flights up to three weeks generally were safe, 

but that specific results needed to be verified. 

After the second flight, Cosmos 936 in August 1977, the results 

were clearer. Basic physiological systems showed no catastrophic 

damage, but there was measurable bone loss and muscle atrophy from 

exposure to microgravity, as well as retinal damage from radiation 

bombardment. Indeed, the regularity of the Cosmos/Bion flights 

let Ames biologists constantly improve their protocols and confirm 

their data. Ames scientists were initially unaccustomed to sending 

up experiment packages every two years, but they eagerly adapted 

to the quickened pace of data analysis, publication, experiment 

proposal, and payload design. New collaborators were added 

constantly, using new types of organisms—plants, tissue culture, fruit 

flies, and fish. Every flight used a mass-produced spherical Vostok 

spacecraft—eight feet in diameter, a volume of 140 cubic feet, with 

active environmental control, and a payload of 2,000 pounds. Ames 

project engineer Robert Mah built the cages and bioinstrumentation 

to fit the space allocated by the Soviets. Kenneth Souza at Ames 

and Lawrence Chambers at NASA headquarters oversaw the entire 

program in one capacity or another, and the Soviets appreciated this 

continuity of leadership that was so rare within NASA. Eugene Ilyin 

led all efforts in Moscow, and Galina Tverskaya of Ames served as 

ambassador on program and technical matters. 

During the 1980s, the cost to NASA rose to an average of $2 

million for each Cosmos/Bion mission, primarily because the 

mission group added a pair of rhesus monkeys as subjects. The 

Soviets had never flown monkeys in space, and NASA had limited 

success. So the Cosmos 1514 mission in December 1983 lasted only 

five days, largely to test life support systems. Not until Cosmos 

2044 in September 1989 would the monkeys fly a full two-week 

mission. These flights displayed the progress Ames had made in 

bioinstrumentation over the previous two decades. Specimens in 

the first Cosmos/Bion missions flew undisturbed, and descriptive 

data were collected post-flight. For the later flights, the animal and 

plant specimens were fully instrumented and data was collected 

continuously during flight. James Connolly became project manager 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

in 1985 and focused the Cosmos experiments to complement those 

now flown aboard the Shuttle. 

The final Cosmos/Bion mission included a rhesus monkey 

experiment devised by American and French scientists. It was 

originally designed to fly aboard the Shuttle, but was cancelled 

because of cost and sensitivity concerns. Ames had developed a 

well-established protocol for the low-cost development of biological 

experimentation, and quickly modified the rhesus project to fly on 

Bion 11 for $15 million, a fraction of the original cost. It launched 

in December 1996 and landed fourteen days later with the monkeys 

in good health. However, a day later, during a biopsy requiring 

anesthesia, one of the monkeys died. A panel of experts convened by 

NASA headquarters confirmed the validity and safety of the rhesus 

research. But animal rights activists vilified this death, and Congress 

questioned why NASA was spending money to help the Russians 

send monkeys into space. Indeed, with the dissolution of the Soviet 

Union, the Russians had begun asking NASA to fund a greater 

portion of the flights. Early in 1997 Congress refused to appropriate 

$15 million for the Cosmos/Bion mission planned for the summer 

of 1998. Few at Ames participated full-time in Cosmos/Bion, since 

the efforts of the life sciences division focused on the space station 

biological research project, so its cancellation had little impact on 

staffing levels. The cancellation, however, immediately degraded 

Ames efforts to pursue a systematic research program. 

G R AV I T A T I O N A L B I O L O G Y 

The Cosmos/Bion program was the free-flier portion of a 

broader research effort at Ames on the prospects of earthly life living 

in space—a program that also included Shuttle-flown and Earthbased experiments. This research work was also pursued on Earth, 

where Ames people devised ingenious ways to explore how humans 

responded to weightlessness even while bathed in gravity. Dolores 

“Dee” O’Hara managed Ames’ human research facility where, since 

the early 1960s, Ames life scientists had refined bed rest into a superb 

tool for understanding specific responses to weightlessness. Bed 

rest with a head-down tilt of six degrees, for example, simulated the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

decreased blood volume incurred during space travel. Joan Vernikos, 

chief of Ames’ life sciences division, used the bed-rest facility to 

determine which methods of plasma expansion made fainting less 

likely upon return to Earth. She also studied how much gravity was 

required to remain healthy, supporting NASA’s decision to provide 

intermittent gravity with an on-board centrifuge rather than rotating 

an entire space station. David Tomko directed the Ames vestibular 

research facility made available to many Ames life scientists studying 

the body’s system of balance and spatial orientation. 

Emily Holton’s research results on how bones and muscles 

atrophy in microgravity are among the most cited in NASA history. 

Her hind limb suspension model, a method of studying bone loss 

in laboratory rats on Earth, was validated on more then fifteen 

spaceflight experiments. It became a compelling example of how 

basic research in space life sciences proves useful in medical research, 

on bone loss in the elderly, on Earth. 

Likewise, researchers interested in hypergravity had access to 

the 20G centrifuge. The 20G centrifuge, built simply under the test 

section of the 40 by 80 foot wind tunnel, was an example of how 

Ames built prototype facilities before committing to construction 

of much larger facilities. The 20G was designed in-house, by the 

research facilities engineering division, led by Robert Egglington. 

John Salas, an expert on electrical feedback controls, designed the 

electrical controls system that rendered the centrifuge controllable, 

and thus man-ratable. It was one of the first centrifuges designed 

with an open truss arm, which meant the test chamber could be 

mounted anywhere along the arm, thus changing the G force. It 

was initially called the planar motion generator, a generic platform 

for human factor studies. Construction was funded through the 

Biosatellite program, to test how well packages flown in Biosatellite 

would survive the hypergravity of take-off and landing. It was 

human-rated in 1964, and remained one of the few human-rated 

centrifuges in operation. It was used almost entirely for human 

factors research rather than astronaut training—which was done at 

the Naval Air Development Center in Pennsylvania or a centrifuge 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

built at the Manned Spaceflight Center. This design worked so well 

that it formed the basis for the 50G centrifuge. 

Design of the 50G started a year after the 20G opened, and the 

50G started its shake-out testing in 1967. Formally called the mancarrying rotation device and centrifuge, it was designed to simulate 

every sensation, other than weightlessness, of a trip to the Moon or 

Mars. In addition to the forces of lift-off and landing, it provided 

angular and vertical motion. The test cabin had a complete set of 

motion controls, computer-driven visual cues, and an environment 

that simulated the temperature, radiation, and vibration environment 

of a space capsule. At the end of a 50 foot arm, driven by a motor 

rated at 18,600 horsepower, the three-person cabin could be 

accelerated to 20G at rates up to 7.5G per second. A smaller cabin 

could be accelerated up to 50G or, if carrying a person, up to the 

level of human tolerance. However, the 50G never performed to 

expectations, and was shut down in the late 1970s. 

By the early 1990s, the 20G was one of six hypervelocity facilities 

at Ames, but the only human-rated centrifuge within NASA. “It’s a 

simple facility,” noted centrifuge director Jerry Mulenburg, “but it’s 

very flexible for our purposes.”148 Ames upgraded its controls and 

data collection system, completed in March 1994, and built a new 

treadmill cab to fit on the end of its 58 foot diameter arm for exercise 

tests in it up to 12.5G. The 20G remained very active in human 

factors research. 

Microgravity, by contrast, could only be sustained in space, where 

it is expensive to send any living thing. Gravitational biology grew 

management-intensive at every step: to select the experiments from 

hundreds of proposals; to oversee the precise construction of habitats 

and biosensors; to ensure that tissues were carefully prepared and 

distributed equitably around the world; to involve every interested 

biologist in reviewing the data; and to make sure the results were 

repeatable from flight to flight with very small numbers of subjects. 

In the mid 1980s, when the Space Shuttle allowed easier access to 

two-week long periods of microgravity and room for a wider array 

of plant and animal habitats, Ames developed experiment packages 

that allowed biologists to ask more complex questions. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Spacelab, a reusable pressurized module flown aboard the shuttle 

orbiter, provided an opportunity to study the effects of weightlessness 

in an integrated fashion. The Ames space life sciences payloads 

office provided half of the experiments flown aboard the Spacelab 

life sciences-1 (SLS-1) mission in June 1991. The crew hooked on 

biomedical sensors, many developed at Ames, to study the effects of 

weightlessness, and ran experiments on animals and plants. Bonnie 

Dalton was project manager and oversaw training of the mission 

specialist crew, coordination of the experiments, and development 

of new biosensors. The Ames payload included two comprehensive 

laboratories. The research animal holding facility (RAHF) provided 

life support to 24 rats, while isolating them from the human crew. 

The general purpose work station was a glove box to contain liquids 

while the crew processed experiments in orbit. 

The SLS-2 (Spacelab life sciences-2) mission flew aboard the 

shuttle orbiter in October 1993 as a continuation and extension of the 

experiments flown aboard SLS-1. Few scientists had an opportunity 

to repeat their studies so completely so soon after first collecting 

data. It marked the first time ever that astronauts collected tissues 

in space. Before then, all tissues were collected by the principal 

investigators after the flight landed, making it impossible to separate 

the physiological effects of microgravity from the hypergravity of 

lift-off and landing. Furthermore, the shuttle payload specialists first 

collected tissues on the second day in space—by sacrificing five rats, 

doing rough dissections, and preserving the tissues—allowing life 

scientists back at Ames to do the fine dissections and to note how 

quickly the organisms adapted to space. Tissues were collected again 

on day fourteen, the day before reentry, so that life scientists could 

study how quickly the organisms readapted to the Earth’s gravitation. 

The speeds of adaptation and readaptation were especially notable in 

experiments on bone density and neurological development. Martin 

Fettman, a veterinarian, flew as the payload specialist responsible 

for the rats, and Tad Savage and John Hines of Ames managed the 

payload of nine experiments. 

Ames life scientists continued to build smaller payloads as 

space opened up aboard individual shuttle flights. For example, in 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

September 1992, Ames investigators flew an experiment aboard the 

STS-47 Spacelab-J mission. Kenneth Souza designed a frog embryo 

experiment, Greg Schmidt served as payload manager, and James 

Connolly designed the frog box. Not only was this the first time 

live frogs flew in space, but they would also shed eggs that would 

be fertilized and incubated in microgravity. The experiment showed 

that reproduction and maturation could occur normally in space— 

at least with amphibian eggs. Biologists had studied amphibian 

eggs for more than a century because of the unique way they orient 

themselves to gravity once fertilized. 

And as small spaces arose in spacecraft manifests, Ames 

continued to fly biological experiments in collaboration with 

international partners. In the mid-1990s, Ames’ work in gravitational 

biology shifted to the Shuttle/Mir program which continued the 

collaboration begun with the Cosmos/Bion missions and paved the 

way for life science research on the international space station. From 

June 1995 to January 1998, Ames managed several experiments 

transferred during the eleven dockings between the Shuttle and the 

Russian Mir space station. For the first time, a complete life cycle 

(seed-to-seed) of plants was lived in space. Desert beetles, previously 

flown on Cosmos/Bion flights, demonstrated the effects of extended 

space travel on a circadian rhythm. Ames researchers swapped tissue 

cultures with their Russian counterparts, gave the Russians a strain 

of wheat to grow aboard Mir, and supplied cardiac monitors and 

bone measuring devices for Mir cosmonauts. Meanwhile, Ames flew 

a number of experiments collaboratively with the European Space 

Agency using its Biorack hardware. 

The STS-90 mission, called Neurolab and launched in April 1998, 

was perhaps the most complex mission flown by NASA bioscientists. 

The laboratory contained a variety of organisms—crickets, fish, mice 

and rats, as well as monitors for the Shuttle astronauts—all designed 

to help explore the impact of gravity on cognition and neural 

development. Neurolab began in 1991 as NASA’s contribution to the 

government’s effort to make the 1990s the decade of the brain. The 

Neurolab announcement of opportunity in 1993 drew 172 proposals 

from around the world. JSC managed the eleven experiments selected 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

that dealt with the Shuttle crew. All the non-human experiments— 

fifteen of the 26 total experiments—were managed by Ames. Chris 

Maese of the Ames life science division served as Neurolab project 

manager, supervising the design and verification of the experiment 

packages. Muriel Ross designed one of the key experiments—her 

third experiment on a Spacelab mission—that led to exciting new 

reinterpretations of neural plasticity in space. 

Neurolab was like a flying, highly sanitary zoo. To accommodate 

the litters of rats, Ames provided the research animal holding 

facilities previously flown on SLS-1 and SLS-2. Mice were housed in 

animal enclosure modules. The Japanese space agency contributed 

the vestibular function experiment unit, which had flown as a 

freshwater habitat on SL-J and IML-2 and which on Neurolab would 

support a saltwater fish, the oyster toadfish. The German Space 

Agency provided an incubator to house the crickets, as well as the 

closed equilibrated biological aquatic system that would incubate 

fresh water plants and animals. Ames also provided its general 

purpose work station, a laminar flow hood developed for in-flight 

experiments, including the first in-flight surgery. The mission made 

for an exciting sixteen days. Some of the Ames payload crew began 

ground control studies and prepared for landing activities. Some sat 

at consoles to answer questions from the Shuttle crew, track hardware 

performance, and record data. Things progressed as planned, until 

the start of the second week. First, the Shuttle system that removed 

excess carbon dioxide from the air appeared to be failing. While 

the Neurolab team began reprioritizing experiments anticipating a 

failure, the Shuttle crew was able to solve the problems by swapping 

out an air filter. A second problem, with the youngest group of 

neonate rats onboard, persisted. The rats were essential to a study 

on whether the nervous system needs gravity to develop. Payload 

commander and in-flight attending veterinarian, Richard Linnehan, 

kept the mortality numbers to a minimum and principal investigators 

earned enough data to achieve their research objectives. Soon after 

the Shuttle landed at KSC, it was clear the rest of the experiments 

had gone well. They were able to examine their crickets, count how 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

many snails were born, perform behavioral testing, and examine 

tissues collected during the flight.149 

Neurolab was the last Shuttle mission to fly the Spacelab module, 

and the last comprehensive life sciences mission NASA planned to 

launch. Shuttle flights thereafter would focus on construction of 

the space station until the opening of the space station itself. When 

the space station was completed, it would present new questions 

life scientists would need to answer and new opportunities to 

experiment. In the meantime, life scientists at NASA Ames looked 

to do more focused studies in small satellites and on Earth. 

A U T O G E N I C F E E D B A C K T R A I N I N G 

One series of experiments—present on many of the life sciencesdedicated Shuttle flights, and intended to help astronauts aboard the 

space station—helped researchers to develop autogenic feedback 

training. Human potential has always fascinated Patricia Cowings— 

both how she could realize her own potential and how she could 

help astronauts realize theirs. While in the graduate program in 

psychology at the University of California at Davis she met Hans 

Mark, who encouraged her to join the Center through the graduate 

research science program. She picked a topic that has guide her 

career, how to train humans to overcome space adaptation syndrome 

(similar to motion sickness) through autogenic feedback (meaning 

training and exercises rather than drugs).150 At Ames she crunched 

the data needed for her dissertation, using the Ames computers in 

the odd hours they were available, thinking all the time about how to 

design a laboratory specifically suited to biofeedback work. 

She entered the civil service in 1978 and started that work. 

Cowings married William Toscano, who had joined her as a research 

associate from the Langley Porter Institute of UC San Francisco 

and they collaborated happily ever after.151 Melvin Sadoff, assistant 

chief in the biomedical research division, proved an adept mentor 

as did psychophysiologist Joseph Sharp, assistant director of life 

sciences. Sharp named her the principal investigator for the Ames 

psychophysiology laboratory and outfitted it with a Barany chair, 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

named for the physician who studied the role of the vestibular 

system in balance. It was like a barber’s chair, except that it cost 

$16,000, the experimenter controlled its rate of rotation on several 

axes, and data from the subject travelled through wires for computer 

analysis. Cowings studied 24 male subjects who experienced motion 

sickness from Coriolis acceleration in the rotating chair, trained 

them to recognized changes to their vital signs, then to use mental 

exercises to control the motion.152 “What were previously considered 

involuntary, or autonomic, responses are in fact voluntary if you are 

taught properly,” said Cowings. This proved a breakthrough in the 

control of motion sickness. Motion sickness would be especially 

problematic when astronauts were able to move about their 

spacecraft, and for two weeks, as they would in the larger shuttle 

orbiter. In 1979 NASA selected Cowings’ experiment—known as 

AFT for autogenic feedback training experiment—to be carried into 

space with the shuttle. 

To support her AFT experiment, Cowings became the first 

woman scientist trained as an astronaut. In contemplating crews for 

the new Space Shuttle, NASA considered training women as payload 

specialists—scientist-astronauts focused on running experiments 

in space. Furthermore, Ames and JSC collaborated on a particular 

experiment, Spacelab mission demonstration III (SMD3) that 

simulated a Shuttle mission dedicated to studying the biological toll 

on humans. Bill Williams of the Ames biosystems division trained 

as the payload specialist with Richard Grindeland and Cowings as 

backups.The press made light of Cowing’s training, especially NASA’s 

lack of space suits that could be worn by women. All recognized that 

Cowing could conceivably become the first woman in space.153 The 

payload specialist would be in charge of about fifty experiments– 

half of them designed at Ames. The candidates trained at Ames, 

first on surgical techniques for research animals, and then on the 

experimental apparatus integrated into the rack configurations. 

The crew back at JSC served as test subjects and practiced the 

experiments inside the Earth-bound Spacelab simulator. 

Meanwhile at Ames, a group led by Hal Sandler and David 

Winter was leading a group of women—twelve Air Force flight 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

nurses—through bed rest exercises to better understand the effect 

of microgravity on women’s bodies. The human body was designed 

to distribute blood despite the pull of gravity. Extended bed rest, like 

microgravity, caused the body to lose a lot of fluid and redistribute 

what remained. In this test, Ames scientists were tracking the effect 

of simulated microgravity on biorythms, muscle atrophy, bone 

density and hormones, comparing the women with tests done on 

men in 1972.154 Cowings would have some data to anticipate the 

affect that microgravity might have on her. 

At the end of Cowings’ two years training for SMD-3, her 

colleagues at Ames threw her a splash-down party. The Shuttle 

program was delayed, and meanwhile NASA instead decided to train 

women as mission specialists (pilots who would fly several missions) 

rather than train scientists as one-flight payload specialists.155 

Cowings’ AFT experiment eventually flew in 1985 on STS 51-C and 

STS 51-B with her on the ground. 

Following SMD3, Cowings continued her work in the 

gravitational research branch.156 She upgraded her system to the 

autogenic feedback system-2 (AFS-2), which was ambulatory. The 

garment, similar to a camisole, included all the necessary transducers 

and signal processors, a feedback display worn on the wrist, and a 

cassette tape recorder. Cowings’ AFTE experiment would fly one 

last time on Spacelab-J. Two astronauts on that flight, Mae Jemison, 

the first African-American women in space, and Mamoru Mohri, 

the first Japanese astronaut, received autogenic feedback training at 

Ames with Cowing and were monitored in space. 

Cowings also began to look for applications of autogenic 

feedback beyond NASA. During the 1990s NASA increasingly 

collaborated with the Russians and Cowings’ Russian collaborator 

invited Cowings and Toscano to Star City in September 1996 to train 

cosmonauts in AFTE in preparation for MIR 23 and 25. The next year, 

in 1997, NASA patented AFTE.157 The patent covered the six-hour 

training program, the AFS-2 equipment, and the software to process 

the data. BioSentient Corp., a company founded by Mae Jemison in 

1999, gained an exclusive license to commercialize the technology 

for nausea, anxiety, diabetic autonomous neuropathy, and other 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

stress-related disorders. Ames work on autogenic feedback shifted 

to military users, who trained a great many more sufferers of motion 

sickness than did NASA. To improve upon a Navy air-sickness 

desensitization program, Cowings began work in 2002 under an 

interagency agreement with Navy researchers in Pensacola, Florida. 

Most human factors scientists change the machine to fit the human. 

Like many of her colleagues in the Ames human systems integration 

division, Cowings studied human potential to modify the human to 

fit the machine. 

S P A C E H A B I T A B I L I T Y 

Byengineering thesemanylife science payloads,Ames researchers 

had learned much about how organisms adapted to microgravity 

and how to sustain life economically in space. Ames people 

authored many of the earliest studies of what long-term settlement 

of space—both in orbit and on other planets—might look like. More 

importantly, Ames did actual experimental and bioengineering work 

that provided the scientific basis for space settlement concepts— 

generating data on exposure and countermeasures to radiation, 

on useable in situ resources, and on life-support in regenerative 

environments. 

In the mid-1960s, Ames also participated in the design of suits 

for astronauts to wear for extravehicular activity. Vic Vykukal led 

Ames’ space human factors staff in designing the AX-1 and AX-2 

suits for extended lunar operations, and in validating the concepts 

of the single-axis waist and rotary bearing joints. Though none of 

these concepts were included in Apollo spacesuits, many were 

incorporated in the next-generation of suits designed for Space 

Shuttle astronauts. The AX-3 spacesuit was the first high-pressure 

suit—able to operate at normal Earth atmospheric pressures—and 

demonstrated a low-leakage, low-torque bearing. The AX-5 suit, 

designed for the space station, was built entirely of aluminum with 

only fifteen major parts. It had stainless steel rotary bearings and no 

fabric or soft parts. The size of the AX-5 could be quickly changed, 

it was easy to maintain, and it offered excellent protection against 

meteorites and other hazards. Ames also developed a liquid-cooled 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

garment, a network of fine tubes worn against the skin to maintain 

the astronaut’s temperature. To expedite Ames’ efforts in spacesuit 

design, in September 1987 Ames would open a neutral buoyancy test 

facility, only the third human-rated underwater test facility in the 

country. In building these suits, Ames relied upon experts in human 

physiology, like John Billingham, joining the Center’s burgeoning 

work in the life sciences. Bruce Webbon continued Ames’ work on 

spacesuits and developed technologies suited for extravehicular 

activity. Well-designed spacesuits also gathered data on the health of 

the astronaut wearing it. Ames consolidated its work in biotelemetry 

into a sensor engineering program, led by John Hines and later 

renamed the Sensor 2000! program. 

Ames work in the engineering of regenerative life support 

systems began in 1979 with a series of workshops, and was followed 

by a series of grants to university researchers. The primary research 

goal was defining a mix of plants that satisfied the human diet 

and improving the energy efficiency of photosynthesis. By 1984 

they had achieved energy conversion efficiencies of nine percent 

with higher plants and eighteen percent with algae. To apply this 

knowledge to future NASA human spaceflight missions, in March 

1990 Ames created an advanced life support division. Initially led 

by William Berry and deputy Lynn Harper, the division developed 

bioregenerative and closed loop life support systems that would 

allow astronauts to colonize the Moon or travel for long periods 

to distant planets. In 1993 Ames built a ground-based, functional 

mockup of a self-contained life support system. Called the controlled 

ecological life support system, or CELSS, it was a twelve square 

meter greenhouse, that required only fifteen kilowatts of energy, and 

by using higher plants provided the nutritional needs of one person, 

while recycling their waste into mineral nutrients and drinkable 

water and scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide.158 The Ames group 

estimated that, compared with resupply from Earth, a CELSS at a 

lunar station would reach a break-even point within five years. 

They also continued working on smaller systems that could be 

useful in the international space station. Some systems had simple 

goals—like a self-contained salad machine designed by Robert 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

MacElroy and Mark Kliss, to grow fresh vegetables aboard the space 

station. Some improved ways of scrubbing waste products and 

gases from a spacecraft atmosphere. Some were more complex, like 

chemical and biological technologies to close the life support loop 

and enable nearly self-sufficient human habitats in space or on other 

planets. All of this work made Ames a leading center in the design 

of biologically sustainable habitats, work that would increasingly 

become useful in designing habitats for Earth. 

SPACE STATION BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECT (SSBRP) 

For more than a decade, Ames led engineering on the space 

station biological research project (SSBRP)—meant to be a complete 

and long duration laboratory for biological research in microgravity. 

The SSBRP would support habitats for a variety of life forms, and 

all the research efforts would focus on the adaptation of Earthly life 

to long-term presence in space. The SSBRP would allow NASA to 

realize some return in scientific research on its massive investment 

in building the station. 

The first report on priorities for life sciences aboard a space 

station appeared in 1982, and Ames life scientists John Billingham 

and Kenneth Souza participated in the many committees over the 

succeeding two decades that honed these research priorities. Ames 

created a centrifuge project office in 1984, led by Roger Arno, which 

authored requirements for a centrifuge, drew together a scientific 

working group, and did hardware feasibility studies on the centrifuge, 

a glovebox, and primate, rodent and plant habitats. The centrifuge 

would provide artificial gravity to specimens while in orbit, and thus 

would be important as an experimental control. In 1992, a separate 

effort to define a gravitational biology facility was established 

at NASA Ames to focus on cell and developmental biology. Both 

facilities were designed as part of an American laboratory, a node, 

aboard the station. 

The SSBRP module was redesigned as often as the space station 

itself. NASA initially intended for the station to primarily support 

scientific research, but during the mid-1990s more than $1 billion 

was moved from the science facilities to pay for basic construction 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

of the station itself. In 1994, the two Ames groups were merged in 

the SSBRP, led by John Givens as program manager and Orlando 

Santos as chief scientist. NASA tasked them to reduce its cost and 

complexity—or “descope” the project.159 The various parts under 

design would be housed in a single centrifuge accommodation 

module. In 1995, NASA assigned construction of the centrifuge and 

glovebox to the Japanese space agency to offset the payment NASA 

would receive for later launching other Japanese laboratory modules 

to the station. For the American-built portions of the SSBRP, rather 

than relying on a single aerospace firm to do systems engineering, 

Ames integrated the parts from various manufacturers. 

Despite the descoping, the SSBRP remained a very complex 

system. Whereas experiment packages on the shuttle mostly used air 

from the main cabin, the station habitats were self-contained. This 

meant additional layers of redundancy and monitoring. The most 

important piece of equipment was the centrifuge, on which various 

habitats would house control groups under artificial gravity. The 

centrifuge initially measured 2.5 meters in diameter, could rotate at 

selectable rates from 0.01G to 2G, and would be human-rated so that 

the crew could experience 1G at times during their stay in space. It 

was also designed so a habitat could be removed without stopping 

the centrifuge. The human-rating and extraction capability were 

removed during the 1994 descoping exercise, but the large-scale and 

long-term exposure of rats to both microgravity and artificial gravity 

remained a key part of the SSBRP research program. 

Three holding racks held microgravity habitats for a variety 

of life forms: rats and mice, insects, plants, small fresh water and 

marine organisms, avian eggs, and one-celled organisms. A glove 

box would allow two astronauts to perform dissections, transfer 

samples, and conduct photomicroscopy while keeping the biological 

samples isolated from the rest of the space station. Flash freezers 

would preserve samples for return to Earth. And a sophisticated data 

collection system would telemeter data back to scientists at Ames, 

who would then convey it to university biologists around the world. 

Ames began to solicit proposals for experiments from collaborating 

biologists, so that the experiments run on the SSBRP would study 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the effects of microgravity on virtually every physiological system.160 

When John Givens retired in 2000, George Sarver became 

program manager and parts of the SSBRP began to fly. Three pieces 

of SSBRP equipment tested well on shuttle flights to the space station. 

Early in 2001, an autonomous radiation monitoring system flew to 

the station. Later in 2001, an avian development facility, basically a 

self-contained egg incubator, was flown to the station though it stayed 

aboard the shuttle. In April 2002 the biomass production system, a 

versatile plant habitat based on work done for the CELSS program, 

was controlled onboard the station from Ames. After the station 

crew successfully completed an experiment on photosynthesis— 

anticipating the day plants would be used to regenerate the station 

atmosphere—the habitat was returned to Ames for refinements. 

By 2003 all themajor technical concerns had been resolved—most 

importantly on how to isolate any vibrations from the centrifuge from 

ramifying through the station. The centrifuge had passed its critical 

design review, all the equipment had been fabricated and stored in a 

high bay clean room at Ames. Though it had been descoped several 

times in response to funding cuts, the project remained on budget. 

Unexpectedly, the SSBRP suffered an ugly death. When Sean O’Keefe 

saw that total station costs had risen $4 billion over its planned 

costs, largely because of a Clinton administration commitment 

to the Russian part of the program, he decided to cancel the crew 

habitation module and the X-38 crew rescue vehicle. Station crew 

would be limited to three astronauts rather than six. Since it took 

the time of two astronauts just to maintain the station, that meant no 

time would be available to do research, and thus there was no need 

to complete the SSBRP. Plus, a human research facility, managed by 

the Johnson Space Center had mated to the station in March 2001, 

and was returning biomedical data on changes in humans during 

prolonged space flight. The station’s international partners objected 

to the downsizing, and NASA reinstated funding to build equipment 

that might someday support the larger crew. Still, in response to 

concerns about the smaller crew size, the Ames SSBPR group studied 

ways to automate the cell culture unit. 

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S p a c e L i f e S c i e n c e s 

When Michael Griffin again descoped plans for the space station 

to free up funds for the Constellation program, in 2004 he declared 

the SSBRP non-essential. Congress reinstated funding, which NASA 

refused. Griffin toured NASA Ames and saw all the equipment 

built to fly in the SSBRP but remained unmoved: “We just don’t 

need all this stuff,” program manager George Sarver rmembers him 

remarking.161 In 2005 NASA zeroed out SSBRP funding from its 

budget, and succeeded in killing it. It also cancelled the work done by 

the Japanese, though NASA later stood by its commitment to launch 

the Japanese module. All the hardware constructed was scrapped, 

with a few parts sent to the station as spares, and three racks built 

by Boeing sent to Kennedy Space Center for possible future use. 

More than a hundred jobs were eliminated, mostly within Lockheed 

Martin Space Operations, the contractor that supported the SSBRP 

effort at Ames. 

Most damagingly, the community of space biologists lost their 

already irregular access to space. Bion/Cosmos had not flown 

American experiments since 1997, and after the Columbia accident 

in 2002 shuttle flights focused on completing the station. In 

December 2006 Ames and university partners sent the tiny GeneSat 

into orbit and in May 2009 Ames sent PharmaSat, a small biological 

nanosatellite, into space. Both were dedicated to single experiments 

using microbes. Without access to microgravity, many space 

biologists abandoned their research efforts in gravitational biology. 

