How NASA Creates Future Gravity w/ Steve Rader

There are few narratives bigger than space exploration, and few journeys that require a more dogged commitment to an unseen future—one that can only be reached through sustained innovation, flawless operations, and a whole lot of belief in that future.

Today's guest, Steve Rader, has worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for 34 years, in mission control, developing software for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, building command and control systems for the X-38, and working on the Constellation Program. He is currently working to crowdsource innovation at NASA and across the federal government by tapping into a crowd of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

In today’s episode, Steve and Chris discuss:

• How Steve's upbringing inspired a love of space and an appreciation of the importance of diversity
• Why some organizations fail at unlocking internal innovation, and what they can do differently
• The story of the very first video conference in space
• How the right narrative can become a center of future gravity that overcomes the pull of the status quo and shifts the future to give everyone the opportunity to win, together

And much more!

Transcript

Steve Rader: We were basically saying, look, I know you're a NASA scientist or NASA engineer, and I know that you're really smart, but that innovation piece that you love so much, we actually think there's a guy in some garage somewhere that's not nearly as qualified as you, that's gonna give us a better idea. And so if you'll just let us take that from you and go solve it with somebody else and give them a bunch of the glory, then that'd be great. Like who's gonna wanna do that? Right. 

Chris Hare: Welcome to the Storied Future Podcast, a show where I interview high-performing CEOs experts and innovators who have put new narratives out into the world, and then use those narratives to shift the future if you want to create a future where you're celebrated not only for what you've accomplished, but for how you've accomplished it, who you took with you, and who you became in the process, this is the show for you.  

Chris Hare: My guest today is Steve Rader. Steve has worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center for thirty-four years, where he is worked in mission control, developing software for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station command and control systems for the X-38, as well as working on the Constellation program. 

Steve is currently working to infuse challenge and crowdsourcing innovation approaches at NASA and across the federal government by tapping into a crowd of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. There are a few narratives bigger than space exploration, and there are a few journeys that require a more dogged commitment to an unseen future, a future that can only be reached through sustained innovation, flawless operations, and a whole lot of belief in that future. 

We like to think that when we have that one big idea, the idea that changes everything, that people will immediately see what we see, believe, what we believe, come along for the ride, and make our vision of the future a reality. If you've ever tried to overcome the gravity of the status quo in a large organization, you're either laughing or crying right now because you've encountered the politics, the intrigue, the sabotage, the dissent, and even the outright rebellion that have left many a great idea permanently grounded. 

In today's episode, we're talking about the moon. We're talking about Mars, and we're talking about how the right narrative can become a center of future gravity that overcomes the pull of the status quo and shifts the future in a way where everyone has the opportunity to win together. Let's dive in. 

Steve, thanks for joining me on the Storied Future Podcast.  

Steve Rader: Ah, thanks for having me Chris. This is great.  

Chris Hare: Amazing way to end the week. I'm super excited to chat with you. When we met up in Houston, I believe it was last month, you were like a kid in the candy store. Absolutely love your job. It got me so fired up. 

So really excited to chat. Before we jump in, I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about who you are. But without mentioning what you do.  

Steve Rader: Well, I'm Steve Rader. I've been at NASA for about 34 years and I'm just a really curious guy. I am always finding just the world. Fascinating. It is a fascinating place and people are fascinating and amazing and uh, what we're able to do together is pretty amazing and that's kind of what I focus on. 

I explore a lot of what the world is and try to kind of make into the best version it can be to my abilities.  

Chris Hare: I love that. So if you fast forward to the first day of your retirement, and I'm guessing someone like you, you'll never, you're just gonna keep going, making connections, keep that curiosity going, but what do you think it is that you'll be most proud of and how do you want people to remember your impact? 

Steve Rader: Yeah, it's funny you say that 'cause I'm actually eligible for retirement in about eight weeks, but I'll still keep going. I would love it if people remembered me as someone who kind of helped NASA and NASA's mission to become something of the people. Like something that people were much more interactive with across the world, that they, they were able to contribute and have a stake in that exploring the universe rather than simply a, a well-informed bystander. 

I think that's kind of where we've had to be for the longest time, and we're finding ways now where people can actually follow through with their passion for NASA and for space exploration in real and meaningful ways without having to quit their regular job and, you know, join the government and things like that. 

Chris Hare: Well, I think, and we'll talk about this a bit later, but one of the things that struck me is, and I think this is what you're talking about, is that there's these only these certain moments where you can interact with NASA. Right. Like, Hey, there's a launch, right? Or whatever kind of event that's going on, versus what you're doing is you're actually creating an opportunity for people to come into that story and help write it in ways, right?  

Steve Rader: Yeah. And rewrite their own story, right? To make something that they're passionate about. Something that they can actually say, look, I did that and I can follow through with that, and I'm capable of more. 

I've actually watched a lot of people's lives transform in this way, and it's, it's so exciting to me because I think of a lot of people see their dreams and their dream job and you know, working in space or working with space stuff and think, oh yeah, that's for PhDs. That was actually me when I was in college. 

I never thought I would work for NASA. I would've loved to work for NASA, and I thought, oh no, that's. For PhD scientists and you know, Nobel Prize winners and wasn't until I learned that they hire engineers and they hire regular people, and that is still limiting, right? So I've tried to even open it up more. 

Chris Hare: Love to understand more about you and how you're wired. So let's rewind at the beginning. Love to hear about where you grew up, what you're like as a kid and what play looked like for you.  

Steve Rader: Sure. Yeah. Well, I had four brothers and I was right in the middle, and so play was rough. It was, uh, all boy all the time. 

But I grew up actually, uh, from about six months old till about 11 in Zambia. And my parents were missionaries, so we were often remote or kind of by ourselves. So the five of us were really pretty close and we had homeschool because that's what was available. And it was great 'cause you could finish your studies by noon and have the rest of the day to, to really go play. 

And it was kind of almost self-paced, but it, it showed me, you know, a part of the world and a part of how people live around the world that's very different and wonderful. I think in the US and in the West. A lot of times people, I. Think, oh, they're, they're miserable. Or they, you know, they, they don't have very much and, and they're not like people with not a lot of stuff still manage to have joy and curiosity and are smart and do all sorts of innovative things. 

And so I've tried to really remember that and keep that, because in the US we kind of make it all about this stuff sometimes, and we forget that it's about joy and exploration and curiosity.  

It seems like too, with the work that you do now, that those were really the seeds that were planted in your belief, in the necessity of diversity. 

Not just because it's the right thing, but also just because it makes the world a more beautiful place and unlocks so much more in terms of innovation and life,  

Steve Rader: really. Oh, yeah. Because innovation is this, it's not just about smarts. Smarts is important, but it's this intersection of somebody's intellect. 

Their experience and the context of where they are in that moment, that gives them that kind of putting the dots together and putting the solution together that no one's ever seen. And that makes all the difference, right? And that only comes with diversity. Like you can go find it only with kind of these really ways that you let everyone in. 

You stop kind of thinking, oh, these people don't have anything to offer for whatever reason. I think we're about to enter an age where the neuro divers are gonna become real contributors to our world. And it's such an exciting time because for the longest time it's been whoever can pass this interview. 

And that meant whatever biases that interviewer had about what would make that person work now kind of get starts fading away.   

Chris Hare: So do you recall what you thought about the future when you were a kid, or what you thought was possible or where you might go?  

Steve Rader: Oh, gosh. I've always been fascinated by the future in space. 

When I was a little kid, I, you know, I had my little Sears, Roebuck, spacesuit and, uh, little rockets and everything. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, my grandmother used to ride a horse and now there's overpasses and cars and freeways and airplanes. I used to ask her about like, what do you think of it? And, and you know, she was older, so she was like, well, you know, it's, it's not all you think it is, and had kind of a more realistic view about about, because for her it was. 

Family and society and those kind of things are the most important things. And technology will always change and the landscape will always change. But she wasn't quite as jazzed by all the technology and, and change that I was. But I remember in high school being intrigued with physics and chemistry and oh my gosh, this is how the world works. 

And you can predict these things and you can build these things if you just have a little bit of knowledge and anyone can do it, right? It's, it's so, it was a, a fun time. We used to have that, I dunno, you're probably too young for this. We had like shelves full of world books, which had the inside of peak. 

You know, we were so isolated. We only had tv, I think available on one channel for maybe four hours a day in the evenings. So a lot of my time was spent Flipping through the airplane section or the space section of those, or just exploring how stuff worked around the world. And I think that just ruminating on all of that and kind of letting it stew really helped kinda for me.

