My week summarized into 3 highlights, 2 discoveries, and 1 anticipation. It’s been a while! It feels good to be writing a weeknote again!

3 Highlights

1. 10x10 Supersonic Wind Tunnel and SLOPE Lab Tours

I coordinated tours for my team to visit the 10x10 Supersonic Wind Tunnel and SLOPE Lab at NASA Glenn Research Center. The wind tunnel was incredible. It’s the largest wind tunnel capable of supersonic speeds in the country, and can push close to Mach 5. The tunnel complex is spread around 4 acres, as the tunnels weave in and out of buildings containing things like motors, compressors, an air dryer, and more. My favorite part of that tour was getting to see the results of a recent mishap they had. I am the product manager for NASA’s Mishap Information System, so I see incidents reported in our system all the time, but it is a completely different story to see the aftermath of a mishap in-person. I can’t go into detail about the mishap, but luckily nobody was injured, although it had the potential for severe injuries.

The SLOPE Lab was also a great tour. I had visited before, but it’s always neat to get a refresher on the history of tire design for space-faring rovers. Our tour guide was responsible for designing simulated lunar soil as part of her PhD, and I enjoyed listening to her passionately explain the process of simulating lunar regolith based on data collected from the Apollo missions. It’s also fun to get to handle and manipulate their fancy shape-memory alloy springs, which always return to their original shape. Materials science is way over my head, but utterly fascinating.

The best part of both tours was being able to make the time to provide these tours for my team. Most team members had not seen these facilities before and these tours are great for helping us all feel more connected to NASA’s mission. And on top of that they’re just really friggin' cool.

2. Ping Pong

I’m working in the office full-time now. One of the silver linings is that I discovered our building has a ping pong table that sat idle for years.

And idle it shall no longer be.

I have my own paddle that I bought a few years back which has also been collecting dust, so I’m glad to finally get some use out of it! Having ping pong as an active way to pass the time during lunch breaks is such a relief. I’ve already found a few other folks in the office that are excited to play, and one of my coworkers played competitively in tournaments in the open division in the past. He’ll definitely whoop my butt (already has), but I’m excited to play with him and others to sharpen my game and have some fun while at the office.

Semi-related: I also found a golf range nearby the office and went with a coworker this week. I’d like to put a little more time into my golf game this year and finally fix my slice! I’ve never gone to the range much and only play a couple of times a year… and it shows.

3. Swimming Lessons

My daughter had her third swimming lesson this week. I’ve looked forward to this every week since it started. She loves the water and has been doing great! This week she got a little carried away and took off sprinting around the pool while we were practicing getting in and out of the pool. I had to jump up out of the pool quickly to go catch her. My repeated utterances of “Stop! Come back!” had no effect, much to my dismay. But other than that, she has been doing great, and swimming lessons have been a wonderful way for our little family to spend time together learning in a fun way.

We also have some friends who enrolled their kids in the same class, so it has been fun to go through it together! And we get access to the rec center’s pool after lessons, so that has been a fun time to let the kids splash in the shallow end while we parents catch up with each other.

2 Discoveries

1. Airless Bike Tires

There was a recent Kickstarter campaign for airless bike tires based on the wheel design for recent rovers. Apparently an intern at the SLOPE Lab used their internship to develop bike tires based on the interwoven shape-memory alloy spring design used on rover tires. After proving this could work, that intern sold their design to The SMART Tire Company, who is now trying to reduce production costs and commercialize the design.

This is a great example of how NASA science discoveries often spin off into great commercial opportunities here on earth. For more, check out spinoff.nasa.gov/.

2. Libby

I’m very late to the game on this one, but I finally discovered Libby. Libby lets you connect your library card(s) to enjoy free ebooks and audiobooks. I’ve used other library apps, but I’m liking Libby much better so far.

With my new commute, I’m trying to transform myself into an audiobook guy. I much prefer reading visually so I can go over things slowly and take notes, but I’m adjusting to the audio format. The new audiobook feature on Spotify had me all excited, but then I realized there was a limit on how much I could listen to each month. Boo.

So now I’m using Libby instead. Another nice perk of Libby is that I can set bookmarks and highlights in audiobooks, to take notes. So in theory, it should be pretty easy to bookmark something that stuck out to me while driving, and then I can come back to it later to take notes and export those notes outside of Libby. I’ve yet to test that process, but it seems like it will work, and I’m excited to figure it out.

Another awesome feature of Libby is that it can send ebooks straight to your Kindle, so there’s no need to read ebooks on my phone. I just tested it out this morning with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and it seemed to work great. I’m curious to see what happens to all my notes and highlights when I need to “return” the ebook. To avoid heartbreak and be safe, I’m going to export all my highlights and notes before returning the book, but I’m hoping they all stay in the Kindle app somehow.

1 Anticipation

NASA’s Reduction in Force Plan

NASA is due to submit their Reductions in Force (RIF) plan this upcoming week. The deadline across the government was March 13, but NASA got an extension until March 20 due to all the space activities this week, including the Crew 10 mission to the International Space Station, a lunar landing, and more. For those interested, here is the OPM memo that spells out the steps agencies need to take to reduce their workforce and restructure.

I’m not sure what to expect for this RIF. It’s hard to tell whether my position would be affected or not, as it all depends on which areas they target for reductions. Some folks around me are very worried about their jobs.

But truth be told, I feel at peace with it. Despite how chaotic things are on the ground, I believe there is a God who is over it all. What comes will come, and I’ll figure it out. The only certain thing is change is coming, one way or another.