The space life sciences, an enormous part of the intellectual life of 

the Center since the 1960s, and despite the early success of the small 

biosatellites, by 2010 was much diminished. 

209 
A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

C H A P T E R 6 

Information Technology 

Information technology (IT) at NASA Ames has always been 

both a research tool and a mission. NASA Ames scientists have often 

leveraged expertise in IT to bolster their research and collaboration. 

This chapter focuses instead on how Ames took the lead in developing 

new IT platforms for NASA. The development of IT platforms at 

Ames follows two trajectories. The first follows expanding hardware 

and infrastructure. At Ames, this revolved around the big leaps 

in technology needed for birthing supercomputers, starting with 

the Illiac in the early 1970s, extending through the Cray and SGI 

clusters in the 1980s and 1990s and the Columbia supercomputer in 

the 2000s. It included pioneering work in internetworking, notably 

Ames’ early role in the development of routing and packet switching 

technology. Capabilities also include ways to gather and display data, 

as with Ames’ work on pilot perception, cockpit design, telepresence, 

and new sensors. The display of data includes the development of 

graphics terminals and virtual reality. Ames’ later basic research into 

robotics also falls into the category of IT-driven capabilities. 

The second trajectory revolves around those writing code to 

solve NASA’s problems. The best example of this is computational 

fluid dynamics, a set of software tools which spread throughout the 

aerospace industry to allow for modeling of complex airflows before 

metal was cut. Other examples include climate modeling, vehicle 

health monitoring, and computational chemistry, especially as it 

pertained to the birth of the universe and to nanotechnology. 

Ames’ location in Silicon Valley, the center of the global IT 

industry, plays an important role in its history in information 

technology. Did Ames become a center of excellence in IT because 

it was situated in Silicon Valley, or did it have a role in creating the 

IT industry that blossomed around it? The answer is that innovation 

flowed both ways. Much historical literature on the role of Stanford 

University in the growth of Silicon Valley focuses on spin-offs, of 

faculty and graduate students forming companies around engineering 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

ideas. NASA Ames’ contributions to Silicon Valley are as important, 

but different. In Silicon Valley, innovation is driven in part by people 

moving easily between firms to cross-pollinate technological plans. 

But Ames people are sticky. Few leave to start firms; most that do 

leave join the engineering ranks of established firms. Silicon Valley 

leaders often lament not being able to hire away Ames talent more 

easily. Lots of NASA-developed technology is licensed out, and 

NASA documents spin-offs closely. But few NASA spin-offs have 

been breakthrough products. 

Rather Ames’ primary contribution to Silicon Valley has been as 

a good lead customer—in an engineering sense. NASA can let grants 

to develop interesting technologies before they are far enough along 

to be called products. Two types of integrated circuits, VLSI and 

MEMS chips, are good examples of products developed on NASA 

grants. Through Space Act agreements, NASA Ames can make 

government facilities available to any variety of corporate partners. 

The MAE-West router and SGI supercomputers are good examples 

of technologies developed through partnerships. NASA has a welldeveloped procurement hierarchy, which means companies get 

a thorough review of their products, and NASA engineers often 

understand how the equipment they buy will need to be broken 

in. Visualization systems are good examples of technologies that 

Ames people helped shepherd to usefulness. And while the types 

of information technologies pioneered at Ames has changed 

dramatically over the decades, one constant has been the value Ames 

has placed on serving as a partner-like customer. 

S U P E R C O M P U T I N G 

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)—using computers to 

depict air flows—was one of NASA’s most important contributions 

to the American aerospace industry. CFD emerged as a scientific 

discipline largely because of work done at Ames. Two events mark its 

birth. Harvard Lomax, a theoretical aerodynamicist, in 1969 formed 

a computational fluid dynamics branch and recruited a world-class 

group of researchers to staff it. Second, in 1970, Ames negotiated 

the acquisition of the Illiac IV, the world’s first massively parallel 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

computer. As with most things at Ames, though, these two birthing 

events merely accelerated established tradition. 

Information technology had a pre-history with the NACA in 

that Ames in the 1950s actively bought and used digital and analog 

computers in reducing its data. Computers at Ames initially were 

women, hired to generate smooth curves from the raw data of tunnel 

and flight tests using electromechanical calculators and mathematics 

textbooks for reference. In 1947, Harry Goett bought Ames’ first 

electronic computer, a Reeves Electronic Analog Computer (REAC) 

and used it to drive simulators to study aircraft stability and control. 

Under the leadership of Stanley Schmidt in the dynamics analysis 

branch, Ames procured about a dozen analog computers in the early 

1950s, mostly single purpose machines. Ames was the first customer 

for an analog flight simulator built by GPS Inc., a firm spun off from 

the Lincoln Laboratory.162 Using these computers, Ames simulated 

the flying characteristics of several new aircraft, such as a study of 

roll induced instability in the F-100A.163 

Despite the usefulness of analog computing, Ames made an 

early move into multipurpose digital computing. The first digital 

computer, an IBM card program calculator, arrived at Ames in 1951. 

Ames’ electrical staff lashed together three accounting machines 

from the IBM product line—a punch card reader, a printer, and an 

electronic calculator—and taught it to do mechanical reduction 

of wind tunnel data. To make better use of this machine, in 1952, 

DeFrance formed an electronic computing machines division, led by 

WilliamMersman, with help from Marcie Chartz. By 1955Mersman’s 

division had succeeded in connecting an Electrodata Datatron 205 

computer directly to strain gauges in the 6 by 6 foot tunnel and the 

Unitary plan tunnels, making it one of the first computers to do realtime compilations of test results. Now, tunnel operators could see 

quickly if their setup generated errors that required rerunning a test. 

In 1955 Ames acquired an IBM 650 digital computer for theoretical 

work. In 1956, they added a second Datatron computer for wind 

tunnel reduction both off-line and in real time. Because this was a 

unique application of the equipment, Ames aerodynamicists also 

first learned to do their own programming. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

For seventeen years, Harv Lomax shared a carpool with 

Marcie Chartz Smith, a woman computer who joined Mersman’s 

division and who later became chief of the computer systems and 

research division. Lomax worked on simplified fluid flow equations, 

developing mathematical approximations of idealized airflows with 

no fluid friction, heating, compression or turbulence. One morning, 

Lomax complained about having to redo a hand calculation because 

he used the wrong integral. Once at work, Smith wrote a one-line 

equation, pulled priority on the IBM calculator, and Lomax had his 

answer by eight o’clock that morning. Lomax became an instant 

convert, though other Ames theoreticians remained unconvinced 

that computers were here to stay. That changed in 1958 when 

Ames acquired an IBM 704 digital computer capable of running the 

Fortran programming language, with which they could calculate area 

rules that reduced drag on wing-body configurations. Calculations 

were a batch operation, done in octal dumps, meaning they did not 

know until after the punch cards finished running if there was a 

programming fault. So Lomax hooked up a cathode ray tube so he 

could watch the transactions in process and could stop the run if he 

saw a fault. Lomax continued to use digital computers for theoretical 

work in aerodynamics, but largely to automate the mathematics.164 

There was little direct connection, throughout the 1960s, between 

theoretical computing in aerodynamics and aircraft design. 

Ames opened its first dedicated, central computer facility (CCF) 

in 1961 adjacent to the circle ringing the headquarters building. At the 

heart of the CCF was a Honeywell 800 which replaced the Datatron 

and, until it was retired in 1977, collected data from all the wind 

tunnels for on-line data reduction.The CCF building also included an 

IBM 7094, used primarily for theoretical aerodynamics. Ames took 

its first step toward distributed computing in 1964 by adding an IBM 

7040 to front-end the 7094 so that the time-consuming input-output 

efforts were not done directly on the 7094 computer processor. Ames 

acquired two smaller, short-lived mainframes—an IBM 360/50 in 

1967 and an IBM 1800 in 1968. Mainframe computing took a giant 

leap forward in 1969, when Ames acquired an IBM duplex 360/67 as 

surplus from the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory project in 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

Sunnyvale. Now on one time-shared computer, Ames did scientific 

computing, administrative data processing, and real time wind 

tunnel data reduction. By adding remote job entry stations around 

the Center, Ames cut its teeth on distributed interactive computing. 

Lomax’s principal contribution to CFD was using finite-difference 

techniques to calculate unsteady flows around aircraft as they 

reached the speed of sound. Using the IBM 7094, in 1964 he wrote 

a program to predict flows past blunt-nosed objects during reentry 

which was widely cited in studies of manned space capsules.165 His 

signal contribution came as a mentor, in training students in a new 

field. More important, he taught them to trust themselves and each 

other. Too often, graduate students would write a code to solve a 

problem, publish the results, throw away the code, and then start 

on a wholly different code. Lomax convinced them to leave their 

code unmodified, on Ames memory, so that other researchers could 

refine and verify it. As they did, the codes became more useful to 

aircraft designers. And by coming to Ames to refine the codes, these 

researchers were exposed to the problems on NASA’s agenda. Ames 

began to make some headway on computing separated flows, airfoil 

buffeting, aerodynamic noise, and boundary-layer transitions. The 

Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model, became the leading application 

for code validation, as Lomax put it, “in so far as its good points and 

its bad points are known for more types of flow applications in a 

wider variety of situation than any other.”166 

While NASA Ames had built a solid collection of computers and 

staff with programming expertise, by the early 1970s its computing 

capability was hardly unique among federal research facilities. With 

the acquisition of the Illiac IV Ames leaped to the cutting edge of 

supercomputing. The Illiac started a new era in supercomputing, in 

which speed was sought from innovative architecture rather than 

faster components. 

The Illiac IV originally had been built as a research tool in what 

was then called non-von Neumann computer architecture, and 

later called parallel processing. Burroughs Corporation built it, 

with funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 

based on a design by Daniel Slotnick of the University of Illinois, 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

for installation in the computer science department at the UrbanaIllinois campus. However, student unrest at campuses around the 

country, especially at the University of Illinois, made DARPA want 

to put the Illiac somewhere more secure. When Hans Mark heard 

through his old friend, Edward Teller, that the Illiac was in play, he 

asked Dean Chapman, his new chief of the thermo and gas-dynamics 

division, and Loren Bright, director of research support, to negotiate 

an agreement that got the Illiac sited at Ames. Chapman and Bright 

promised that Ames could get the Illiac to work and prove the concept 

of parallel processing. They also promised Ames would get a return 

on DARPA’s $31 million investment by generating applications in the 

emergent field of computational fluid dynamics—using computers 

to model airflows and thus do the parameter variation phases of 

aircraft design on computers rather than in wind tunnels. 

The Illiac IV arrived at Ames in April 1972. It was the world’s first 

massively parallel computer, with 64 central processing units, and was 

the first major application of semiconductor rather than transistor 

memory. For three years, the Illiac was little used as researchers 

tried to program the machine knowing the results would likely be 

erroneous. In June 1975, Ames made a concerted effort to shake-out 

the hardware—replace faulty printed circuit boards and connectors, 

repair logic design faults in signal propagation times, and improve 

power supply filtering to the disk controllers. Not until November 

1975 was it declared operational, meaning the hardware worked as 

specified, but it remained very difficult to use. Designed for research 

in computer science, it lacked even the most primitive self-checking 

features. The programming language Burroughs wrote for it, called 

GLYPNIR, was general enough for computer science research but 

too bulky for computational fluid dynamics. Most CFDers at Ames 

found it easier to continue writing Fortran codes and running them 

on existing serial computers. 

A few persisted, however. Robert Rogallo began looking at the 

architecture and the assembly language of the Illiac IV in 1971, 

even before it arrived. In 1973, he offered a code called CFD that 

looked like Fortran, and could be debugged on a Fortran computer, 

but that forced programmers to take full advantage of the parallel 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

hardware by writing vector rather than scalar instructions. Vector 

computing meant that programmers wrote algorithms that divided 

a problem into simultaneous discrete calculations, sent them out to 

the Illiac’s 64 processors, then merged the results back into a single 

solution. Some problems in CFD were especially amenable to parallel 

processing. For example, air flow over a wing could be divided into 

cubic grids—containing air of specific temperatures and pressures— 

and the algorithms could compute how these temperatures and 

pressures change as the air moves into a new grid. 

Ames acquired a CDC 7600 computer in 1975, built by Seymour 

Cray of theControlDataCorporation and also surplused from theU.S. 

Air Force. In translating Illiac-specific CFD language to run on the 

7600, Alan Wray wrote VECTORAL, a more general programming 

language used in some form in all subsequent supercomputers at 

Ames. Hans Mark felt the younger researchers, who struggled to 

get the Illiac to work, never appreciated the risk he took in getting 

the Illiac to Ames. With just these early codes for CFD, Ames had 

proven the value of locating the Illiac at Ames. 

By the late 1970s, Ames leadership began to look for a way to 

build a more coherent program. Mostly, they wanted a new Cray 1S 

supercomputer to replace the Illiac. They initially planned to buy one 

and rent time on it to interested researchers, but instead decided to 

work around all the problems posed by that plan. Such a large capital 

purchase would likely be precluded by the Carter administration. If 

it did get the money, Ames would need to compete the contract, 

which could take five years, and they would likely end up with a DEC 

computer which would satisfy the requirements but not do what 

they wanted. If they tried to sole source the procurement to Cray, 

there would be protests that would delay delivery of the computer 

for months. 

So Ames leadership defined the NAS as a program. (Initially NAS 

stood for numerical aerodynamic simulation facility, later changed 

to the NASA advanced supercomputing facility.) Rather than the 

NAS being one computer, it was a program whereby one contractor 

supplied “computer cycles and systems engineering.” The contractor 

would then buy a series of computers, upgraded as technology 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

improved, eventually housed in one facility, and internetworked 

around the United States. This larger vision for the NAS was more 

palatable within the NASA budget, and the NAS was funded in 

1983. As the contractor to support the NAS, in June 1983 James 

Arnold and Ken Stevens of Ames’ astrophysics division encouraged 

formation of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science 

(RIACS), allied it with the Universities Space Research Association 

(USRA), and recruited Peter Denning as its director. 

Arnold remembers that during a stint at NASA headquarters, he 

witnessed firsthand how the government works at the administrator’s 

level. On one quiet night, the day before Thanksgiving, Arnold had 

to write a reclama for the OMB to explain why RIACS deserved 

funding. Hans Mark was the deputy administrator for NASA and 

the two had developed a good friendship. Arnold visited Mark on 

this evening and Mark showed Arnold a hand-written note that he 

had just composed for the OMB. Because of the note, the funding 

for RIACS survived. “That’s what sold it,” recalled Arnold, “I had 

nothing to do with that. It was all Hans.”167 

Though Ames had signalled its commitment to the development 

of parallel supercomputing, its first hardware purchases signalled 

their larger vision for the NAS. With the encouragement of RIACS, 

NAS bought two fairly standard DEC VAX 11/750 computers and 

named them Wilbur and Orville (back then all computers were 

given names to facilitate networking). These VAXen were then 

linked together by ethernet and by hyperchannels, then a fast and 

expensive way to transfer data between machines. Ames continued 

to build a network-centric system of these VAXen by using UNIX as 

their operating system and networking via TCP/IP (for transmission 

control protocol/internetworking protocol, the communication 

method on which the internet was built). Wilbur and Orville 

functioned as a friendly front door to the Crays at the NAS, used for 

compiling code and data and facilitating internetworking. 

Thereafter, supercomputers arrived at the NAS in a regular flow. 

Ames installed the Cray 1S in 1981, followed by the CDC Cyber 

205 in 1984 (the largest ever constructed), the Cray X-MP/22 in 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

1984, and the Cray X-MP/48 in 1986. In addition, Ames was the 

launch customer for a variety of mini-supercomputers introduced 

in the early 1980s—like the Convex C-1, the Alliant FX/8, and the 

Thinking Machines Connection Machine. The Intel iPSC Hypercube 

and Sequent Computer supercomputers, installed in 1985, allowed 

expanded research in parallel algorithms. 

Because of the rapid development of new chips useful in parallel 

computing, the NAS needed a measurable standard by which to 

assess new processors and their ability to work in the NAS. The 

result was the NAS parallel benchmarks, a standard released in 1982 

to objectively study the performance of parallel supercomputers.168 

It included five kernels and three CFD applications, and was also 

useful in evaluating new architectural concepts. By the 1990s the 

NAS benchmark was widely used for evaluating the performance of 

parallel computers. 

All these computing tools attracted computing talent. In 

keeping with the USRA charter of cross-organizational teamwork, 

RIACS was designed as a bridge between Ames, the Silicon Valley 

computer industry, and universities around the world. RIACS forged 

a match between the scientific problems of interest to NASA and 

the potential of new supercomputers, then created efficient new 

algorithms to solve problems in CFD and computational chemistry. 

Ames researchers focused on theory, while the visiting scholars 

at RIACS pioneered applications, either patented or open-source. 

These would come to include new processes for software testing, 

aerodynamic simulations, autonomous vehicles, and enterprise 

collaboration.169 

The NAS building opened in March 1987, and gave a physical 

center to Ames’ established expertise in graphical supercomputing, 

parallel processing, and numerical aerodynamic simulation. At the 

heart of the NAS was one of the world’s greatest central processors, 

the Cray-2 supercomputer. The Cray-2 had an enormous 256 million 

word internal memory—sixteen times larger than any previous 

supercomputer—because Ames CFDers had visited Seymour Cray 

to impress upon him the need for massive memory that was quickly 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

addressable. It was the first Cray to run the Unix operating system, 

the emerging open standard in scientific and university computing, 

which brought new blood into the field ofCFD. It had cost $30 million, 

computed a quarter of a billion calculations per second, and had to be 

cooled by liquid nitrogen rushing through clear plastic tubes. Ames 

acquired the Cray-2 in September 1985, and had already written the 

technical specification for the computer that would supersede it. 

The Cray Y-MP arrived in August 1988, sporting eight central 

processors, 32 megawords of central memory, and a $36.5 million 

price. The Y-MP performed so much better because its bipolar 

gates allowed faster access to memory than the Cray-2’s metal 

oxide semiconductor memory. The NAS plan was to always have in 

operation two of the fastest supercomputers in the world—one fully 

operational and one going through its shake-out period. By May 

1993 the NAS added to its stable of computers the Cray Y-MP C90, 

then the world’s fastest, and six times faster than the Y-MP. 

The NAS building itself was sophisticated, flexible, and capable of 

constant upgrades. As a home for the Cray, it was kept cool and clean 

by an air system thirty times more powerful than the systems serving 

any normal office building of 90,000 square feet. NASA expected to 

fund ongoing operations at the NAS with an annual appropriation 

of about $100 million, so the NAS also housed one of the world’s 

great computer staffs and a range of input and output devices. 

Support processors had friendly names, like Amelia, Prandtl, and 

Wilbur—the smaller processors named for aviators, the larger ones 

for mathematicians. The NAS acquired the earliest laser printers and 

graphical displays. F. Ron Bailey, NAS project manager, directed his 

staff to provide supercomputing tools for aerospace research which 

took them into the development of computing technology itself. 

I N T E R N E T W O R K I N G 

Though the NAS was a physical center for computing at Ames, 

its tentacles reached into much larger communities. First, around 

Ames, NAS staff worked directly with wind tunnel and flight 

researchers to make CFD an important adjunct to their work. 

Virtually every other research community at Ames—those working 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

in the life, planetary, astronomical, and materials sciences—found 

the staff of Ames’ computational branch ready to find new ways to 

apply supercomputing to research questions. 

Plus, the NAS was born wired into the larger world of science. 

ARPA had decided that its Illiac should be accessible via the 

Arpanet—an early network of data cables that linked universities and 

national laboratories. Hans Mark agreed, based on his experience 

in using supercomputers in the nuclear laboratories following the 

end of above ground tests. Ames built an IMP, an interface message 

processor, now known as a router, to connect Illiac to the Arpanet. 

Notably, it used TCP/IP, a communications protocol that would drive 

the future growth of the internet. The Illiac became the fourteenth 

node on the Arpanet and the first supercomputer. 

Editors, compilers, and other support software for the 

Illiac initially ran only on IBM, DEC, or Burroughs computers. 

Programmers submitted their code while remotely logged into the 

IBM 360, usually between the hours of midnight and eight o’clock 

in the morning, and results were returned back over the Arpanet. 

This made the scientific community more aware of bandwidth 

and reliability limitations of the network, and to solve those Ames 

continued to lay cables from the NAS leading to the Arpanet ring 

around the Bay Area. 

A shift to the Unix operating system also spurred the growth 

of networking at Ames. Budget pressures in the mid-1970s forced 

Ames to do more with less. Jim Hart, on the technical staff of the 

computation division, convinced Ames leadership to buy VAX 

mainframe computers then rent time on them to research groups 

around the Center. Most VAXen then were operated as stand-alone 

machines with minimal memory. Hart instead acquired smaller, nonbatch VAX computers, with mass storage and graphics capabilities, 

and linked them together. Beginning in 1978, Ames acquired several 

VAX computers and soon Ames had the largest DECnet in the 

world—outside of the Digital Equipment Corporation itself—and a 

reputation for aggressive development of distributed computing. 

Notably, many of these DEC computers ran the Unix operating 

system. Bill Joy at UC Berkeley, and later a founder of Sun 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Microsystems, had first ported Unix to a VAX. Unix was an open 

source operating system, and thus substantially cheaper than DEC’s 

proprietary operating system. Programmers at Ames also considered 

Unix more flexible and stable, and VAXen running Unix achieved 

faster speeds than with the DEC operating system. Ames struggled 

to get a license for Unix because AT&T, the company that wrote 

the operating system, was not willing to indemnify Ames for any 

problems with it. The first Unix machines on Center were bought 

by RIACS for Dave Nagel in the Ames life sciences division. Nagel 

wanted to use the computers to expand collaborative work in human 

factors: including the work of Everett Palmer on cockpit displays, 

Steve Ellis on visual displays, and Andrew “Beau” Watson on a 

computational model of human visual motion perception. Ames had 

access to speech synthesis software that the human factors group 

made good use of. Soon after, Unix proliferated on the Ames VAXen. 

However, VAX computers remained an expensive way to run 

Unix. In November 1982, Ames computer scientists Eugene Miya, 

Creon Levit and Thomas Lasinski circulated a message asking “What 

is a workstation?” specifically, how should a workstation divide 

with the network and the mainframe the many tasks of scientific 

computing. They compiled the comments into the specifications 

for the first graphic design workstations built by local firms with 

close ties to Ames—Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, Inc. 

Unix would not have penetrated Ames had not a contracting officer, 

Rosemary Buchanan who reported to Ron Bailey in the NAS, been 

able to procure the machines from start-up vendors. With the rise of 

Unix workstations, most of which supported ethernet networks and 

TCP/IP, internetworking accelerated. The next piece of technology 

in the expansion of the internet was the router. 

Eric Schmidt of Google and of the Carnegie Mellon University 

board of directors reflected at the dedication of the CMU class 

building in October 2003 at the NASA Research Park: “A decade 

ago one-fifth of all the world’s internet traffic travelled through 

this place, through the MAE-West server at NASA Ames and the 

NASA Research and Education Network.” Ames’ place at the birth 

of the internet is usually attributed to Milo Medin. Medin arrived 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

at Ames in 1984, after having studied at UC Berkeley and spending 

a few years programming supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore 

National Laboratory. As a contractor at Ames through Informatics 

and Sterling Software, his immediate task was to network the NAS, 

and NAS leadership encouraged his enthusiasm for building an open 

network that could link many government research centers. 

The dominant networking standards, both at Ames and around 

the world, were proprietary. Throughout most of NASA it was 

an IBM protocol, and around the scientific community it was 

Digital’s DECnet. In 1984 Ames, primarily through RIACS, began 

development work on a local area network for the international 

space station, called LANES. They chose the dedicated computerto-computer wiring of the DECnet. Jim Hart, as the civil servant 

in charge of internetworking at Ames, considered DECnet a good 

vehicle. Some networks at Ames and elsewhere were already using 

open-source packet switching TCP/IP internet protocols on local 

networks, but these networks weren’t interconnected. 

In 1987, NASA headquarters asked the Ames central computing 

facility to form a NASA Science Internet project office (NSI) which 

would merge NASA’s DECnet-based network into a secure TCP/ 

IP network. NASA had hoped to achieve operating efficiencies by 

consolidating networks. The larger the network, the cheaper each 

site was to support. Furthermore, in 1987 the NSF had started 

laying fast T1 internet cables around the nation, and within three 

years would began laying even faster T3 cables. NASA wanted to 

be able to manage the increased data flow. Medin and Ames made 

a commitment to the networking technology that allowed closer 

collaboration with universities and industry: TCP/IP, servers running 

the UNIX operating system as refined by Silicon Valley firms like Sun 

Microsystems, and object-oriented client computers like the Apple 

Macintosh. The first NSI effort linked Ames with the Goddard, 

Marshall and JPL centers. It was funded by the NASA office of space 

science and applications to link project scientists working on Earth 

remote sensing data. 

Through the NASA Science Internet, NASA also got added 

security. On the night of November 2, 1988 a computer virus, one of 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the first, was released onto the network. Medin and John Lekashman 

of the NAS detected the virus, isolated the NAS from it, then sent 

notices to systems administrators around the country advising them 

how to control the virus. Peter Gross at Ames had put the Center 

on the USEnet communication network, which was how systems 

administrators then communicated. By the next morning, Ames 

was swamped with telephone calls from network managers seeking 

advice on how to apply a software patch and bring their networks 

back onto the national network. In this one episode, by providing 

leadership on network security, Ames had proven its value as a 

central node in the internet.170 

In 1989, Medin built the first interconnect facility at Ames that 

used TCP/IP to run wide-area networks. Rather than build one 

huge, expensive network, he built a network of backbone networks, 

called the federal internet exchange (FIX West) that was at the heart 

of the NASA Science Internet. Medin and Jeff Burgan also helped 

develop some of the first router protocols, including OSPF, for the 

open shortest-path first interior gateway protocol, which permitted 

routers to exchange information about the accessibility of other 

networks.171 In April 1990, Medin switched the entire NASA Science 

Internet to OSPF. By supporting the open standard, NASA Ames 

helped establish TCP/IP as the major protocol for the internet. 

The NSI enabled exchange of data between several government 

networks (notably the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET 

and its regional BARRnet, the Department of Energy’s ESnet, the 

Department of Defense’s MILNET, and DARPA’s TWBNET). NSI 

also had international connections to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, 

Chile and several European countries. FIX West was the first switch 

to use a multicast protocol, all ethernet peered. The entire NSI was 

displayed on an electronic map in the network operations center on 

Center. By the time the Cray Y-MP was operational in 1989, more 

than 900 scientists from more than a hundred locations around the 

United States were wired into the NAS over the internet. By 1994 

the NASA Science Internet linked researchers at 175 sites in sixteen 

countries and six continents (including Antarctica). The NSI was 

among the largest networks, and certainly the most diverse in the 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

type of connections. Almost all of Australia’s access to the internet 

globally came through the NSI. 

While the NSI was borne of a need to save money by consolidating 

operations, it expanded through service to specific NASA programs. 

With the discovery of polar ozone depletion in the late 1980s, NASA 

called for increased cooperation between science and meteorological 

organizations around the world, especially on the construction 

of models of global climate change.172 NSI built a network, at the 

request of NASA’s Earth Observing System program, that transfered 

the data—from satellites, data archives, and climate models—needed 

for this global research program. 

NASA Ames had hosted FIX West for five years when, in October 

1994, it was asked to build MAE West, the first major interconnect 

point on the west coast, designed to support the nascent commercial 

internet. When the National Science Foundation divested itself of the 

ARPAnet in May 1993 it sold its four nodes to telecommunications 

firms. The fiber company MFS Inc. bought the network that served 

the Washington beltway and named it MAE East (for metropolitan 

area exchange). In October 1994, seeing the explosive growth of 

internet traffic on the west coast, the NSF asked Ames to extend 

its interconnection service to everyone. MFS also had an office in 

San Jose, and using a Space Act agreement to reimburse NASA 

for the use of federal facilities, connected the Ames FIX with what 

became the MAE West network. MAE West was many machines, 

a conglomeration of servers, routers and switches, where diverse 

networks traded information. MAE West was the first distributed 

network, in that its machines were located at both Ames and at an 

office on Market Street in San Jose. 

MAE West was the fifth NAP (network access point), and in 

1995 there were only five exchange points in the world. By 1995, 

at the birth of the commercial internet, MAE West handled every 

federal network, including everything for the White House, as well 

as the networks of 35 private internet service providers. No one kept 

accurate statistics on how much traffic went through each node, so as 

not to alert terrorists to which were the most heavily trafficked nodes. 

Still, there is likely much truth to the anecdotal estimate of one-fifth 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

of the world’s internet traffic at the birth of the commercial internet 

travelling through Ames. Medin left NASA in 1995, becoming chief 

technology officer for @Home Network, the first major provider of 

household cable modems and cable internet access. 

The commercial internet exploded in the mid-1990s, and 

therafter NASA Ames came to rely on commercial products for 

the expansion of its internetworking. The default desktop computer 

for Ames employees was an Apple Macintosh, which facilitated the 

integration of desktops with high-end computing. The integration 

of data archives with high-performance computing underlay NREN, 

the NASA research and education network, which dramatically 

improved how researchers in other parts of NASA Ames did their 

work. Ames work in telepresence and air traffic control was largely 

driven by the ability to move great amounts of data over vast areas, 

andmake sense of it.Visualization technology enabled computational 

chemistry to develop into a tool useful to many engineering efforts 

at Ames. And many of these technologies traced their origins to the 

maturation of computational fluid dynamics. 

C O M P U T A T I O N A L F L U I D D Y N A M I C S 

The technologyofCFDis transferredviacomputercodes—generic 

programs into which aerospace designers enter a proposed design in 

order to model how air flows around it.The increasing sophistication 

of these codes—over the two decades that Ames committed itself to 

CFD—reflected not just the application of greater computing power. 

CFD was also built upon a concomitant flourishing in aerodynamic 

theory around the Navier-Stokes equations, and validation of those 

codes through wind tunnel tests and flight experience. 

The Navier-Stokes equations were introduced in 1846, as a 

theoretical statement coupling various algebraic equations based 

on the rules of conservation of mass, momentum and energy. 

The Navier-Stokes equations are so complex that until the advent 

of CFD aerodynamic theorists avoided the full set of equations. 