Chris Hare: So you studied engineering in college, is that right?

Steve Rader: I did mechanical engineering at Rice University.

 Chris Hare: You said NASA wasn't really in the consideration, just 'cause you didn't think it was possible, but how did you land there?  

Steve Rader: Well, it's kind of funny. I got into engineering just because I'd taken a plant trip and I thought it looked interesting. 

And I like physics, but I didn't know really what, so I was like, oh, mechanical engineering, everyone needs one of those and it's the most generic. And I was the most interested. So I did that. And then I was just trying to find a job, right? Oil and gas or GE or manufacturing or something. And one day NASA showed up at school, you know, as part of a job fair. 

And in talking to them, they're like, oh yeah, we, we need engineers. And I thought. Oh, I thought I had to have a space science degree or be a PhD, and they were recruiting folks to work on the space station. At the time it was called Space Station Freedom. It was a US only space station, but it was the precursor to the International Space Station and they were hiring flight controllers and it didn't exist yet, so you couldn't just go sit console. 

But it was the people who would understand what operations were and how to operate it and kind of be the informed. Folks to help design the operational system, so the command and control systems and all the kind of tele-control. And so I jumped at that. I was like, that's gonna be amazing. And it was, they were hiring a lot of people. 

So a lot of people my age. And we started, and I was at it with a contractor at the time, Barrios Technologies. And we all learned all about operations. In fact, at one point I worked for Gene Kranz, who, if you remember Apollo 13 was the guy in the vest, in the crew. Cut. He, I literally hit him every week. 

Wow. It was a really special time. One of my co-office workers used to sit console on Skylab and I knew people who had sat in an Apollo mission control. And so it was, it was a really interesting time, uh, when I first got there.  

Chris Hare: And I'm curious about how you were wired in terms of what goes on internally when you're in, it's obviously a very high stakes situation and also imagine very high stress. But what was that like  for you in those moments? 

Steve Rader: Well, I mean, you just kind of lay back on the information and the training, right? You very much live into this idea that you've gotta know your stuff. And that panic and emotion doesn't really help you there, right? It's very much about what you've already decided, what you already know and going forward. 

And in the ops culture at least, you never make a guess. You never kind of like say, well maybe if we do this, it's you either know or you don't know. And you have to say, I don't know when it's time. And operations is a really interesting thing 'cause it is high stakes and they train you very much to only speak about the things that you know. 

Don't try to talk for somebody else's position 'cause you're not the expert and. It's very much about pre-thinking things and you only start to innovate in operations if everything else is broken. So Paul XIII is great, right? It's an example because in this moment where literally everything stopped working and they had to figure out something that they had no plan for, they were able to shift from this operations mode where you always followed every rule and you didn't think independently to this pure independent thinking there are no bad ideas mode. 

And the fact that those teams were able to make that mind shift in real time and go on to save that mission is a miracle of teamwork. And really, you know, the flight directors like Gene Kranz can, should be credited for that. 'cause they had to lead and say, we have to do things differently for right now. 

Chris Hare: Yeah, it seems, I imagine it sounds like there's very much cycles where it's. All about innovation and then you shut that off completely. Yeah. And focus on Flawless execution.   

Steve Rader: That's actually, I talk about that a lot because organizations struggle with innovation now, and mostly the ones that have the hardest time are organizations that their job is either to operate something with high reliability or high safety, or they're trying to produce something and get it out the door. 

So if you're trying to produce the Orion spacecraft, and you've gotta have it on the launchpad by May, you don't want a lot of guesswork, and you don't want a lot of innovative people raising their hand and going, well, what if we did this? Like, you don't have time for that and you shouldn't, right? 

They're very goal specific. There are certain instances where it's important too, but it's when there's deviance. So it's deviations from the norm, right? So if something's not working, then you have to get creative. But those organizations have a really hard time because they've trained their people largely to not. 

Question, to not raise their hand and say, what if we do this? And so when you shift into that mode, you have to really be clear and explicit that, hey, the rules are different right now. Just like when Gene Cray is like, okay, here's a whiteboard. There are no bad ideas. Everyone start to come up with stuff, you have to do that. 

And if you don't do that, people will just assume the normal rules really are there and you can't get those ideas because innovation is often three bad ideas. Deep, right? Or more. So if you're not willing to listen to an idea and you're immediately gonna say why it doesn't work, then that person's not gonna give you their second idea or their third idea. 

Or someone across the room's gonna say, well, if that's not gonna work, then we shouldn't even go down that path. But a variant of that combined with somebody else's idea that then gets combined with something else, could very well address whatever concern you had. And then beyond. The way our psyche works, innovation is, it's really about vulnerability. 

It's, it's this very personal thing and people will only give you their really great ideas. If they think it's safe, they'll try the waters and they'll put out the kind, some kind of minor improvement to see how things go. And if those get shot down, then they're like, oh, this is not a safe space. And so when it comes to innovation, that stuff becomes really important. 

Chris Hare: Yeah. One of the things I loved at Amazon was this belief that a good idea could come from anyone or from anywhere. And my favorite time of year is there was a built-in cycle where. You would have, it was called, I believe, OP three, operational Plan three. And on the front end of it, it's essentially an idea fest. 

The ideas are supposed to be so big that it takes at least three years to execute. So like Amazon Prime, like it has to be that level, right? And you crank out ideas and you have to write a one pager for each of 'em. And I think my last year there, I won a prize for volume. I don't know about quality, but at eight of eight of them. 

But then your idea, if it gets selected, then you become the product manager. But then you shift into the operational mode of taking the big ideas and then building out the strategy and the pathway, right? But having that, that intentional piece, I thought was super helpful.  

Steve Rader: Yeah, I've always been really curious about that whole process because on the one hand, someone who has the idea is gonna be a great banner holder and someone who's gonna be passionate about getting it all the way through, but it also takes a certain kind of skill to get things all the way through. 

There's some people that are busy over here doing this and like what they're doing, but they're super creative and they can launch an idea. But if it doesn't have somebody who will take it, like the ideas tends to die, no matter how great it's, so it's, but I've kind of been interested as like, is there a way to take someone who's a good project manager who can get it and take it because you, you do. 

I think we lose some ideas that would be really great. 'cause we don't have great handoff mechanisms and those ideas don't always. Come to people that can afford to just move on to something else. Right. And come and do that. So, well, yeah. 

Chris Hare: No, I  would've been a terrible product manager. I'm the idea guy. 

But I did also see what you talked about, which is once you get to the idea, winnowing down the ideas, then you get into the group think, and you also get into the lack of safety, and then you kind of diminish the impact. Right. And so I think it's very critical to have that safety all the way through and that environment all the way through. 

Steve Rader: Yeah. Well,  and really realizing innovation is only valuable in its realization that a lot of people get hung up on, well, I had the idea and I just wanna throw it across the fence to somebody and they'll make it happen. And you're like, well that's, that's one tiny piece of the innovation. Yeah. You gotta actually make it work. 

Which is a lot of hard work. I think that's one of our flaws with our intellectual properties that. System is it, it focuses so much on the person that had the idea. Yep. And almost devalues the people that make it real. And so I think that'll all change as as we move forward. But yeah, for sure. We'll see. 

Chris Hare: So we're gonna talk a fair amount about connection, but bringing together this idea of invention and innovation. What's something that from your career that you're incredibly proud of that may be the first big thing for you?  

Steve Rader: Well, you know, uh, one of the first things I did that was really cool was I actually did the first video conference in space. 

So mine was the first image that I know of that went in video up. We were Downlinking video, but we actually worked a laptop system that had an Intel Pro share. Video system. And you know, Brett Parrish had done all this amazing work to get the bits flowing, but I got to do the checkout video with Marsha Ivins when the shuttle was docked to Mir, and she's basically in front of a window and you can see the entire Mir stack through the window. 

And, uh, so I, we dial up, we see each other's faces, and I, I, I, you know, basically say, Hey Marsha, can you hear me? And she gets this look on her face. It's like. Oh my gosh, you sound like you're right next to me. Because it was voiceover IP, right? It was slightly delayed, but compared to the analog voice, which is, you know, you hear the air to ground loops since there was kind of this crackly rough voice, this was just crystal clear for her 'cause it was digital and she just couldn't believe it. 

And it was really a special moment. And, uh, so I thought that was really cool. But then I got to do a bunch of different cool stuff. I got to build one of the first publish and subscribe mission control systems for X-thirty-eight, which was fantastic. I got to help architect the interoperable communications for the Constellation program, which are still the communications protocol that the Orion uses. 

