Ellen Ochoa (NASA) - Leadership Lessons from Space

Narrator: This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series brought to you by Stanford E Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

Emily Ma: Hello everyone. My name is Emily Ma and I am an adjunct lecturer for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. And welcome back to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series which is hosted by the, uh, Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Basis, the business association for Stanford entrepreneurial students. Today I could not be more thrilled to welcome back Ellen Ochoa to campus. It is such a pleasure and such an honor.

Ellen Ochoa: Thank you.

Emily Ma: Uh, I will share a quick bio for her and uh, she brings so much specialness from her time at NASA that we'll dive right in. Okay, so, quick intro. Ellen Ochoa is the first Hispanic woman astronaut to go into space, flying on two missions aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, STS 66 and STS 110 as a mission specialist, payload commander, robotic arm operator and scientist. She then served as the first Hispanic director and second female director of Johnson Space center from 2013 to 2018. Dr. Ochoa has her BS in physics from San Diego State University, her Ms. In electrical engineering from Stanford University, and her PhD in electrical engineering in Optical Information Processing, also from Stanford. She holds three patents for optical systems inventions. And as I said in our first class, she is a classico flautist. And uh, she was not only the first astronaut to play a musical instrument in space, but she was the first one to play a flute in low Earth orbit. How fun. Welcome, Ellen.

Ellen Ochoa: Thank you.

Emily Ma: I know you're going to start with a video, so I'm going to cue it up for you and then, uh, you wanted to talk through the video.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah. Well, let me give a little bit of introduction first. Uh, first, very glad to be here and see all of. Hope you'll have, uh, an opportunity to ask some questions. Um, yes, Stanford is kind of where it all started and we'll talk about that later, I'm sure about getting into my career, but I was lucky enough to be on four space shuttle missions, um, two on Discovery, two on Atlantis. And um, one of the things I wanted to start out doing was just show you a little bit about, uh, what we were doing on one of my missions. So I picked my final mission, uh, STS110 in 2002. It was part of a, the International Space Station. And uh, so by that time there was already a crew living on board. But it's sort of like living, uh, in your home when you're still building it. And so we had various shuttle missions that were going up and adding pieces to the space station while there were people living on Board. And what we were going to do on this mission was, um, to start building out the truss structure. So if you know what the station looks like, and you'll see it in the film if you don't. Um, at the time it had one solar array. Um, but we were trying to move into a phase of assembly where we could send up, um, other laboratories from other countries, the European laboratory, um, the Japanese laboratory. For that we needed much more power. So we, uh, were going to start building out a long truss, which is in total about 350ft long. And then have the four large solar rays hang off that truss. So we were bringing up the very first piece of that truss. Um, it's about 40ft long, about £20,000. So our job was to attach that to the station and kind of really start into the second phase where we could really turn it into an international station and support all these other laboratories. Um, uh, it was an exciting mission to be part of. And if you want to start the video. Yeah, okay, let me start. I'll go ahead and, uh, narrate it for you. I'm so excited.

Emily Ma: This video is just incredible.