Aerodynamicists won acclaim, instead, by reducing a flow calculation 

to its essence and then applying the appropriate partial differential 

equations—either elliptical, hyperbolic, or parabolic. The only flows 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

they could simulate were for slender aircraft, at small angles of 

attack, outside the transonic regime, flying in perfect gas with no 

viscosity and with no flow separation. Thus, even though the advent 

of Fortran-based computers in the 1960s made it possible to run 

these so-called inviscid linearized equations in three dimensions, 

the simplified aircraft configurations on which their calculations 

were based bore little resemblance to actual aircraft. Nevertheless, 

Harvard Lomax continued to refine his calculations of supersonic 

flows over blunt objects, and Robert MacCormack of the Ames 

vehicle environment division continued to refine his calculations of 

viscous flows. 

In the early 1970s, CFD took a major leap forward with code 

that allowed the velocity, density, and pressure of air flowing over 

a realistic aircraft design to be calculated, ignoring only viscosity or 

flow separations. Ames CFDers wrote codes that generated results 

near Mach 1 and other speeds where tunnel data were unreliable— 

codes to model wing-body interactions in transonic flow, the blast 

wave over a hypersonic missile, blunt bodies, and supersonic aircraft 

configurations. The first experiment run on the Illiac IV was a model 

of how a sonic boom changed as it approached ground air. Thomas 

Pulliam wrote the ARC3D code, which superseded Harvard Lomax’s 

ARC2D code. For the first time, the Illiac allowed three-dimensional 

portrayals of airflows. 

By the late 1970s, with the Illiac IV in more routine operation, 

CFDers were modeling incompressible flows—flows in which the 

atmosphere expands or grows denser, adding kinetic energy to the 

flow and requiring equations that coupled velocity and pressure with 

temperature. This was the first step toward models of supersonic and 

hypersonic shock waves, as well as models of turbulent boundary 

layers. By the early 1980s, CFDers had essentially developed a 

complete set of Navier-Stokes solutions. They had computed timedependent flows, which depicted how flows changed over time, rather 

than time-averaged flows, which showed their general tendencies. 

Furthermore, they had improved their models of turbulence, 

from simple eddy viscosity models to finite difference models of 

turbulence in separated flows. Some, like Helen Yee, worked on 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

using chaos theory to study turbulence numerically. Ames and 

Stanford University, in February 1987, formed a joint venture called 

the Center for Turbulence Research to develop turbulence models 

to inject into the Navier-Stokes equations. Once these individual 

calculations were proved theoretically, Ames CFDers coupled them 

together to push the Navier-Stokes equations to the limits of their 

approximation. They also packaged them into routine codes with 

real industrial significance. 

At first, CFDers always used tunnel data to validate their 

computed results. If CFD replaced any types of wind tunnel testing, 

it was in the parameter variation stage early in the design process, 

when designers were deciding between gross variations in aircraft 

configurations. As airframe companies made more complex aircraft, 

the number of tunnel and flight tests required in the design of any new 

aircraft grew at an exponential rate in the 1960s and 1970s. Charles 

“Bill” Harper who led Ames’ full-scale and systems research division, 

made this argument in a major 1968 address. During F-111 design 

definition, in the mid-1960s, Ames did 30,000 hours of tunnel tests 

at a cost of $30 million. For the Space Shuttle, Ames aerodynamicists 

planned even more tunnel time. CFD codes, they expected, could 

eventually eliminate half of this testing in the early design stage. 

Only in the 1990s did CFDers write code that complete enough to 

replace tunnel tests for simpler designs. Some especially complex 

CFD simulations, like airflow around rotors remained routinely 

verified in wind tunnel tests. 

The first major research program at the NAS validated the design 

parameters for theNationalAerospacePlane,aReaganadministration 

effort to build an aircraft that could take-off from a runway and reach 

low-Earth orbit. Using the Cray-2, Ames researchers evaluated 

airframe designs proposed by the three contractors, calculated 

thermal protection requirements, and suggested ways of integrating 

the unique scramjet engine into the shock waves around the airframe. 

Ames’ computational chemistry branch helped by calculating the 

energies released by air-hydrogen combustion and evaluating the 

promise of ceramic-ceramic composite heatshields. Of course, 

others at Ames then validated all these computational results with 

tests in the wind tunnels or in the arc jet complex. 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

Thus, in less than two decades, Ames had brought the field of 

CFD to maturity. Ames people helped design the supercomputers, 

visualization equipment, and internetworking that linked them. 

They rebuilt aerodynamic theory around the complete NavierStokes equations, wrote the codes for general approximations of 

airflow, rendered these codes routine design tools, then pioneered 

codes for more complex problems. Ames CFDers authored code for 

virtually every flow problem: external as well as internal flows in the 

subsonic, transonic, and hypersonic regimes. They coupled these 

codes to encompass more parts and, eventually, model entire aircraft 

and spacecraft. Ames CFDers then worked up tools of numerical 

optimization, so that designers could specify the performance of a 

new design and the code would suggest the best configuration for 

it. Wing designs, especially, could be optimized computationally so 

that wind tunnel tests were needed only to verify performance. 

Ames CFDers wrote code used in the design of virtually every 

aircraft in the western world. The Cray version of ARC3D was 

reportedlyused tohone thefirst Airbus, theA300.Amesdeveloped the 

general aviation synthesis program (GASP) to do quick configuration 

studies of general-purpose aircraft. Industrial users included Beech 

Aircraft, Avco-Lycoming, and Williams International. The code was 

used to analyze configurations of subsonic transport aircraft with 

turbo-props, turbofans, prop-fans, or internal combustion engines. 

It predicted flight performance, weight, noise, and costs, and allowed 

easy trade-off studies. Ames CFD work helped Orbital Sciences, a 

start-up company trying to develop the first new American launch 

vehicle in decades. Under NASA’s program for small expendable 

launch vehicles, Ames CFDers adapted code to hone the design of 

Orbital’s air-launched Pegasus rocket and arranged for flight tests 

with the Pegasus hanging under the Ames-Dryden B-52 aircraft in 

November 1989. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas followed the state 

of the art in CFD to refine their commercial transports, but by far 

the biggest users of CFD were entrepreneurial firms or the airframe 

firms designing entirely new fighter aircraft. 

Definition of the fundamental fluid mechanics problems of 

rotorcraft notably lagged behind those of fixed wing aircraft. Those 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

problems, including stall, transonic flow and acoustics, were first 

worked out in the 1960s and 1970s during the formative years of 

CFD. William MacCroskey studied the dynamic-stall problem and, 

by writing code and devising new ways of gathering flight data, 

validated rotorcraft designs based on fundamental aerodynamics. 

The Ames-Army CFD team developed path-breaking code on airfoil 

stall, acoustic wave propagation, tip vortex interaction and rotorbody flow interactions. CAMRAD was a comprehensive code capable 

of analyzing various rotor configurations—tandem, counterrotating, 

and tilt rotor—used to predict blade loads, aeroelastic stability, 

and general performance. ROT22 was a code for rotor field flows, 

applicable from hover to forward flight, and was three-dimensional, 

transonic, and quasi-steady.The Ames rotorcraftCFD team produced 

the first Navier Stokes simulations of a complete rotorcraft, the V-22 

Osprey in helicopter mode in forward flight. 

For designers of supersonic inlets, Leroy Presley of Ames devised 

the first three dimensional internal flow code. In 1988, Ames 

researcher Man Mohan Rai published a code to model the complex 

pressures, temperatures, and velocities within a jet turbine engine. 

Engine parts moved constantly relative to each other, clearances 

were tight, and pressure changes produced by entering air created 

unsteady states. Controlled experiments of engine prototypes were 

expensive. Rai’s model not only solved unsteady three-dimensional 

Navier-Stokes equations but did so for complex geometries. It first 

needed 22 trillion computations, performed on the Cray-XMP at the 

NAS, before others at Ames set to work simplifying the code to make 

it a practical tool for industrial design. A highly accurate method for 

transferring calculated results between multiple grids was the key to 

Rai’s model, and this method later found extensive applications to 

multiple rotor-stator aircraft. 

Some NAS programmers applied their codes to the solution of 

peculiar problems which then shed light on more general solutions. 

To depict flows within the space shuttle engines, Ames CFDers 

Dochan Kwak, Stuart Rogers and Cetin Kiris created a program 

called INS3D (an incompressible Navier-Stokes solver in general 

three-dimensional coordinates). Because it was useful in modelling 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

low-speed, friction-dominated flows, in 1993 the group also applied 

the code to model air flow over transport aircraft at take-off and 

to improve a mechanical heart developed at Pennsylvania State 

University. 

In 1996, Ames researchers began work on algorithms to simulate 

steady state flows in three dimensions using Cartesian grids. 

This was released as CART3D, an inviscid analysis package for 

preliminary aerodynamic design. CART3D was suitable for a wide 

range of vehicles, including aircraft, spacecraft, ships, submarines, 

race cars and trucks. CART3D automated grid generation, speeding 

up the modeling of complex geometries by a hundred times over 

previous methods. In 2002, CART3D won the NASA software of the 

year award. A month later a patent was awarded and CART3D was 

commercialized. CART3D helped resolve the physical cause of the 

Columbia disaster, by simulating the trajectory of tumbling debris. 

Another project that displayed the utility of CFD was the 

discovery of vortex burst on the F-18 fighter aircraft.The leading-edge 

strakes on the F-18 generated strong vortices, and when the aircraft 

flew at high angles of attack these vortex bursts induced a rolling 

moment. Using CFD, David Kenwright at Ames demonstrated how 

these vortices turned turbulent.173 In 1991, Ames researchers put a 

full scale F-18 into the NFAC and verified their models of the burst 

and some strakes to mitigate it. As part of a larger NASA research 

program on high alpha technology, the F-18 then moved to AmesDryden where it flew as a test bed for thrust vectoring research.174 

Not all of Ames supercomputing focused on modeling airflows. 

In fact, only twenty percent of the computing time on the Illiac 

IV was spent on aerodynamic flows, and only a slightly higher 

percentage on the Crays that followed it. Various users, overseen 

by Melvin Pirtle of RIACS, also spent computer time modeling 

climates, seismic plate slippage, radiation transport for fission 

reactors, and the thermal evolution of galaxies. When the NAS 

became available, Ames people wrote codes to extract aerodynamic 

stability derivatives from flight data. Airframe designers worldwide 

used this code to acquire aircraft parameters from flight data, and 

thus validate aerodynamic models, update simulators, design control 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

systems, and develop flying qualities criteria. Ames people wrote the 

hidden-line algorithms underlying most computer-aided design. 

This code depicted large, complex, engineering renderings faster 

than ever, and could be applied to aircraft design, architecture, and 

systems design. It became the best-selling software in NASA history. 

But the biggest use of Ames supercomputers, apart from CFD, was 

for computational chemistry. 

C O M P U T A T I O N A L C H E M I S T R Y 

Aerothermodynamics and heatshield research brought 

computational chemistry to Ames. James Arnold had spent his entire 

career, starting in 1962, analyzing the chemical properties of shockheated air and other planetary gases, and how these atmospheres 

interacted with ablating materials on heatshields. Ames had built 

shock tunnels and simulators used on Earth to experiment on 

atmospheric entry, though at great expense. With his colleague Ellis 

Whiting, Arnold saw ways to apply Ames’ emergent infrastructure 

in supercomputing to solve problems in atmospheric entry physics. 

Ames’ growing infrastructure in computational chemistry, though, 

would benefit many fields. 

As a young man growing up in the Midwest, Jim Arnold might 

have pursued his early passion and become an automobile mechanic. 

Arnold was at a junior college in Kansas City, Missouri when Sputnik 

launched in October of 1957. He went to the University of Kansas 

where he completed a degree in engineering physics. With a dream 

common to many midwesterners, Arnold moved to California. He 

began his career at Ames in 1962 just as the Apollo program began 

in earnest. In his first week at Ames, Arnold turned around and there 

stood Harvey Allen, interested to hear about Arnold’s work. Within 

two years, Arnold had his first publication, a NASA technical report 

co-authored with Bill Page, on shock layer radiation.175 Arnold was 

amazed at how quickly he had gone from a farm in Kansas to the 

cutting edge of space travel. 

Shock layer radiation defined much of Arnold’s work over the 

next decade, as would his work with Alvin Seiff. Arnold always 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

left meetings with Seiff excited about his work, even though the 

meetings were sometimes scientifically daunting. Arnold and 

Whiting designed the multi-channel radiometer aboard the PAET, 

Seiff’s landmark atmosphere probe launched in 1973. Arnold 

focused on radiation from the gas cap, the hot gases produced in the 

bow shock wave of the entry body which generated a unique spectral 

fingerprint from which he could deduce the chemical composition 

of the atmosphere.176 

With Ames’ funding, Arnold continued his education. He 

earned his master’s degree from Stanford University in aeronautics 

and astronautics and his doctorate in molecular physics from York 

University. Arnold’s thesis was based in part on work he had done 

at Ames. The cyanide molecule was then of much interest, both in 

its bond association energy and transition moments.177 Cyanide as 

a shock layer product might provide insight into the composition 

of the Martian atmosphere. His doctoral research and collaboration 

with Whiting drove Arnold’s interest in theoretical chemistry and 

ultimately to the establishment of computational chemistry at Ames. 

Arnold recalled his first encounter with Hans Mark in 1969: 

“I got back from Toronto and thought I was hot stuff. My 

branch chief, Bill Page, asked me to give a talk on another 

person’s work. As I was discussing his measurements of 

transition moments for the carbon monoxide molecule 

this tall guy I’d never seen before said, ‘Why don’t 

you compute those?’ I got up there and I wrote out 

Schrödinger’s equation and I said, ‘There it is, but you 

can’t solve it.’ Fred Hanson backed me up. The tall guy 

was Hans Mark, and he had been doing calculations 

on transition moments on atoms while he was at 

Livermore.”178 

Unabashed, Arnold and Whiting approached Mark and proposed 

todevelop thefieldofcomputationalchemistry, so theycouldcompute 

gas properties rather than relying on measurement. Mark responded 

enthusiastically. While Mark was visiting NASA headquarters he 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

secured $50,000 in research funding and computational chemistry 

at Ames was born. They were supported by Dean Chapman who 

had pioneered theories of aerothermodynamics and, as director of 

astrophysics, helped lead Ames into CFD. 

At the time, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory had 

some success with diatomic fluorine predictions that showed 

the potential for reliable computations of the gas properties of 

small molecules. Whiting and Arnold visited and returned with 

computer code they adapted for the Illiac IV at Ames and a CDC 

7600 at Livermore. Together with G.C. Lyle, they developed code to 

predict the spectra resulting from electronic transitions of diatomic 

molecules and atoms.These predictions were done faster and cheaper 

than measurements in a shock tube. With the success of this work, 

Arnold, now branch chief, hired young researchers like Richard Jaffe, 

Stephanie Langhoff and Charlie Bauschlicher. They were joined by 

David Cooper who also earned his doctorate from York University 

with a thesis on the carbon molecule. 

Around 1980, Bill Ballhaus asked Arnold to spend a year at 

NASA headquarters, working with the associate administrator of 

OAST to sell the idea of the NAS. He proved remarkably affective 

and the NAS was funded for a 1984 start. After Arnold’s promotion 

to chief of the thermal and gas dynamics division, Cooper served as 

the NAS supercomputer division chief and they spent years as peer 

division chiefs, able to support both the hardware and applications 

work for computational chemistry. Ames’ computational chemistry 

branch developed, under Arnold’s leadership, into a unique resource 

in NASA. 

Academic chemists had computed results that were accurate 

only for single atoms. Fairly quickly, computational chemists at 

Ames—including Langhoff, Bauschlicher, and Jaffe—developed 

tools to predict rates of gas-solid chemical reactions involving thirty 

atoms, predicted forces in molecules and atomic clusters as large as 

65 atoms, and simulated material properties involving up to 10,000 

interacting atoms. Applying this work to problems of interest to 

NASA, they designed polymers that were resistant to degradation 

by atomic oxygen and improved noncatalytic thermal protection 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

systems. Computational chemists explored several species of 

ablative materials for the heatshield of the Galileo Probe—which had 

to be well matched to the atmosphere of Jupiter—and derived the 

radiative cross sections and absorption coefficients of these species 

to determine what data was required to design the heatshield. 

With these tools in place, David Cooper led the Ames 

computational chemistry branch to apply its research to other 

problems. To develop better aircraft fuels, Ames explored the 

chemistry of transition metals used in catalysts. To understand 

gas properties in aircraft engine flows, Ames computed bond 

energies and gas transport properties more precisely than ever done 

experimentally. To develop smaller robotic vehicles, better computer 

memory devices, and other nanotechnologies, Ames calculated 

how to make materials bond at the molecular level. To understand 

the chemical evolution of the solar system, Ames calculated the 

composition of unidentified spectra observed from space telescopes. 

Within a decade, Ames had nurtured computational chemistry into 

a discipline of major importance to American industry and NASA. 

Most important, virtually the entire first generation of CFDers 

and computational chemists had circulated through Ames in order to 

use the best machines, to try out new code, and to train with the best 

in the field. As Ames computational experts saw their fields mature, 

they reinvented themselves as pioneers in new areas of information 

technology like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and distributed 

networking. 

I N T E L L I G E N T S Y S T E M S A N D T E L E P R E S E N C E 

In the early years of artificial intelligence (AI), symbols rather 

than numbers were used to represent information, and heuristic 

rules structured this information rather than the yes/no algorithms 

used in numerical computation. In 1980 Henry Lum acquired a 

computer that ran the LISP (for list processing) computing language, 

and used it to develop the symbolic language of artificial intelligence. 

By 1984, Lum had established an artificial intelligence plan for 

NASA Ames. Increasingly, Ames researchers focused specifically 

on communications protocols for integrating various artificial 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

intelligence agents, as needed to guide spacecraft or manage complex 

and changing projects. The goal was to construct rational agents that 

could acquire and represent abstract and physical knowledge and 

reason with it to achieve real-world goals. 

Pentti Kanerva’s work on sparse distributed memory made 

neural networks a standard approach in robotics and speech and 

vision recognition.179 A sparse distributed memory system mimicked 

human long-term memory. It stored long patterns, up to thousands 

of bits of data, that represented encoded sensory data and retrieved 

patterns when presented with clues. Bayesian statistics was likewise 

an important approach in Ames work on intelligent systems. The 

AutoClass software suite, developed by Peter Cheeseman, found 

unexpected classifications, or groupings of like things, in large data 

sets.180 AutoClass was the first AI software to make a published 

astronomical discovery. In July 1989 AutoClass detected statistical 

patterns indicating a new class of infrared stars in data from the 

IRAS low resolution spectral catalog.181 AutoClass was used for 

other astrophysical discoveries, as well as discovery of new classes of 

proteins and introns in DNA sequence data. AutoClass won a 1992 

NASA space act award and was cited in numerous patents. 

Ames formed an information sciences division in June 1987 

to apply artificial intelligence to space missions. NASA had plans 

for an autonomous Mars rover and Ames hoped to provide the 

technology for many such intelligent agents.The enormity of NASA’s 

just-announced space station, for example, required on-board 

automation for many of the housekeeping functions that would 

otherwise need to be done by astronauts. Ames’ artificial intelligence 

branch looked at the scheduling of shuttle orbiter ground processing 

and developed software that, beginning in 1993, saved NASA $4 

million a year in shuttle maintenance. “Shuttle refurbishing is a 

difficult problem because you can only predict half of the work in 

advance,” noted Monte Zweben. Zweben led a team of contractors 

at Ames and the Johnson Space Center, shared in the largest Space 

Act award ever granted by NASA, then left to start up a company 

to program scheduling software for industry.182 Peter Friedland led 

a group working with JSC to automate Shuttle mission control and 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

reduce human-intensive tasks by forty percent. Silvano Colombano 

worked with MIT researchers to develop the astronaut science 

advisor, a laptop computer running artificial intelligence software 

that helped astronauts perform spaceborne experiments as they 

unfolded. Astronauts referred to it as the “PI in a box”—like having 

the principal investigator on board. While the Ames information 

sciences division contributed to larger NASA missions, for missions 

not yet conceived they continued to refine the basic principles of 

artificial intelligence. 

Artificial intelligence enabled humans and robots to work as an 

integrated team of rational agents when coupled with the technology 

of virtual reality and telepresence. In 1984, when Michael McGreevy, 

a researcher in spatial information transfer, learned that a headmounted display developed for the Air Force would cost NASA a 

million dollars, he pulled together a team to build its own. The result 

was VIVED (for virtual visual environment display), the first low-cost 

head-tracked and head-mounted display, with stereo sound and a 

wide field of view. McGreevy soon built the first virtual environment 

workstation by integrating a number of components, including the 

VIVED helmet, a magnetic head and hand tracker, a custom-built 

image conversion system, an Evans & Sutherland vector graphics 

display, a DEC PDP-11/40 computer, and software he wrote that 

generated and displayed three-dimensional stereoscopic scenes 

of commercial air traffic in flight. It was the first major advance in 

wearable personal simulators since the laboratory systems built by 

Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s. By 1987 NASA boosted the budget 

thirtyfold for this work in virtual reality. 

A whole industry was built around virtual environments, with 

many of the major innovations inspired or filtered through Ames. 

Start-up VPL Research of Redwood City commercialized the VIVED 

design and supplied low-cost virtual reality systems around the 

world. Scott Fisher, who joined Ames’ virtual reality team in 1985, 

worked with VPL to develop a data glove for computer input. Though 

the first systems at Ames used Evans & Sutherland vector graphics, 

Ames later used some of the first raster graphics systems. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Jim Clark credits the many image generation projects at Ames 

with helping his start-up company, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) of 

nearby Mountain View.183 Beginning in the early 1980s, 3D imaging 

became commonplace in the entertainment industry—in films, 

television, cartoons and video games—as well as in engineering, 

manufacturing and medicine. In 1980, Jim Clark, then a computer 

scientist with Stanford University, introduced himself to Jim Hart 

of the Ames computer systems division. He heard that Hart, who 

managed all research on visualization for CFD, had purchased 

an Evans & Sutherland display. Hart created some research 

contracts for Clark to develop algorithms needed for visualizing 

the aerodynamic fluid flows around jet aircraft. CFDers at Ames 

were already modelling such flows on their Control Data and 

Illiac computers, generating massive amounts of data that proved 

difficult to understand when printed in two-dimensions on a page. 

Using the algorithm he devised at Ames, Clark built a sophisticated 

chip, a pioneering example of very large scale integration or VLSI, 

dubbed the Geometry Engine. This chip was transformed CFD data 

into visual portraits in three dimensions, portrayed on a computer 

screen. With subtle shading of different surfaces, these images were 

more intuitively understandable to the human eye. Furthermore, the 

images were conveyed in real time and allowed multiple views of the 

object under study. 

SGI bundled these chips with video displays into its IRIS 

workstations and, with a $2.9 million order placed in September 1984, 

Ames was its launch customer.184 Marcie Smith and Ken Stevens were 

the computer scientists in the NAS who understood the promise of 

the SGI system. SGI headquarters were less than a mile from Ames 

as the crow flies (Google would occupy that building after 2003). 

One of the biggest selling points for the IRIS workstations in other 

industries was the depiction of fluid flows emanating from the NAS. 

Engineers could envision the complex airflows around an aircraft 

as it broke the sound barrier, then see what would happen as they 

tweaked the design. With useful CFD codes ready to run, aerospace 

firms adopted both supercomputers and SGI workstations. Because 

Ames had encouraged SGI to adopt the Unix operating system and 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

TCP/IP for the IRIS, engineers around the world could network into 

the Ames supercomputers via their SGI workstations. They could 

send their simulations to run on the remote supercomputers, then 

view their results the next morning on the SGI workstations in their 

offices. 

SGI realized that to succeed they needed to make their 

workstations useful beyond CFD. SGI worked with Ames on 3D 

landscapes for flight simulators and on simulating the evolution 

of the universe following the Big Bang. SGI then worked on code 

for oil prospecting, weather forecasting, automobile design, parts 

manufacturing, and viewing scans for medical diagnoses. In the late 

1980s, Industrial Light and Magic and Tippett Studio in Berkeley 

began to use the SGI workstations for film work, and the breakthrough 

for SGI computers came with Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. By 

1997, after fifteen years in business, SGI’s annual revenues topped 

$3.6 billion. 

Ames work in virtual reality also depended on new tools for realtime computing. Working with Sterling Software, an Ames support 

contractor, Ames people developed the mixture of peripherals and 

interfaces for data acquisition, telemetry, computer animation, and 

video image processing to compute and portray data points as they 

were collected. More immediate access to data made virtual reality 

of use in space exploration. Virtual reality put Ames at the forefront 

of human-centered computing. With human-centered computing, 

people would not consciously interact with the computer itself 

but rather interact directly and naturally with remote, computeraugmented or computer-generated environments. NASA saw the 

value it might have on the space station, by allowing astronauts 

to control robotic devices around the station. Ames used images 

generated by CFD to build a virtual wind tunnel—wherein the 

wearer could walk around a digitized aircraft and see the brightly 

colored lines depicting airflows. Elizabeth Wenzel of Ames’ spatial 

auditory displays laboratory led a university and industry team 

developing virtual acoustics using headphones to present sounds in 

three-dimensions. Stephen Ellis and Mike Sims developed other key 

components of virtual reality. 

Space scientists at Ames saw other uses for telepresence in 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

virtual planetary exploration. As NASA’s planetary probes returned 

digital data on the planets—like Magellan’s mapping of the surface 

of Venus—Ames used that data to project images through a 

personal simulator. It gave anyone—geologists, astronaut trainees, 

journalists or schoolchildren—the feeling of being there. They used 

the panoramic views returned from the Viking landers to plan the 

digitization technology for the Mars Pathfinder, then tested this 

technology on remotely operated rovers. Prototype rovers imaged 

the hostile terrain around Death Valley, Antarctica, the volcanoes 

of Alaska and Hawaii, and underwater in the Monterey Bay. The 

Marsokhod Rover, lent to Ames in 1993, was a superb platform on 

which to test the technology of telepresence. 

Work in human-centered computing at Ames took a major leap 

forward in 1990 with the dedication of a new human performance 

research laboratory (HPRL). David Nagel had championed the 

laboratory to house Ames’ aerospace human factors research 

division. After all, Ames’ traditional work in flight simulators and 

fly-by-wire technology was a form of telepresence. In addition to 

supporting Ames’ longstanding work in aviation flight training, 

cockpit resources, and pilot and controller performance, the HPRL 

brought together researchers working to solve the problems of 

extended human presence in space, like with Vic Vykukal’s work 

in spacesuit design. In the HPRL Ames continued its work on how 

to make spacecraft more habitable by investigating microgravity 

restraints, visual orientations, and changes to circadian rhythms. 

Built adjacent to the human factors laboratory was the automation 

sciences research facility (ASRF) so that experts in human factors 

and artificial intelligence could collaborate. The ASRF opened in 

January 1992, four months ahead of schedule and $500,000 under its 

$10 million budget. The ASRF provided office space for the growing 

number of artificial intelligence and robotics experts at Ames, led 

by information sciences division chief Henry Lum. It also provided 

eleven superb laboratories. In the high bay, Ames built a simulated 

lunar terrain and used it to test intelligent systems for a rover that 

would explore planetary surfaces. “We consider it our responsibility 

to not only promote the productivity of people housed in space,” 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

noted Ames environmental psychologist Yvonne Clearwater, “but to 

assure that once there, they will thrive, not merely survive.”185 

C E N T E R O F E X C E L L E N C E I N I T 

“The future of NASA lies in information technology and 

information systems,” proclaimed administrator Dan Goldin in 

May 1996 in a ceremony designating Ames as the NASA center 

of excellence for information technology (COE-IT). The COEIT developed rapidly, directed by Jack Hansen and then Kenneth 

Ford, with operations led by to Steven Zornetzer. Zornetzer 

was a neurobiologist who had studied how the brain processed 

information, hoping to mimic those processes in the design of 

artificial systems. He taught at the medical school of the University 

of California at Irvine, then directed the life sciences program at 

the Office of Naval Research. Ford introduced Zornetzer to Harry 

McDonald, who was looking for someone skilled at managing the 

intersection of Washington with cutting-edge research. Zornetzer 

appreciated that “Goldin asked NASA to be bold, take risks, hire the 

best people, then let them attack the biggest problems, like humancentered computing.”186 

Zornetzer was no computer scientist, but when he arrived 

in 1997 he managed a staff of 700 of them with authority to hire 

a hundred more. This was during the internet boom in Silicon 

Valley, and Zornetzer was able to hire well by offering computer 

scientists interesting problems and the freedom to attack them. For 

example, he hired Peter Norvig, a Silicon Valley millionaire, to turn 

the computational science directorate into an intelligent systems 

directorate and apply artificial intelligence to NASA’s exploration 

missions. 

The COE-IT served as the center of a virtual corporation that 

linked NASA Centers, industry, and academia into tight-knit teams. 

These teams developed enabling technologies in modeling, database 

management, smart sensors, human-computer interaction, and 

high-performance computing and networking. These enabling 

technologies then supported NASA’s missions—like networking 

data for simulations, improving efficiency in aviation operations, 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

and developing autonomous probes to make space exploration 

more frequent, reliable, and scientifically intense. By the mid-1990s 

internetworking had become commercial and commodified, so 

Zornetzer convinced McDonald to move any continuing research 

on internetworking and the management of Ames’ IT infrastructure 

into the center operations group so that he could focus on new 

application of IT. Furthermore, all of Ames’ expertisein human factors 

then worked in aeronautics, so Zornetzer convinced McDonald 

to move half of them into his division where they could work on 

human centered computing. The COE-IT was more than a simple 

reorganization. It simplified the funding relationship with NASA 

headquarters, and allowed Ames to build out unique capabilities. 

Ames became NASA’s lead for supercomputer consolidation. 

Consolidation began with an inventory of NASA’s high-performance 

computers —including central computer facilities, the NAS facility, 

and the testbed supercomputers—and identified forty systems with 

a total purchase price of $300 million. Consolidation continued with 

Ames matching the right computer to the right job within NASA. 

One Ames effort integrated into the CoE-IT was the NASA 

Center for Bioinformatics, which had opened in August 1991 

with a dazzling display in the Ames auditorium by Muriel Ross. A 

biologist specializing in the neural networks around the vestibular 

system, Ross joined Ames in 1986 for access to its supercomputing. 

