NASA Technology Roadmap: A Heavenly Guide For IT And CIOs
NASA's Technology Roadmap for 2015-2035 gives hints about the future of IT in your enterprise. Here's how space is changing big data, supercomputing, and other technologies.
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Try predicting what technology is going to look like in 20 years.
What will replace the Apple Watch or the smartphone? Whatever you say is going to be wrong. Now, try to be part of NASA, where you actually have to predict technology 20 years down the road, because a lot of what you build takes that long to invent, test, and deploy. That's what makes the 2015 draft of the NASA Technology Roadmap so interesting to look at.
NASA started this concept in 2010, and the agency published the first draft in 2012. The goal is to put out a document that projects the most important technology needs and developments of the next 20 years. The agency calls it the Strategic Technology Investment Plan (STIP). Twenty years isn't an arbitrary time. 2035 is the projected year we're going to land on -- at least orbit -- Mars.
This is the timetable President Obama set.
"By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crew missions beyond the Moon into deep space," Obama is quoted saying in the report. "So, we’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."
In other words, this is the roadmap to another planet. While many, including me, have criticized NASA for what seemed like a lack of plan recently, especially when it came to doing anything besides low earth orbit (LEO), many of the smaller low-orbit missions were designed to make commercial LEO flight cheap and reliable.
That will allow for bigger steps out in the near future.
One of the most gratifying things for InformationWeek readers is that at the very center of this technology map is IT. Not only does NASA see 24 specific IT areas that are important for it to develop, including big data, exascale computing, and cyber-security, but the agency also sees how IT touches every other part of its mission.
"The topic area of Modeling, Simulation, Information Technology, and Processing spans nearly the entire NASA mission portfolio," according to the report. "Although parts of [the IT section] are discipline-specific, most of this technology area (TA) enables future disciplinary modeling and simulation technologies as found throughout the other technology roadmaps."
Because space exploration has always influenced IT and technology in general, it is important to look at areas where NASA is focusing on in IT, robotics, and a few other sectors to help see the future of IT here on Earth. I picked 14 technologies that seem likely to have a direct impact on the datacenter in the next 10 to 20 years. I only scratched the surface of a massive document, but I think it will help CIOs and IT pros look ahead to sketch out the future of their industry for the next couple of decades to come.
Check out NASA's priorities and then tell me what you think your priorities should be while we get ready to put people on Mars.
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There are two major issues with flight computing that NASA needs to address, but that enterprise IT also might be interested in -- data triage and hardened computing. Space flights pull in a lot of data. Not all of that data can be transmitted back effectively at this point, especially if transmission times are limited by the orbit of the craft or the planets. How to send the right data at the right time will matter, especially as craft get farther from the earth. That's going to become an increasingly important issue for enterprises as the Internet of Things explodes as well. Pulling the right data at the right time to make real-time decisions is going to get harder, but more important, as data sources explode.
NASA also needs radiation-hardened computers. You might not need radiation hardened computers, but tough computers that can take a pounding in a lot of extreme environments wouldn't hurt. It may allow for some pretty extreme data centers -- like underwater or in the Arctic -- to save cooling costs.
This is a big category for most of what NASA does, so you'll see most of the next slides on IT fit into ground computing in one way or another. But to ready themselves for these projects, NASA is working quantum computing, exascale supercomputing, and big data analytics. The agency is even experimenting with cognitive computing -- chips designed to simulate the human brain. If you think you've got big data, imagine storing the archive of the records of a space telescope constantly recording in multiple spectrums on dozens of instruments -- from visual images to x-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet. And you need to make all that data searchable and easily accessible to an entire scientific community.
Basically, what we talking about here is super-fast bug detection. Miss a bug in a piece of software in space and a billion dollar spacecraft might be lost in space forever. Worse yet, people could be stuck on that thing. If you're lucky, you might be able to send a patch, but the farther the ship goes from Earth, the less easily that can be done. You have to eliminate as many software bugs and software-hardware integration issues as possible. You want to find your failures and find them fast so you can fix them before launch or as early into a mission as possible. Sounds like a nice thing to have on the Earth, too. Sure patching is no big deal, but finding bugs, especially security flaws, early will save time, money, and customer goodwill.
The funny thing about space is that a lot of what happens is pretty easy to predict. Isaac Newton worked out the laws of physics centuries ago. Missions go according to carefully worked out timetables. Machines, for the most part, can repeat most actions in the same way over and over. The most difficult thing to model is human behavior. How will a human react in a given situation? As missions get longer, predicting human behavior and providing computer-aided ways to let humans make decisions are crucial.
Sure, there are experiments going on right now with people in simulated space ships for months at a time. But in the end, there are too many variables to test with real people. We need better ways to simulate a long voyage. The thing is that when something goes wrong in LEO, NASA mission control can help in real-time. But it can take minutes or longer for communications to go back and forth as distances grow. That makes understanding, simulating, and predicting human reactions all the more important. When NASA is done, I suspect retailers wouldn't mind getting their hands on human simulator tools either. In fact, NASA even mentions in the report that this is a place to save costs by partnering with the private sector.