Basically taking us from walkie talkie, narrowband communication to network centric. Which is gonna be huge as we go forward to lots of spacecraft spread across the, not just the solar system, but across the surface of, uh, the moon and Mars. And I'm really proud of the team that we had doing that. Did some amazing stuff, learned a lot about change and change management and how that is resistant in organizations even when it, it's technically the right thing to do. 

And then what I'm doing now, I'm super, super proud of. Yeah.  

Chris Hare: I saw you published a paper on the lag time with communication  and

Steve Rader:  Oh, you are well researched.  

Chris Hare: I didn't read it end to end. Yeah. So I'd love to, if you could talk a little bit about that and the impact that it has on a mission.  

Steve Rader: Absolutely. Yeah. 

So after I did operations for four or five years, I moved over to do flight software. And the very first projects I was working was time delayed tolerant file transfer software, and then later the video and. At the time we were doing multiple hops to the spacecraft. So you had to go out to geosynchronous at very, very far distances and back and then up to the spacecraft. 

And those two geosynchronous hops caused like a one and a quarter second delay. That's to give you an idea, most terrestrial protocols that we use on the internet that we're using right now, it takes about a quarter second to get all around the world and back. Hmm. Right. So all the protocols are designed to send a little bit of data and wait, and they'll wait enough time for that quarter second. 

But if you take longer than that, they actually start to get really wonky and they would really not work. Now a lot of that's been fixed since this was the Dark ages, the internet. But what was interesting there is we really had to work the protocols and rework them and come up with custom kind of software that would do this for us. 

That experience led me into work later on Constellation, where we knew we were going to have delay of not just a few seconds or minutes if you're talking about a few seconds to the moon, but 50 minutes round trip to Mars when it's really far away from the earth. And I actually got to work after Constellation on some analog missions where we pretend that we're doing a Mars mission or we pretend to do something. 

And we were using simulated 50 minute round trip delays. And I was sitting next to the flight surgeon. I. And I was watching as the astronauts pretended to have a health problem and we were getting the message that was 20 twenty-five minutes old that said, oh, this, they're having trouble breathing and they're this. 

And so the flight surgeon's like, well go do this, put their feet up and do this. And they send that message and as soon as they send that message, we get another message like passing in the night that says, well now their heart rate's doing this and this is happening. And he goes, oh my gosh, whatever he does, he shouldn't be whatever, doing whatever. 

I just told him, we need to do this other thing. You just, you could suddenly see the consequences of trying to have a conversation That is so. I think a lot of people can connect with this now because of texting, because you text your spouse or something, you know this big news, and then they don't see it till three hours later and something else happens and you, you can get into these loops personally now, whereas you couldn't before. 

But all of that learning, we took along with a lot of other analogs, we put in a study and that was what the paper is. The impact of that is we're moving farther and farther into the solar system with humans and with robots, and you can see it on Mars, right? We have rovers and have had rovers for years and years, and unfortunately I got to have some of the folks that control those and drove those rovers on my team when I was working Constellation. 

And the thing they told us is, you can operate things robotically. You can have this, but it's very, very slow. If you were to put an astronaut on the moon or on Mars. With human decision-making and closed-loop decision-making, or even just someone close enough to do real-time robotic operations. You could do all of the work that took years in just a few weeks because you're sending up like, move five feet this way and four yards this way and do this and that's it. 

Well, that's three minutes of work if you're right there. But it's a full day's work if you're having to do it as a package and send it up and make sure that nothing goes wrong. So going forward, if we're moving out, we've gotta find ways to really make our spacecraft autonomous. They're very complex and this idea that you're gonna have just crew members that that can do everything. 

Trust me when I say spacecraft are really, really, really complex and they're kind of one-off, right? It's not like you have an assembly line and people working on their garages like cars. You know, you got people working on 'em on their own. You've got people who've been mechanics, you have places to go, they've been around for years. 

You're on generation, you know, 450, um, spacecraft. It's very slow right? Of, of the maturation. So the expertise and the complexity required is really, really high. And so having autonomy that can deal with that and won't kill the people is going to be really important. And in fact, I think it's one of the biggest challenges to deep space exploration going forward is getting the smarts. 

Because for years and years, you had to know what every line of code did and you had to know every path through. Well, with AI and some of the new autonomous systems. It's a lot more block box. Right? And how do you do that? How do you make this to where you can have high probability that this thing won't act against what the people need and be successful? 

Chris Hare: I'm curious how you  would take some of those same learnings around that lag time and apply it to some of the big narratives that you all are working on. Right. Where it's work fast, innovate, deliver results now, but this is gonna take  

Steve Rader: 30 years. It is such a big task because you're building. Not everything at once. 

You're building this and sending it, then you're building this and sending it, and these things all have to fit together. And if you've ever tried to integrate even something in your house, trying to get some new sink to work in the bathroom, it's like, oh, there's no fittings for this and I gotta get an adapter. 

So you have to have everything kind of worked out Beforehand, and then you have to have the smarts to handle the real-time aspects of that in space. The good news is you can still use the ground folks and you have lots of resources on the ground to help. It's just the time horizon it takes for the bat for, you know, the worst case for Mars right now is solar occlusion, right? 

So it's not even a delay, it's the fact that Mars is on the other side of the sun and so there's no communications. And so you've got two weeks where if something bad happens, they have to be able to handle it on their own and. Bad happens, can mean something's going wrong, but we don't know what it is. 

Yep. And so how do you find the problem? How do you diagnose it and then go fix it? And that can be anything from a medical issue to a leak to some squirrely system that's about to shut down all of your power systems that then keep you alive. And you've gotta be able to handle that, right? The ground can help you once you come back in communications, but something's gotta keep you alive. 

That's the kind of technology we gotta look at. 

Chris Hare: So, I'm pretty sure you said that the International Space Station is a family affair. One of the articles I was reading. Can you talk a little bit about why you said that and then also why you said that it's miraculous that the, uh, the Space  

Steve Rader: Station is miraculous? So yeah, I started on Space Station Freedom and about I think three or four years into that it converted over to ISS, the International Space Station program when we partnered with the Russians. 

Well, a couple years into that, as I said, they, they were hiring a lot of younger people back then, so it was almost like a college experience. Uh, there were so many people right outta college, but one of those people working on that was an instructor in the training who was also in the operations directorate who was. 

Basically setting up the astronaut training. So they were the ones that were going to train the astronauts and so Designing the simulators and coming up with the courses and the curriculum to go teach them. And one of those was a woman who eventually agreed to marry me. So, uh, my wife, Dolores was one of those folks and she went on to be the lead of the flight training for the astronauts, for the very first space station crew. 

Wow. Uh, Expedition one. And so I remember she was holding her first child and posing in front of the TV as it docked. And you know, that's amazing. Uh, she would fly to Kazakhstan with her crew and train and do all sorts of stuff and she's quite amazing. She spent 17 years at JSC and did just amazing, amazing work. 

She is by far the smarter of the two of us, so, uh, yeah. In Space Station, the reason I say it's a family fair too, is. It took 10 years to put that together. I mean, it was this huge affair that took people that literally spent portions of their career on this and then kind of moved on. But the, you know, thousands and thousands of people working on this to make it happen. 

It's one of the most complex human endeavors we've ever undertaken and been successful in, just celebrated 25 years of, uh, space Station being operational and congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah, it's amazing. Right? And there's no one person that you point at and go, oh, they designed Space Station. Oh, they operated, there's been, I think, hundreds by now astronauts that have lived on Space Station. 

I mean, it's realized a whole phase of the space program at this point. And not just this patient. The way we work in space that is this natural follow on now of we're commercializing low Earth orbit and normal regular people that don't belong to to NASA are starting to get into space and able to travel in space. 

And I think that's a really special thing that we're getting to this time where space is kind of like, it used to be to travel to Tibet, you know, I mean that used to be a, an expedition and it took a lot of people and a lot of planning and a lot of wealth. And now we're moving into to where we're normalizing that more and  more. 

Chris Hare: One thing that really struck me from a storytelling standpoint is when you talked about just the conditions on the moon, right? And what would happen if you were to. With your bare, you know, pick up moon dust, like that's something that was brand new to me. So I'd love to understand just that. 

Steve Rader: So as we know, the moon is kind of barren wasteland, right? 