She suspected, and later experiments confirmed, that exposure to 

microgravity caused the inner ear to add new nerve cells. She also 

suspected, rightly, that this rewiring could only be accurately depicted 

in three-dimensional models. Reconstructing the architecture and 

physiology of this expansive neural network was painstaking work. 

Ross worked with programmers in the NAS to devise a technology for 

reconstructing serial sections of a rat’s vestibular system into a threedimensional computer model. This combination of supercomputing, 

internetworking, and telepresence stood as a model of what the 

COE-IT might achieve. 

Ross’ efforts paved the wave for Ames’ work in virtual surgery. 

Ames’ artificial intelligence experts explored this model for clues 

about building neural networks with computers. Ames experts in 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

virtual reality bought a prototype virtual boom from Fakespace 

Corporation and linked it with Silicon Graphics workstations to 

project reconstructed images into the first immersive workbench. 

There, surgeons could rehearse difficult procedures before an 

operation. 

The Center’s next step was to build collaborative networks with 

other NASA centers using emergent Silicon Valley networking 

technology. Stanford University Medical Center was first, followed 

by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, then the Salinas Medical 

Center, and the Navajo nation. With each new collaborating 

clinic—each more distant and less sophisticated in computing— 

Ames tested technologies for doing remote medicine, preparing 

for the day when astronauts many days distant on the space station 

might need to respond to medical emergencies. In the meantime, 

the Center became a national resource that allowed investigators 

to apply advanced computer technology to the study of biological 

systems. When challenged to apply its skills to a national initiative in 

women’s health, the Ames Center for Bioinformatics developed the 

ROSS software (for reconstruction of serial sections) to provide very 

precise three-dimensional images of breast cancer tumors. 

Ames made telepresence into a useful tool for planetary 

exploration. In the late 1980s, the Ames space instrumentation and 

studies branch, led by G. Scott Hubbard, developed mission plans for 

the Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR). The plan was to build a 

global network of sixteen landers around the Martian surface—each 

capable of atmospheric analysis on the way down and, once on the 

surface, of performing meteorology, seismology, surface imaging, 

and soil chemistry measurements. Because the network could grow 

over several years, the annual costs would be small and the landers 

could be improved to optimize the scientific return. With the data, 

NASA could pick the best spot to land a later human mission to 

Mars. However, in November 1991, NASA headquarters transferred 

MESUR to JPL, where it was trying to centralize work in planetary 

exploration. JPL transformed the idea of the MESUR lander in to the 

single Mars Pathfinder, which roved across the Martian landscape in 

July 1997. Pathfinder was an exciting early step in human telepresence 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

on Mars. Ames continued developing the technology to support 

telepresence missions to Mars. In January 1992, Geoffrey Briggs 

was appointed scientific director of Ames’ new Center for Mars 

Exploration (CMEX). Since the Viking missions of the mid-1970s, 

Ames maintained a world-class group of scientists specializing in 

Martian studies across a broad spectrum. CMEX brought all of this 

expertise—especially in robotic spacecraft and data processing—to 

bear on questions on the geographical and atmospheric evolution of 

Mars. 

“Antarctica is the most Mars-like environment on Earth,” said 

Carol Stoker of the Ames telepresence technology project. “We’re 

taking this technology to a hostile environment to conduct research 

that has direct application to NASA’s goal of exploring Mars.”187 

In December 1992, Stoker and Dale Andersen tested telepresence 

technology on mini-submarines exploring the sediments under the 

permanent ice covering Antarctic lakes. The next Antarctic summer 

they returned with a rover with stereoscopic vision, not only so they 

could generate a three-dimensional terrain model of McMurdo 

Sound but also so the teleoperator had depth perception to better 

collect samples with the rover’s robotic arm. Back at Ames, Butler 

Hine controlled it using a teleoperations headset developed by Ames’ 

intelligent mechanisms group. They were linked via a powerful 

satellite and internet connection put together by Mark Leon and the 

NASA science internet team. The COE-IT was making the tools of 

scientific telepresence more useful. 

Remote Agent was the first artificial intelligence to control 

a spacecraft without human supervision. NASA’s Deep Space-1 

spacecraft, launched in October 1998, was the first mission under 

NASA’s new Millennium program to test the innovative technologies 

for truly “smart” spacecraft. One new technology was Ames’ AutoNav 

remote agent that rendered the spacecraft capable of independent 

decision-making so that it relied less on tracking and remote 

control from the ground. In May 1999, for the first time, an artificial 

intelligence program was given primary control of a spacecraft. Then 

in July 1999, after getting a brief instruction to flyby the asteroid 9969 

Braille, the DS-1 remote agent evaluated the state of the spacecraft, 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

planned the best path by which to get there, and executed a flyby no 

more then ten miles from the asteroid. The Remote Agent laid the 

foundation for autonomy in future robotic space flight. The Remote 

Agent team was honored with the NASA software of the year award, 

and was widely consider one of the top achievements in the history 

of artificial intelligence. It also validated much of the automated 

scheduling software used for the Mars Exploration Rovers. RIACS 

scientists based at NASA Ames developed MAPGEN, a groundbased human-in-the-loop control system used to generate plans for 

the twin Mars rovers. A few days after its landing in January 2004, 

command sequences created from MAPGEN activity planning 

software brought the MER Spirit to life. MAPGEN was used to plan 

activities for every day on the Martian surface, and the MER science 

team credited it with boosting scientific yield by thirty percent. The 

core of MAPGEN was the Europa artificial intelligence suite, which 

RIACS released as open-source software, and which subsequently 

found wide adaptation. 

Zornetzer himself spearheaded a research effort in bioinspired 

engineering, which culminated in a prototype Mars airplane 

flight-tested in 2001. It was designed to be released into the Mars 

atmosphere from a high altitude, unfold, and with a solar-powered 

engine fly at low altitude over the Martian landscape taking high 

resolution images of geologically interesting locations below. The 

concept required thorough knowledge of the Martian atmosphere, as 

well as new methods of artificial intelligence for aircraft navigation. 

Using neural net algorithms, it flew autonomously around Moffett 

Field. 

The Ames CoE-IT, managerially, was increasingly integrated into 

the Ames information science and technology division as applying 

this expertise became more routine. Ames assumed oversight of the 

NASA facility in Fairmount, West Virginia that independently tested 

and validated new software for space projects. Ames applied its 

skills to test Shuttle avionics software, to make commercial software 

compatible with proprietary software already used in the Shuttle, 

and to create an integrated vehicle health management to further 

expedite Shuttle maintenance. Ames also applied its expertise to help 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

NASA develop aerospace hardware quicker and cheaper, with less 

technical risk. Integrated design systems, for example, let engineers 

see and test a system before metal was ever cut. Ames information 

technologists had systems to translate, in real time, massive amounts 

of dataintoimages, which proved usefulinmonitoring environmental 

changes—like fires, hurricanes, and ozone holes—from space. And 

Ames information technologists applied their expertise to solve the 

logistics and information problems of the airspace system. 

Earth science was an especially intensive user of information 

technology. In 1996, Ames and SGI signed a cooperative research 

arrangement as part of the Ames COE-IT. SGI introduced its 

Onyx and Origin supercomputers, and the NAS again served 

as launch customer. Ames encouraged SGI to develop a shared 

memory architecture whereby many chips operating in parallel 

served as a single system that modified the same memory. Using 

those computers, NASA scientists built detailed models of ocean 

circulation and its impact on climate. Notably, they predicted and 

displayed the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean during the El 

Nino years of the late 1990s. While Ames cooperated fruitfully with 

SGI over the coming decade, this marked the high point of SGI as 

a Silicon Valley powerhouse. Visualization programs migrated to 

cheaper servers, offered by companies like Sun Microsystems and 

Hewlett Packard, and SGI stuck to the high end of the workstation 

market. SGI bought Cray in 1996 to enter a higher end of the market, 

supercomputers, but divested itself of Cray within four years. In 

May 2006 SGI declared bankruptcy and, though it emerged from 

reorganization soon after, its position in the visualization market 

remained small. 

Ames was also challenged financially. The concept of centers 

of excellence throughout NASA died in 2003 as Sean O’Keefe 

consolidated program responsibility in headquarters. IT funding was 

pulled from Ames, and many IT specialists finally left for the private 

firms swelling during some boom years in Silicon Valley. Ames 

remained the primary conduit for advanced information technology 

flowing into NASA, though it grew less revolutionary. What NASA 

called the “technology readiness level” of its research grew shorter, 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

and Ames worked on tools needed for missions launching sooner. A 

period of radical innovation in IT was drawing to a close. 

R E B I R T H O F S U P E R C O M P U T I N G 

Though IT in the service of space exploration had blossomed, 

comparatively supercomputing had stagnated. By the turn of the 

century the NAS was struggling to provide adequate computing 

power, as needed for global models of climate change. Walt Brooks, 

the NAS director, asked his staff to explore the potential of Intel 

Itanium processors in an SGI Altix system, and they mocked up a 

system using 512 Altix processors.They namedit forKalpanaChawla, 

the astronaut who perished aboard the Columbia and a former CFD 

researcher at Ames. This system proved such systems could produce 

great speeds, cheaply. Scott Hubbard issued a challenge. If Brooks 

could build a supercomputer in four months, Hubbard would find 

funds for it. 

On 18 June 2004, Congress funded the project, named Columbia. 

Team engineers—from SGI, Intel and the NAS—designed a high 

speed internal network that efficiently linked the processors, 

upgraded an internal fiber network for system users, developed a 

robust computer security architecture, and modified facility power 

and cooling systems with under floor water piping. The first two SGI 

Altix 512-processors systems were installed on June 28, ten days 

after start, and quickly networked. By the end of the first week, one 

system was running operational codes for work on the Shuttle return 

to flight. One month later, it produced its first results. By 2 August, 

more processor nodes arrived, along with six new power distribution 

units, and the Kalpana system was merged into Columbia. The 

NAS itself was replumbed and rewired to accept the new system, 

work completed by September. Twelve more SGI Altix systems 

were installed in September, bringing Columbia to ninety percent 

completion, and NASA staff began to test integration approaches 

with a Linpack benchmark. 

By September, the Columbia visualization team developed a way 

to view simulations of Hurricane Frances. Using the line integral 

convolution technique developed by the NAS, the team deployed 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the new method on the finite volume global circulation model 

(fvGCM). They corrected some hardware errors in October, and the 

Columbia achieved a Linpack benchmark speed of 42.7 teraflops, 

well exceeding the speed of the then top system, the Earth Simulator 

in Japan. On October 25, four months and a week from start, all 

twenty nodes—more than 10,000 Intel processors accessing twenty 

terabytes of memory—ran for the entire nine hours needed for the 

Linpack run.The numbers were reported to the Linpack organization, 

to be publicly released at the supercomputing conference SC2004 in 

November. Then Columbia immediately went to work. Eight nodes 

were dedicated to return to flight simulations, six nodes for science 

applications, two to refine the efficiency of the system, and four 

nodes were used by SGI to test their Altix 3700-Bx2 technology. 

The Linpack numbers showed that Columbia ran at 51.9 

teraflops, making it the second faster computer in the world (an IBM 

machine had topped it the week before). With this one machine, 

NASA computing power increased ten-fold. Columbia remained 

NASA’s most powerful computer until 2008. The Columbia first ran 

simulations of debris flow patterns to support the return of the Space 

Shuttle to flight. Within a year, the Columbia allowed a complete 

CFD simulation of the Shuttle’s ascent from launch to orbit. The 

Columbia was also used to model the interaction of climate and sea 

ice, study the evolution of the dark matter halo that envelops the 

Milky Way galaxy, and help scientists understand the evolutionary 

history of our galaxy. 

ThesuccessoftheColumbialedtoarenaissanceofsupercomputing 

at Ames. For example, in November 2007 the Army opened a new 

high performance computing research center at Ames, and installed a 

Cray X1E and Cray XT3 at the NAS. This center forged collaboration 

between the NAS, Stanford University, and other university partners 

to solve the challenges of Army aviation, notably in the design of 

rotorcraft. 

Ames continued its prowess in building supercomputers with 

the Pleiades. It debuted at the SC08 conference in November 

2008 as number three among the world’s fastest computers, and 

as the fastest of all non-defense computers. Managed by William 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

Thigpen, the Pleiades was designed as an SGI Altix ICE system with 

12,8000 Intel Xeon quad core processors running at 487 trillion 

teraflops. It featured the world’s largest InfiniBand network which 

connected the processors with memory and allowed sophisticated 

visualization and data analysis. It also ranked as one of the most 

energy efficient supercomputers in the world. Pleaides was a general 

purpose computer, like Columbia, and easy to use for a variety of 

applications. It ran NASA codes with minimal modification, and 

was compatible with standard desktop workstations. With the surge 

in supercomputing, as usual, came a need to depict the massive 

amounts of data. 

NAS staff developed its hyperwall, a set of integrated screens 

that debuted in November 2002 as the largest display in the world 

based on the number of pixels. Rather than pushing the size limits of 

a single screen, NAS staff took a low cost approach. They mounted 

smaller screens into an immersive display, and developed software 

to project the data seamlessly. NAS engineers presented the idea to 

Ames management in February 2002, and challenged the team to 

complete it by SC02. NAS staff scrounged up four screens, which 

they integrated into an array. Soon after, an order of fifty eighteen 

inch LCD screens arrived, and these were integrated into ever larger 

arrays. A specially designed rack held the seven by seven array of 

screens in a dish shape for a more immersive viewing experience, 

and each screen was driven by a its own computer with a graphics 

card. In eight months they had it ready for SC02.188 

The NAS hyperwall presented 64 million pixels, distributed 

over 55 square feet of viewing area. It was put to use in all research 

areas at Ames—aerodynamics, protein docking, galaxy formation, 

Earth climate data, multispectral imaging of Mars—where large, 

multidimensional data sets needed to be understood. A single large 

image, perhaps of clouds moving across the Earth, could be presented 

as a mosaic across all of the screens, similar to the powerwall displays 

then in use. What made hyperwall an advance over powerwalls 

was software developed by Chris Henze, which let the hyperwall 

control many independent but related images, so-called spreadsheet 

visualization. Data series could be displayed in sequence on 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

individual screens so viewers could better perceive trends in data. 

For example, users could see 49 unique steps in protein docking. Or, 

as an example of parameter variation, one hyperwall display could 

show surface pressures and streamlines from a computational model 

of airflow about a proposed reusable launch vehicle. All images in 

the same column represented simulation at the same Mach number 

(but increasing angles of attack), while all images in the same row 

showed simulations at the same angle of attack (but increasing Mach 

numbers). Parameter variation research was a legacy of Ames dating 

back to its NACA roots, and hyperwall kept such research eminently 

useful. 

At SC08, NAS debuted its hyperwall-2, a 23 by 10 screen display 

developed in partnership with Colfax International of Sunnyvale. 

It had a hundred times more processing power than the hyperwall 

introduced in 2002. The hyperwall-2 was powered by 128 graphics 

processing units and 1,024 processor cores, with 74 teraflops of peak 

processing power and a data storage capacity of 475 terabytes. It was 

more explicitly designed to support the supercomputing being done 

in the NAS. “The hyperwall-2 offers an environment that is truly up 

to the task of visualization and exploration of the very large datasets 

routinely produced by NASA supercomputers and instruments,” said 

Bryan Biegel, NAS deputy chief. “The system also will be used to get 

detailed information on how NAS supercomputers are operating, 

enabling staff to quickly diagnose problems or inefficiencies with the 

supercomputers or the software running on them.”189 

World Wind represented another leap forward in imaging 

capability. World Wind was created by NASA’s learning technologies 

project, led by Patrick Hogan, and was the most downloaded 

program on the internet when released in 2004. World Wind was a 

world viewer that used data from the Landsat satellites and shuttle 

radar topography elevation data to provide an interactive view of 

Earth. Starting with a global view of Earth, users could zoom into a 

regional three dimensional picture that portrayed climate, elevation, 

vegetation, population density or other data traits. In May 2008 

NASA Ames released it as a Java program able to run on a wider 

variety of platforms, supported by World Wind servers which hosted 

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I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y 

geospatial data. World Wind preceded Google Earth, a similar world 

viewer. But World Wind was entirely open-source, meaning users 

could constantly add new data and applications. World Wind won 

NASA’s software of the year competition for 2009, and was widely 

adopted by other government agencies for their mapping projects. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

C H A P T E R 7 

Aeronautical Technology and Flight Research 

With the integration of the NACA into NASA, not every 

aerodynamicist at Ames shifted to work on the Apollo project. 

Throughout the 1960s, most Ames people continued working 

on high-speed aerodynamics, on such issues as boundary-layer 

transition, efficient supersonic inlets, dynamic loads on aircraft 

structures, and wing-tip vortices. Ames also continued its work on 

low-speed aerodynamics, notably on high-lift devices, improved 

landing technologies, and new approaches to vertical and short 

take-off and landing aircraft. Ames continued to use its wind tunnels 

to solve the seemingly intractable flight problems encountered by 

the military’s supersonic and transport aircraft—problems often 

uncovered during action in Vietnam. 

Still, Ames work in aeronautics underwent a profound shift in the 

1960s and 1970s, not so much in the research topics addressed but 

rather in relationship between NASA and the aircraft manufacturers. 

Aircraft engineering had matured. The shape of transport aircraft 

went largely unchanged since the 1950s and, with the exception of a 

few radical departures like variable sweep wings, so had supersonic 

aircraft. The NACA had considered its function to be engineering 

research and testing, providing data and insights which all aircraft 

firms were free to use to improve their designs.190 Most of these 

NACA innovations were on the component or operational level, 

leaving the manufactures in charge of system integration. 

NASA, by contrast, especially at the new human spacecraft 

centers in Huntsville and Cape Canaveral, saw itself as builders 

of spacecraft. In its early years NASA did not jump into building 

aircraft as it had with spacecraft, though it did commission more of 

its X-plane series of experimental aircraft. Into the 1970s, NASA 

engineers more commonly devised the complete configurations 

of aircraft, as with the tilt rotor and the oblique wing aircraft. 

NASA shifted its efforts away from the component level and 

toward issues on the system level. Other examples of system-wide 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

issues NASA addressed included pilot workload and safety and 

air traffic management. 

Perhaps the best example of NASA efforts to work on the system 

level was with commercial supersonic transport (SST), especially in 

the 1960s.191 NASA outlined the general configuration from which an 

aircraft firm would build the SST. Because of Ames’ long interest in 

delta wings and canards—dating back to tests of the North American 

B-70 supersonic bomber—Victor Peterson and Loren Bright helped 

define the aerodynamics of a delta-canard configuration. The 

Ames vehicle aerodynamics branch also suggested a double-delta 

configuration that Lockheed used for its SST proposal. Then Ames 

used its wind tunnels to help the Federal Aviation Administration 

(FAA) evaluate the efficiency and environmental impact of the 

designs. And Ames used its flight simulators to coordinate handling 

qualities research by NASA, pilot groups, industrial engineers, 

and airworthiness authorities from the United States, the United 

Kingdom, and France. Ames thus led development of the criteria used 

to certify civil supersonic transports. The European-built Concorde 

was certified to these criteria in both Europe and the United States. 

Into the 1980s and 1990s, though, as funding for aeronautics 

declined as a portion of NASA’s budget, Ames researchers retreated 

from their work on high-concept experimental aircraft. Increasingly, 

they partnered with other government agencies—like the FAA for 

work in air traffic management and with the Army in rotorcraft. And 

they refocused on what they historically did best—provide research 

capability in such areas as flight simulation, wind tunnel testing, and 

component development to serve a variety of aircraft. 

F L I G H T S I M U L A T I O N 

Ames people constantly reinvent themselves to apply the skills 

they have to problems that they are just defining. One example of 

personal reinvention, in the 1960s, is reflected in Ames’ emergence as 

a leader in flight simulators. Ames had begun building simulators in 

the early 1950s, when the Center acquired its first analog computers 

to solve dynamic equations, and as part of Ames’ work in aircraft 

handling qualities. Harry Goett, leader of Ames’ full-scale flight 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

research, had pushed his colleagues to move further into simulator 

design, and George Rathert had led this effort. George Cooper, the 

Ames chief test pilot and author of the Cooper-Harper handling 

qualities rating scale, also advocated greater use of simulators to 

study the how pilots worked with aircraft. 

Ames’ computing staff recognized that they could program analog 

computers with an aircraft’s equations of motion, that a mockup of 

the pilot stick and pedals could provide computer inputs, and that 

computer output could drive mockups of aircraft instrumentation. 

Thus, the entire loop of flight control could be tested safely on the 

ground. Simulators for entry-level flight training were already widely 

used, but by building their system around a general, reprogrammable 

computer, Ames pioneered development of the flight simulator for 

research. 

By the late 1950s, using parts scrounged from other efforts, 

Ames had constructed a crude roll-pitch chair. Goett championed 

construction of another simulator, proudly displayed at Ames 1958 

annual inspection, to test design concepts for the X-15 hypersonic 

aircraft. Ames was ready to move when NASA asked for simulators 

to help plan spacecraft to be piloted in the unfamiliar terrain of 

microgravity. Fortunately, Ames had on staff a superb group of test 

pilots and mechanics who wanted to stay at Ames even after NASA 

headquarters, in the early 1960s, sent most of its aircraft south to 

Rogers Dry Lake. Led by John Dusterberry, this analog and flight 

simulator branch pioneered construction of sophisticated simulators 

to suit the research needs of other groups around NASA. 

In 1959, Ames embarked on an ambitious effort to build a fivedegree-of-freedom motion simulator. This was a simulated cockpit 

built on the end of a thirty-foot long centrifuge arm, which provided 

curvilinear and vertical motion, and also the G-forces pilots were 

encountering in supersonic aircraft. The cockpit had electrical 

motors to move it about pitch, roll, and yaw. It was a crude effort, 

built of borrowed parts by Ames’ engineering services division. But 

the simulator proved the design principle, pilots thought it did a 

great job representing airplane flight, and it was put to immediate 

use to develop stability augmenters for supersonic transports. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

In 1963, Ames opened a six-degree-of-freedom simulator for 

rotorcraft research, a moving cab simulator for transport aircraft, 

and a midcourse navigation simulator for use in training Apollo 

astronauts. Ames combined its various simulators into a space 

flight guidance research laboratory, opened in 1966 at a cost of $13 

million. One of the most important additions was a centrifuge space 

flight simulator at the end of a centrifuge arm capable of accelerating 

at a rate of 7.5 G-forces per second. Another was a satellite attitude 

control facility, built inside a 22 foot diameter sphere to teach ground 

controllers how to stabilize robotic spacecraft. 

Ames had become the best in the world at adding motion 

generators to flight simulators, and connecting them with 

programmable analog computers to simulate aircraft not yet built. 

Into the 1970s, Ames researchers pioneered out-the-window scenes 

to make the simulation seem even more realistic for the pilot. These 

began with wooden models of airfields, over which a television 

camera would fly in response to how the pilot flew the simulator. 

They evolved into digital images generated by increasingly more 

powerful computer visualization methods. 

Throughout this work, Ames also emphasized the modular 

design of simulator components, so that various computers, visual 

projectors, and motion generators could be interconnected to 

simulate some proposed aircraft or spacecraft design. All of this 

technology was available to aerospace firms, who by the 1980s had 

bought their own simulators for cockpit design. Likewise the NASA 

centers focused on human space flight had procured simulators 

for astronaut basic training (though the most challenging landing 

scenarios were still trained for at Ames). So Ames continued to build 

simulators with unique capabilities, and increasingly used them to 

attack problems of aircraft safety. 

Ames opened its flight simulator for advanced aircraft (FSAA), 

in June 1969, initially to analyze concepts for wide-body aircraft 

and supersonic transports. It was followed by the vertical motion 

simulator (VMS) that, like the FSAA, was part of a comprehensive 

flight and guidance simulation laboratory (known as the SimLab) 

which officially opened in February 1980. The FSAA had superb 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

horizontal motion, so the VMS was optimized for studies of 

vertical motion. The VMS tower was 110 feet high and 73 feet 

long, and offered vertical displacement of thirty feet up or down, 

with maximum vertical velocity at twenty feet per second. All other 

degrees of freedom were built upon the vertical.192 

The VMS was initially used to study aircraft flair and touchdown, 

and a cab was soon added for studies of helicopter control. 

Ultimately five different cabs were built—to simulate helicopters, 

transport aircraft, the Shuttle orbiter, short take-off and vertical 

landing aircraft, and advanced cockpit designs. The VMS was where 

the control laws of V/STOL aircraft were worked out. The Shuttle 

orbiter cockpit was refined there, and every Shuttle commander 

used it to train for the very precise dead-stick landing as the orbiter 

returned to Earth.193 

Ames continued to study theories of cockpit automation to reduce 

pilot error in conventional airliners, and then built these ideas into 

the crew-vehicle systems research facility (CVSRF). Opened in 1984, 

the facility encompassed all facets of air traffic control from the pilot’s 

perspective—air-to-ground communications, navigation, as well as 

a computer-generated view out of the simulated cockpit. It housed 

two simulators with six-degrees of freedom, one modeled after a 

Boeing 747-400 and one with greater flexibility to model advanced 

cockpit concepts. It also housed an air traffic control laboratory, a 

room where stand-in controllers could track data on their computer 

screens and talk with pilots about where they should pilot their 

simulators. It was located near the Ames research laboratories 

for aerospace human factors and information technology; the 

vertical motion simulator was located closer to the flight research 

groups. The CVSRF was used to test, cheaply and quickly, potential 

improvements to cockpits and air traffic control centers. 

Harvey Allen had built at Ames a comprehensive and 

overlapping set of experimental facilities to study all aspects of 

reentry aerodynamics, and Ames aerodynamicists had built a 

comprehensive and interconnected set of computing machines to 

develop CFD. In that same spirit, Ames built the CVSRF and VMS 

as parts of a comprehensive set of Ames facilities to experiment 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

on improving pilot workload, aircraft automation, flight safety, 

airline efficiency and, later, air traffic control around airports. Ames 

researchers then broadened their use to encompass safety within the 

entire national airspace system. As it had with the Army to study the 

aerodynamics of rotorcraft, Ames built an alliance with the FAA, 

which had a research laboratory for its applied research but did little 

basic research. Ames brought into this flight safety partnership its 

full range of capabilities—in communications, simulation, materials 

science, and computing. 

The FAA asked Ames, for example, to devise an aviation safety 

reporting system (ASRS) to collect data—supplied voluntarily by 

flight and ground personnel—on aircraft accidents or safety incidents 

in American aviation.The Ames human factors group, led by Charles 

Billings, brought every involved group into the planning, and ASRS 

director William Reynard implemented it with a reputation for 

fairness. The ASRS won the trust of pilots and air traffic controllers, 

who initially balked at reporting incidents because they almost 

always arose from simple human error. Ames did not collect the data 

anonymously, since they had to verify reports, but they removed 

identification before compiling data for the FAA. In its first fifteen 

years, ASRS received 180,000 safety reports, at a rate of 36,000 a 

year by 1991. From this massive database on human performance in 

aviation, Ames staff generated hundreds of research papers that led 

to incremental improvements in aviation safety. The ASRS also put 

out periodic alert messages about matters that required immediate 

attention and a monthly safety report. “There’s nothing worse than 

sending information to a government agency,” said Reynard, “and 

seeing nothing happen.”194 

Using these data to locate weak spots in the system, Ames used 

its simulators to minimize human errors. One protocol tested on the 

simulators became known as line-oriented flight training (LOFT) 

a method devised at Ames in the late 1970s for evaluating and 

training crews in all facets of flight management. Earlier methods 

of training flight crews focused on their reaction to emergencies. 

Because these reactions emphasized maneuvers, these training 

methods tended to instill rote and isolated responses. Line-oriented 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

flight training was done in a simulator, which recreated an entire 

flight from gate to gate, interjecting complications along the way 

to test the crew’s anticipation of problems and coordination of 

decision-making. All major airlines adopted a version of it, as did 

the American military. During these full-flight simulations, Ames 

discovered that most accidents occurred not because pilots lacked 

technical skill, but because they failed to avail themselves of all 

the resources available in the cockpit. Paradoxically, most training 

focused on technical proficiency with individual parts of the cockpit. 

So the Ames aeronautical human factors branch developed methods 

for use in training pilots to manage all cockpit resources. Ames and 

the U.S. Air Force Military Airlift Command organized a conference 

attended by more than 200 aircraft safety experts from 14 countries, 

who established the importance of training pilots in cockpit resource 

management. 

This work then led to better workload prediction models, which 

Ames used to devise simulations subjecting pilots to standardized 

workloads. From this the U.S. Air Force adopted a single code to 

promote its pilots, and NASA adopted a target-selection code 

to evaluate control devices for the Space Shuttle. What pilots 

call the “NASA nap” originated in a long running experiment by 

Curtis Graeber, begun in 1979, that proved short periods of rest 

dramatically improved pilot performance during long-haul flights. 

By 2000, NASA Ames consolidated its efforts in improving human 

performance into PDARS, the performance data analysis and 

reporting system, which moved safety beyond the cockpit and into 

the air traffic control tower. Six FAA centers prototyped the PDARS, 

which rapidly processed air traffic data and provided daily reports to 

facility managers on the operational health of their facilities. They 

could then model operational changes to boost the capacity their 

centers could safely handle. 

Ames’ aerospace human factors research division, in October 

1993, installed a Boeing 747-400 simulator in its CVSRF. The cockpit 

simulator was identical to those used to train airline pilots, except that 

the new displays were reprogrammable and stocked with equipment 

for collecting computer, audio, and video data. “Our goal is to find 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

ways to improve human capabilities using automation,” said CVSRF 

manager Robert Shiner. Indeed, one of the first studies addressed 

replacing voice communication between pilot and controller with 

a digital datalink.195 Ames was working on all the technological 

components to allow the airspace system to be managed as an 

integrated whole. 

A major upgrade of the vertical motion simulator was completed 

in May 1997, adding a new interchangeable cockpit. Ames built this 

new T cab in-house to satisfy the needs of NASA’s tilt rotor and 

high-speed airliner programs. The new T cab had a side-by-side 

arrangement and an all-glass cockpit, so pilots could press easily 

altered touch-screens rather than actual instruments.The 270 degree 

view out the window was twice that of the other four cabs available to 

the simulator, which simulated helicopters, airplanes, and the Space 

Shuttle. Into the 2000s, the VMS and CVSRF remained fully booked. 