In pharmaceuticals, one of the ways big data is saving money is by helping researchers "fail fast." The idea is that if you are going down a bad line of inquiry, you want to know as fast as possible. The same is true for NASA missions. Analysis tools that will judge the risk and potential success of a given mission will help NASA fail fast in simulation rather than spend billions on a mission which had inherent flaws in it. As missions go farther from Earth, their complexity rises geometrically, as do the variables associated with it. That increases risk, making more robust assessments necessary.
One of the big needs in manufacturing is an understanding of when a system is going to fail before it does, so that an assembly line isn't disrupted, costing potentially millions of dollars. This is also true of NASA's needs. Craft leaving LEO will be subjected to more stress for longer periods than any ship we've currently used. Data on what will happen to those craft is limited. NASA wants to create "digital twins" of all its craft through the use of data collected directly from the craft in space to subject a of simulated versions, subject to the same stresses, in order to help predict problems in real time. The same could be done for an assembly line robot as it provides information on its performance, environment, physical stress, and other variables.
This is where the rubber meets the road for NASA. As it admits in its study:
A modeling and simulation environment providing exascale performance is essential for development of solutions to NASA's most challenging problems. Simply stated, without these HPC-related capabilities, most of the other simulation-related goals [in the roadmap] and other [sections of the] roadmaps will not be achievable.
Basically, we're talking goals like physics-based models of the universe, mission analysis, validating data, and nearly all of the IT goals we've listed here. Not every enterprise needs exascale-level computing, but NASA needs to lower the cost and prove the utility -- probably with cloud-based computing -- of supercomputers. That's something every enterprise can benefit from.
NASA has tons of data, and if there's a mission none of that data is "at rest." It needs to be accessible to both the mission and to the science community. This is your data storage problem, but on a grander scale. NASA hopes to create a scalable, comprehensive data architecture that allows it to make data available through its entire life cycle, yet remaining affordable.
All that data needs to be readily understood, connected, parsed, structured, cross-linked, and generally manipulated. NASA, like many of us, has an unstructured data problem. The agency has a lot of notes written by people from repair logs, mission logs, debriefings as people leave projects, and even email. NASA wants to use machine learning to pull this together and understand it. It also wants to help astronauts make quick, data-driven decisions in space. But not all the data is easily discovered in a database query. Machine learning could help humans make life-or-death decisions with more data available than they could currently.
We're basically talking user experience exactly the way IT would understand it, only with speeds most of us don't need to operate at. As NASA says in its report: "Although the amount and quality of available information has increased, the way in which information is presented to the operator has become dangerously outdated." In other words, we have to throw data at astronauts differently, and we need to give them an interface that allows them to make commands, request data, and read it, better than we have. NASA says that for the most part its controls still resemble an airplane cockpit. That's no longer good enough, and does not suit the tasks of future astronauts.
"In the current operational environment, existing cyber security technology has not kept pace with the rapid evolution of information technologies, including cloud computing, and their interfaces with existing NASA systems. It has also not kept pace with the constantly-changing threat environment, including attacks from foreign governments. To identify new and emerging threats, cyber security technology must be rapidly improved in several areas, including security situational awareness and anomaly detection." Sound familiar? Just the day before this article was written news broke that someone may have taken control of an airplane, from coach seats. Imagine that happening to the International Space Station. I'll be the first to admit, however, that if NASA, or any part of the US government, cracks the security puzzle, whoever does might not share it with enterprises any time soon.
In addition to straight IT, there are three robot-related technologies worth talking about from the report. The first is 3D sensing. This goes beyond robots. It's also for the surroundings of space craft. 3D sensing, especially mapping, is a crucial part of any mission of exploration, but it is also a part of human-robot safe interaction. Really, this is one of those technologies where enterprises might need it more, or at least as much, as NASA.
Again, here is something that commercial robotics companies have been working on just as hard. Whether a robot needs a "hand" that works like a human's, or just sensitive scientific equipment that doesn't destroy samples while taking them, NASA's remote vehicles need fine motor skills. But unlike robots on Earth, they need to adapt to changing gravity and other conditions. Imagine a robot doing experiments on the way to Mars and then having to adjust from microgravity to Mars-surface gravity. It may not "know its own strength."
A lot of industrial robots are surrounded by fences or at least yellow warning tape on the ground. A lot of them would have no idea you were coming and would accidentally kill you. Few work in concert. The ones that do are mostly timed in an intricate dance, not designed to literally work together. NASA wants to change that. It wants robots to work alongside people, where the robots know where the people are and know how to move safely. It wants robots to be able to work with other robots autonomously to achieve complex tasks. Robot-to-human and robot-to-robot interactions are the next steps on the factory floor, too.
There you go -- 14 technologies NASA expects to develop in the next 20 years, with many coming sooner than that, that will have a direct effect on IT in the coming years. Are you ready to incorporate this technology into your data center? Which do you think will be the most game-changing? Comment below.
There you go -- 14 technologies NASA expects to develop in the next 20 years, with many coming sooner than that, that will have a direct effect on IT in the coming years. Are you ready to incorporate this technology into your data center? Which do you think will be the most game-changing? Comment below.
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