Ellen Ochoa: So, of course, here we are down at Kennedy, uh, Space Center. Uh, I was part of a crew of seven. Uh, one of the others, uh, Steve Smith, also, uh, he was an undergraduate at Stanford, went to business school here. Um, there's the main engines of the space shuttle. Once they're up and running, then the solid rocket boosters, those white boosters on either side light up. You can see some of the vibration there. I'm the person in the middle, kind of the second row. Um, the flight engineer supporting the commander and pilot who are in the first row of that, um, flight deck. Here's a good view overall of the space shuttle system. The orbiter itself, the 2 white solid rocket boosters, and then the big orange tank which holds the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which feed the main engines, um, of the space shuttle itself. So about £7 million of thrust altogether. And the solid rocket boosters only, um, burn for about the first two minutes of launch. Then they separate away and the liquid engines take us the rest of the way there. Eight and a half minutes later, we're traveling 17,500 miles an hour. And, uh, we really spent the first day and a half, uh, doing some burns and getting us in position to be able to rendezvous with the station. So again, I'm working with the commander and pilot as the flight engineer, um, as we're, uh, sort of flying the rendezvous profile. So this is what we look like from the station as we're coming up. And that big piece you see in the center there, that's the truss structure we called S0 that we're going to add. This is what the station looked like. Um, we're coming up to dock with it now. So that's the station on the upper half. And the docking mechanism in the shuttle on the lower half connecting. And then we're going to, um, pull our. Our commander was pretty happy with us flying there. So after a couple hours, we did a leak check. We opened the hatches, and he met up with the commander of the space station, Cosmonaut Yuri Onofranko. And, uh, you know, then we all, uh, floated into the station, um, met with the rest, uh, of the station crew. Which happened to be two guys from my astronaut class. So that was fun. Um, then we started right off moving, uh, equipment and supplies. Which you can do between your knees. Not just in your hands when you're floating. Um, fortunately, then the next morning, we really got into the meat of the mission. I'm operating the robot arm here. This is the robotic workstation on the space station. We're, uh, using the station arm to lift S0 up out of the payload bay and move it around, trying not to get distracted by, let's see the Nile river, the Gulf of Aqaba behind you, all the beautiful views. Um, as we're moving it into place. Then this is sort of the final part of that. Um, we're going to attach it to the zenith side of the space station. And astronaut Dan Birch, who was a station crew member. He and I were the two people operating the arm at that point over the week that we were docked. Once we got it temporarily attached, um, we did a series of four spacewalks to, um, complete the attachment to power up all the equipment, everything you needed to do to get S0 really up and running and powered. Uh, these next few here are from the cameras that are on the helmets of the spacewalking crew members. Um, here you can see he's holding, um, a big cable tray. Weighs about 200 pounds on Earth. Weightless of their, of course. And, um, they had many, many different kinds of connections, um, to make a lot of them. Power connections, um, using power tools to actually complete the structural attachment to the station. Um, for all of these, I was inside operating either the station robot arm or the shuttle robot arm, moving crew members around during some other views. This is actually on the shuttle side. We're in the mid deck. Um, we brought up some, uh, food to share with the station. It was rodeo, ah, time in Houston, which is a big deal if you're in Houston. So we had a rodeo theme going there. Um, one of my crewmates, Rex Walheim, was showing off for his two little kids on a family conference. Here's Steve Smith, as I mentioned, Stanford grad, um, showing what happens when you let liquid loose in the cabin. At the end of the week where we were docked, uh, we fortunately completed all of our objectives. Um, everything was up and running on the truss structure. So we um, closed the hatches, um, making sure we had the right number of people on both sides. Then, um, it was time to undock. This time our pilot, Steve Frick was at the commands. Uh, again I was working with him. We separated away about 400ft, waited for sunrise, which happens very quickly when you're orbiting the Earth every hour and a half. And then, um, after we separated away, we did a complete fly around of the station so that we could photo document it for the next cruise coming up. So here we're halfway around, um, you can see it's using cameras and laser ranging devices here. And uh, this is sort of at the end of that. You can see the arm down there. The dark rectangle in the center is the piece we just added. Um, after that we did a burn to move much further away. And then we spent a day checking out all the systems we were going to need for reentry on the shuttle. Here's the very final morning. We're closing the payload bay doors as we're getting ready for reentry, getting into our launch and entry suits, um, and of course then into our seats, um, performing a deorbit burn. And then at the very final part of entry, uh, the commander is flying right now, um, we're over Florida. Um, he's going to line us up on the Runway. He's got a heads up display here that he's watching. Um, and you can see the Runway come into sight now. So we look a lot like an airplane, but one big difference. No engines running. So we're a big glider. We're actually dropping very rapidly. Not a whole lot of lift. Kind of like a rock with a little bit of Forward motion until 2,000ft. We do perform a pull up, um, to get ready to land, uh, on the Runway there. And the gear come down about 300ft above the ground. There's touchdown, uh, again, much faster than an airliner. We're still going well over 200 knots at this point. So we use that drag chute to Help slow us down. We do have a three mile long Runway, but that certainly helps make the touchdown, uh, happen much more quickly. And then, um, as I mentioned, this was part of station assembly. So I just wanted to give you a little bit more introduction.

Speaker D: Okay.