The VMS, for example, was used to study ways to pilot a new lunar 

lander being built for the Constellation program. The CVSRF was 

connected with FutureFlight Central, an air traffic control simulator 

that looked like an airport tower, which allowed realistic simulations 

of how air traffic controllers and flight crews would interact following 

any redesign of a major airport. Using these interconnected facilities, 

Ames simulated how civil tilt rotor aircraft might be handled around 

an airport. They allowed a crew and controller to simulate a flight 

between, say, the Dallas and Chicago airports using the data 

generated by next generation air traffic control technologies. Air 

traffic safety, from the human perspective, continued to be a key 

part of the NASA Ames research agenda. 

I N T E G R A T I V E F L I G H T C O N T R O L 

Leonard Roberts served as Ames director of aeronautics and 

flight systems from 1972 through 1984, when integrative projects 

dominated. He helped match all Ames facilities—the tunnels, 

computers, simulators, and the test grounds at Dryden—with new 

flight research programsinmaneuverability, short takeoff andlanding 

aircraft, and aircraft safety. Ames grew especially adept at building 

light, inexpensive, and well-focused flying laboratories to verify 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

component technology, to test seemingly bizarre new configurations, 

or to gather data that could not be gathered otherwise. 

Exemplifying this integrative urge—especially between 

researchers at Ames and Dryden—was digital fly-by-wire technology 

(DFBW). Engineers at Ames had pioneered the concept of digital flyby-wire in the 1960s, expecting it to replace the heavy and vulnerable 

hydraulic actuators still used in high-performance aircraft. Ames 

had already built many of the electronic controls for its groundbased flight simulators, which were made digital in order to run 

programs stored on their computers. Making these codes, controls 

and connectors reliable enough for a flying aircraft, though, required 

a magnitude greater of integration and reliability. So they acquired an 

F-8 Crusader fighter aircraft, removed all the mechanical controls, 

and installed their best DFBW technology. In 1972 in the air above 

Ames-Dryden, they first demonstrated the concept of DFBW. 

Once Ames had demonstrated the feasibility of DFBW, they 

worked on hardware and code that the aerospace industry could 

use in any new aircraft. For example, any bug in a multiple channel 

digital system, like DFBW, could crash all redundant channels. To 

avoid the cost, complexity and weight of a backup system, Ames 

designed software that could survive any problem in the main 

program. They further designed this fault-tolerant software to check 

itself automatically during flight. Other Ames scientists working in 

computational fluid dynamics applied algorithms that incorporated 

nonlinear functions into the software, and thus allowed DFBW 

to expand the flight envelope to the extremes of turbulence and 

boundary layer separation. The success of fly-by-wire in the AmesDryden tests convinced NASA to use it as the basis of the Space 

Shuttle flight control system. 

Ames next applied its skills to the equally complex, multichannel 

task of controlling jet engines. Ames designed a digital electronic 

engine control (DEEC) that could optimize the ten variables on 

the F100 engine that powered the F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft. 

Electronic control improved engine performance, with higher thrust, 

faster throttle response, improved afterburner response, stall-free 

operation, and eight times better reliability and maintainability than 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

the mechanical controls it replaced. The Ames DEEC first flew on a 

NASA F-15 in 1982 and, revised by McDonnell Douglas to military 

specifications, entered production on U.S. Air Force models in 1985. 

Ames continued integrating the components of its digital control 

technology. In the skies over Ames-Dryden, in June 1985, a group 

of engineers led by program manager Gary Trippensee witnessed 

the first flight of the NASA F-15 that had been modified as the 

HIDEC aircraft (for highly integrated digital electronics control). 

By integrating data on altitude, Mach number, angle of attack, 

and sideslip, HIDEC let the aircraft and engine operate very close 

to its stall boundary. Simply by improving these controls, and 

reducing the stall margin, thrust improved two to ten percent. The 

next phase of the Ames-Dryden HIDEC program included flight 

path management, by adding a digital flight controller built for 

the Air Force. This technology optimized trajectories to lower fuel 

consumption, suggest faster intercepts, and allow navigation in four 

dimensions. The FAA asked Ames to expand upon this flight path 

controller in order to improve capacity in the commercial airspace 

system. So Ames developed a set of algorithms to process data 

from aircraft sensors into cockpit instructions on how a pilot could 

fly more efficiently. The Ames algorithm found its way onto new 

Boeing 757 and 767 and Airbus A310 aircraft, and airlines estimated 

Ames’ work saved them four percent on fuel costs. Ames-Dryden 

staff also used the F-15 flight research aircraft to develop selfrepairing flight controls. In flight tests during May 1989, sensors and 

computers aboard the F-15 correctly identified a simulated failure 

in the flight controls. Diagnosing failures on the ground was always 

time consuming, and often fruitless since the failures could only be 

identified in specific flight conditions. Once the system identified the 

failure, it could reconfigure other parts of the aircraft to compensate. 

Ames’ powerful triad of facilities—tunnels, computers, and 

simulators—allowed it to create and prove the fundamental 

hardware and software that controlled that generation of aircraft. 

Ames people also created protocols useful in the integration of 

electronics and software in flight systems. And it validated the use 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

of airborne laboratories—like the F-8 and the F-15—to quickly and 

cheaply demonstrate new component technologies. 

Ames also drove development of new experimental aircraft. 

In the early 1960s, for example, Ames aerodynamicist R.T. Jones 

worked out the theory behind the oblique wing. The oblique wing 

was perpendicular to the fuselage at take-off to provide maximum 

lift, then it swiveled in flight so that one half-span angled forward and 

the other angled backward to decrease drag. This shape could solve 

the transonic problems of all naval aircraft, which needed high lift 

to get off a carrier and a sleek profile to go supersonic. Swept wings, 

like those on the F-111, solved this problem by using a joint that 

was heavier and weaker than the swivel joint needed to support an 

oblique wing. Aerodynamically, though, the oblique wing was quite 

complex. First, the airfoil had to provide lift with air moving over it 

at a variety of angles. Second, flight controls had to be sophisticated 

enough to compensate for the asymmetry of the control surfaces. 

Ames’ ongoing work in digital fly-by-wire made it easier to design 

the oblique wing, by enabling programmers to write code to control 

an inherently unstable aircraft. 

Jones had already established his reputation in theoretical 

aerodynamics. He saw in the oblique wing not only a promising 

concept and an intellectual challenge, but also a program to validate 

Ames’ integrative approach to flight research. Jones marshalled 

the scientific resources of Ames—especially its wind tunnels and 

computer modeling—to design the experimental aircraft called the 

AD-1 (for Ames-Dryden). Then, the AD-1 was fabricated quickly 

and cheaply, using sailplane technology and a low-speed jet engine. 

With this low cost approach, Jones quickly validated the concept 

and assessed flying qualities without the bureaucratic squabbles that 

usually accompany X-series aircraft. 

Soon after the AD-1’s first flight, in 1987, the U.S. Navy 

joined Ames to sponsor the Grumman X-29A. The X-29’s bizarre 

aerodynamics had both wings swept forward and a canard for lateral 

axis control. Because it was inherently unstable, the X-29 made 

extensive use of the flight control software and digital fly-by-wire 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

technologies developed at Ames-Dryden. Also used to validate the 

concepts and technology behind the X-29A was another unique 

NASA Ames aircraft. 

The HiMAT, which first flew in July 1979, was specifically 

designed for flights tests of high-maneuverability concepts. HiMAT 

(for highly maneuverable aircraft technology test bed) was a Dryden 

project until Ames was called in to help solve some aerodynamic 

problems. Bill Ballhaus wrote code to solve three-dimensional, 

transonic, small-perturbation equations—which marked the first 

time computational fluid dynamics had been used to design a wing. 

(Later this code was used to design the wing for the Sabreliner and for 

the B-2 stealth bomber, establishing Ballhaus’ reputation in applied 

CFD.) Dryden and Ames staff built the HiMAT as a small-scale, 

remotely-piloted, and heavily-instrumented aircraft to test risky 

technology. At a fraction of the time and cost of a human-carrying 

vehicle, Ames tested the interactions between many new highmaneuverability devices on an aircraft in flight. HiMAT included 

digital fly-by-wire, relaxed static stability, close-coupled canards, 

and aeroelastic tailoring. Aeroelastic tailoring of composite materials 

allowed Ames to construct wings so that airflows twisted them to the 

optimum camber and angle, whether at cruise speeds or undergoing 

heavy loading during maneuvers. Tests of aeroelastic tailoring on the 

HiMAT provided valuable data on the use of composite materials in 

all modern aircraft. 

Perhaps because Ames people directed work at the Dryden flight 

research facility, there was a flourish of research into improving the 

correspondence between tunnel tests and flight tests. For example, 

Ames designed a remotely augmented vehicle to expand its skills 

in flight test instrumentation. This vehicle collected data using the 

same sensors that collected data during flight tests, telemetered it 

to a computer on the ground, which transmitted back commands 

to the flight controls to augment the aircraft’s performance. This 

ground-based computer was easy to maintain and upgrade, flexible 

enough to control several test aircraft, and powerful enough to run 

more sophisticated software than was possible on flight-approved 

computers. Ames used this technology to test artificial intelligence 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

algorithms before including them in flight controllers. And it proved 

a far more efficient way in which to take the next step forward in 

variable-stability flight-test aircraft. 

Similarly, Ames’ flight-test autopilot was a digital computer into 

which engineers programmed an exact flight-test maneuver. Since 

this test autopilot was patched directly into the on-board flight 

controls, there was no need for additional actuators. The pilot could, 

of course, override it at any time, but it proved especially valuable 

when a pilot had to simultaneously perform many maneuvers and 

control many flight variables, or when repeatability of a maneuver 

was important. 

Ames-Dryden pilots also developed the technology of the 

transition cone. To scale results from wind tunnel models up to 

full-scale aircraft, aerodynamicists needed to understand where 

boundary layers made the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. 

Researchers at the USAF Arnold Engineering Development Center 

originated the transition cone concept, which pilots and flight test 

engineers at Ames-Dryden then tested at a variety of Mach numbers 

in wind tunnels and mounted to the nose cone of NASA’s F-15. They 

obtained data that set standards, used worldwide, on the quality of 

airflows in wind tunnels. 

NASA’s high-alpha technology program was an effort to calibrate 

its many research tools while exploring an intriguing regime of 

aerodynamics. For twelve weeks beginning in June 1991, an Ames 

team led by Lewis Schiff tested a Navy F/A-18 in the 80 by 120 foot 

section of the NFAC, making it the first full-scale aircraft tested in 

the world’s largest wind tunnel. The goal was to understand how a 

modern fighter aircraft performed at very high angles of attack (called 

high alpha) like those encountered in aerial combat. Wind tunnel 

data were matched against the data predicted by computational fluid 

dynamics, and both were compared with flight-test data collected on 

a highly instrumented F/A-18. 

The NASA/Boeing X-36 tailless fighter agility research aircraft 

proved, with dramatic efficiency, the concept of the tailless fighter. It 

was conceived in 1989 by researchers at Ames’ military technology 

branch and McDonnell Douglas’ Phantom Works in St. Louis 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

(later part of Boeing). It embodied the results of a decade of Ames 

research into tailless fighters—using wind tunnels, simulators, 

supercomputers, and flight controls. The X-36 lacked vertical and 

horizontal tails. Instead, it got directional stability and flight control 

through a split aileron and engine thrust vectoring. This innovative 

design promised to reduce weight, drag, and radar signature and 

increase the range, maneuverability and survivability of future 

fighter aircraft. 

Rather than build a full-scale prototype needing a pilot, the 

Ames/Boeing team built a 28 percent scale model that was remotely 

piloted. Two X-36 prototypes rolled out in May 1996, only 28 

months after go-ahead, at a total project cost of $21 million shared 

between Ames and Boeing. They were fully powered by turbofan 

engines providing 700 pounds of thrust, and flown by a pilot sitting 

in a ground-station cockpit, complete with a heads-up display. By 

keeping a pilot in the loop, Ames eliminated the expense of complex, 

autonomous flight controls. “When we saw this airplane lift off,” 

exclaimed Rod Bailey, the X-36 program manager, “we saw the shape 

of airplanes to come.”196 Between May and November 1997, the X-36 

prototypes flew 31 flights, for a total of 15 hours, in only 25 weeks. 

Four different versions of flight control software were tested. The 

X-36 reached an altitude of 20,200 feet, and a maximum angle of 

attack of forty degrees. The flight tests clearly demonstrated the 

feasibility of tailless fighters, and showed that they could possess 

agility far superior to that of today’s best fighters. 

The X-36 was the last high-concept test aircraft to be managed 

at Ames, attesting to the decline in NASA funding for aeronautics 

research. At the turn of the century, funding for basic aeronautical 

research shifted to the defense department. The research that 

remained within NASA, on aircraft efficiency, played to the historic 

strengths of the Glenn Research Center in propulsion technology. 

Ames remained capable of reinvigorating its aeronautical research 

when Congress directed it to do so. At the request of the Army, 

Ames continued a comprehensive research program on rotorcraft 

and subsonic aircraft. Ames had improved its monitoring and 

control software, for spacecraft, and was looking for ways that 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

spacecraft technology could be used to improve aircraft. And Ames 

had upgraded its wind tunnels and other research facilities. 

U P G R A D I N G T H E W I N D T U N N E L S 

Even beyond the 1980s, Ames’ wind tunnels tied together work 

in computational fluid dynamics at the start of aircraft design and 

automated flight testing at the end. The golden age of wind tunnel 

research had passed, though Ames researchers continued to invent 

new techniques to make more efficient use of its tunnels. With 

laser speckle velocimetry, for example, Ames solved the seemingly 

intractable problem of measuring unsteady fields in fluid flows. 

By seeding the air with microparticles, then illuminating it with 

a coherent light like that of a pulsed laser, they created speckled 

patterns which were superimposed on a photographic plate to 

create a specklegram. This specklegram recorded the entire twodimensional velocity field with great spatial resolution. From this 

single measurement, aerodynamicists easily obtained the vorticity 

field generated by new aircraft designs. Similarly, Ames’ fluid 

mechanics laboratory in 1987 started working closely with chemists 

at the University of Washington to develop pressure-sensitive 

paints that would turn luminescent depending on the amount of 

oxygen they absorbed. The paint was easily sprayed on an aircraft 

surface before tunnel or flight testing and returned good data on the 

distribution of air pressure over the aircraft surface. 

Ames had built many special-purpose tunnels in the 1950s and 

1960s, which were then dismantled. But many of the general-purpose 

tunnels built in the 1940s had started to degrade. In 1967 NASA 

participated in a nationwide review of American wind tunnels, and 

three at Ames were designated as key national resources—the 40 

by 80 foot, the 12 foot pressure, and the Unitary. (This result was 

repeated in a 2004 study by the Rand Corporation, and the vertical 

motion simulator and the arc jet complex were designated national 

resources in their categories.) Ames planned a long-term effort 

to bring these tunnels up to the state of the art, and to keep all its 

tunnels operating safely. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Perhaps the most significant upgrade was the December 1987 

rededication of the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex 

(NFAC). The 40 by 80 foot wind tunnel, the largest in the western 

world since its opening in 1944, remained Ames’ most unrivalled 

tunnel. It had been in almost constant use. Beginning in the late 

1960s, and for more than a decade, Mark Kelly led groups from 

Ames to headquarters asking for funds to repower the 40 by 80 foot 

tunnel and add a new test section. With the support of the Army and 

Air Force, Congress relented. 

In November 1978, Clarence Syvertson turned the first spade of 

dirt under the new 80 by 120 foot test section of the now renamed 

NFAC. (In addition to the one tunnel housing the two test sections, 

the complex also included Ames’ outdoor aerodynamic research 

facility to test airflow beneath vertical take-off aircraft.) New drive 

motors rated at 135,000 horsepower—four times more powerful 

than the original motors—drove the need for new wood-composite 

fan blades and strengthening of the hull. The 40 by 80 foot section 

would continue to work as a closed-loop tunnel, with an air circuit 

a half-mile long. The 80 by 120 foot section would be open at both 

ends, rather than closed loop, which reduced the cost to $85 million 

and construction time to an additional six months. It would gulp in 

air through a horn-shaped inlet as big as a football field. Kenneth 

Mort, lead aerodynamicist on the upgrade, built a 1/50th scale 

model of the tunnel itself to show that Bay Area winds would not 

unacceptably degrade the smooth ingest of test air. This bigger 

section would operate at an airspeed only one-third that of the 40 

by 80 foot test section, but was big enough for ever-larger military 

and commercial aircraft. Furthermore, the higher speed and larger 

size of the modified facility made it ideal for Ames’ growing body of 

work in VTOL aircraft, helicopters, and aeroacoustics. The larger 

test section minimized tunnel-wall interference, which worsened 

at low speeds or when air was deflected downward and outward by 

rotorcraft. Since sound waves took some distance to propagate, large 

test sections were also important in aircraft noise studies, an issue 

becoming more politically sensitive. To make the new tunnel better 

suited to aeroacoustic research, and reduce the noise made while 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

the tunnel was running, Ames engineers lined the test sections with 

sound-absorbing insulation. Cranes were added for moving around 

larger models. Better sensors, model mounts, wiring and computers 

improved data collection. Construction of the composite tunnel 

ended in June 1982. 

Just before noon on 9 December 1982—with only two months 

of shakedown tests to go before it would be fully operational—the 

NFAC suffered a serious accident. While running at 93 knots in the 

80 by 120 foot test section, close to its maximum speed, a slip joint 

holding the hinge mechanism on vane set number five slipped. The 

entire lattice work of vanes broke up and its debris blew into the drive 

fans. Vane set five stood 90 feet high, 130 feet wide, and weighed 77 

tons. Located a hundred feet upwind of the fans, the nose sections 

of the vanes hinged to guide airflow around a 45 degree corner from 

the new 80 by 120 section into the old tunnel. All ninety fan blades, 

handcrafted of laminated wood, were destroyed. The institutional 

trauma of the accident announced itself with a terrifying thump 

heard around Center. 

Ames had done a poor job supervising design and construction 

of the vane set. More stunning, Ames could no longer be proud of 

its safety record (though no one had been hurt in this accident). 

Syvertson had earlier nominated the Ames machine shop for a 

NASA group achievement award to recognize its year of no losstime accidents. When NASA headquarters refused the nomination, 

on the grounds that NASA gave no awards for safety, Syvertson was 

so incensed that he refused the NASA Distinguished Service Medal 

that he was to be awarded. 

Yet Ames wrested success from the tragedy. Ames tunnel 

managers shuffled the test schedule to make use of smaller tunnels, so 

that the accident added little to the two-year backlog of tests waiting 

for the tunnel to open. Ames estimated it would take one year and 

cost $13 million to repair. However, a blue ribbon panel of aerospace 

experts convened by NASA and led by Robert Swain suggested this 

was an opportunity to make additional upgrades to boost NFAC 

reliability. This raised the total renovation cost to $122 million, the 

amount Ames had originally requested. Better instrumentation, 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

stronger structural steel, and turning vanes with sophisticated 

airfoils and no movable parts all created a more capable tunnel. New 

wiring for 1,250 channels pushed data at rates up to two million bits 

per second into computers where they could be instantly compared 

with theoretical predictions. Although both tunnels could not be 

run at the same time, engineers could set up tests in one tunnel while 

the other one ran. In September 1986, the Ames project group led by 

Lee Stollar, started the first preliminary tests. Almost a year passed 

before the NFAC was declared fully operational. 

Following the upgrade, airspeeds in the 40 by 80 foot test section 

could reach 345 miles per hour, the low cruise speed for many 

aircraft. The 80 by 120 foot tunnel, operating at 115 miles per hour, 

became the world’s largest open-circuit tunnel. It proved especially 

useful in studies where low-speed handling was especially critical, 

like during landing and take-off. It has been used to test a variety 

of aircraft on a large scale—fighter jets, lifting-body configurations, 

Space Shuttle models, supersonic transports, parachutes, and even 

trucks and highway signs. 

Once Ames got the tunnel renovation program back on track after 

the accident, it focused on the 12 foot pressure tunnel. The tunnel 

hull had, since its opening in 1946, undergone constant expansion 

and contraction as it was pressurized to achieve its extraordinarily 

smooth flows of air and then depressurized. Such extensive, 

unrepairable cracks in the welds were discovered during a detailed 

inspection in December 1986, that Ames decided to rebuild the hull 

completely. Models of virtually every American commercial airliner 

had been tested in the 12 foot pressure tunnel, and aircraft designers 

hoped to continue to rely upon it. Beginning in 1990, a project 

team led by Nancy Bingham stripped and rebuilt the closed-loop 

pressure vessel, and installed an innovative air-lock system around 

the test section. The new air-lock let engineers enter the test section 

without depressurizing the entire tunnel, boosting its productivity 

and reducing the pressure cycling that had earlier degraded the hull. 

Ames also integrated new test and measurement equipment, and 

upgraded the fan drive. The 12 foot pressure tunnel reopened in 

November 1994, creating a superb test facility at a renovation cost of 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

only $115 million. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately placed 

on standby due to a lack of a testing backlog. 

Since being placed in service in 1955, the Unitary Plan wind 

tunnel, like many Ames facilities, had been heavily used. Such 

constant operation was planned, since Ames had designed the tunnel 

with massive diversion valves that allowed a test to be run in one 

section while models were set up in the other two. The drive system 

had accumulated more than 70,000 hours of use, as the Unitary 

complex tested every military aircraft, every significant commercial 

transport, and every manned spacecraft since its inception. The 11 

foot transonic tunnel still had a 2.5 year backlog of tests, and the 

cost had risen to $300,000 for a one-week test. Ames shut down the 

Unitary in 1996 for an $85 million renovation to make it operate more 

efficiently. Modernization would automate the control system and 

improve flow quality in the transonic section by adding honeycomb 

flow straighteners, turbulence reduction screens, and segmented 

flaps in the wide-angle diffuser to eliminate flow separation. 

Other wind tunnels did not fair so well. One of the 7 by 10 foot 

tunnels, the first opened at Ames, remained in active use by Ames and 

Army researchers. The second tunnel, though, was largely scavenged 

for parts to keep the first one operating. The 14 foot transonic wind 

tunnel, largely unused since the 1980s, in 2009 was demolished. But 

with the modernization of the NFAC and Unitary, some of the most 

valuable facilities at Ames were available to continue moving aircraft 

concepts to flight tests—as with VTOL aircraft. 

V E R T I C A L T A K E - O F F A N D L A N D I N G A I R C R A F T 

The separation of lift from thrust (that is, using an airfoil and an 

engine instead of flapping wings) was the insight that made powered 

flight possible. Reuniting lift and thrust into propulsive lift, with the 

technology earned over a half century of flight, promised a revolution 

in the relationship between aircraft and the populations they serve. In 

a tilt rotor or VTOL aircraft (for vertical take-off and landing), wingtip rotors lift the aircraft like a helicopter, then the rotors tilt forward 

like propellers and transfer the lift from the rotors to the airfoil until 

the aircraft flew like an airplane. Helicopters do not fly forward 

271 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

efficiently. Fixed-wing aircraft find forward efficiency in higher wing 

loading, which requires longer runways, which then mandate bigger 

and more congested airports, farther from population centers. Tilt 

rotors can fly longer distances than helicopters, yet require little 

more space than a helipad to take-off and land. 

The XV-3 tilt rotor that Bell Aircraft designed for the U.S. Army 

was a small aircraft. A single engine mounted in the center turned 

a gear box that powered large rotors at the wing tips. The XV-3 first 

flew in 1955, and every flight was nerve-racking. In a hover flight, 

in 1956, a rotor pylon coupling failed catastrophically and the pilot 

was severely injured. Bell strengthened the structure, then, in 1957, 

Ames engineers started working with Bell on the XV-3 with tests 

in the 40 by 80 foot wind tunnel. The XV-3 flew again in 1958, with 

NASA pilot Fred Drinkwater at the controls to define the flight 

envelope between vertical and horizontal flight. Full conversion 

from helicopter to forward flight was flown in August 1959, and the 

XV-3 test program proved a major advance in understanding the 

transition from ground to air. The XV-3 program ended in 1965 after 

a rotor pylon tore loose while the aircraft was inside the 40 by 80 foot 

tunnel. In 1966, Ames finally mothballed the XV-3. 

In the 1960s, though, the excitement over propulsive lift swirled 

around vectored-thrust jet aircraft—that is, aircraft that could lift 

straight up when its jet exhaust is pointed to the ground. Ames 

began that flight research effort with another Bell VTOL aircraft, 

the X-14, a twin-engine deflected turboprop. It was dramatically 

underpowered, but did hover and allowed Ames pilots to discover 

ways of controlling VTOL flight.197 NASA then contracted with 

British Aerospace to build the XV-6A Kestrel, which flew so well 

that it was quickly redesigned into the Harrier, known in the United 

States as the AV-8B. The jet exhaust nozzle of the Harrier was pointed 

downward to lift it off the ground, then rotated backward to provide 

forward thrust. The Harrier was inefficient when hovering but 

otherwise performed well in the marine attack role. Ames received 

early prototypes of the Harrier, which they tested in the 40 by 80 foot 

tunnel to better understand the complex airflows of vectored thrust. 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

Ames also used their flight tests with the AV-8B Harrier, as well 

as wind tunnel and simulator tests, to author handling qualities 

definitions for all future VTOL aircraft. VTOL aircraft feel different 

to any pilot, whether they train on helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft. 

First published as a NASA technical note, these handling quality 

definitions were applied to all VTOL aircraft in NATO and in the 

U.S. military through its VTOL flying qualities specification. 

But ideas for higher-efficiency propeller-driven VTOL aircraft 

continued to percolate. NASA let contracts for a variety of 

approaches—like the Ryan XV-5A which used tip-turbine driven 

lift fans. For the U.S. Army, Vought built several XC-142 tilt-wing 

prototypes, which flew well but had problems in conversion. Bell 

invested its own money, with considerable help from Ames, in 

designing its Model 300. It had good hover and rotor efficiency and 

its pylons proved stable in wind tunnel tests. Ames had worked hard, 

since the demise of the XV-3, to solve the lingering problems of tilt 

rotor aerodynamics. 

In 1970, NASA decided to fund another effort in tilt rotor design. 

Foreign competitors were especially strong in small aircraft and 

helicopters, and NASA headquarters wanted America to regain the 

lead through a technological leap. In the debate that ensued, Gene 

Love and his colleagues at Langley favored a tilt-wing approach. But 

Bill Harper, then director of aeronautics at NASA headquarters, 

sided with his former colleagues at Ames in favoring the tilt rotor 

approach. This resulted in the Bell XV-15, the first successful tilt 

rotor aircraft. 

A key factor in Ames earning the XV-15 project was its 

relationship with the Army airmobility research and development 

laboratory, co-located at Ames since 1965. Richard Carlson became 

director of the Ames/Army effort in 1976, and infused it with a 

theoretical foundation for VTOL aerodynamics. Because of this 

alliance with the Army, Ames had funds to refurbish one of the 7 

by 10 foot tunnels for small scale tests in advance of tests in the 

full-scale tunnel. The complex aerodynamics of helicopters and 

VTOL aircraft meant that they ultimately had to be tested in full273 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

scale tunnels. On VTOLs, effects could not be scaled, interference 

from downwash was extreme, and the hard work was in the details. 

The XV-15 was intended for medical evacuation and search and 

rescue missions like those the Army had flown during the war in 

Vietnam. The XV-15 had a gross weight of 15,000 pounds, a payload 

of 4,000 pounds, a cruising speed of 350 knots, and a range of 1,000 

nautical miles—roughly twice that of the best helicopters. In 1970, 

management of the XV-15 went to a joint NASA-Army project office 

at Ames with David Few in charge. Half of the $50 million required 

for the project came from Ames, half from the Army. Hans Mark 

gave it his full support, and considered it one of his most significant 

accomplishments while director of Ames. This was the first time 

Ames procured an aircraft meant to be a full-scale technology 

demonstrator—to show the military and airlines how easily they 

could build such an aircraft for regular service. 

In September 1972, the NASA-Army project office gave both 

Bell and Boeing design contracts, and in April 1973 declared Bell the 

winner. Bell then apportioned the work for two XV-15 prototypes 

using standard components as much as possible. Rockwell 

fabricated the tail assemblies and fuselage, Avco-Lycoming modified 

a T-53 engine, Sperry Rand designed and built the avionics. Ames 

aerodynamicists started modeling wind flows around the aircraft, 

for example, formulating equations to predict whirl flutter caused 

by a rigid rotor spinning on a pylon. In exterior configuration, the 

XV-15 looked much like the XV-3. But as often happens in aircraft 

development, better propulsion made the whole system better. The 

Lycoming turbine engines had better power-to-weight ratios than 

those on the XV-3. Bell mounted one at each wing tip to turn the 

three-bladed proprotors, which were 25 feet in diameter. The only 

cross-shafting in the XV-15, that is, linkages between the wings, was 

designed to carry load only if one engine failed. 

The XV-15 underwent a careful series of flight tests, spread over 

three years. The first prototype rolled out of the hangar in October 

1976 for ground tests by Bell pilots. In May 1977 Bell chief project 

pilot Ron Erhart first flew the XV-15: “It flew just like the simulator,” 

wrote Erhart, “but with better visuals.”198 A year later, the XV-15 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

arrived at Ames for more extensive flights. Ames pilots tested it in 

engine-out flight, and found the cross-shafting worked well in an 

emergency. In July 1979 it made the full conversion from vertical 

to forward flight. Ames uncovered some fascinating aerodynamic 

problems. When the proprotors were tilted at certain angles relative 

to the wings, a vortex over the wings caused buffeting in the tail. The 

only solution was to brace and stiffen the tail. Pilots found it took 

some time to get the feel of the conversion, and that it behaved oddly 

during taxiing and in light wind gusts. 

In spring 1980 Ames opened its outdoor aerodynamic research 

facility (OARF), essentially a tilt rotor tie-down facility on a hydraulic 

lift. By raising the wheel height from two to fifty feet off the ground 

(to accommodate the large proprotors) they could evaluate the XV-15 

flying through air in any flight configuration. Ames aerodynamicists 

could measure rotor torque, fuel consumption, aircraft attitude, 

pilot control positions and—at various hover altitudes—ground 

effects, downwash, handling qualities, exhaust gas ingestion, and 

noise levels. 