But it's funny because there is no atmosphere and no atmosphere is a big deal. It's also a one-sixth gravity. So when you throw stuff up, it kind of comes down slower. But it does come down if you, this is a side, I'll get to the dust in a second, but if you have a smoke trail, let's say, and you're not gonna really have a smoke trail, 'cause smoke requires air to suspend. 

But it basically, if you have stuff coming out of a rocket, it basically just collapses back slowly. There's no like con trail that's gonna form there. It's just gonna all come back. But the lunar regolith itself, what is basically the same as kind of volcanic rock that we have on the earth, but there's no wind. 

There's no water. And so it's like shards of glass that have been broken and broken and broken. So if you imagine just. Breaking a bunch of glass and having it really fine where none of the edges are worn and you start rubbing that in your hands, it's, you're probably gonna start bleeding a little bit because it's so sharp. 

And in fact that's a big problem on the moon because if you have rubber seals or if you inhale some of, if you get it back into the spacecraft and you get it into the air, 'cause again, it's kind of floats a little bit as the gravity is a little less, if you breathe that in, you, it's kinda like asbestos. 

It's got that sharp stuff and it can really damage your lungs. So there's a lot of work to deal with the hazards of lunar regolith. There's one rover design that we've got, if you've seen the lunar electric rover where you actually back your suit pack into this little hatch and the whole thing opens into the interior of the rover. 

So you never bring any dust in and you can actually clean it a different way, but it's that kind of stuff that you just don't realize, uh, the complexities.  

Chris Hare: Sometimes. Yeah. I think again, going back to the kind of limited interaction that civilians have with NASA, most it's, I often think about, well, it's getting to the moon and then maybe doing a thing and then coming back, but it's just constant and constant, what's the word? 

Steve Rader: Just vigilance. Yeah. And constantly encountering resistance and  constant challenges. Yeah. It's funny too, because you have limited insight. So I would've to interact when I did a lot of the software work, if something went wrong with the software, well, this is a really, it's file transfers, right? So it was really a minor part of space station ops. 

But if there was a problem, they wanted it solved. Well, what was the problem? Well, we got word that the astronauts saw this. Well, did he see it? Well, we don't know. And so then you'd have to figure out how to get a message up, but it was really low priority. And this is the thing when you're troubleshooting anything, right? 

How do you know what happened? Like you, if you ever have those software errors that happen once and then never again, it's that kind of thing. Except you're getting everything third and fourth hand and you have a little bit of telemetry here and a little bit there. So you can kind of see these really complex problems can manifest themselves in really strange ways that no one's ever seen. 

And you've got to somehow figure that out on the ground and figure out what the right questions are to ask and the right kind of actions to take. 'cause you don't wanna get too many variables going, but you also can't take an hour of the crew's time to do something that that's, you know, for them fairly low priority, but for you, really important, right? 

So it is that complexity as well that you get to add on to all that delay stuff.  

Chris Hare: So one of the things I talk a lot about that I've conceptualized that's been helpful for me with storytelling is atomic stories. So thinking about what are those. Small moments in time where there's just this massive shift and it unlocks this energy and transforms thing. 

Are there any, anything like that, any atomic stories that come to mind for you? Whether it was a time something went sideways or a big aha or small aha that just shifted things?  

Steve Rader: I remember we were working X-38, which was a small crew return vehicle. This was kind of a skunkworks thing. It was basically a crew return vehicle or the space station. 

So an emergency, it happens on the space station. You could jump in, push a button, and it would automatically float away from the Space station de-orbit and land. So you could be literally like barely alive, crawl into this thing with your lungs full of smoke and. Push a button and the whole thing would come down. 

We got that prototype all the way to where we were preparing the shuttle demonstration. So we were building the shoulder demonstration and then it got canceled. However, we were doing a flight test where, uh, and this was the $6 million man, if you ever watched that show, like the beginning of that show has this crashing vehicle. 

And that's why they had to replace all of this parts with Bionic. Anyway, the older listeners will understand. But it was this little lifting body, right? And we would take it up on a B-52 at Edwards Air Force Base, and we would basically drop it to see it fly and it would reach a certain Altitude, we'd drop it in, it would accelerate to a certain level, and then we would deploy this huge parachute that's like bigger than a 7 47 wing and, and glide down. 

So we were, we were doing lane tests as one of the first big integrated tests. I had the whole ground system as well as the command and telemetry. We were in the control center, and it would always have these fighter jets that would videotape everything, right? And they drop it off, we see it drop off, and then suddenly this, all the video goes blank. 

And everyone's watching telemetry. We still get telemetry, right? So we watch the the horizon ball. We had a simulated horizon ball and we watch, and for whatever reason, video all goes away. We don't know why, but we're just watching. And that started to do this. And it started to just do this whole, and we're like, well, that can't be right. 

There's no reason it would ever do a whole barrel roll. At some point the video comes back, the parachutes out, and the whole thing is like sideways. Wow. It's like everything's tangled up and it lands, and some of the landing gear ripped off. And I'll never forget, it comes to a halt. And the flight director, John Muir Turk goes, well, we learned a lot today and we have a lot to unpack here. 

And I think it was the aha for me was perfect. Experiments are actually not nearly as useful as imperfect, like where something goes wrong. Uh, now we don't want things to go wrong operationally, but when you're developing something, there's this balance of risk and understanding. And if you do everything perfect all the time, you probably aren't learning and pushing the envelope enough to learn about where the edges are and to understand how to handle those edges. 

And I think that, for me was this risk/reward thing. You can get really into a place where you're not willing to risk at all, but you're not learning and you're not progressing. We see that a lot in the science community where they've been kind of competing for funds and so they don't, they don't wanna share with anyone and they don't wanna go open with their, their problem because somebody might take their money and I have to come back for money, so I can't fail on any of my experiments. 

And it's like. Your most valuable innovations can only come at the riskier edges. And so you have to be willing to fail in order to do that.  

Chris Hare: Well, it also comes back to what you're saying around safety and the culture piece. 'cause if you're in a culture that doesn't allow you to learn Yeah. Through mistakes. 

Steve Rader: Yeah. And it's the view of what mistakes are. Right. If you view mistakes as failure. Exactly. And that was, to me, the big thing that John Muir Tor said was, this was really valuable. We learned stuff today. This wasn't a big mistake, that we've gotta go blame people and we've gotta go, you know, it's not a negative thing. 

This is a positive thing because we learn, and I think whenever leaders see failure. There's a decision to make. Do I lay into people or do I try to learn and figure out how do we make this a learning experience? It's kind of like you hear about these CEOs that have big failure, or somebody in their chain that has a big failure and they call for their resignation, and it's like, why would you do that? 

They just learn the most valuable lesson. They're never gonna do that again. You don't wanna waste that. You want to capitalize on it, understand it.   

Chris Hare: So how did you eventually make the shift into open innovation and can you talk some about your role today?

Steve Rader: So after Constellation, I, I, I think I said I went on to work on some analog missions and I was doing that and my brother at IBM kept bugging me to read this book by Jeff Howe called Crowdsourcing. 

You know, people suggest books and you're like, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. And then you don't, and then it was about a year, probably later I got it and read it and. Jeff Howe is the Wired editor who kind of Mm-Hmm. Is credited with coining the term crowdsourcing. Right. And I have to say, I read that book and I thought, wow, everything has changed. 

We are entering kind of a new era of human innovation and what we can do with this. This isn't the same old thing. This is something new. And so I, I immediately went out. I, I was fascinated by just why people were spending their fair hours doing this kind of stuff. Uh, and what was it and what could you do with it? 

And what were the disincentives and how, and I, so I went and joined a bunch of communities, even online games. 'cause there were some things that, that were similar. I just wanted to understand what's going through people's minds. What are they. Doing and how does it work. And so about that same time, NASA was running a pilot on an internal crowd. 

I immediately joined, I, I hunted down whoever was doing it. I had conversations with them and I, I, I encouraged like you could post your own challenges. So I got my group and we were trying to put together challenges and I was basically getting on and trying to solve challenges. And I did that for a couple of years. 

And one day I was going through the cafeteria and after Constellation, a lot of people who used to work together suddenly were doing other things, right? And so my friend, Lynn Buco, who I had worked with in Constellation. I was in the cafeteria and I said, oh, how you doing? What, what have you been up to? 

And she goes, oh, well I'm leading this new group that's all about crowd sourcing. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but, and she starts to explain. I was like, oh no, I know all about crowds. And I started going on on, and she, and she kind of, it kind of surprised her because everyone else she had ever talked to on this was like, what are you doing? 

