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Review: I Was Scared To Say This To NASA... (But I Said It Anyway) - SmarterEveryDay

This is a talk that Destin from Smarter Every Day gave at the 2023 American Astronautical Society von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. Basically, a gathering of higher-ups in the space industry including those responsible for the Artemis mission to take us back to the moon.

The talk is largely about communication and why he doesn't think we'll be able to launch in two years (e.g. at the time of the talk no one knew how many refueling rockets about necessary en-route)

I don't have a good TL;DR because he covers so much ground. Check the notes below or dig into the video yourself.

The more complex a system is, the more communication you need to make it work.

Notes

  • The title is a little to click-baity for me. If it was from someone other than SmarterEveryDay I wouldn't have clicked it, but I know their stuff is legit

  • Talk was centered on Artemis program going back to the moon

  • His goal is to take a third-party look at Artemis and present it in the talk (but he also has some strong credentials. He's just not, as he says, in the food chain of anyone in the room)

  • When looking into it, he saw potential problems in parts of the architecture that folks seem unwilling to talk about. His speculation about that unwillingness is because of the political hit folks would take

  • When telling folks he was going to do the talk, he got warned that saying creating things "might change your relationship with NASA forever"

  • Video is mainly playing the talk. The first part of which is him establishing credibility as en engineer (since being a youtuber means little on the professional level to members of the audience)

  • Mentions that he sees it as an exercise in rhetoric and shows a graphic with Logos, Pathos, and Ethos. (~3:00)

  • Love that hit points on the slide are to: 1. look at the mission differently, 2. In a world of talkers, be a thinker and a doer, and 3. Ask the hard questions

  • Lot of really good stuff in here that would basically be me just writing one or more sentences for everything he says

  • Talks about being young on a test range and thinking tech had advanced so far there is no way folks would use tanks again and then how much he still thinks about that conversation especially in light of the current fighting and wars

  • Shows the first video they did where they got a chicken and showed how it's head stayed centered if you move it around. That's what kicked off SmarterEveryDay

  • Mentions a couple times that his dad made him take a business minor which is one of the reasons the channel has succeeded

  • Also, talks about how success comes from the fact that he looks at things differently. And after reviewing his stuff, took an engineering approach to his videos with these drivers:

  • Quality over quantity, Be authentic/genuine, Add real value to a viewer's life, Be very personal, Feel like a conversation, Be humble and fun, Be self-aware

  • Made a graph (shown at 14:38) plotting topic complexity against personality

  • Talks about going to meet the president and when asking folks what questions they would ask the response was not that they would ask, but that they would tell the president he wasn't going to take their guns

  • Talks about the interview with the president and the shift in body language when the president realizes it's not going to be hostile and is more a conversation

  • Talks about negative feedback. Shows engineering diagram on how if a system only gets positive feedback it goes unstable.

  • Takes an engineering perspective. Shows a PID diagram with feedback in it (I haven't looked up what PID is yet, but he skips paste it so I'm going to too)

  • Graphic at 19:50

  • Gets into the more pointed questions about 24min in that is all about rockets if you're into that stuff, it's super interesting

  • Literally says at one point: I'm gonna tell you the trick, I'm gonna be the bad guy for a bit and then roll around and inspire you at the end

  • Gets into details about the number of rockets that would have to be launched for refueling in transit

  • Gets into details about the number of rockets that would have to be launched for refueling in transit. and how folks in the audience seemed not to know. Doesn't fault them for that, but talks about it as an issue of communication

  • At the time of the talk, folks didn't know how many rockets it would take. After the talk, someone did a paper and came up with at least 15

  • Points out that we're two years away from the launch and we still don't have that number which makes him think we're not gonna hit the date

  • Asks the room to ask themselves individually if they've read NASA SP 287 - What Made Apollo A Success

  • NASA-SP-287 - What Made Apollo A Success

  • NASA-SP_287

  • Goes on to say that given the audience, they should actually be ashamed if they haven't read it. It's a playbook that lead to success.

  • Shows his bike demo with the reverse wheel and talks about how it required thinking differently

  • Acknowledges the the architecture is the architecture and lots of stuffs locked in, but there's still things that can be changed

  • Says that if someone loses their job for identifying a problem that effectively he'd rather live with that than with something going wrong

  • I doubt I'll be aware of any rumblings this causes, but I expect it'll cause some