The XV-15 program was scientifically interdisciplinary—human 

factors, computing and digital controls all contributed in the crucial 

area of pilot workload. Flight data were cross-checked with tunnel 

data, which were matched to early efforts in computational fluid 

dynamics. The XV-15 culminated in an intense research program 

at Ames to further develop the VTOL concept and to prove its 

commercial and military utility. Yet it took some big steps to move 

the tilt rotor to its next iterations. 

In 1978 Ames, emboldened by Hans Mark’s duty as secretary of 

the Air Force, directly, and without success, tried to get the Army or 

Air Force to buy an improved tilt rotor for search and rescue missions. 

Mark made a special, and again unsuccessful, pitch to Admiral 

Holloway, former chief of naval operations who led the investigation 

into the failed April 1980 effort to extract the American hostages 

from Iran. Resistance came because the U.S. Air Force had always 

fought its air wars from protected airfields, and thus saw no need 

for an airfield-independent aircraft. The Army already had expensive 

new helicopters entering service to fly those same missions. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Mark moved from the Pentagon to become deputy administrator 

of NASA early in 1981, and one of his first decisions was to take 

the XV-15 to the Paris Air Show. It was a hit. The new secretary 

of the Navy, John Lehmann, saw it and turned staunch advocate 

of the tilt rotor. In 1982, NASA departed from usual practice and 

let its experimental aircraft be used in operational tests. The Army 

flew the XV-15 to simulate electromagnetic warfare near Fort 

Huachuca, Arizona. The Navy evaluated it aboard the U.S.S. Tripoli. 

P.X. Kelley, commandant of the Marine Corps, also became a tilt 

rotor advocate, especially after the 1982 Argentine-British conflict 

over the Falkland Islands. Standoff distances between ships and a 

hostile shore had to be farther than the short operating ranges of 

ship-based helicopters allowed. 

In 1983, the Marines issued the specification for what became the 

V-22 Osprey, a VTOL designed to replace the Boeing Vertol CH-46 

and the Sikorsky CG-53 assault helicopters. Bell Helicopter Textron 

Inc. of Fort Worth teamed with Boeing Vertol of Philadelphia and 

won the contract in 1985. The V-22 was three times the size of the 

XV-15, with a total gross weight of 40,000 pounds, but otherwise 

similar. It would carry 24 heavily armed Marines from ship to shore 

in amphibious assaults. Marking an advance in airframe technology, 

most of the key structural members of the V-22 were made from 

fiber-reinforced graphite-epoxy laminate. The V-22 designers were 

comfortable using composites so extensively because of the VTOL 

technology database developed at Ames, and overseen by John Zuk, 

Ames’ chief of civil technology programs. 

The first V-22 flew in March 1989. However, it worked itself 

slowly into military service and dramatically exceeded its budget. 

The U.S. Marine Corps began crew training for the Osprey in 2000, 

and in 2007 deployed it for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan with 

good results. Though Ames went further into aircraft development 

with the tilt rotor than was typical, it reflected the sort of radical 

technology that can emerge with intense NASA research support on 

all the elements required to make it a success. 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

S H O R T T A K E - O F F A N D L A N D I N G

Ask pilots, and they’ll say that just as important as flying fast, 

is being able to fly slowly well. Slow-speed flight remained out of 

fashion as engineers built aircraft to go faster and farther, but Ames 

researchers always held a great deal of respect for complex airflows 

at slow speeds. So Ames developed expertise in the aerodynamics of 

slow-speed flight in order to help in the design of fixed-wing aircraft 

that handled better in the trickiest parts of any flight—takeoff and 

landing. Better performance at slow speeds also resulted in aircraft 

that could takeoff or land on much shorter runways—important for 

commuter airlines operating from smaller regional airports or for 

military pilots operating from unimproved foreign airfields. 

Ames began its research on STOL aircraft (for short takeoff and 

landing) during the NACA years, in the wind tunnels. They saw 

that large lift gains came in immersing the wing in the propeller 

slipstream and using engine thrust to augment wing lift. However, 

this came at the cost of stability while landing. Ames moved to flight 

tests, in 1960 with a Stroukoff Corporation YC-134A and, in 1961, 

a Lockheed NC-130B. In 1965, NASA Ames evaluated a Boeing 

367-80, paying attention to STOL capability to reduce noise during 

landing. Ames also matched these flight tests with simulator models 

of the landing approach to figure out the general handling rules.199 

Into the 1970s, in conjunction with researchers from the U.S. 

Army, Ames built a series of research platforms that they used to fine 

tune their theories and designs of STOL technology. These aircraft 

included the augmented-wing quiet short-haul research aircraft 

(QSRA), the rotor systems research aircraft (RSRA), and the E-7 

short takeoff and vertical lander (STOVL) test model. 

Ames first worked to develop specific components that airframe 

firms could apply to their STOL aircraft. A rotating cylinder flap, for 

example, improved lift by energizing boundary layers as it turned 

airflow downward over the trailing edge of the wing. Ames installed 

a rotating cylinder flap on an OV-10 Bronco and, even though 

radically modified, the OV-10 proved the point faster and cheaper 

than building a completely new demonstrator. Ames shortened the 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

wings, removed the flaps and pneumatic boundary-layer control, 

shortened the propellers, and cross-shafted the two engines for 

better performance at slow speeds. Before its first flight in August 

1971, Ames completely tested the OV-10 in the 40 by 80 foot tunnel. 

The rotating cylinder used so little power that full horsepower was 

available for takeoff. Compared with the basic OV-10, it achieved 33 

percent better lift. 

In the 1970s, Ames and Canadian researchers joined to study 

jet-STOL with a complete flying test bed. They modified a surplus 

deHavilland C-8 Buffalo turboprop aircraft to show the technology 

of powered-lift ejector augmentation. The modified Buffalo first flew 

in May 1971 and remained at Ames in flight tests through 1976. 

Its thrust-augmentor wing achieved augmentor ratios of 1.2 with 

significant gains in lifting coefficients, so that it could fly as slow as 

fifty knots and approach the landing field at sixty knots. It routinely 

demonstrated takeoffs and landings in less then a thousand feet, 

with ground rolls less than 350 feet. After a full range of flight tests, 

Ames pilots flew the Buffalo in a series of joint flights—with the 

FAA and the Canadian department of transportation—to develop 

certification criteria for all future powered-lift aircraft. 

Ames’ next iteration of powered-lift aircraft was the QSRA (for 

quiet short haul research aircraft). Boeing built the QSRA from the 

Ames C-8 Buffalo and four spare Lycoming turbofan engines. They 

mounted the engines on top of the wing, so that exhaust air blew 

over the upper surface, creating more lift, while the wing shielded the 

ground below from noise. The QSRA wing was also new, emulating 

a supercritical airfoil capable of Mach 0.74 (though the QSRA never 

flew that fast). The result was a quiet, efficient aircraft, capable of 

short takeoffs and landings. 

Boeing delivered the QSRA to Ames in August 1978, and it 

quickly validated the concept of upper-surface blowing. The QSRA 

could fly an approach at only sixty knots, at a steep, twenty-degree 

angle. “It feels as if it’s coming down like an elevator,” said Jim Martin, 

QSRA chief test pilot.200 During carrier trials in July 1980 aboard the 

USS Kitty Hawk, with wind over the deck at thirty knots, the QSRA 

took off in less than 300 feet and landed in less than 200. In zero278 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

wind conditions, during Air Force tests to simulate operations on 

bombed runways, the QSRA took off in less than 700 feet and landed 

in less than 800 without thrust reversers. The real military payoff, 

though, was that augmented lift boosted payload by 25 percent. In 

1983, Martin and Robert Innis flew the QSRA to the Paris Air Show 

to encourage firms to use the technology in commuter aircraft. Short 

takeoffs and landings were important to operating bigger aircraft on 

smaller, local runways; more important, the QSRA surpassed federal 

requirements for noise abatement. It flew a demonstration landing 

into the Monterey, California, airport undetected by the airport 

monitoring microphones. 

Over the fifteen years that Ames pilots flew the QSRA, they 

conducted 697 hours of flight tests which included more than 4,000 

landings—averaging nearly six landings per flight hour. More than 

200 research reports emerged from data collected on the QSRA. 

Once the aircraft itself was understood, the Ames QSRA team, led by 

John Cochran and then Dennis Riddle, used it more as a test bed for 

new technologies. Renamed the NASA powered-lift flight research 

facility in 1990, it was an ideal platform to test a jump-strut nose 

gear that kicked up an aircraft nose during takeoff. Ames retired the 

QSRA in March 1994. 

Another unusual aircraft that bridged the worlds of vertical and 

fixed-wing flight was the rotor systems research aircraft (RSRA). 

Sikorsky built two RSRAs, originally for research at Langley, that 

arrived at Ames in September 1979. Ames and Army engineers 

designed them as flying wind tunnels—highly instrumented flying 

test beds for new rotor concepts. One was built in a helicopter 

configuration, powered by two T-58-GE-5 turboshaft engines. The 

second had a compound configuration, meaning it could fly with lift 

provided by two short wings as well as by the helicopter rotor. Two 

TF-34-GE-400A turbofans were added as auxiliary engines, and the 

aircraft was instrumented to measure main and tail rotor thrusts and 

wing lift. Warren Hall served as RSRA project pilot in exploring the 

differences between the two versions. The helicopter version of the 

RSRA was later modified to test an X-wing design proposed by the 

Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The X-wing 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

RSRA had a single four-blade rotor, built out of composite materials, 

that lifted the aircraft vertically like a helicopter. Air blown through 

a fore or aft strip along each rotor blade provided pitch and roll 

control. As its turbojet engines thrust it forward as fast as Mach 0.8, 

the rotor provided lift as a symmetrical airfoil with a four-blade X 

shape. The convertible engine divided its power as it shifted between 

rotor flight and jet exhaust. In aircraft mode, the air blown through 

the rotor blades provided lift and control. The RSRA flew only three 

times in the X-wing configuration, before being abandoned as too 

difficult to control. 

R O T A R Y W I N G A I R C R A F T 

Ames began working on rotorcraft in the mid 1960s as its 

research relationship with the Army aeroflightdynamics directorate 

expanded. Initially, studies focused on pilot control during terminal 

operations—getting aircraft on and off the ground, especially 

during bad weather—and Ames built a sophisticated series of flight 

simulators for helicopter pilots. 

Ames’ inventory of rotorcraft jumped after 1976, when five 

helicopters were transferred to Ames from Langley: the UH-1H 

and AH-1G for rotor experiments, and the SH-3 and CH-47 for 

operational studies. Ames established a new helicopter technology 

division to focus on these aircraft, to pursue research in rotor 

aerodynamics and rotor noise, and to develop new helicopter 

technologies. The Army, likewise, continued to beef up the technical 

expertise in its aeromechanics laboratory, led by Irving Statler. Ames 

and Army aerodynamicists developed a free-tip rotor, for example, 

with a tip that was free to pitch about its own axis, which was forward 

of the aerodynamic center. Ames built a model that showed that the 

free-tip rotor reduced power at cruise speed, minimized vibratory 

flight loads, and boosted lift by sixteen percent. 

Another airborne research platform arrived at Ames in April 

1977. Lockheed originally built the YO-3A as an ultra-quiet spy 

plane. The sailplane wings, muffled engine, and slow-turning, beltdriven propeller kept the Y0-3A quiet enough that Ames and Army 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

researchers could add microphones to the wing-tips and tail-fin 

to accurately measure noise from nearby aircraft. Ames and Army 

researchers used the converted YO-3A primarily for studying 

helicopter noise. The test aircraft flew behind the Y0-3A, while onboard aero-acoustic measurements were synchronized with data on 

flight and engine performance telemetered from the test aircraft. 

Again, based on this research, the FAA asked Ames to play a larger 

role in research on flight noise mitigation. 

Ames flew the UH-1H to develop automatic controls for landing 

a helicopter, culminating in an automatic digital flight guidance 

system known as V/STOLAND. Principal engineers George Xenakis 

and John Foster first developed a database of navigation and control 

concepts for instrumented flight operations. Kalman filtering 

extracted helicopter position and speeds from ground-based and 

onboard sensors. To define the helicopter’s approach profile and 

segregate it from other airport operations, the system investigated 

several descending flight paths. Lloyd Corliss then led a series of UH1H test flights on flying qualities for nap of the Earth operations and 

Victor Lebacqz used it to devise certification criteria for civil helicopter 

operations. Later, project pilots Dan Dugan and Ron Gerdes flew the 

UH-1H in the first demonstration of automatic control laws based on 

the nonlinear inverse method of George Meyer. 

When the Bell AH-1G White Cobra arrived it was highly 

instrumented for a tip aerodynamics and acoustics test. Ames got 

the highly instrumented rotor blades that the Army had used for its 

operational loads survey, and added additional absolute pressure 

instrumentation to the rotor tips. Thus, one rotor blade returned 188 

pressure transducer measurements, with 126 more measurements 

added by the other blade and the rotor hub. Robert Merrill was chief 

pilot and Gerald Shockey led the project, which returned detailed 

measurements of aerodynamics, performance, and acoustics. 

Ames modified the CH-47B Chinook to include two digital 

flight computers, a programmable force-feel system, and a color 

cathode-ray tube display. This system allowed wide variations in the 

helicopter’s response to pilot controls, making it an ideal variable281 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

stability research helicopter. Ames used it in flight simulations 

to define new military handling qualities. In close cooperation 

with Stanford University researchers, Michelle Eshow and Jeffery 

Schroeder used the CH-47B to investigate control laws developed 

on Ames’ vertical motion simulator. The Army let Ames use the 

CH-47B from 1986 until September 1989, just before they closed 

out the line that remanufactured them into a CH-47D suitable for 

Army duty. 

To carry forward this variable-stability research, in 1989 Ames 

acquired a Sikorsky JUH-60A Black Hawk. Known as RASCAL (for 

rotorcraft aircrew systems concepts airborne laboratory), it carried 

extensive rotor instrumentation, a powerful 32-bit flight control 

computer, and image generators for the cockpit. “We’re putting a 

research laboratory in a helicopter,” said RASCAL program manager 

Edwin Aiken. “Now when we experiment with flight control software, 

advanced displays or navigation aids, we can get a realistic sense 

of how they work.”201 Ames and Army engineers used RASCAL to 

develop a range of new technologies—active sensors like millimeter 

wave radar, passive sensors using infrared, and symbologies for 

advanced displays. The goal was to make helicopters respond to pilot 

controls with more precision and agility, to provide better obstacle 

avoidance and automated maneuvering close to the terrain, and to 

improve vehicle stability when carrying loads or using weapons. 

For example, Ernest Moralez helped devise algorithms that would 

automatically protect a flight envelope in which pilots could then 

maneuver freely. 

Another UH-60 Black Hawk also entered the Ames inventory 

in September 1988 as part of the modern rotor aerodynamic limits 

survey. Sikorsky Aircraft built two highly instrumented blades for the 

Ames/Army program. A pressure blade with 242 absolute pressure 

transducers measured airloads—the upward force produced as the 

blades turn. A blade with a suite of strain gauges and accelerometers 

measured the structural responses to air loads. The pressure blade 

alone returned a 7.5 megabit data stream, demanding a bandwidth 

well beyond the state of the art. An Ames group, led by Robert Krufeld 

and William Bousman, devised a transfer system that returned 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

thirty gigabytes of data during test flights in 1993 and 1994—data 

then archived for access by rotorcraft designers. The UH-60 studies 

ended a ten-year airloads program, launched in 1984 and completed 

for only $6 million. Its legacy was an airloads database actively 

used to refine helicopter design and to better predict performance, 

efficiency, airflows, vibration, and noise. 

When NASA headquarters transferred other Ames aircraft to 

Dryden, the Army aeroflightdynamics directorate insisted that its 

research helicopters stay at Ames. After several years of negotiation, 

in July 1997 NASA headquarters signed a directive that Ames would 

continue to support the Army’s rotorcraft airworthiness research 

using three helicopters. One UH-60 Blackhawk configured as the 

RASCAL remained as the platform for advanced controls. The 

NASA/Army rotorcraft division, led by Edwin Aiken, used it to 

develop programmable, fly-by-wire controls for nap-of-the-Earth 

maneuvering. Another UH-60 was rigged for airloads tests, and an 

AH-1 Cobra was configured as the flying laboratory for integrated 

test and evaluation (FLITE). In addition, the rotorcraft division 

made good use of the upgraded wind tunnels. For example, Stephen 

Jacklin led load and efficiency tests in the 40 by 80 foot wind tunnel 

of an advanced rotor hub, without hinges and bearings, designed by 

McDonnell Douglas for its new generations of helicopters. 

Even as NASA cut its budget for helicopter research in the 

2000s, the Army remained a consistent source of funds. In 2006, 

Ames refocused its work to defining first principles in helicopter 

aeromechanics.202 Ames research in helicopter flight proved to be 

just as valuable as its work in integrative flight control for fixed-wing 

aircraft. By taking novel technical approaches to first isolating and 

then solving seemingly intractable problems, and integrating their 

use of computation, tunnel, and flight testing, Ames bolstered the 

core technologies found in all helicopters. 

AV I A T I O N O P E R A T I O N S 

Research in air traffic management harkened back to Ames’ 

legacy in the NACA. The NACA purview included any topic that 

affected American aviation. Thus, in the early 1920s, during the early 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

years of American airmail service, the NACA turned its attention 

to weather forecasting, airport design, and radio communication. 

The NACA continued to monitor problems in aircraft operations, 

as with flight near cold-weather airports in the 1940s. In the 1970s, 

NASA Ames first focused on automating the environment in which 

aircraft operated. 

In April 1972 Heinz Erzberger published the fundamental 

papers on analyzing aircraft trajectories in four dimensions—the 

three spatial dimensions plus time. Erzberger had joined Ames in 

1965 in applied mathematics as part of an environmentally-friendly 

effort to determine which flight paths generated the least noise. 

Soon after he was modelling the best way to get STOL aircraft, that 

others at Ames were designing, into and out of an airport. During 

the fuel crises of the 1970s he shifted his emphasis to study ways 

to optimize America’s air traffic system. Over the ensuing three 

decades Erzberger served as principal architect of the CenterTRACON automation system (CTAS), a suite of software that 

generated new types of information to “advise” air traffic controllers. 

His worked was not driven by supercomputing. He relied instead 

on Ames innovation in visualization and internetworking, and used 

fairly simple client-server computers. He brought scientific rigor 

to the air traffic management and, along with his colleague Dallas 

Denery, built a major research program that served the flying public 

by reducing delays and boosting safety. 

Notably, he accomplished this in close collaboration with the 

FAA, the federal agency responsible for the national airspace system. 

NASA Ames had earlier done much of the human factors work 

that enabled automation of aircraft cockpits. “Flight management 

systems in today’s aircraft help pilots do their job much better,” noted 

Erzberger. “The CTAS program is about providing the same benefits 

to air traffic controllers.”203 In 1991 the FAA asked Ames to begin 

programming specific tools to infuse the airspace system with greater 

safety, efficiency and timeliness. In November 1996, Victor Lebacqz, 

chief of the Ames flight management and human factors division, 

announced a joint NASA and FAA plan to focus the many facets 

of Ames’ air traffic efforts. In June 1997, NASA announced a $450 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

million aviation system capacity program, with Ames as lead Center. 

The Center-TRACON system released in 1997 included three 

computer advisors to air traffic controllers. The traffic management 

advisor picked up aircraft when they were twenty minutes from 

landing, and figured out the best way for them all to land.The descent 

advisor graphically depicted incoming aircraft as they converged 

forty miles from the airport, to make their descent most like a fuelefficient glide. The final approach spacing advisor let controllers 

quickly correct aircraft spacing as aircraft approached the runway. 

CTAS quickly proved its value in both time and cost savings 

at some of America’s busiest airports. As early as May 1992, Ames 

installed the simplest version of CTAS at the Stapleton international 

airport in Denver, then continued to refine the more complex 

parts. The software was integrated with the existing radar system 

at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in 1994, and saved an average of 

two minutes per flight. With those results the FAA chose CTAS for 

implementation at all major airports. Resistance from airlines and 

local airport authorities delayed its use within the United States, 

though CTAS appeared in many other nations. Michelle Eshow, on 

behalf of a team of 37 contributors who wrote and implemented 

CTAS, in 1998 accepted NASA’s software of the year award. 

NASA Ames continued to augment its software advisors into a 

comprehensive suite of air traffic management tools. Once aircraft 

were on the ground, a different set of advisors chimed in. The surface 

movement advisor (SMA) provided data to the airlines, through 

the flight controllers, on when aircraft would land and arrive at the 

gate, thus improving gate scheduling and reducing radio traffic. 

Programming for surface movement was more complex than 

with air traffic, in that each airport had a unique layout and was 

controlled by an airport authority rather than the FAA. Still, from a 

go-ahead in March 1994, Ames got a prototype of the SMA working 

at the Atlanta airport in time for the 1996 Olympics. After eighteen 

months, taxi-time reductions averaged one minute per aircraft and 

Delta Airlines calculated that SMA saved them $50,000 a day in 

fuel costs alone. NASA Ames and the FAA expanded SMA into the 

surface management system (SMS), verified it in the FutureFlight 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Central simulator, and in September 2003 tested it successfully at 

the Memphis and Dallas airports.204 FedEx and UPS made it a key 

part of their operations. The FAA began exploring ways to install the 

SMA at all airports. 

Another key software innovation was FACET software, for future 

ATM concepts evaluation tool, which won the NASA software of the 

year award in 2006. Drawing actual but delayed weather data from 

NOAA and air traffic data from the FAA, FACET rapidly projected 

thousands of aircraft trajectories through climb, cruise and descent. 

It was used to model new approaches to air traffic planning, 

including aircraft self-separation, integrated aircraft and space 

vehicle launching, and monitoring of rerouting. “FACET started as a 

simulation tool for NASA research,” noted Banavar Sridhar, FACET 

team leader, “and has evolved into an operations planning tool for 

the FAA and airlines.”205 NASA Ames researchers also integrated airbased and ground-based systems. Unrestricted flight routing, or free 

flight, for example, allowed more aircraft to share airspace under all 

weather conditions. Ames’ advanced air transportation technology 

branch developed a block-to-block planning service that allowed 

each aircraft to choose its own best flight path, potentially saving 

minutes of air time per trip. 

Another example of using information technology to solve 

safety issues was FutureFlight Central (FFC), a simulator designed 

to prototype Ames’ surface movement advisor. “Surface movement 

around airports,” said Stanton Harke, who managed construction of 

FFC, “is really the bottleneck to making the air transportation system 

more safe and efficient.”206 The FFC looked like the interior of an air 

traffic control tower, with consoles that could be moved to fine-tune 

the layout. Harke’s staff used off-the-shelf video and SGI computers 

to generate a high resolution display with a 360 degree view out the 

window. For less than $10 million the FFC became the world’s most 

sophisticated test facility for air and ground traffic simulation. The 

FFC was configured to simulate what controllers saw at the world’s 

major airports—both in the arrangements inside the tower and in 

the view out the window. (By projecting panoramic images of the 

Martian landscape out the windows, they also simulated the control 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

station of a Mars base.) By reprogramming the display, airport 

designers saw how well aircraft moved around a proposed airfield 

before concrete was poured. FFC was also used to test new airport 

designs so that aircraft would spend less time idling their engines as 

they waited for take-off or looking for a landing gate. 

Ames also completed a system to automatically record and 

process huge amounts of real-time flight data from new aircraft. 

“We can detect accident precursors that we didn’t know existed,” 

said Richard Keller of his work on the FAA and NASA aviation safety 

reporting system. Alaska Airlines and United Airlines helped Ames 

demonstrate the recorder, beginning in 1998, and reported that the 

data returned could be used to not only improve safety, but also 

improve aircraft performance and maintenance scheduling. 

In 2008 Ames researchers shared in the Collier Trophy, awarded 

to a public-private team working on the automatic dependent 

surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B. Instead of relying on radar, 

ADS-B used global positioning system (GPS) satellite data to give 

pilots and controllers accurate traffic information in real time. The 

system also gave pilots access to weather services, terrain maps 

and flight schedules. The ADS-B had been certified by the FAA in 

2000, and was widely, though not universally, deployed around the 

United States. By 2004, as part of the FAA Capstone program, it 

was installed on 300 aircraft that flew remote routes in Alaska, and 

reduced accidents by 47 percent. It was installed more widely outside 

the United States, and reduced air accidents more than any previous 

technology. United Parcel Service was early adopter, specifically to 

improve aircraft separation around its airport hubs, where its air 

fleet showed remarkable gains in efficiency. “ADS-B is a groundbreaking effort for next-generation airborne surveillance and cockpit 

avionics,” noted the FAA press release. “Its implementation will have 

a broad impact on the safety, capacity and efficiency of the national 

airspace system.”207 

The next generation of air traffic control, in fact, would be built 

around this GPS technology rather than the radar technology in use 

since World War II. Ames researchers continued to contribute to 

the design of NextGen air traffic management using GPS technology 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

matched with more complex algorithms, not only to improve 

safety and the economics of air travel, but also to reduce its 

impact on the environment. 

G R E E N AV I A T I O N 

Into the 2000s, as the Constellation program diverted NASA 

funds from aeronautics research, Ames leadership began to question 

the role of aeronautics research in NASA. There likely would not be 

much new work on aircraft structures. The shape of jet airliners had 

changed little since the 1960s. The Boeing 777 was the first airliner 

designed, in the 1990s, entirely on computer, relying on codes 

brought to maturity at NASA Ames. Thomas Edwards, then deputy 

director of aeronautics at Ames, recalled that “all of those classical 

problems in structures, controls and aerodynamics are sufficiently 

well understood that the one company that’s left in the U.S. making 

airplanes can pretty much do it themselves.”208 In response to 

declining funding for more traditional aeronautics research, Ames 

reframed its aeronautics portfolio as “green aviation.” Under this 

umbrella fell all the various efforts aimed at reducing the significant 

environmental impact of air transport.209 

Some of these innovations arose at the component level, under 

the purview of NASA’s subsonic fixed wing project. The most 

prominent of these innovations was the advance turboprop engine, 

which had won the Collier Trophy in 1987, and served as the basis 

for work on a geared turbofan by Pratt & Whitney and an open rotor 

propulsion system by General Electric.210 Other more recent work 

focused on extensive use of lighter weight composite materials. Some 

work looked much like that done during the NACA days, as with 

laminar flow control or on the aerodynamics of the hybrid wingbody which was a variant of the flying wing. Other work proceeded 

into the development of low-carbon fuels to reduce emissions, and 

biofuels to achieve carbon-neutrality across the system. Jonathan 

Trent, for example, pursued a comprehensive research program 

into generating biofuels from tubes of plastic sheeting full of algae, 

floating in the ocean, and fed sewage. 

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A e r o n a u t i c a l Te c h n o l o g y a n d F l i g h t R e s e a r c h 

Green aviation also encompassed work in radically new 

airframes. Airships, such as the dirigible based at Moffett Field since 

2005, were a decidedly green alternative for air tourism, for carrying 

large payloads, or for hovering over a fixed spot for surveillance 

or environmental monitoring. Electric aircraft showed the most 

promise as short-range VTOL aircraft or as uncrewed aerial vehicles. 

VTOL aircraft also earned attention because of the maturity of the 

XV-15 Osprey in military service. Since the 1970s VTOLs have been 

studied as a way of locating air transport more closely to population 

centers, and thus reducing the overall environmental impact of 

getting to the airport. 

Battery performance was the limiting factor in the development 

of electrical aircraft, as it was in other types of electric transport. One 

solution came in the development of a solid oxide fuel cell, a spin-off 

of technology developed to generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide 

heavy atmosphere of Mars. KR Sridhar arrived at NASA Ames in 

1996 as an NRC postdoctoral fellow from the University of Arizona, 

focused on solid oxide electrolysis for in situ resource utilization 

on other planets. He collaborated with John Finn, a young chemist 

working on carbon dioxide adsorbtion for air purification with Mark 

Kliss in Ames’ regenerative life support branch. In 1997, an oxygen 

generating system proposed by Sridhar and Finn was selected to fly 

on the Mars 2001 Survey Lander. It would generate enough oxygen 

to, some day, propel a sample return capsule off the surface of Mars. 

In the wake of the Mars failures in 1999, though, this mission was 

cancelled. Harry McDonald encouraged Sridhar to continue working 

on other space applications of solid oxide technology, and Sridhar 

was successful in earning NASA grants. In April 2002 Sridhar and 

Finn founded a company—ION America, later renamed Bloom 

Energy—to reverse the electrolysis and produce electricity instead 

of oxygen. They leased space in the NASA Research Park as they 

refined their technology with venture funding.211 In February 2010 

they unveiled their Bloom Box, which promised energy efficiencies 

twice that of the American electrical power grid. While the Bloom 

solid oxide fuel cells were too heavy to use in conventional transport 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

aircraft, Bloom hoped to refine it to be useful on solar-rechargeable, 

high-altitude rockets. 

Aeronautics represented an ever-declining portion of NASA 

research portfolio, but Ames engineers continued to make major 

advances. As during the NACA days of fundamental research, 

some advances were on the component level, others came from 

re-envisioning the entire airspace system. As in the NACA days, 

this work was driven by attention to the long-term needs of the 

aeronautics industry. The NACA model, which revolved around 

support of commercial firms in developing aeronautics, would 

eventually return to favor within NASA. 

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C o n c l u s i o n 

C H A P T E R 8 

Conclusion 

In January 2010, a year into the administration of Barack Obama, 

NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced that NASA aspired 

to a new approach to American space exploration. NASA’s budget, 

as proposed, would increase $6 billion. NASA would cancel the 

Constellation program and reshape its human space flight efforts. 

NASA abandoned the ESAS architecture with the Moon as its 

destination. NASA instead opted for a flexible technological path 

leading toward destinations later determined opportunistically. The 

Space Shuttle would still be retired in 2011, as decided during the 

Bush administration, and NASA committed to the International 

Space Station through 2020. To get on station, NASA would buy seats 

temporarily on Russian spacecraft until about 2016. Then NASA 

would rely on commercial launch vehicles, like the Atlas V and Delta 

IV launchers built by United Launch Alliance LLC or the Falcon 9 

built by SpaceX, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. 