And so she was really surprised. And so we kept talking and probably a, I don't know, six months or a year later, she ended up looking for a new deputy and I applied and I started doing that. So that was back in 2013. And so I've been doing that for the last two or three years, have been leading the group, uh, when Lynn retired and it is amazing. 

And we followed that, pulled on those strings to understand it, and have kind of built a whole program around using those methods to kind of help. NASA with its needs of staying on the cutting edge, because that's actually really hard to do these days, and we can talk about that. But it's, the old methods don't work anymore. 

We've all worked a certain way for, you know, over a hundred years, and some of those methods are starting to break because of how fast technology's moving. 

Chris Hare: What are some of the old,  and then what does the new look like?

Steve Rader:  Well, yeah, so in the old days, if you were gonna start your new cutting-Edge Radio, right? 

Space Radio first would see, well, what's the last generation do? How does that work? And then you'd talk to some older engineers, you'd go to some conferences, you'd talk to some vendors, and you would have a pretty good lock on, oh, these are the new power amplifiers and this is the new antenna technology and this is the new. 

And you would start to kind of take the baseline and modify that to make the next generation of radio right. And you could do that and you'd trade and try different things. In the experiment, it usually takes like two or three years to get something into orbit, even if, if it, it's fairly straightforward, but you spend millions of dollars trying to go from those initial ideas about what's cutting edge and then what the radio is. 

And in those three to five years, not only do you spend a lot of time and money, but by the end of it, when you're flying it, back in the old days, it was the cutting edge. Like it really could stay the cutting edge for the next five years because technology wasn't maturing that fast. It was more like five or 10 years between big things that were changing and now things are changing at a pace that's really unbelievable. 

And I talk about this in a, a roadshow, I do quite a bit where I talk about first why we're here is. We're at this point of exponential growth in so many areas right now, starting with population, right? The population have started the common era. It was 1400 years before the first doubling of the population from that time. 

But the world's population has more than doubled in my lifetime. In fifty-five years. It's more than double, and it is going to even increase more than that. And there's theories, it'll, it'll kind of even out here soon, although I'm not sure that takes into account lifespan. But that increase is huge. But at the same time, over the last 30, 40 years, the entire world has gotten more wealthy. 

You can go look at all of the statistics and the number of universities and technical schools has increased incredibly over the last 20 years. The number of people that have graduated secondary education has multiplied by two and a half times. Wow. That's a huge number of people. And those people, some proportion of them are going into research and new tech development, right? 

And so you can proportionally say likely that that many more people are going in to researching and developing new technology. But layer on top of that, that we now have these technologies like three-D printing and machine learning, and nano coatings and CRISPR and APIs, you know, to really powerful code along with open source code. 

And all of these are really amazing technologies that mask a ton of complexity. But are these really simple to use building blocks To some degree, not all of them, but you can go get an online course and learn how to use a three-D printer and go buy a $10,000 metal three-D printer and become a manufacturer of parts. 

But you can also go build on top of things. So people that have a cool technology over here that can use these to go even further, and they can start to combine these with their problems that they're trying to solve and the existing methods and technologies they have. And here's the thing, these technologies are not only masking a ton of, of capability, they're not only easy to use, but almost all of those technologies apply not to one industry, but to almost every industry. 

And so you're getting innovation happening on a much larger scale with technologies that apply to almost everyone, which means you're getting a lot of parallel development and maturation of solutions that because they're built on technologies that apply to everywhere. They possibly are solving problems that you just change the equation a little bit and that solution can come over here and solve somebody else's problem. 

So I'll give a great example that I use a lot, which is a sub C seven. They do oil and gas, they did pipeline inspections, right? So from an oil and gas rig back to Shores Pipeline, and there's a whole bundle of these pipelines and they do these inspections and they would take a ship out at about a million dollars a day and they would lower this minivan sized piece of equipment next to the pipeline and then it would take them about two weeks to inspect that ship that's rigged to shore segment. 

They went out with a a nine sigma crowdsourcing challenge and within, I think it was a couple weeks, they found a technology already being used in the mining industry. So not in a lab somewhere that had to mature already being used. That was handheld. And could do that job in two hours instead of two weeks. 

Wow. Like, so you can kind of do the math on how much that saves them. But their big takeaway was, yes, we're gonna save a lot of money on this. 'cause they went out and purchased that company. But they said, if we hadn't found this technology before our competitors, we wouldn't even be in business anymore. 

Hmm. And we hear about disruption, in fact, that if you look, the average lifespan of companies has shrunk from about 90 years in 1918 down to, I think it's down to 14 years now. Average lifespan. And those aren't average lifespan of all companies. It's the most successful. S&P 500. So it's this amazing kind of transition that's happening where the faster the technology's coming, the shorter these companies can last because they don't know how to adapt. 

So they've made a product line and they know how to do that. But when a new technology comes and interrupts that, there aren't good ways to actually know it's coming and know how to get there. And it turns out that crowdsourcing is like this statistical dragnet that can actually sample across multitudes of industries worldwide and find the people that have the right expertise and the right experience and the right context to go, oh, to solve this, they should use this thing I found over here. 

If you've ever heard me talk about the potato chip, uh, yeah, I wanna hear it. That I love, I love this. The listeners will love this one. I use this a lot 'cause it demonstrates several things. But there was a potato chip company that, that wanted a better way to get the grease off of its potato chips. You know, they would, they would take a tray of chips that were in the boiling oil and they would lift them out and drain away the oil and then they would vibrate that tray to kind of shake off any of that excess oil. 

But anytime you shake these kind of delicate chips, a bunch are gonna actually break. And we as humans only like the really big chips until we get to the end of the bag. But that's a whole other thing. And so in that situation, you think about who's doing that kind of design? That's mechanical engineers, right? 

That are food production engineers. And they are world's experts in vibration. And you can kind of see that in the solution they came up with, right? So they do this challenge and go to Innocentive, which was the company doing that at the time? And the first thing that Innocentive did is they changed the challenge statement. 

They said, look, you don't want to ask how do you get grease off of potato chips? What you wanna ask is, how do you remove a viscous fluid from a delicate wafer? Now that sounds a lot nerdier, but here's what that did, right? One, it hid the fact that these were potato chips and this was a potato chip company. 

So they love that, right? Because they didn't want their competitors knowing they were trying to find a better way to get less grease on their potato chips. So, but the more important thing from an innovation standpoint is this was no longer a challenge that was just focused on food production engineers and food scientists. 

Right now, the people whose ears were gonna perk up. Weren't just those folks. It was really anyone who understood kind of basic physics and chemistry and bio like it. It Expanded the number of people, the diversity that you can bring to the table. And sure enough, the solution that came in was really fascinating was to acoustically vibrate the air around the chips, kind of like you do with those big bass speakers and you see the water dancing, it's kinda similar idea and you, you have this resonant frequency where the oil will just kind of fly off and the chip will be fine. 

And here's the thing, that was a vibration solution that all those mechanical engineers were blind to for years and years. This has been a problem. They had a vibration solution, but they didn't have that vibration solution. But the one who did submit that. Was a violinist who had seen the rosin dance on her stand when she played certain notes. 

Understood the dynamic, you know, was also an expert in vibration, just not an engineering expert. Right. And she basically submitted that idea, said, well, wouldn't this work? And I think that's really shows how this diversity thing can pop the bubble. Warren Berger has a book called, uh, called A More Beautiful Question, these these great things. 

And he, he shows a lot of analysis that says, look smart people with deep knowledge in one domain have these blind spots because they don't ask the same critical questions. They fall into this kind of rut of what the assumptions are and what works and what doesn't work. And they don't explore these other areas that are really ripe for innovation. 

And a lot of times they'll write 'em off. I would be willing to bet someone could be like, can't you just vibrate the air? And they'd be like, oh no, that never worked because, and they'd come up with five reasons. But the reality is with some other adjustments, you can make it work. And it's finding those people that can bring that to the table and open innovation does that in spades. 

We just see it happen over and over and over, and it's sometimes the knowledge they bring because they've been exposed to something different, and sometimes it's an actual solution from another discipline.  

Chris Hare: Yeah. A few things really jump out at me. The first one is when you talk about the old model, it was very much kind of, yes, we need to learn from history, but innovation was tied to historical products, right? 

So you were kind of, you limited. Limited in that way, right? Versus no holds barred, innovating from scratch, right? In the way that you're able to with your community now with the crowd. The second piece that struck me was the cost. To put together the kind of team that you're talking about. You know, hiring a violinist at NASA and hiring this person, hiring that person. 

