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Recently, we've been hosting the NASA CoLab Luna Philosophie talk series at Brickhouse in San Francisco. It's a public conversation between NASA thought leaders and top scientists and the community: "Anyone who is interested in an open, creative dialogue on human, space related topics is encouraged to attend!"

The second NASA CoLab@Brickhouse session took place earlier this month. Tom Cochrane of NASA Ames discussed his most recent project, Virtual Reality System Engineering Environments for the Space Program. He reflected on his lengthy career -- 25 years of using ever more powerful technology to engineer complex simulation models ranging from ground water movement to space flight.

Building on the tradition of SimCity and SimEarth, Tom and his team at NASA Ames have built SimStation, SpaceStation:SIM, and SimCEV. These are virtual environments for browsing and understanding real human space flight systems environments. The team is currently developing SimConstellation, a viewer that will support NASA's plans to return to the moon.

Unlike Sim games from Maxis, NASA simulations are mission critical: if the engineers get it wrong, the astronauts don’t come back. The simulations monitor oxygen levels, rocket fuel, and a range of other factors to accurately replicate what’s supposed to happen. You can drill into each phase of the mission and rotate the views to see exactly what’s going on inside the craft.

This degree of complexity is extraordinary. For instance, in order to land on a particular spot on the moon, the spacecraft has to orbit the moon in a particular orbit. To achieve that orbit, it must get onto a precise space trajectory out of earth’s atmosphere, and for that the craft must launch from a particular spot, at a particular speed. And that’s just for modeling orientation...

One memorable quote from Tom: “I remember being a brat on the Apollo program – they did all their documentation using typewriters and carbon paper.”

Decades later, Tom and his team have built an entire environment that generates simulations. An environment that's light-years beyond what you could visualize with a typewriter.

Thanks to Ricky Montalvo for his high-quality video of the talk. Watch it here:

Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network, Total runtime 59min:33sec

download (m4v)

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