To help this commercial spacecraft industry succeed NASA 

would “return to its NACA roots,” a phrase used repeatedly by Pete 

Worden in explaining the Ames perspective on the new budget. The 

government would create a market for access to low Earth orbit, 

as it already had by investing in human suborbital flight. NASA 

would also invest a half-billion dollars in transformative technology 

for space exploration, help commercial firms solve their common 

problems, and invent the technology needed for space exploration 

decades in the future. 

One example of that help, mentioned by Bolden in Congressional 

hearings, was the PICA heatshields developed by SpaceX for 

their Dragon crew capsule.212 PICA had been developed at Ames, 

successfully demonstrated on the Stardust return capsule in January 

2006, and refined for the Orion crew capsule developed by Boeing 

for the Constellation program. Using a reimbursable space act 

agreement administered by the NASA Ames Space Portal, SpaceX 

consulted with Ames staff on the thermal and mechanical properties 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

of PICA, finite element modeling to improve it, ways of building 

and instrumenting an arc jet model, and a risk reduction strategy 

for validating it. SpaceX tested its variant, dubbed PICA-X, in the 

Ames arc jets and selected it for its Dragon crew capsule. Thermal 

protection engineering for the Constellation program, led by Ames, 

revived many American firms that made ablative materials and gave 

NASA new options for the future design of heatshields. 

Other parts of Obama’s proposal boded well for NASA Ames, 

in that they played to Ames’ historic, but recently underfunded, 

research strengths. Aeronautics research would receive $80 million. 

NASA would shift a half-billion dollars into space science and into 

monitoring the health of the Earth, especially through small Venture 

class missions. Ames would be the center of NASA’s small spacecraft 

efforts. Robotic precursors would be sent to several destinations, 

and space life sciences would refocus on fundamental research. 

Whenever possible, NASA would pursue collaboration with 

international partners. NASA put education as a top priority. 

Other developments showed that NASA would again value 

its basic research centers. All Center directors reported to the 

administrator. NASA empowered a new chief technologist to 

fund break-through technologies and to manage the innovative 

partnerships program which led interaction with commercial 

firms. Full cost recovery was cancelled; though full cost accounting 

remained. Center maintenance budgets were boosted by $200 

million, and Bolden created a new mission support directorate with 

a budget to fund the health of the NASA Centers. 

It appeared that the Obama administration was aware of all 

Ames people hoped would get America back into space exploration. 

NASA shifted its paradigm in-line with the paradigm Ames had 

operated under for decades: support of industry and university 

partners, taking a longer-term view toward technology, a willingness 

to work with smaller budgets, and a dedication to space science 

and aeronautics research. All this would be possible by righting the 

imbalance induced by spending on the Constellation program. 

However, NASA’s proposed budget soon encountered strong 

resistance. Members of Congress representing the areas near the 

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C o n c l u s i o n 

Kennedy, Marshall and Johnson human space centers objected to 

much of NASA’s plan, especially the cancellation of Constellation. 

President Obama flew to Florida and announced a jobs program and 

continued investment in the Orion crew capsule, which could be 

used aboard a commercial rocket. As NASA and Congress worked 

on a compromise budget, NASA Ames people remained optimistic 

about the prospects of a historic shift in how NASA equipped itself 

for space exploration. 

As NASA tried to reshape itself, NASA Ames celebrated its 70th 

anniversary on December 20, 2009. In fact, Ames people celebrated 

for months as the Center invited former directors back to speak, 

held picnic lunches, and inducted a new class into its hall of fame. 

The celebration of Ames’ past culminated in a gala dinner in January 

2010 and the next week NASA Ames—its culture and all it had 

built over the past 70 years—found itself positioned at the center of 

America’s space exploration future. 

293 
A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

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A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s 

C H A P T E R 9 

Acknowledgements 

Jack Boyd has played a unique role in the history of Ames. 

Jack joined Ames in 1947 as an engineer working in supersonic 

aerodynamics. In 1966 he became technical assistant to Harvey 

Allen and since then—as he moved up to deputy director, associate 

director, NASA associate administrator for management, and other 

leadership posts—Jack has served as Ames’ institutional memory 

and the embodiment of its corporate ethos. As this book was written, 

he served as senior advisor to the Center director, helping make the 

Center’s past relevant to the shaping of its future. Jack also served as 

Center omsbud, helping solve problems that arose where the Ames 

corporate culture has broken. Jack also served as senior advisor for 

history, available to give ready advice on how to interpret Ames’ 

multifaceted history. Jack lives the belief that a strong sense of the 

past is great grounding in the rush to forge the future. 

Thanks to April Gage and Leilani Marshall who built the archives 

of the NASA Ames history office, to Kristina Gibbs who managed 

the contract, to James Anderson for research assistance, and to 

Rho Christensen and Jacqueline Nelson for general help. Many past 

and present Ames people shared time and thoughts with me, both 

formally and informally. Thanks especially to Lewis Braxton, Pete 

Worden, Steve Zornetzer and Scott Hubbard. 

This is a work for hire, though the only restriction Ames placed on 

this manuscript was that it be done for their seventieth anniversary 

year. Some may say I failed to give adequate attention to certain 

projects, failed to credit to all those who dedicated their careers 

to the Center, or failed to appreciate the struggles they overcame. 

Many people reviewed this manuscript for errors, though any that 

remain are mine alone. Most made sure that I understood that the 

best scientists, engineers and managers will keep coming to Ames, 

not because of the history that I was tasked to portray—but to work 

with the best minds in their professions. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

End Notes 

Chapter 1: Administrative 

1 John W. Boyd, “Management of Research and Flight Project 

Management Groups,” (Thesis submitted to the Stanford School of 

Business, Stanford University, June 1966) 12.

2

Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Apollo Experiments and 

Training on the Scientific Aspects of the Apollo Program: “Sonett Report” 

(15 December 1963).

3

Interview with Clarence Syvertson (7 August 1999).

4

Hans Mark comments, NASA Ames Directors Panel (22 

January 2010).

5

“NASA focusing on June date for merger recommendations,” 

Aviation Week and Space Technology (1 June 1981) 23. 

6 “Ballhaus to Resign as Director of NASA’s Ames Research 

Center,” Ames Press Release 89-54 (6 July 1989). 

7

Ted Shelsby, “Taking the Helm at Martin,” The Baltimore Sun (3 

May 1993).

8William F. Ballhaus, “A Message from the Director’s office,” 

Astrogram (14 July 1989) 2. 

9 Dale Compton comments, NASA Ames Directors Panel (22 

January 2010).

10William J. Broad, “TRW Executive Chosen to Lead Space 

Agency in New Directions,” New York Times (12 March 1992). 

11 “NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin Presents His First 

Employee Address,” Astrogram (8 May 1992) 3-6. 

1 2Interview with Warren Hall (12 July 1999). 

13 “Meatballs Devour Worms,” New York Times Magazine (10 

January 1999) 11.

1 4Breck W. Henderson, “NASA Headquarters Conducts Security 

Raid at Ames Center,” Aviation Week and Space Technology (17 

August 1992) 26.

15 Op cit. note 11. 

1 6Ann Hutchison, “Goldin Praises Research at Ames during his 

Recent Visit,” Astrogram (28 October 1994) 1-2. 

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E n d N o t e s 

17Bob Rosen, “Quality Improvement Plan Approved by Center 

Board of Directors—Implementation to Begin Shortly,” Astrogram 

(2 April 1993) 6.

1 8Palmer Dyal, “Employee Survey, Malcolm Baldridge SelfAssessment Completed,” Astrogram (16 September 1994) 2; Total 

Quality Survey: NASA Ames Research Center (Mountain States 

Solutions and Novations Group, Inc., January 1994).

1 9“Appendix 1—Cultural Climate and Practices Review Team 

Report, July 27-31, 1992,” in Cultural Climate and Practices Plan: 

NASA Ames Research Center (March 1994) 61. 

20Melody Petersen, “Ames ends tough year with 2 key 

retirements,” San Jose Mercury News (11 December 1993). 

21 Cover Letter, Cultural Climate and Practices Plan: NASA 

Ames Research Center (March 1994).

22Kenneth J. Szalai, “Dryden’s Director Sends Appreciation 

Message to Ames,” Astrogram (1 April 1994) 1. 

23 Interview with Nancy Bingham (15 July 1999). 

24David Perlman, “NASA Proposal Would Shift Ames’ Work to 

Colleges, Firms,” San Francisco Chronicle (19 May 1995) A13. 

25 “Review Team Proposes Sweeping Management, 

Organizational Changes,” NASA Headquarters Press Release No. 95-73 

(19 May 1995).

26“Press Release: Eshoo Calls for GAO Investigation of NASA 

Plan to Move Aircraft from NASA/Ames and Other Facilities” 

(Office of Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, 26 September 1995).

27Interview with Harry McDonald (9 December 1998).

28Sally Brew, “Wind tunnel/simulator divisions pass ISO 

certification audit,” Astrogram (12 June 1998) 6. 

29Henry McDonald, “State of the Center Address” (7 July 1999).

30 Interview with William E. Berry (12 February 1999). 

31David Morse, “Community response is ‘off the scale,’” 

Astrogram (3 October 1997) 3. 

32Henry McDonald, “A message from the director,” Astrogram (3 

October 1997) 1.

33W. Henry Lambright, “Leading Change at NASA: The Case of 

Dan Goldin,” Space Policy 23 (2007) 33-43. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

34Interview with Steve Zornetzer (22 October 2009).

35 Interview with Lewis Braxton III (9 October 2009). 

36Matthew Kohut, “Reaching for the APEX at Ames,” ASK 

Magazine 29 (Winter 2008) 40-41. 

37Interview with Ingrid Desilvestre (14 October 2009).

38NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study (NASA TM2005-214062, November 2005)

39“Change is Underway,” Centerwide Announcement (January 

18, 2006).

40“Ames Has Good Chance to Overcome FY07 Budget 

Problems,” Astrogram (February 2006) 2. 

44Andrew J. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space 

Technology and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry (Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 2003).

42 S. Pete Worden, “On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones,” in 

Mark Gianpapa and Jay A. Bookbinder, eds., Seventh Cambridge 

Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun, ASP 

Conference Series 26 (1992) 599-603. 

43James Dao and Eric Schmitt, “A Nation Challenged: Hearts and 

Minds; Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad,” New 

York Times (19 February 2002). 

44S. Pete Worden, “Perspectives on Space Future,” (November 

2003) (accessed 26 August 2009 at http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/ 

library/ meetings/annual/nov03/Worden_Simon.pdf )

45 Interview with Simon P. Worden (17 November 2009). 

46“Worden gives rousing address,” Astrogram (May 2006) 1. 

47“Lunch Money,” Director’s Blog, (accessed 30 May 2006 at 

http://pete.arc.nasa.gov).

48RLEP 2 Concept Decision Review: Presentation (11 April 2006). 

49Interview with Simon P. Worden (17 November 2009).

50Government Accounting Office, NASA’s Enhanced Use Leasing 

Demonstration Program GAO-07-306R, (December 2006). 

51Charles W. Wessner, ed., Understanding Research, Science and 

Technology Parks: Global Best Practices; Report of a Symposium 

(The National Academies Press, 2009). 

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E n d N o t e s 

52Interview with Butler Hine (7 October 2009).

53 Matthew Kohut, Butler Hine and Mark Turner, “A New Design 

Approach: Modular Spacecraft,” ASK Magazine (Winter 2009) 5-12. 

54Sidney Sun et al., “The 21st-Century Expedition to the Moon,” 

NASA Technology and Innovation 15/2 (2009) 21-23. 

55Government Accountability Office, Space Acquisitions: 

DOD Needs a Departmentwide Strategy for Pursuing Low-Cost, 

Responsive Tactical Space Capabilities GAO-06-449 (March 2006).

56Interview with Simon P. Worden (17 November 2009). 

Chapter 2: Spacecraft 

57Mark Wolverton, The Depths of Space: The Story of the 

Pioneer Planetary Probes (Joseph Henry Press, 2004) 18.

58 John R. Spreiter and Benjamin R. Briggs, “Theoretical 

Determination of the Form of the Boundary of the Solar 

Corpuscular Stream Produced by the Interaction With the 

Magnetic Dipole of the Earth,” Journal of Geophysical Research 

(January 1962).

59Michel Bader, Thomas B. Fryer and Fred C. Witteborn, “Two 

Instruments for Measuring Distributions of Low Energy Charged 

Particles in Space,” NASA Technical Note D-1035 (July 1961). 

60Michel Bader, “Preliminary Explorer XII Data on Protons 

Below 20 KEV: Theory of Solar Proton Energy Transition at 

Interplanetary Space-Magnetic Field Interface,” Journal of 

Geophysical Research 67/13 (December 1962) 5007-5011. 

61Marcia Neugebauer, “Pioneers of Space Physics: A Career 

in the Solar Wind,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102/A12 (1 

December 1997) 26,887-26,894.

62John H. Wolfe and R.W. Silva, “Explorer 14 Plasma Probe 

Observations during the October 7, 1962 geomagnetic disturbance,” 

Journal of Geophysical Research 70 (August 1965) 3575-3579. 

63Palmer Dyal, C.W. Parkin, Charles P. Sonett, “Lunar Surface 

Magnetometer Experiment,” in Apollo 12 Preliminary Science Report 

NASA SP-235 (June 1970) 55-73. 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

64Hans Mark, “Pioneer Jupiter-Saturn: Better, Cheaper, Faster 

in 1970,” Proceedings Report: 12th National Space Symposium (United 

States Space Foundation, 1996) 63-67; Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman 

Sagan and Frank Drake, “Message from Earth,” Science (25 February 

1972) 881-884.

65Willard G. Smith and William P. Peterson, “Free-Flight 

Measurements of Drag and Stability of a Blunt-Nosed Cylinder with 

a Flared Afterbody in Air and Carbon Dioxide,” NASA Technical 

Memorandum X-642 (December 1961); Willard G. Peterson, 

Tables of Flow Properties of Thermally Perfect Carbon Dioxide and 

Nitrogen Mixtures, NASA SP-3009 (1964). 

66Discovery Dispatch: A Quarterly Newsletter of the NASA 

Discovery Program 2/1 (January 2001).

67“Lunar Prospector Program Profile,” Lockheed Martin Missiles 

& Space Press Release #98-41 (March 1998). 

68Douglas Isbell, “Comet Sample Return Mission Picked As Next 

Discovery Flight,” NASA Press Release 95-209 (November 22, 1995). 

69Kenneth L. Adkins, et al., “Stardust: Implementing a new 

manage-to-budget paradigm,” Acta Astronautica 52/2-6 (JanuaryMarch 2003) 87-97.

70Lockheed Martin, “Fact Sheet: Aeroshell Thermal Protection 

System Used on the Stardust Sample Return Capsule” (accessed 

23 October 2008 at http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/ 

assets/11795.pdf ).

71Interview with Daniel Rasky, by James Anderson (September 

2008); Huy K. Tran, et al., Low density resin impregnated ceramic 

article having an average density of 0.15 to 0.40 g/cc. US Patent 

5,536,562 issued July 16, 1996.

72Interview with Huy Tran, by James Anderson (September 

2008).

73Genesis Mishap Investigation Board Report 1 (2006) 

24 (accessed 17 September 2008 at http://www.nasa.gov/ 

pdf/149414main_Genesis_MIB .pdf )

74M.A. Covington, J.M. Heinemann, H.E. Goldstein, et al., 

Performance of a Low Density Ablative Heat Shield Material, 37th 

AIAA Thermophysics Conference AIAA 2004-2273 ( 2004). 

300 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

75Interview with James O. Arnold, by James Anderson 

(September 2008).

76Interview with Scott Sandford, by James Anderson (October 

2008).

77Scott Sandford, “Sandford emails,” Astrogram (January 2006). 

78Nicholas Leventis, “Mechanically Strong, Polymer Crosslinked Aerogels (X-Aerogels),” Nano 50 Award Ceremony, Boston 

(November 10 - 11, 2005). 

79Scott A. Sandford, et al., “Organics captured from comet 81P/ 

Wild 2 by the Stardust spacecraft,” Science 314 (December 15, 

2006) 1720; Scott A. Sandford, “Terrestrial Analysis of the Organic 

Component of Comet Dust,” Annual Review of Analytic Chemistry 

(2008) 549-578.

80D.P. Glavin, J.P. Dworkin, and S.A. Sandford, “Detection of 

Cometary Amines in Samples Returned by Stardust” Meteoritics 

and Planetary Science 43 (2008) 399-413. 

81Interview with David Jordan, by James Anderson (October 

2008).

82Peter Jenniskens, et al. “Preparing For Hyperseed MAC: An 

Observing Campaign To Monitor The Entry Of The Genesis 

Sample Return Capsule,” Earth, Moon, and Planets 95 (2004) 339-

360. 

83Dean A. Kontinos and Mairead Stackpoole, “Post-Flight 

Analysis of the Stardust Sample Return Capsule Earth Entry,” 46th 

AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting, AIAA 2008-1197 (January 

2008).

84John T. Merrifield, “NASA proposes use of 747SP as platform 

for infrared telescope,” Aviation Week and Space Technology (6 

May 1985) 116-117. See also Edward Erickson, et al., SOFIA: A 

Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy; Final Report, NASA 

TM-103840 (August 1991).

85Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA): 

Phase A: System Concept Description, NASA TM-110669 (January 

1995). 

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

86On infrared instrument development, see Craig R. McCreight, 

compiler, Proceedings of the Third Infrared Detector Technology 

Workshop, NASA TM-102209 (October 1989). On many programs 

under development in the 1990s, see Frederick Gillett, et al., 

“Infrared Panel Report,” in National Academy of Sciences/National 

Research Council, Working Papers: Astronomy and Astrophysics Panel 

Reports (January 1991) 1-21. 

87David Morse, “SOFIA ‘privatization’ contractor team selected,” 

Astrogram (10 January 1997) 1. 

88One of the earliest planning documents was Julie Pollitt, SOFIA 

mirror coating study, NASA TM-110809 (28 March 1990). 

89William J. Borucki and Audrey L. Summers, “The Photometric 

Method of Detecting Other Planetary Systems,” Icarus 58 (1984) 

121-134. 

90Andrew Lawler, “Bill Borucki’s Planet Search,” Air & Space 

(2003)

91Charles Sobeck, Astrometric Telescope Facility preliminary systems 

definition study, 3 vols., NASA-TM-89429 (March, May, and July, 

1987); David Black et al., “The Astrometric Telescope Facility,” 

Astrophysics and Space Science 177/1-2 (March 1991) 307-313. 

92Arno F. Granados and William J. Borucki, Astrophysical 

Science with a Spaceborne Photometric Telescope: FRESIP 

Astrophysics Workshop, NASA CP-10148 (1994).

93Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, “A Jupiter-mass companion 

to a solar-type star,” Nature 378 (23 November 1995) 355-359. 

94Jon M. Jenkins, Douglas A. Caldwell and William J. Borucki, 

“Some tests to establish confidence in planets discovered by transit 

photometry,” The Astrophysical Journal 564 (2002) 495-507. 

95W.J. Borucki, “Kepler: A Step Toward Discovering Life in the 

Milky Way,” Director’s Colloqium, NASA Ames Research Center (9 

June 2009).

96David J. Des Marais, Martin O. Harwit, Kenneth W. Jucks, 

James F. Kasting, Douglas N.C. Lin, Jonathan I. Lunine, Jean 

Schneider, Sara Seager, Wesley A. Traub, Neville J. Woolf, “Remote 

Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar 

Terrestrial Planets.” Astrobiology 2 (June 2002) 153-181. 

302 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

97David C. Catling, Kevin J. Zahnle, Christopher P. McKay, 

“Biogenic Methane, Hydrogen Escape, and the Irreversible 

Oxidation of Early Earth,” Science 293 (2001) 839-843. 

98Tori M. Hoehler, Brad M. Bebout, David J. Des Marais, “The 

role of microbial mats in the production of reduced gases on the 

early Earth,” Nature 412 (2001) 324-7. 

99Anthony Colaprete, O. Brian Toon, and J. A. Magalhães, 

“Cloud formation under Mars Pathfinder conditions,” Journal of 

Geophysical Research 104 (1999) 9043–9053. 

100Anthony Colaprete, O. Brian Toon, “The Radiative Effects of 

Martian Water Ice Clouds on the Local Atmospheric Temperature 

Profile,” Icarus, 145 (2000) 524-532. 

101Teresa L. Segura, O. Brian Toon, Anthony Colaprete, Kevin 

Zahnle, “Environmental Effects of Large Impacts on Mars,” Science 

298 (2002) 1977-1980. 

102Robert M. Haberle, et al., “The NASA/Ames Mars General 

Circulation Model: Model Improvements and Comparison with 

Observations” Mars Atmosphere Modeling and Observations Workshop, 

January11-16, 2003.

103Anthony Colaprete, et al., “Albedo of the south pole on Mars 

determined by topographic forcing of atmosphere dynamics,” 

Nature 435 (2005) 184-188. 

104Space Science Board, The Scientific Context for the Exploration 

of the Moon (National Academies Press, 2007). 

Chapter 3: Human Missions 

105Jerome Pearson and Bruno J. Gambucci, A Unique Model, 

Suspension and Excitation System for Launch Vehicle Dynamics Studies, 

NASA TMX-67397 (1970); Henry A. Cole and Albert L. Erickson, 

Buffeting During Atmospheric Descent: NASA Space Vehicle Design 

Criteria (Structures), NASA SP-8001 (November 1970). 

106 James O. Arnold, Howard E. Goldstein, and D.J. Rigali. 

“‘Follow the TPS’: An Analysis of What Occurred to the Thermal 

Protection System (TPS) During the Flight of Shuttle Columbia on 

STS 107,” CAIB Report, Volume 4: Appendix F. 

303 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

107 Stephen P. Walch, W.A. Goddard and Ralph P. Merkle, 

“Theoretical Studies of Reactions on Diamond Surfaces,” Nanotech 

9 (1998) 285-96.

108Al Globus, David Bailey, Jie Han, Richard Jaffe, Creon 

Levit, Ralph Merkle, Deepak Srivastava, “NASA Applications 

of Molecular Nanotechnology,” The Journal of the British 

Interplanetary Society 51 (1998) 145-152; on the importance of this 

paper see Ann Johnson, “Institutions for Simulations: The Case of 

Computational Nanotechnology,” Science Studies 19/1 (2006) 35-51. 

109M.C. Roco, S. Williams, P. Alivisatos, eds, Nanotechnology 

Research Directions: IWGN Workshop report—Vision for Nanotechnology 

Research and Deverlopment in the Next Decade (accessed 17 March 

2009 at http://www.wtec.org/loyola/nano/IWGN.Research. 

Directions/).

110Interview with Meyya Meyyappan, by James Anderson 

(February 2009).

111Sumio Iijima. “Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon,” 

Nature 354 (7 November 1991) 56-58. 

112T. Guo, P. Nikolaev, A. Thess, D.T. Colbert and R.E. Smalley, 

“Catalytic growth of single-walled nanotubes by laser vaporization,” 

Chemical Physics Letters 243/1-2 (8 September 1995) 49-54. 

113Meyya Meyyappan, Lance Delzeit, Alan Cassell and David 

Hash, “Carbon Nanotube Growth by PECVD: A Review,” Plasma 

Sources Science and Technology, 12 (2003) 205-216. 

114Ramsey Stevens, Alan Cassell, Cattien Nguyen, Lance Delzeit, 

Meyya Meyyappan,and Jie Han, “Improved Fabrication Approach 

for Carbon Nanotube Probe Devices,” Applied Physics Letters 77/21 

(2000) 3453-3455.

115Jun Li, Q. Ye, H.T. Ng, Alan Cassell, Ramsey Stevens, Jie 

Han and Meyya Meyyappan, “A Bottom-up Approach for Carbon 

Nanotube Interconnects,” Applied Physics Letters, 82 (2003) 2491-

2493. 

116Andrew McMillan et al., “Ordered nanoparticle arrays formed 

on engineered chaperonin protein templates,” Nature Materials 1 

(December 2002) 247-252. 

304 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

117Meyya Meyyappan and Minoo Dastoor, eds., Nanotechnology 

in Space Exploration: Report of the National Nanotechnology Initiative 

Workshop, August 24-26, 2004, Palo Alto (National Nanotechnology 

Coordination Office, 2006).

118H.T. Ng, B. Chen, J. Li, J. Han, Meyya Meyyappan, J. Wu, S.X. 

Li, and E.E. Haller, “Optical Properties of Single-Crystalline, ZnO 

Nanowires on M-Sapphire,” Applied Physics Letters, 82 (2003) 2023-

2025. 

119Meyya Meyyappan, James O. Arnold, “A Survey of the Rapidly 

Emerging Field of Nanotechnology: Potential Applications for 

Scientific Instruments and Technologies for Atmospheric Entry 

Probes” 2nd International Planetary Probe Workshop NASA CP-2004-

213456 (2004) 289-290.

120James O. Arnold, et al., “Nanostructured Thermal Protection 

Systems for Space Exploration Missions,” Paper presented at Second 

International Probe Workshop, NASA Ames Research Center, 23-26 

August 2004. 121Huy K Tran, et al., Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablators (PICA) 

as Thermal Protection Systems for Discovery Missions, NASA TM-11044 

(April 1997).

122Muscettola, Nicola, Nayak, Pandarang,Pell, Barney, and Brian 

C. Williams, “Remote Agent: To Boldly Go Where No AI System 

Has Gone Before,” Artificial Intelligence 103 (August 1998) 5-47. 

123Mark Schwabacher and Robert Waterman, “Pre-Launch 

Diagnostics for Launch Vehicles,” IEEE Aerospace Conference 2008, 

Paper #1063 (22 October 2007).

124 Interview with Steve Zornetzer (22 October 2009). 

Chapter 4: Planetary Sciences 

125Steven S. Wegener, “Lessons Learned from NASA UAV 

Science Demonstration Program Missions,” AIAA paper (2003). 

126Vincent G. Ambrosia, Steven S. Wegener, James A. Brass, and 

Sally Buechel, “Demonstrating Acquisition of Real-Time Thermal 

Data over Fires Utilizing UAVs,” Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial 

Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Conference, San Diego, CA, 

8-12 April 2002. 

305 
 

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

127Peter W. Merlin, Ikhana: Unmanned Aircraft System Western 

States Fire Missions, NASA SP-2009-4544 (2009). 

128 Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in 

the 1980s (MIT Press, 2009). 

129Interview with David Morrison (23 October 2009).

130Richard P. Turco, O.Brian Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James 

B. Pollack and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences 

of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222 (1983) 1283-92. 

131L.W. Alvarez, et al., “Extraterrestrial Cause for the CretaceousTertiary Extinction: Experimental Results and Theoretical 

Interpretation,” Science 208 (1980) 1095-1108; A.R. Hillebrand et 

al., “Chicxulub Crater: A Possible Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary 

Impact Crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico,” Geology 19 

(1991) 867-71. Also Charles E. Duller, The Case for archaeological 

reconnaissance of the Cabo Catoche-Porvenir region of the northeastern 

Yucatan Peninsula, NASA TM-102248 (February 1990) and Kevin 

Pope, Adrian Ocampo and Charles Duller, “Mexican site for K/T 

impact crater?” Nature 351 (1991) 105. 

132David Morrison and William C. Wells, eds., Asteroids: An 

Exploration Assessment, NASA Conference Proceedings 2053 (1978). 

133Clark Chapman and David Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes 

(New York: Plenum Press, 1989).

134David Morrison, ed., The Spaceguard Survey Report of the NASA 

International Near Earth Object Detection Workshop, NASA TM 

107979 (1992).

135Quoted in D.L. Chandler, “Defying the Laws of Nature? The 

Boston Globe (6 July 1998) C1; and in David A. Kirby, “Science 

Consultants, Fictional Films, and Scientific Practice,” Social Studies 

of Science 33/2 (April 2003) 231-268. 

136Felicity Mellor, “Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and 

the Legitimization of War in Space,” Social Studies of Science 37/4 

(2007) 499-531.

137Martin E.B. France, “Planetary Defense: Eliminating the 

Giggle Factor,” Air & Space Power Journal (7 August 2000). 

306 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

138“The Collision of an Asteroid or Comet with the Earth,” Erice 

International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, 17th Workshop, Erice, 

Italy (May 1993).

139 David Morrison and Edward Teller, “The Impact Hazard: 

Issues for the Future,” in T. Gehrels, ed., Hazards Due to Comets and 

Asteroids (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1994) 1135-43. 

140Grant H. Stokes, Study to determine the feasibility of extending 

the search for Near Earth Objects to smaller limiting diameters: Report 

of the NASA NEO Science Definition Team (22 August 2003); David 

Morrison, “The Impact Hazard: Advanced NEO Surveys and 

Societal Responses” in Peter Bobrowsky and Hans Rickman, eds., 

Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society (Springer, 2007) 163-73. 

141Stephanie R. Langhoff and David Morrison, Workshop Report 

on the Low-Cost Missions to Explore Near-Earth Objects, NASA CP2008-214579 (May 2008).

142NASA Strategic Plan, NASA-TM-112253 (February 1996). 

143David Morse, “Goldin lays out vision for NASA Astrobiology,” 

Astrogram (24 May 1999) 1+ 

144Pale Blue Dot 2 Workshop: Habitable and Inhabited Worlds Beyond 

Our Own Solar System, NASA CP–2000-209595 (2000). 

145http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov; accessed 6 November 2009); 

Interview with Gregory Schmidt (4 November 2009).

146Space Science Board, The Scientific Context for the Exploration of 

the Moon (National Academies Press, 2007). 

147 Heather Pringle, “NASA Dives Into Its Past to Retrieve 

Vintage Satellite Data,” Science 327 (2010) 1322-1323. 

Chapter 5: Space Life Sciences 

148 Jane Hutchison, “Unique Ames Facility Aids Space Research,” 

Astrogram (28 February 1992) 2. 

149Laura Lewis, “Neurolab is a huge success,” Astrogram (29 May 

1998) 2-4.

150Interview with Patricia S. Cowings by James Anderson (11 

February 2009). 

307 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

151Interview with William Toscano, by James Anderson (10 

February 2009).

152Patricia Cowings, John Billingham, and William B. Toscano, 

“Learned control of multiple autonomic responses to compensate 

for the debilitating effects of motion sickness,” Therapy in 

Psychosomatic Medicine 4 (1978) 318-323. 

153“Panties Prove Poser; NASA Has to Ask.” The Denver Post 

(February 5, 1977) 6.