But then also they're inevitably going to fall into whatever organization it is, culture and expectations and all of that, which is then again, going to, I think, probably suppress a lot of that.  

Steve Rader: Yeah. It's interesting because you, you know, we have such amazing people at NASA, but you're right, we fall into that same kind of, uh, thing. 

One of the programs we have is actually a crowdsourcing platform where we encourage our employees. To be the solvers. And we, we do a little bit of training on this and say, Hey, open up your mind on this stuff, or try to teach them a little bit about what innovation is and how the rules that apply in your organization don't apply on this platform. 

You can give us your crazy idea. Uh, in fact, that idea of someone giving us their conservative idea and then their real idea, that was actually shown by a study that was done. I think it was NYA NYA NYU did that. But they looked at all of our challenges and they said, you know, you get more innovative solutions when the dialogue on the, the discussion about the solutions gets to be more casual. 

Hmm. And what it was, was that they kind of analyzed and said, people are giving conservative ideas, seeing how accepting the, the conversation is to these ideas. And they're like, oh, well, if you like this idea, then you'll like this idea. But they weren't gonna give that unless they got that trust. It's kind of an interesting, uh, dynamic that we've seen. 

Chris Hare: It all sounds wonderful, but I know it also hasn't been sunshine and rainbows. You know, you talk about, you know, with the change piece of there's resistance, but even sabotage at times and things like that, right? Yeah. So talk to me about how you learned to evolve. What was the story you were telling initially and how did that evolve over time?

Steve Rader: Yeah, it was really interesting and some of this happened before I got there and as I was getting there, uh, Jeff Davis Dr. Jeff Davis is really the originator of this whole program at Johnson Spacer and an amazing guy. And he was the directorate head of all of the human research folks and all of the human operations, everybody who was dealing with kind of, I. 

Health science type stuff and life sciences. And he found this stuff, they piloted it was successful and he turned around and said, Hey everybody, let's go do this. And uh, everybody was like, no. And in fact, there's a Harvard Business School case study that's taught that's on NASA's reject calls. Houston, we have a problem, there's a case A and case B, but it's literally about how our culture basically said no. 

And so one of the things we looked at coming out of all of that was, okay, what's happening here? And part of it was, if you think about it, the workforce that we were asking to go do this, we were basically saying, look, I know you're a NASA scientist or a NASA engineer and I know that you're really smart. 

And if I think about it, I. You probably only get to do the cool innovation stuff that you came here to do about five percentage at the time. And in fact, it's probably a couple times a year you get an opportunity and the rest of the time you're in meetings doing the work. Right? That's not as fun. But that innovation piece that you love so much, we actually think there's a guy in some garage somewhere that's not nearly as qualified as you, that's gonna give us a better idea. 

And so if you'll just let us take that from you and go solve it with somebody else and give them a bunch of the glory, then that'd be great. Like who's gonna wanna do that? Right. And in fact, when we first were kind of pitching to the workforce, we would actually tell stories about this retiree won this prize. 

'cause he came up with this great solution and this freshman at Berkeley came up with this great solution for NASA and it, I don't think it was something where people were listening and thinking those things. It's one of those things in change where. People bristle and they don't know why. They just know it makes them uncomfortable. 

But deep down, I think that's really what it was. It's like, look, you're outsourcing the thing you hired me to do. And so what we did is we looked at the way we were talking about this stuff. We said, look, first, innovation isn't just the idea. Innovation really is this end-to-end process. And what we're talking about is we live in a world where the tech is moving really fast. 

So part of it was understanding that why is, is this even valuable? And we went back and we looked and we said, oh, it's because things are changing fast. It's because there's this, I call it a tsunami of technology that's hitting us over and over, and organizations don't know what's there, don't know what's coming, have hard time maintaining expertise in all the areas and constantly gets disrupted, right? 

Because. Now when you try to go pick that technology and go develop, there's a high chance that if you haven't done really good job of using a dragnet out there to find the best starting points, it's very likely you'll get halfway through your project and you're gonna be faced with, Hey, somebody just came out with a solution that works five times better than what you're working on. 

Do you wanna throw away everything you've done and have to go pay for something else? Or do you live with bad performance and now you're not competitive? Like that's a horrible place to be, right? And so we, we started telling that story and we said, look, you're in a situation and, and people could relate to it. 

They're like, yes, that happened to me last year. And say, look, what we're trying to do is get you a better starting point for your innovation. You're gonna be rewarded when you can produce that cutting-edge component in space, but you don't have to be the originator of all the tech that goes into it. So the question is how do you find that starting point? 

How do you find the best ideas that come into this? You wouldn't start a project with a ten-year-old computer and Lotus 1, 2, 3, right? If anyone even remembers what that was, you would wanna get the latest and greatest tools, right? You would use generative ai, you would use all these kinds of tools to get started. 

And that's what we tell 'em. And on the chart, we literally redid the way we did charts. We started actually featuring as the hero, the engineer that was willing to take his problem and use crowdsourcing to solve, to get solutions to get that starting point. And we would say, Hey John, in, you know, engineering director had this problem. 

We ran a challenge on Top Go. They don't need to know all the details of that. And we were able to find a solution that was five at times better than what he thought he could get. Right. Well, now you gotta hear people are like, FOMO, right? Well, I wanna do that. And if they're getting that kind of, uh, results, then I want those kind of results. 

And so we're still in that transition with a long game, right? I want people to put money in their budgets to go do this stuff and plan on doing it periodically and train their people. And we're about to kick off an innovation academy where we're gonna train people on how to actually recognize problems that are a good fit for this and formulate those into requirements and then teach 'em the process to get these challenges going. 

But that's a slow process that I tell my team. I say, we're in the middle of going from a food truck to a franchise, and so we gotta figure out how to package this up to where everyone's gonna like it, that the quality's high, and that we can execute this stuff cheaply and consistently.  

Chris Hare: What I love that you did is yes, you painted a picture of the future. It's much better where they're at now. But you also presented a clear gap and also showed them the stakes of not embracing that future.

Steve Rader: They could relate to. Because a lot of them are going through it. Right. So yeah.

Chris Hare: Exactly. The  other thing that really stood out is, I mean, honestly, what you're dealing with is not just a collision of, Hey, this is what I was hired to do. It's really an identity piece, right? Of this is who I am as an innovator. Right? And tapping into that.  

Steve Rader: we just had a, uh, a team meeting and one of the things we're looking at is the impacts of generative ai, right? Because there's a real question of, as AI matures, how much can it do in terms of this drag net, right? 

And one of the things I told the team is I was like, look, our team, uh, it's kinda like 3M. three M'S about sticky, right ball is about containers, right? They work across lots of industries. I said, our job actually isn't crowdsourcing. Our job is how do we deal with this problem of rapidly changing technology landscape and how do we innovate and how can we help the agency continue on whatever that wave looks like? 

And so if generative AI is part of that, let's make sure we, we understand it and we have, we have to own it all, but let's make sure we understand it so that we can point people. And we're not just trying to sell like today's solution for solving problems 'cause things are just changing too fast. We have to be flexible. 

And that's what's interesting is we're sitting here trying to make a reproduce. We're trying to make a steady process that's reproducible. So now we're, our team is actually in that position where we have to be careful or we'll lose our innovation chops as well. And trying to find that ambidexterity of two competing priorities that we have to hold in tension. 

Chris Hare: I really like the potato chip example and then the oil and gas example. Can you share a NASA example of, you know, one of your favorites and then also would love to understand how many of these projects you've done. 

Steve Rader: Yeah. I think our count currently is including the ones that are kind of in flight, is about a hundred or 830. 

So we've done quite a few. That's not competitions, that's projects. 'cause some of the challenges we've done with like are literally 30 challenges. Gotcha. That they do kind of back to back to do different parts. So I think that if you did that count, it's like 2000. If you do the other count, it's like  

Chris Hare: how big is the crowd that you tap into? 

Steve Rader: We actually tap into, I think if I count them all, it's about 50 different crowds that represent about 200 million people if you aggregate them. Yeah. Yeah. The largest crowd is freelancer at about almost 70 million people, which. That's 1% of the world's population on one distribution list. Wow. It's crazy. 

So one of the favorites I have, well it's an early one we did, I have lots of favorites honestly, but one that we did fairly early with Innocentive was trying to predict solar flares. So when people are working on the space station in spacesuits, you know, out on the solar arrays, it takes them a long time to reverse, you know, half of a football field and get all their equipment and get back in. 

