It's all about the mission - An interview with NASA CDO Ron Thompson

'Let's continue the journey together, let's figure out where we need to go together'

NASA holds more than half a century's worth of earth science and space data in its archives, covering everything from oceanography to interstellar physics. Its aeronautics datasets go back even further, to the era of the agency's predecessor the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).

In fact, chief data officer (CDO) and deputy chief digital transformation officer Ron Thompson, can only guess at the total number of pots of information NASA is sitting on, but he's pretty sure it's in the tens of thousands.

Part of Thompson's job to pull these disparate datasets under one roof, doing so as part of an overarching strategy to bring NASA's far-flung departments operationally closer together.

Why things happen the way they do

Digital transformation takes many forms, but in NASA's case it means using digital technologies as a lever to break down structures that are still heavily geographically based.

"You have to go back to the root of why things happen the way they do," he tells Computing, after delivering a keynote on digital transformation at the recent Tibco Now event.

"Our systems and the way we work is very geographically specific because it was based on delivering mail, delivering a package, and initially there was never a sense of an enterprise, there was never a sense of sharing beyond the local capabilities."

This means that specialisms - aeronautics, space travel, earth science - tend to be highly concentrated in particular locations. NASA's digital transformation effort, dubbed - fittingly - Thrust, is all about updating the workplace and the workforce so it functions cohesively as one unit, as befits its modern role, Thompson observes.

Ron Thompson. Source: NASA

"Hey, we are one NASA, we are one organisation. At the end of the day it is all about the missions, buying into a common goal where everyone sees value in what they're delivering."

NASA's many interlocking missions include putting people on the moon, gathering data from deep space with the new Webb Telescope, observing the earth from satellites to track phenomena like climate and land use changes, hypersonic travel, and supporting low earth orbit ventures that are starting to put the first tourists into space - notably and imminently one William Shatner.

More than ever before in these ventures, NASA is part of an ecosystem that includes international bodies such as the European Space Agency and also commercial companies. For example, two NASA astronauts are due to walk on the moon's surface in 2024 descending on a SpaceX lunar lander from an orbiting spacecraft, Orion, designed by Lockheed Martin, having been launched on a giant, mostly Boeing-built Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, all as part of the Artemis human spaceflight programme.

Such collaborations are deeply knit into NASA's operations, which is another reason that it needs to speak with one voice.

"We work very closely with Boeing on aeronautics - what flies within the Earth's atmosphere - and then in low Earth orbit that's where you see the Virgin Galactic, that's where you see SpaceX," Thompson explains. (Notable by its absence from his mentions is Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, which is suing NASA, claiming its bid to build the Human Landing System was unfairly disregarded.)

Many missions

NASA has always been closely aligned with the aerospace industry, of course. For example, the Apollo rockets that first took human beings to the moon, were built mostly by Boeing, but these days there are many more players launching satellites and even crewed rockets for their own commercial purposes. In a sense, NASA is the star around which many commercial, governmental and multinational bodies revolve.

The field of low-earth orbit flight is currently hot, with firms like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic racing to take paying passengers out of this world. But with rockets blasting off into the same airspace used by planes before descending again (and often exploding spectacularly on landing), clearly a careful multiparty coordination effort is required, as Thompson explains.

"We see more of the commercialisation of that low Earth orbit piece, and I think we'll see [space tourism] within our lifetimes very routinely.

SpaceX launch. Source: iStock

"Most of everything that's launched is done in partnership with our Kennedy site, although SpaceX has Boca Chica in Texas, and they launch from there, but it's all coordinated here and there are other government agencies like the FAA. Think about what SpaceX is doing, it's not just punching a hole in the airspace, going up, but they also have stuff coming back down."

Another area currently grabbing attention is hypersonic flight, aircraft that travel at many times the speed of sound, space shuttles for example. Hypersonics have military and potentially civilian applications. Much of the research in this area is done in West Virginia at Langley Park, and it's an example of NASA sharing data with the private sector.

"We'll develop sonic boom technologies to make sure that the commercial providers can have aircraft that don't rattle houses and set off car alarms. So we do the research on that and then turn that research over for commoditisation to our commercial partners to advance further."

Then there are the various Mars missions, including the InSight Mars Lander, and Ingenuity, the robot helicopter that in April accomplished the first powered flight on Mars, which are mostly the preserve of the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

And to come right up to date, last month saw the successful launch of Landsat 9, a partnership between NASA and the US Geological Survey, which will be able to observe changes to the Earth in higher fidelity than its predecessors, providing more valuable data to be added to the Landsat global land archive.

Open source and open standards

Making all these dispersed and disparate datasets available to those who need them is the other major strand to Thompson's unifying mission.

Connecting tens of thousands of repositories together in a meaningful fashion is a major undertaking with an expected timeline of ten years; the programme is being worked out by Thompson's team in coordination with NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

As far as technical integration solutions goes, Thompson mentions that semantic web technologies and graph databases will part of the platform, in fact work on an HR visualisation tool using graph technology is already underway, but says plans are still at the early stage, with standards, controlled vocabularies and ontologies still being worked on.

The challenge is how to make all the data searchable centrally, how to ensure it is relevant to its many audiences, working out which datasets to tackle in which order, and thinking about how to retrofit the older datasets to provide a longitudinal overview of a topic, he says.

"We're not wed to any solution yet; I would say we are in the fundamental architecture stages. We're working the standards up and leveraging a lot of commercial standards, but we really haven't really decided what the solutions are going to be yet."

When they do decide, openness will be a prerequisite, he adds.

"But we do not want to lock in, so open source and open standards are absolutely the way to go. We don't want any solution that we build to take us into a path where we can't agilely replace it as things mature."

Off-planet AI

One use for data generated by NASA's operations is feeding machine learning and analytical models. The main use for the modelling so far has been predictive maintenance, which might seem rather humdrum for an organisation like NASA working on the cutting edge of science and technology. The agency has been a little slow to get moving in this area, Thompson admits, but predictive maintenance is where the current value lies, and anyway AI plays a big part in NASA's space plans.

Webb Telescope. Source: iStock

"We're going to be leveraging more and more in this space and then just taking what we do and putting it off-planet. We need to be able to repair the Webb Telescope, which is getting ready to launch shortly. It can't be serviced like we did with Hubble [Webb will be situated 1 million miles from Earth so cannot be repaired using a human-crewed space shuttle equivalent], so we're going to have our robotics missions, and reliance on AI, and reliance on automated repairs. It's going to be really, really interesting."

From CIO to CDO

Thompson has been NASA CDO for 3 years. Prior to that he was CIO at the US Department of Agriculture. Workplace aside, which role does he like best?

"I think the CDO role was a natural progression for me personally. What attracts me is I'm close to the mission. I can talk about the mission side of the house because data touches everything, it's the great denominator. For me it's been a very foundational element to understanding the basics of running operations.

"The skillset, I would say, is less directive authority and more influential. So, more of a consulting mindset and that's a difference."

The most important thing is to learn as an organisation, he concluded.

"All organisations are unique, but there's also a common aspect and that's people. We all have struggles, and we all need to learn from each other. So if I have an ask, it's let's keep the dialogue going. Let's keep the conversations where it needs to be, because I will tell you, I don't have everything figured out, quite the contrary: the older I get the less intelligent I feel. It is a humbling aspect of life so, so let's continue the journey together, let's figure out where we need to go together."