A Return to Technology Development

By Ashley Korzun, Student Amabassador, Georgia Institute of Technology

Hi! My name is Ashley Korzun, and I’m working on my Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech. I’ve worked at NASA Goddard, Langley, Ames, and JPL since I started college in 2002. For the past 3 ½ years, I’ve been working on the problem of landing large payloads on Mars. Mars is a unique planet, with an atmosphere 1/100th as dense as the Earth’s atmosphere. At Earth, it can take ~ 45 minutes to go from where the atmosphere starts down to the ground. At Mars, this same process only takes about 6 minutes! Landing on Mars is so challenging that we’ve only accomplished the feat successfully 6 times. Mars Science Laboratory, launching in 2011, will be the largest vehicle ever sent to Mars; it’s a little bigger than a Mini Cooper. All of these missions use technology originally developed in the 1960s and early 1970s that we’ve incrementally improved upon over the past 40 years. One of the most critical systems is a supersonic parachute that slows the vehicle down before using rocket propulsion to land on the surface.

To land more complex robotic missions and eventually, humans, we can no longer use parachutes. The materials aren’t durable enough and there’s not enough time to deploy and inflate parachutes that are half the size of a football field. My work focuses on supersonic retropropulsion, an alternative to parachutes for deceleration where you begin firing your rocket propulsion while you are traveling much faster than the speed of sound. I started digging through the literature as a new graduate student almost four years ago, blowing dust off reports last checked out in the 1960s and early 1970s and using this information to start understanding if supersonic retropropulsion could help enable advanced exploration. NASA’s interest in supersonic retropropulsion has picked up over the last year, and I’m now able to work with a larger team and support plans to collect new test data. This recognition by NASA, that we need new technologies to achieve goals of exploring beyond Earth and gaining a better understanding of our home planet, has led to major changes to the NASA budget.

If humans are ever going to explore beyond the Earth-Moon system (think: Mars!), we are going to need technologies that have never been flown or even been built to full-scale. If you browse NASA’s technical reports server (NASA NTRS), you’ll find that it’s loaded with data from broad technology development efforts from the 1960s and early 1970s, all research done to enable the Apollo missions to the moon and the Viking missions to Mars. In 1958, NASA was founded to develop the technologies necessary to send humans into space. NASA, in general, hasn’t developed an end-to-end design since the space shuttle in the late 1970s / early 1980s, and the new NASA budget will allow us to get back to the foundation of work on which NASA was established.

Human space exploration is not going to stop, just because the Constellation program has been cancelled. A return to technology development means tons of new work at NASA, and finally, there will be a budget that allows us to focus on developing the systems needed for advanced exploration. I have always thought about how exciting and challenging it would have been to work at NASA in the 1960s. With a return to technology development aimed at enabling advanced exploration, I think that feeling will come back to NASA, and it will continue to be a great environment for young engineers and scientists in the future.