And so if a solar flare happens, it's devastating. Like it can either mean significant health consequences then, or you're just exposed to a lot of radiation that's gonna be cancer later. Right. So we don't want our astronauts. To be exposed to solar flares. So we have ways to protect them in the space station, but we had a two-hour prediction capability so we could get a heads-up that solar flares are coming in two hours and then you could tell the astronauts, but that's pretty tight for them to get in in all situations. 

'cause remember some of that time's gonna be spent on the ground arguing about whether you should tell them and how fast they, you know, is it real? Things like that validation. So we were trying to double that to four hours. And so we posted a challenge, Hey, we're trying to boost that. It turned out that the winner of that challenge was able to get an eight-hour prediction capability. 

Now there's not perfect, but what was really interesting about his solution was he was a retired cell phone engineer who happened to have a heliophysics undergrad that he had never done anything with, and he was able to take the math that you use in kind of extracting signal from noise for radios and apply that. 

To the data coming off of the sun, right in the solar and be able to actually find these micro signatures that would tell you that this is coming. Right? And so it's that using stuff from one industry and applying it to a whole nother problem that, that was just really beautiful. And I thought that was amazing. Um, we've done, uh, one or...

Chris Hare: Really quick, I wanna jump in 'cause at the beginning you talked about how what you're doing actually opens up personal transformation and shift in people's personal stories. And you think about for that guy potentially for decades like that potentially that felt like a waste to him. 

You know, why did I do that? And then to have that hit, I can't imagine what that did for him. Yeah.  

Steve Rader: I will tell you, we talk about how this pulls in the public and to participate. My favorite story on that is Loren. Fell Dr. Loren, Fell. I think she's Dr. Almost a doctor. She was a psychologist in Australia who entered a small competition. 

I was doing a pilot on freelancer that was literally doing like a hundred dollars, $500 challenge, like these really cheap jump. And one of them was to write a storyboard for a video, three minute video that explained this RFID system on the space station. And so she won like $500 'cause she made this needle PowerPoint shows. 

In fact, I think Freelancer even did a little video of her learning about it and she was excited. A few months later I saw that she was submitting for another contest, but it was a radiation shielding. And she had done a PowerPoint showing her concept for this origami technique for radiation shielding. 

And I think she might have placed in that one. And then a little bit later I saw that she submitted to another contest, but this time it was a CAD design using a CAD tool, a computer-aided design tool and had a whole model built up. And then there was another contest I shot and she had a picture of this rock sorter for the lunar rock sorter that we were doing the competition on, but she had bought a three-D printer and had printed her design out. 

I'm like, oh my gosh, she's gone out and got a three-D printer. And then there was one where she did a robotics challenge and she had a an a Raspberry Pi and it did all these inflatables and moved and stuff. And I was like, I think this woman is pivoting her entire trajectory to do space. I just saw on social media. 

And I've actually talked to her. And it is true. She basically changed the trajectory of her life and now she has a startup working lunar vegetable growing and has, I think some NASA funding is speaking, teaching other people. She just wrapped up doing an analog mission, uh, Mars analog mission in Hawaii. 

This draws people into the mission of what space exploration is. And she's not the only one. I've seen this Repeatedly happen where people in their spare time initially start to kind of see what they can do and then they go and notice she didn't come work for NASA, she couldn't, she's an Australian citizen. 

Right? But she pivoted and now is as much in the space industry as I am. So I love to see the transformation that's happening in people's lives, but I, I mostly love to offer that. 'cause there is this understanding I now have is they have something to offer us and we are the better for it because we're getting people to help us get that starting place for innovation and move on with it. 

Chris Hare: Well, I think what's interesting too is when you think about a negative narrative around NASA is like, Hey, why are we going to the moon? Why are we going to Mars? You know, we should be spending the money here. And you think about. That. I mean, just that one story. Talk about an atomic story that's incredibly powerful, but you think about how that spread across how many people's lives that's impacting how many jobs that's creating, and then you're also rolling it across the United States government, like all of that piece that has nothing to do with space, but it's possible because of where you all are heading. 

Steve Rader: Yeah, it is really cool to watch because I remember being around, well, I mean I was little when we did Apollo, but I remember studying Apollo and what was always kind of depressing to me was that we did this Apollo 11 and everyone was just like, that's amazing. Then we did Apollo 13 and we and got to 14. 

It's like the popularity of the space program just dropped every time because people were like, oh, we're going, well, that looks exactly the same as it did before. And oh, now we're picking up rocks. Why aren't we picking up rocks? The engagement didn't understand a lot of the science didn't care about all that, and it started to look like a rerun of the exact same thing. 

And within just a few missions, the program was canceled. We're about to go back to the moon and I'm thinking, how can we bring everyone in, make everyone participate? How can people have a stake in this to where this isn't, I just wanna see that land on the moon. It's when that lands on the moon. I'm gonna get to, to work with this part of it. 

I'm gonna get to have a robot explore this cave, or I'm gonna be helpful in making this solution. Uh, gets to be exciting.  

Chris Hare: I'm gonna actually go take a look today and see if there's a challenge I can sign up for.

Steve Rader: Well, it's great because I'll tell you, there's also citizen science. A guy, mark Kushner at Goddard runs this amazing program where you can get on Zooniverse and I think there's a few other platforms where literally you can be the one analyzing the images from telescopes and classifying. 

They've even had discoveries where whole sets of citizen scientists have been cited in papers because they made a discovery and were able to be part of the actual scientific discovery process.

Chris Hare:  Hmm. Oh wow. That's awesome. I'll report back to you, I promise. So kind of diving into the narrative side of things. 

So when I think about narrative, especially at the scale you're doing, I like to think it about it as kind of a future center of gravity, right? So it's this force. That really propels people to make that journey together, right? Like I'm feeling it as you're talking, like it's that pull, right? But it also has to overcome gravity of the status quo, right?

Steve Rader: I think what I've seen is that people are amazing and part of this is to try to get people to realize they're amazing and to activate the parts of their life, the training, the trying things so that they can live into that. I think a lot of people just make assumptions about life and they, they can't that, oh, I couldn't do that, I couldn't do that, and there's so much opportunity there, so I want people to come and try. 

Here's the thing, challenges the one place in your entire life that you can try something and fail. Nobody cares. Like nobody's gonna laugh at you like you're not gonna get a bad grade, your boss isn't gonna get mad. You're wasting your time. And maybe you're doing that instead of watching sitcoms or Netflix or death scrolling on your phone. 

Well, that's a good thing. And we hear people all the time talk about how much fun they have doing this stuff because they're doing, they're actually engaging their brains. They're using what they've learned and they're doing all this. I'll say too, we've gotta figure out, as humans where our role is, and we are gonna have to push more and more. 

As automation does more for us, as gen AI and all these kind of things start to work for us. We've got to up our game a little. We've gotta learn how to use those tools and innovate more. I tell people technology, it is sort of coming for jobs, but it's sort of not. And. I always use Snow White as my example. 

Uh, so Snow White, right? Animated series back, or not series, animated movie that Disney did back in what, the fifties, forties, somewhere in there. It was pretty early. And I looked up the facts on this, right? It's something like 200 seventy-five animators basically took a couple of years to do 2 million hand-drawn frames and coloring. 

Right? Now, most people who see Modern Graphics packages will tell you that you could do that same movie with maybe two or three people, maybe five in a few months. It's almost trivial to do, right? But if you look at one of the more recent, like let's just say Iron Man III, 'cause that's the one I looked at, iron Man III is an animated movie. 

It looks real, but it's really all animated or largely animated. And if you look at the credits, there's something like thirty-five hundred animators that were or used to do that. When we get technology that can do something better and faster, we don't just do the same thing we did before and fire everyone. 

We do more, which sometimes will actually include more people in it, but they have to have the skills to do that, right? They have to have new skills and more skills. And so what I'm really hoping is that we're starting to get a, a culture of lifelong learning, of micro learning, of people really pursuing new avenues of learning and then applying those on platforms and learning how to do things. 

What's funny about this is this entire journey, about five years ago, we were working with all these platforms of hundreds of thousands of people and we noticed that half of the platforms also did freelance work. Like they were ways for, people were finding jobs and they were doing challenges and. We started studying that and found that people are moving into this open talent. 