154Harold Sandler and D.L. Winter, Physiological Responses of 

Women To Simulated Weightlessness: A Review of the Significant Findings 

of the First Female Bed Rest Study, NASA SP-430 (1978) 

155Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of 

Women in Space (MIT Press, 2006) 54. 

156Patrica S. Cowings, William B. Toscano, Joe Kamiya, Neal 

E. Miller, Joseph C. Sharp, Spacelab 3 flight experiment No. 3AFT23: 

Autogenic-feedback training as a preventive method for space adaptation 

syndrome, NASA-TM-89412(1999). 

157Patricia S. Cowings. Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise: 

Method and System. Patent number 5,694,939, issued December 9, 

1997. 

158Mark Kliss, et al., “Initial Closed Operation of the CELSS 

Test Facility Engineering Development Unit,” Advances in Space 

Research 31 (2003) 263-270. 

159 Space Station Biological Research Project, Science and Technical 

Requirements Document, ARC/BRP-40002, Revision A (August 1996); 

Catherine C. Johnson and Charles E. Wade, eds., Space Station 

Biological Research Project—Reference Experiment Book, NASA TM110378 (1996).

160Catherine C. Johnson, Charles E. Wade and John J. Givens, 

“Space Station Biological Research Project,” Gravitational and Space 

Biology Bulletin 10 (1997) 137-143. 

161Interview with George Sarver (6 October 2009). 

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E n d N o t e s 

Chapter 6: Information Technology 

162Per A. Holst, “Sam Giser and the GPS Instrument Company: 

Pioneering Compressed Time Scale (High Speed) Analog 

Computing,” Pioneers and Peers (Society for Computer Simulation 

International, 1988) 4-10.

163Brent Creer, “An Analog Computer Study of Several Stability 

Augmentation Schemes Designed to Alleviate Roll-Induced 

Instability,” NACA RM A56H30 (1957). 

164Michael R. Adamson, Biographies: Harvard Lomax,” EEE 

Annals in the History of Computing (2005) 98-102. 

165Harvard Lomax and Mamorou Inouye, “Numerical Analysis of 

Flow Properties about Blunt Bodies Moving at Supersonic Speeds 

in an Equilibrium Gas,” NASA TR-204, (1964). 

166Barrett S. Baldwin and Harvard Lomax, Thin Layer 

Approximations and Algebraic Model for Separate Turbulent Flows, 

AIAA Paper No. 78-257, presented at the 16th AIAA Aerospace 

Sciences meeting 16-18 January 1978.

167Interview with James O. Arnold, by James Anderson (26 

January 2009).

168David H. Bailey, Eric Barszcz, John T. Barton, David S. 

Browning, Russell L. Carter, Leonardo Dagum, Rod A. Fatoohi, 

P. O. Frederickson, Thomas A. Lasinski, R. S. Schreiber, Horst 

D. Simon, Venkat Venkatakrishnan, and Sisira K. Weeratunga, 

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks, NASA Contractor Report 203186 

(March 1994).

169 On the history of RIACS, see RIACS: 25 Years of Innovation 

(Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, 2008).

170Jim Hart, “Ames personnel play major role in countering 

computer virus attack,” Astrogram 31/5 (18 November 1988) 3-4. 

171Corporation for National Research Initiatives, “Proceedings 

of the Seventeenth Internet Engineering Task Force”, Pittsburgh 

Supercomputing Center, May 1-4, 1990; Corporation for National 

Research Initiatives, “Proceedings of the Eighteenth Internet 

Engineering Task Force”, University of British Columbia, July 

309 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 

 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

30-August 3, 1990; Milo Medin, The Great IGP Debate—Part II,” 

ConneXions 5/10 (October 1991). 

172C.M. Wong, M.S. Medin, J.R. Lekasham, A.L. Hain, “High 

Speed, Cross Continental Networks: A Necessity,” AIAA-91-0155 

(1991).

173David Kenwright and Robert Haimes, “Automatic Vortex Core 

Detection,” IEEE Visualization Case Studies (1998) 70-74. 

174Lane Wallace, Nose Up: High Angle of Attack and Thrust Vectoring 

Research at NASA Dryden, 1979-2001, NASA SP-2009-4534 (2009) 30. 

175 James O. Arnold, W.A. Page, Shock layer radiation of blunt 

bodies at reentry velocities, NASA-TR-R-193 (1964). 

176Ellis E. Whiting, James O. Arnold, W.A. Page, R.M. Reynolds, 

“Composition of the Earth’s atmosphere by shock-layer radiometry 

during the PAET entry probe experiment,” Journal of Quantitative 

Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer 13 (1973) 837-859; Alvin Seiff, 

David E. Reese, Simon C. Sommer, Donn B. Kirk, Ellis E. Whiting 

and Hasso B. Niemann, “PAET, an entry probe experiment in the 

Earth’s atmosphere” Icarus 18 (1973) 525-563. 

177James O. Arnold and R.W. Nicholls, “A shock tube 

determination of the electronic transition moment of the CN red 

band system.” Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative 

Transfer 12 (1972) 1435-1452. 

178Interview with James O. Arnold, by James Anderson (26 

January 2009).

179Pentti Kanerva, Sparse Distributed Memory (MIT Press, 1988). 

180 Robin Hanson, John Stutz and Peter Cheeseman, Bayesian 

Classification Theory, Technical Report FIA-90-12-7-01 (NASA 

Ames Artificial Intelligence Research Branch, May 1991)

181Peter Cheeseman et al., Automatic Classification of Spectra 

From the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), NASA Reference 

Publication 1217 (1989).

182Breck Henderson, “Ames researchers earn largest Space Act 

Award ever,” Astrogram (23 July 1993) 2. 

183 Michael Riordan, “NASA Ames Research Center: Computer 

Visualization in Three Dimensions,” Focal Point (California Council 

on Science and Technology, January 2007). 

310 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

184“NASA Awards $3 Million Graphics Workstation Contract,” 

NASA Press Release 84-41 (September 14, 1984). 

185“Ames honored for Space Station Habitability Research,” 

Astrogram (28 July 1989) 1. 

186Interview with Steven Zornetzer (21 October 2009).

187Michael Mewhinney, “Telepresence Technology to Study 

Antartic Lakes,” Astrogram (9 October 1992) 4. 

188Timothy A. Sandstrom, Chris Henze and Creon Levit, “The 

hyperwall,” in CMV03: Proceedings of Coordinated and Multiple 

Views in Exploratory Visualization (2003) 124-133. 

189“NASA Develops World’s Highest Resolution Digital Display 

System,” NASA Ames Press Release 08-56AR (29 June 2008). 

Chapter 7: Flight Research 

190Glenn E. Bugos and John W. Boyd, “Accelerating 

entrepreneurial space: The case for an NACA-style organization,” 

Space Policy 24 (2008) 140-147. 

191 Erik M. Conway, High Speed Dreams: NASA and the 

Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945-1999 (Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 2005) 82-117.

192David F. Engelbert, Allan P. Bakke, Mladen K. Chagrin and 

Wilbur C. Vallotton, “Mechanical Design of NASA Ames Research 

Center Vertical Motion Simulator,” JPL Technical Memorandum 

33-777 (July 1, 1976); A. David Jones, Operations Manual: Vertical 

Motion Simulator (VMS) S.08, NASA TM 81180 (May 1980). 

193See the Simulation Laboratories Year in Review for 

1997 through 2005 (accessed 4 January 2010 at http://www. 

aviationsystemsdivision.arc.nasa.gov).

194Kevin Tucker, “Aviation Reporting System Saves Lives,” 

Astrogram (7 June 1991) 2. 

195Donald James, “State of the Art Simulator to be Installed in 

MVSRF,” Astrogram (22 May 1992) 1+. 

196Michael Mewhinney, “Remotely piloted aircraft completes 

first flight,” Astrogram (30 May 1997) 10. 

311 
 

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

197Seth B. Anderson, Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer: Flight 

Tests at Ames Research Center, 1940-1970, NASA SP-2002-4526 (2002) 

31-34. 

198Hans Mark and Robert R. Lynn, “Aircraft Without Airports: 

Changing the Way Men Fly,” Vertiflite 34 (1988) 80-87; Robert R. 

Lynn, “Rebirth of the Tilt Rotor: The 1992 Alexander A. Nikolsky 

Lecture,” Journal of the American Helicopter Society (1993) 3-11. 

199Seth B. Anderson, Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer, NASA 

SP-2002-4526 (2002) 29-31.

200Michael Mewhinney, “Final Chapter Closes on History 

Making QSRA Project,” Astrogram (18 March 1994) 4. 

201Donald James, “RASCAL Off and Flying,” Astrogram (27 

March 1992) 1.

202Gloria K. Yamauchi and Larry A. Young, A Status of NASA 

Rotorcraft Research, NASA TP-2009-215369 (2009). 

203Donald James, “Ames Technology Could Improve Air Traffic 

Control,” Astrogram (14 August 1992) 1+. 

204Yoon C. Jung and Gilena A. Monroe, ‘Development of 

Surface Management System Integrated with CTAS Arrival Tool,” 

AIAA-2005-7334, AIAA 5th Aviation Technology, Integration and 

Operations Forum (2005).

205David Steitz, “NASA Air Traffic Management Tool Wins 

Software of the Year Award,” NASA Press Release 06-298 (18 August 

2006).

206Interview with Stanton Harke (28 January 1999).

207 “NAA Announces ADS-B Program as the Winner of the 

2007 Robert J. Collier Trophy,” Press Release, National Aeronautic 

Association (7 March 2008). 

208Interview with Thomas A. Edwards, by Robert G. Ferguson 

(14 January 2005).

209Stephanie Langhoff et al., Workshop Report on Green Aviation, 

NASA CP-2009-216012 (2009). 

312 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

E n d N o t e s 

210Mark D. Bowles and Virginia P. Dawson, “The Advanced 

Turboprop Project: Radical Innovation in a Conservative 

Environment,” in Pamela E. Mack, ed., From Engineering Science to Big 

Science: The NACA and NASA Collier Trophy Research Project Winners, 

NASA SP-4219 (1998).

211“NASA Technology Comes to Earth,” (accessed 1 March 2010 

at http://www.bloomenergy.com/about/company-history/). 

Chapter 8: Conclusion 

212Charles F. Bolden, Challenges and Opportunities in the NASA FY 

2011 Budget Proposal: Testimony before the Subcommittee on Science and 

Space, Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, U.S. Senate, 

(24 February 2010) (accessed 3 March 2010 at http://commerce. 

senate.gov/public/ 

313 
 

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Index

A

Abbott, Ira 76

ablation 127, 128, 132

Ackerman, Thomas 94, 171

ADS-B, automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast technology 289

aerogel 103

AFT, autogenic feedback training 203

Aiken, Edwin 284, 285

airborne aerosols 162

airborne science 159–163

Alger, George 160

Allamandola, Louis 172, 182

Allen, H. Julian 5, 6, 11, 13–15, 18, 21, 57, 75, 76, 83, 125, 126, 127, 131, 135,

157, 158, 159, 175, 234, 297

Allmen, John 140

Ambrosia, Vincent 163

Ames-Dryden Flight Research Center 22–23, 39

Ames gap fillers 137

analog computing 215

Andrew, Daniel 119

Antarctica 162

Apollo 5, 102, 129, 130–134, 159, 168

Apollo guidance computer 133

arc jet 96, 103, 128, 130, 137, 139, 158

Arnold, James 103, 138, 143, 220, 234–235

Arno, Roger 208

artificial intelligence 237–239

ASRF, automation sciences research facility 242

asteroids 89, 160, 176–180

astrobiology 180–185

Athena launch vehicle 100

Atkinson, David 96

atmosphere structure experiment 95–98

AutoClass software 238

B

Bader, Michel 80, 81, 164, 301

Bailey, F. Ronald 25, 222, 224

Bailey, Rodney 268

Ball Aerospace 114

314 
	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

I n d e x 

Ballhaus, William F., Jr. 24–27, 112, 236, 266

Bauschlicher, Charles 143, 147, 236

Bebout, Brad 116

Bell Boeing V-22 278

Bell XV-15 275–276

Berry, William 43, 46, 49, 138, 207

Bicay, Michael 66

Biegel, Bryan 252

Billingham, John 25, 173–175, 207, 208

Bingham, Nancy 41, 43, 272

Bioletti, Carlton 78

Biosatellite program 78, 193–194, 198

Black, David 112, 172

Blake, David 145, 149, 170

Blumberg, Baruch 183

blunt body 125

Boeing X-36 268

Boese, Robert 93

Bolden, Charles 293–295

Borucki, William 111–115

Bousman, William 284

Boyd, John W. 1–2, 6, 14, 20, 25, 45, 54, 59, 65, 66, 92, 138, 142, 297

Brass, James 163

Braxton, Lewis 52, 59, 66

Bregman, Jesse 166

Brennwald, Louis 22

Briggs, Geoffrey 45, 246

Bright, Loren 14, 218, 256

Brooks, Walter 249

Buchanan, Rosemary 224

Bunch, Theodore 170, 175

C

Cabrol, Nathalie 184

CAIB, Columbia Accident Investigation Board 50, 139–140

Canning, Thomas 128

Caroff, Lawrence 184

Carroll, Carol 109

Cassell, Alan 146

Cassen, Patrick 172

Catling, David 116

centrifuges 198–199

315 
 

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

CFD, computational fluid dynamics 17, 25, 140, 214, 228–233, 266

Challenger accident 97

Chang, Sherwood 170, 175

Chapman, Dean 125, 129, 137, 218, 236

Chartz Smith, Marcie 215, 216, 240

Chawla, Kalpana 249

Cheeseman, Peter 238

Chin, Benny 97

Christensen, Marvin 58–59, 66

Clancy, Daniel 55

Clark, James 240

Clearwater, Yvonne 243

Clementine spacecraft 60, 99, 117, 178–179

Cochran, John 281

Colaprete, Anthony 117–119, 122

Cole, Henry 135

Coleman, Jana 38

Colin, Lawrence 97

Colombano, Silvano 239

Columbia supercomputer 249–250

Comet Halley 95

Comet Wild-2 104

Compton, Dale 27–30, 32, 36, 113

computational chemistry 234–237

Condon, Estelle 51, 162

Connolly, James 119, 196, 201

Constellation program 151–154

Convair 990 (Galileo II) 160, 164

Cooper, David 44, 236

Cooper, George 257

Corliss, Lloyd 283

Cosmos/Bion missions 194–197, 201

Cowing, Keith 187

Cowings, Patricia 203–206

Crane, Robert 14, 76

Cray supercomputers 220–221, 230, 248, 250

Creer, Brent 134

Cruikshank, Dale 157, 171

CTAS, Center-TRACON automation system 286–287

Cuzzi, Jeffrey 157, 171

CVSRF, crew-vehicle systems research facility 259, 261

316 
	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

I n d e x 

D

Dean, William E. 37

DEEC, digital electronic engine control 263

Deep Space 2 spacecraft 153

DeFrance, Smith 5, 6–13, 14, 19, 26, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 83, 190, 191, 192–193,

215

Delory, Gregory 122

Denery, Dallas 286

Denning, Peter 220

Desilvestre, Ingrid 54

Des Marais, David 116, 182, 184

DeVincenzi, David 170

DFBW, digital fly-by-wire 263

Dimeff, John 18, 193

Dodson, Estelle 185

Dolci, Wendy 53

Douglas DC-8 161

Drake, Frank 174

Drinkwater, Frederick 274

Driver, David 141

Dryden Flight Research Center 109

Dugan, Daniel 283

Duller, Charles 160, 176

Dusterberry, John 257

Dyal, Palmer 85

Dyer, Jack 91

E

Early Warning Inc. 150

Earth-observation aircraft 161–163

Edwards, Thomas 66, 290

Eggers, Alfred 7, 13, 14, 21, 75, 76, 125, 126, 130, 131

Electromagnetic control 87

Electrostatic analyzers 81–82

Ellis, Stanley 195

Ellis, Stephen 224, 241

Elphic, Richard 121

Ennico, Kimberly 118, 119

Erickson, Albert 135

Erickson, Edwin 106

Erzberger, Heinz 286–287

317 
 

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Eshow, Michelle 283, 287

Evans, Bradford 10

exobiology 167–170, 180, 191

Explorer spacecraft 81–82

extremophiles 147

F

FAA, Federal Aviation Administration 260, 261, 264, 286–287, 289

Farmer, Jack 170

FFRDC, federally funded research and development center 53–54

Fimmel, Richard 91

Finn, John 145, 291

Flynt, G. Allan 52

Ford, Kenneth 243

Foster, John V. 14, 79

free-flight facility 126, 128

FRESIP, frequency of Earth-sized inner planets spacecraft 112–113

Freund, Minoru 151

Fryer, Thomas 81

full-cost recovery 51, 56, 64, 294

FutureFlight Central 288

G

Galal, Ken 120

Galileo probe 96, 182, 237

GEMS, gravity and extreme magnetism SMEX spacecraft 123

General Electric Company 96

GeneSat nanosatellite 211

Gerdes, Ronald 283

Gillespie, Carlton 166

Givens, John 97, 208

Glazer, Jack 19

Glennan, T. Keith 6, 7

Globus, Albert 143

Goddard Space Flight Center 7, 76

Goett, Harry 7, 9, 76, 130, 215, 256, 257

Goldin, Daniel 30–33, 49, 98, 107, 144, 180, 183, 243

Goldstein, Howard 103, 137, 139

Goodwin, Glen 129

Govindan, T.R. 145

Graeber, Curtis 261

318 
	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

I n d e x 

gravitational biology 197–202

gravitational boost 88

Griffin, Michael 55–57, 62, 151, 179, 210

Grindeland, Richard 195, 204

Gross, Anthony 45

Guastaferro, Angelo 23, 99

H

Haberle, Robert 117, 171

Hall, Charles 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 86, 87, 88, 93, 130, 298

Hall, G. Warren 281

Hardy, Gordon 43, 134

Harke, Stanton 288

Harper, Charles W. 7, 9, 230

Harper, Lynn 47, 207

Hart, James 225

Hartman, Edwin P. 3

Hayden, Sandra 153

Haymaker, Webb 190

heatshield 97, 102, 104, 130, 132, 136, 149, 152, 237

Heldmann, Jennifer 121

heliophysics 84, 122

helium tunnel 127

Henze, Christopher 251

HIDEC, highly integrated digital electronics control 264

high-alpha technology program 267

HiMAT, highly maneuverable aircraft technology testbed 266

Hine, Butler 56, 64, 68, 121, 246

Hines, John 200, 207

Hoehler, Tori 116

Hogan, Patrick 252

Hollenbach, David 172

Holton, Emily 195, 198

Holtzclaw, Ralph 86

Howe, John 126

HPRL, human performance research laboratory 242

Hubbard, G. Scott 43, 49–57, 62, 99, 139, 146, 150, 182, 245, 249

Hughes Aircraft 93

Huntress, Wesley 98, 181

Huygens Titan probe 98

Hwang, Helen 145

hyperwall display 251–252

319 
 

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

I

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Ikhana UAV 163–164

Illiac IV supercomputer 217–218

Imprescia, Clifford 53

infrared astronomy 105–107, 164–166

Innis, Robert 281

instrumentation 118, 193

IRAS, infrared astronomical satellite 106

IRIS, interface region imaging spectrograph 122

Iverson, David 153

IVHMS, integrated vehicle health monitoring systems 153

J

Jaffe, Richard 143, 236

Jahnke, Linda 170

James, Donald 47

Jedlicka, James 96

Jemison, Mae 205

Jenniskens, Peter 104

Johnson Space Center 78

Jones, Robert T. 265

JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 29, 58, 67, 77, 82, 99, 107, 113, 114, 153, 173,

174, 177, 181, 225, 245, 313

Jupiter 86, 110, 166, 171, 237

K

Kalman-Schmidt filter 133

Kanerva, Pentti 238

KAO, Kuiper Airborne Observatory 105, 165–166

Kasting, James 94, 171

Kearns, Joel 59, 109

Keller, Richard 289

Kelly, Mark 270

Kemp, Christopher 66

Kenwright, David 233

Kepler spacecraft 110–114, 115

Kidwell, George 43

Kiris, Cetin 232

Kittel, Peter 107

Klein, Harold P. 12, 167, 169, 191–193

Klineberg, John 20

Kliss, Mark 207, 291

320 
	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

L

I n d e x 

Klupar, Peter 66, 67

Knutson, Martin 39, 43, 160

Koch, David 111

Korsmeyer, David 55

Krufeld, Robert 284

Kutler, Paul 25

Kwak, Dochan 232

LADEE, lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer 69, 121–123

Langhoff, Stephanie 180, 236

Larson, Howard 136

LCROSS, lunar crater observation and sensing satellite 59, 63, 117, 184

Learjet 160, 165

Lebacqz, Victor 283, 286

Lekashman, John 226

Leon, Henry 195

Leon, Mark 246

Lepetich, Joseph 86

Levit, Creon 224

life support systems 207–208

lifting bodies 130

Lissauer, Jack 171

Livingstone software 153

Lockheed C-130 160

Lockheed Martin Corporation 99, 102, 137, 161, 211, 256

Lockheed U-2C 160

LOFT, line-oriented flight training 260

Lomax, Harvard 214, 216–217, 229

Loomis, Mark 149

Lum, Henry 237, 242

Lunar Orbiter spacecraft 187

Lunar Prospector spacecraft 50, 99–101, 119

lunar science 99, 185

M

M2-F2 lifting body 131

MacCormack, Robert 229

MacCroskey, William 232

MacElroy, Robert 207

MAD, mission analysis division 13

Maese, Christopher 202

MAE-West server 224–225, 227–228

321 
 

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Magalhães, Julio 117

magnetometers 85

Mah, Robert 153, 196

Mandel, Adrian 195

Mark, Hans 15–20, 63, 72, 86, 118, 136, 160, 173, 203, 218, 220, 235, 277

Marlaire, Michael 43, 46, 65

Marmie, John 123

Mars 50, 117, 171, 246, 247, 291

Martin, Gary 66

Martin, James 280

McCreight, Craig 106

McDonald, Harry 44–49, 72, 107, 142, 180, 182, 243, 291

McGreevy, Michael 239

McKay, Christopher 116, 170, 185

Mead, Merrill 14

Medin, Milo 224–226

Merrill, Robert 283

Mersman, William 215

Meyyappan, Meyya 142–149

Mihalov, John 80

Mikula, Julie 123

Minafra, Joseph 185

Moffett Field 33–34, 39–40

Montreal Accord 162

Moon 117–120, 151, 158

Moralez, Ernest 284

Morrison, David 107, 176–180, 181, 182, 185

Morse, David 47

Mort, Kenneth 270

Mulenburg, Jerry 199

Munechika, Ken K. 37–40

Murphy, James 106

N

NACA, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 3, 10, 75, 125, 131, 140,

190, 255, 285, 292, 293

Nagel, David 224, 242

nanosensors 148

nanotechnology 64, 141–150, 237

nanotubes 143–144

NASA Ames Center for Nanotechnology 142–147

NASA Astrobiology Institute 180–185

NASA Lunar Science Institute 185–187

322 
	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

I n d e x 

NASA Research Park 48–49, 65, 70

NAS, NASA advanced supercomputing facility 219–222, 230

National Air and Space Museum 91

NEAR, near Earth asteroid rendezvous spacecraft 99, 177

Neel, Carr 80

NEO, near Earth objects 175–179

Neurolab 201–202

Newberry, Stan 57

NFAC, national full-scale aerodynamics complex 59, 270–272

North American Aviation 133

Northrop-Grumman Corporation 69, 119, 131

NSI, NASA Science Internet 226–227

nuclear winter 171, 176

O

OAO, orbiting astronomical observatory 76

OARF, outdoor aerodynamic research facility 277

OART, NASA Office of Advanced Research and Technology 13, 14, 16, 79

oblique wing 265

OGO, orbiting geophysical observatory 82

O’Hara, Dolores 197

O’Keefe, Sean 51, 149, 210, 248

OSO, orbiting satellite observatory 80

Oyama, Vance 11, 93, 168, 169

P

PAET, planetary atmosphere experiments test 93, 235

Palmer, Everett 224

Panontin, Tina 122, 139

Pappas, Constantine 126

Parsons, John 75

Partridge, Harry 151

Patton, Mark 192

Peterson, Victor 28, 236, 256

PharmaSat nanosatellite 211

Philpott, Delbert 195

photometers 112, 114

PICA, phenolic impregnated carbon ablator 101–103, 104, 152, 293

Pilcher, Carl 177, 183

Pioneer plaque 89

Pioneers 6 to 9 77, 83–86

Pioneers 10 and 11 87–92

Pioneer Venus spacecraft 91–95

323 
 

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Pirtle, Melvin 233

planetary atmospheres 159–163

planetary probes 93–95

planetary sciences 78

plasma probes 80

Pleiades supercomputer 250–251

Pollack, James 94, 157, 170–171

Ponnamperuma, Cyril 167, 175

Presley, Leroy 232

Pueschel, Rudolph 162

Pulliam, Thomas 229

Q

QSRA, quiet short-haul research aircraft 279

Quaide, William 168

quality management 34–35, 46

R

Ragent, Boris 93

Rai, Man Mohan 232

RASCAL, rotorcraft aircrew systems concepts airborne laboratory 284

Rasky, Daniel 71, 102

Rathert, George 257

reentry capsule 132

Reese, David 92

Remote Agent software 246–247

responsive space 61–62, 67, 69

Reuther, James 55, 141, 152

Reynolds, Raymond 170

RIACS, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science 220–221, 225, 247

Riddle, Dennis 281

RLEP, robotic lunar exploration program 56, 63–64, 68, 119, 121

Roberts, Leonard 262

Robinson, Russell 6, 76

Rodert, Lewis 80

Rogallo, Robert 218

Rogers, Stuart 140, 232

Ross, Muriel 202, 244

rotorcraft 232

Rubesin, Morris 126

Runnegar, Bruce 183

Russell, Philip 118

324 
	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	 	

	 	

	 	 	 	 	 	

	 	

	 	

	 	

I n d e x 

S

Sadoff, Melvin 203

Sagan, Carl 89, 113, 174, 191

Salama, Farid 166

Sandford, Scott 103

Sandler, Harold 204

Santos, Orlando 209

Sarver, George 59, 209

Saturn 86, 171

Savage, Paul 200

Schiff, Lewis 267

Schmidt, Gregory 185, 201

Schmidt, Stanley 133, 215

Schroeder, Jeffery 283

Schultz, Peter 120

Schwabacher, Mark 153

Seiff, Alvin 7, 75, 92, 93, 95, 96, 128, 235, 312

SETI Institute 114, 174

SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence 173–175

SGI, Silicon Graphics Inc. 143, 240, 245, 248, 249

Sharp, Joseph 203

Shiner, Robert 262

Silicon Valley 1, 47, 70, 213, 221

Sims, Michael 241

SIRTF, Shuttle infrared test facility 106

SMA, surface movement advisor 287

Smith, Charles 152

Smith, Gerald 134

Smith, Willard 92

Sobeck, Charles 112

SOFIA, Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy 105–110

Sonett, Charles 11, 62, 81, 83, 301

Souza, Kenneth 196, 200, 208

Soviet Union 194–197, 201, 205

Spaceguard survey 177, 179

Spacelab missions 199–201, 204

Space Shuttle 135–140, 199

space suit 135, 206

Space Technology Laboratories 83

SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation 152, 293

Sperans, Joel 97

Spreiter, John 81

Sridhar, Banavar 288

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A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Sridhar, KR 145, 291

Srivastava, Deepak 143, 150

SSBRP, space station biological research project 57, 208–211

SST, supersonic transport 256

Stardust spacecraft 101–103, 177

Statler, Irving 282

Sterling Software 241

Stern, Alan 121, 185

Stevens, Kenneth 220, 240

Stewart, David 138

Stine, Howard 96

Stoker, Carol 246

Stollar, Lee 272

STOL, short takeoff and landing aircraft 279–281

Sustainability Base 154

Swain, Robert 271

Syvertson, Clarence 14, 21–24, 173, 270, 271

Szalai, Christine 102

T

Tarter, Jill 113, 174

TCP/IP, transmission control protocol/internetworking protocol 220, 223

tektites 158–159

Terrestrial Planet Finder spacecraft 116

Thigpen, William 251

Thorley, Gary 106

Tielens, Xander 172

Tomko, David 198

Toon, Brian 117, 162, 171, 176

Toscano, William 203

Tran, Huy 102, 149

Trent, Jonathan 147

Trippensee, Gary 264

TRW Inc. 30, 31, 88

Tu, Eugene 56, 66

Turner, Mark 122

Tverskaya, Galina 196

U

UAV, uncrewed aerial vehicle 162–163

Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel 133, 273

University of California at Santa Cruz 70, 150, 172

Unix operating system 223–224

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V

I n d e x 

Uranus 106

USRA, Universities Space Research Association 107

Valero, Francisco 162

Venkatapathy, Ethiraj 103

Venus 91, 127

Vera, Alonso 153

Vernikos, Joan 195, 197

Vertical Gun Range 158

Vertical Motion Simulator 136, 258–259, 262

Viking gas exchange experiment 94, 169

Viking landers 95, 168

Vincenti, Walter 27

VIVED, virtual visual environment display 239

Voyager spacecraft 88

VTOL, vertical take-off and landing aircraft 9, 273–276

Vykukal, Hubert 135, 206, 242

W

Walch, Stephen 143

Watson, Andrew 224

Webb, James 8, 131

Webbon, Bruce 207

Webster, Lawrence 113

Wegener, Steven 163

Wenzel, Elizabeth 241

Weston, Alan 66, 67

Whiting, Ellis 234–235

wildfires 163

Wilmoth, Krisstina 185

Wilson, Charles 79, 194

Wingo, Dennis 187

Wingrove, Rodney 134

Winter, David 204

Witteborn, Frederick 81, 106

Wolfe, John 81, 82, 85, 86, 301

Worden, Simon “Pete” 1–2, 60–71, 72, 109, 151, 152, 178–180, 185, 293

World Wind software 252

Wray, Alan 219

Wright, Michael 154

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X

A T M O S P H E R E O F F R E E D O M : 7 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n 

Xenakis, George 283

Y

Yaggy, Paul 20

Yee, Helen 229

Young, Richard 11, 171

Z

Zahnle, Kevin 116, 118

ZBR, zero base review 41

Zornetzer, Stephen 45, 50, 154, 243–244, 247

Zuk, John 278

Zweben, Monte 238

328