Mm-hmm economy, this gig economy at record rates and then Kovat happened and the great racing nation now, like this large percentages out there doing gig work and don't want to go back to full-time employment. And part of it is when you're freelance, you can do lifelong learning. You can go find those new jobs, you can find the new skills and you're not gonna just be used up until you're not, not useful anymore, and then laid off, which is kind of the model we've stumbled into in the full-time employment model, which is really tragic in a lot of ways. 

But I get really excited because I thought automation was just coming for everyone. And what I'm seeing is this organic migration of workers to this new Construct where they can actually learn so much more and adapt at a rate that's commensurate with the rate of technology. I'll give you an example. 

If you a freelancer and you have 70 million people, let's just say you have a lot of big clients coming to you, right? And so let's just say there's a new technology, blockchain Z comes outta nowhere, nobody knows how to do it. And suddenly they're getting five requests. And just think about it. Maybe I should say gen.ai generative ai. 

'cause this happened with generative AI just a few months ago, and everybody's like, who's an expert in this? And they're getting requests, Hey, we need an expert in blockchain Z. We get an expert and suddenly in, in a week, they're getting five requests, 10 requests. Well, they could easily put a blockchain Z training together and offer it to easily five, 10,000 people on their platform that have the right qualifications and within weeks be able to deploy people that could do that work. 

There's more to it probably, but think about the old model cutting edge technology. Somebody learns about it takes about four years to convince a university to actually go teach this, except to maybe a handful of grad students. Once you get it in the curriculum, now they've got actually built, or you, now you gotta build a curriculum that takes a couple of years and then you gotta get people through the pipeline. 

That entire process is anywhere from five to 10 years. Compare that with two months. Like our ability to be agile as a workforce is actually much better in this new construct that people, nobody recruited 'em to go do it. They're just doing it, which is really fascinating.  

Chris Hare: I mean, you're honestly breaking a lot of, breaking a lot of frames is essentially, I would expect someone like you to be talking about the technology. 

And what excites you most, but also where the power is, is with the people. Like the technology is an assumed. It's assumed that yes, it's going to evolve and it's going to become more and more powerful. But so that piece is really fascinating to me that you're pushing more and more into the people.

Steve Rader: Um, we're not gonna run out of problems to go solve. 

Chris Hare: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Rader: So what we've gotta figure out is how do we use the tools and the people like we, it's always been this equation. Yep. How do you get the tools and the people to work together to get to solve more problems and do things better? I tell people when, when we talk about why is NASA doing this? 

I'm like, well, there's a reason people aren't living on moons of Saturn and drinking martinis on Mars. It's 'cause it's really, really hard. It's very hard and very expensive to go out in space. But we're now doing lots of hard things where technology does allow humans to go do more. And some of that's good a lot of times. 

We've gotta handle how the negative effects of that are too, right? That that's our responsibility as folks that work in technology is to handle, not just take the good but also make sure we're handling any bad technology's agnostic. It's gonna have good and bad effects and good and bad uses. And we've gotta do more on that. 

So part of the technology's gonna be solving the problems of technology, right? And this is actually where I get excited and I think I've shared with you as you earlier, is I think there's an intersection that I see coming with open innovation and ai. And that is with, with open innovation right now, it's really about individuals. 

You gotta have kind of narrow problems. You can have big teams, but it's really expensive to do that 'cause you've, they've gotta make it worth it. They've gotta form and do all this stuff. What's interesting is with these large communities, you can train people how on, on innovation practices and then you use AI to match them into teams of seven or five or, you know, wherever the optimal number is. 

Really instantaneously. And you can match them based on their personality types so that there's, nobody's gonna get stepped on and you can match them by, well, this problem requires a physicist and a chemist and electrician and an artist, and then put a couple of other folks in for diversity, right? Uh, uh, of thought. 

And then you can say, and I want half of those people to have worked together before, so I have some amount of trust to seed this. And I'll put a facilitator on top of that that's gonna make this a really great experience for everyone. And you say, Hey, come be part of this team. You're gonna, should work for four hours and you're gonna try to come up with a solution for this, or you're gonna deconstruct this problem. 

You can create this machine of both people and machine, uh, machine learning and process that's breaking down a problem, solving it, producing the results. It's using the best of what humans have and rewarding them, right? Like you wanna reward people for what they're doing. But every time I've worked on a high performing team, it's, it's almost its own reward. 

It's like this amazing experience. So it's, it's getting all that in there.  

Chris Hare: So fast-forwarding to 2025 with Artemis three, can you talk a little bit briefly about what that mission is, why it's so important, and then also how what you're doing fits into that?  

Steve Rader: Yeah, so I mean, we are headed to the moon, right? 

So we wanna not just visit the moon, we wanna establish an outpost, our next mission's to send people on the trip around the moon. So it's kind of like the Apollo eight mission where they check out all the systems and make sure we can go all the way there and back, and then. Landing on the moon is a big deal. 

'cause now we're just not just gonna land. We're gonna stay a while, right? And it's gonna be where we start to build up habitats and have landers that can sit there for a long time. Think about how many mission scrubs you see on the ground and how often rockets take to, well now you're gonna stick one on the moon and it's gotta sit there for a long time. 

And what's really great about this is we've now kind of released this commercial, uh, beast. Like there's all of these companies that are now participating in the ecosystem of low earth orbit, but they're also using that knowledge to help build pieces of what we're building for the moon. So there's, you know, I think Motorola is doing some cell tower kind of work for us for the communications node. 

I think, uh, I just saw Intuitive machines has, uh, one of the landers. There's just a lot of really great work going on there. And it's. Its intent is not just to do this one more time, right? This is to learn how to live and work on another surface, which is not easy, and it's doing it close enough that it's a just a few days back to earth rather than months. 

And when we get really good at that, then we can start to look to Mars and start to go there. It's just, you gotta take the baby steps. And it's pretty clear that there are already commercial interests in the moon. There's all sorts. Like we're just at a different place in history than we were back in the first uh, Apollo days. 

Chris Hare: Well, thank you, Steve. This has been awesome. As we come to a close, I'm curious, I know you've told your story a million times, you've been super generous, uh, with sharing it with me and with my audience. Was there anything new that you discovered in telling it today or anything that you're excited about coming out of this? 

Steve Rader: Oh gosh. I get excited about talking to this every time. I love it. I think, you know, I really like talking about the personal aspect of this. Both about how personal innovation is, but also to encourage people to take that leap, right? To learn something new, to try it out. Throw your hat in the ring. What's the worst gonna happen, right? 

Uh, somebody doesn't choose it. Okay, that's fine. You might get feedback on it, you might learn something. And a lot of these communities are around finding other people with these same passions and learning, and I think your questions really kind of pulled some of that out me that I don't talk about a lot. 

And I love not just the idea, I know it works. I know that people. Can do more than they think they can. And I'm hoping we're providing those opportunities and they can go to challenge.gov and see opportunities all around the government or at NASA.gov slash get-involved because we have lots of opportunities for folks to be part of the mission and to grow themselves into the kinds of technologies, the kinds of things that are coming and that are gonna be valuable. 

We've got to get to where we learn how to pivot and learn new things so that we as humans remain valuable, but it's gonna take work on our part. It's gonna take a different way of learning. So I'm hoping we provide that encouragement, that enticement, that opportunity to make that happen.  

Chris Hare: Yeah. Some big takeaways for me are joy. So you clearly bring joy, but that's also a huge motivator for you, is to help bring joy and fulfillment and purpose to more people, which you're doing right. So that was. Really inspiring. And I think also the idea of yes crowd, but also community, right? Of how you're connecting people with each other, with the mission and with the narrative that you all have built, but also empowering them to even just go further on their own. Right? Separate from that. So it's a beautiful story, so. Well, thank you, Steve.  

Steve Rader: Oh, thank you, Chris. This has been great. I always like talking to you.  

Chris Hare: Well, I really appreciate it. Look forward to talking to you again soon. 

Thanks for joining me for another episode of The Story Future. What part of Steve's story did you find most impactful? Did anything shift in how you're thinking about your future and how you're thinking about your narrative, about how you want to tell your story? Find someone today and tell them your story. Because when we tell our stories, it can change  us, it can change others, and it has the power to change the future. 

And that's it. Please subscribe, leave us a review, and be sure to visit TSFPOD.com for information about Steve Rader, for show notes, and to check out other episodes.

The Storied Future Podcast is a production of The Storied Future LLC. Produced and edited by Ray Sylvester. Audio Engineering by Ali Ozbay, and theme music by The Brewz. Your host is me, Chris Hare. Learn more about how I help leaders use the power of narrative to transform themselves, their companies, and their industries at www.thestoriedfuture.com.