Ellen Ochoa: This is what the station looks like today. You can see how much it grew, um, after the mission that we had. As I mentioned, that truss structure is about 350ft long. Of course, um, we're basically using it for research and development. Um, this is one of the experiments on the outside, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, trying to learn more about dark matter and dark energy. This is the US Lab. As you can see, it has all kinds of science equipment in it that's used for many different kinds, um, of science experiments and technology development. Um, this is astronaut Peggy Whitson working with stem cells on board the station. Let's see, um, actually turning skin cells into heart muscle cells. And you can see they're actually starting to beat together as they would in an actual heart. Uh, this is astronaut Kate Rubins, another, um, Stanford grad, by the way. She got her PhD in cancer biology here, um, doing work. Astronaut Shell Lindgren looking at combustion, uh, in space. That's actually a flame in space which looks quite different than, um, something on Earth under the influence of gravity. And it actually burns at two different temperatures, one much cooler than what you would find on Earth. Um, here's a piece of equipment developed at NASA Ames just down the road, um, to be essentially an astronaut assistant. Can help with photography, with inventory, um, other kinds of things. Um, one of the, uh, technologies they tried out, um, fairly early on was this rollout solar array. And they've now actually attached several of these, um, to take over from the original solar rays, which had degraded, um, because of all the ultraviolet light that they're, uh, subjected to. Uh, they've deployed, I don't know, well over 200 small, um, sats and cubesats, including even for an elementary school, but certainly lots of universities and companies. Um, they've tested out, um, expandable modules, not just aluminum ones, grown many different kinds of plants, uh, on orbit. The astronauts themselves are part of a lot of the science experiments trying to learn more about human health and performance in space. That gives you an idea. They also participate in a lot of different educational activities. Um, uh, speaking with schools around the country and of course around the world too, given that it's an international station. And of course one of the things that they do is, uh, they're trying to learn a lot more about the Earth. And sometimes that's with specific equipment. But it also happens with astronaut photography and videography, which are used by scientists on the ground often to supplement some other kind of data that they are collecting. This gives you an idea of the resupply vehicles, um, that we use. SpaceX Dragon, uh, Northrop Grumman Cygnus vehicle, um, at some point, maybe this year or next year, a new one by Sierra Space. Um, and uh, then we have a company, um, SpaceX, that of course is delivering our astronauts now to and from the International Space Station. And so that was actually from the very first mission, uh, test mission that took up two astronauts by SpaceX, Bob Behnken and um, uh, Doug, uh, and um, this is what it looks like, of course, when it splashes down. And then there's a second company, Boeing, also developing a vehicle, Starliner. You've probably heard of some of the issues that the Starliners had, but this was the first mission that was Uncrewed that actually went up there and docked with the station, um, uh, and came home. And then I'm going to have to update this now that we've had Artemis ii, but this is, uh, the Artemis I vehicle again was uncrewed, but a completely new rocket, the Space Launch System sls, a new spacecraft called Orion, which Johnson Space center was responsible for developing along with prime contractor Lockheed Martin. So Uncrewed was uh, a very exciting mission. But of course now, uh, we've had the first crewed mission, Artemis 2, and uh, NASA's looking toward Artemis 3 next year. So with that we'll get to some of your questions. Emily. Oh my goodness.

Emily Ma: I watched the video prior without the narration, and it was already amazing. And hearing your narration is even more incredible. And it's such a timely topic.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah, especially at the end.

Emily Ma: I know you're going to have lots of questions at the end, so I'll be pretty brief with three or four questions and I'm going to allow all of you to come up to the microphone here. So let me start with, uh, the first question. This class is about really embodying the entrepreneurial spirit. And I can't think of a more entrepreneurial action that a human can do than to go into space. So maybe we could hear a few reflections from you about what does it mean for you to embody the entrepreneurial spirit.

Ellen Ochoa: Well, um, to me it's kind of about being part of exploration. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do exploration, but certainly space, the final frontier. I don't Know if it's the final, but it certainly is exciting. I think, um, a lot of what the shuttle program was trying to do was talk about what can you actually use space for? Um, the space shuttle was developed to do many, many different things. It could take up satellites and deploy them. And actually on, um, my first couple of missions, we took up science satellites. I used the robot arm to deploy them into space, and then we came back a few days later, used the arm to grab it and bring it back. Um, most of the data were collected on board, so you really did want

Emily Ma: to bring it back.

Ellen Ochoa: Studying the solar wind, studying, um, the weather in the upper atmosphere. Um, so certainly that was one thing that the shuttle could do. Of course, um, it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, so it's done a lot for space science. Um, all of the US Uh equipment that went up to build the International Space Station was taken up on the shuttle itself. Then, um, on other missions, uh, the whole payload bay was filled with a laboratory, a pressurized laboratory, so that the astronauts could work inside and use it for many different kinds of science. A lot of it was understanding, okay, um, what do you really want to use it for? What can you learn? I think we're actually still very much at the beginning of, of answering that question. But we had a lot of opportunities during the shuttle program to try out many different kinds of science.

Emily Ma: What I loved about, uh, your sort of reflections is that it's all about leaning very heavily into curiosity and scientific discovery. And the space shuttle and the International Space Station was a vessel for that.

Speaker D: Yes.

Emily Ma: And, uh, I mean, I'm sure not every experiment went well.

Ellen Ochoa: Right.

Emily Ma: So, you know, tell us maybe a story or two where maybe you weren't able to recover a cubesat or whatever it was out there. What was that like to be a crew? It's pretty high stakes being up there.

Ellen Ochoa: Well, it is. And, um, obviously there's a whole safety aspect to it. And fortunately, on all the missions that I was on, we never had any issue that we really affected personally, our safety. Although I was in Mission Control the day Columbia, um, was supposed to return. So I know about that side. But I would say every time we sent up a shuttle, you were up there usually anywhere from 10 to 16 days. All my missions were nine, 10 or 11 days. And you had, um, generally one main objective and then often a lot of smaller experiments that you were working on. But, um, no question it costs a lot of money to get everything into space. And so what you really felt like was you need to make the absolute most of every minute you had on board. So people are always like, well, you know, what did you do in your spare time while you were up there? And I was like, I do not recall any spare time while we were up there. You played the zooto. Yes, but all they. Well, I'll tell you about that because, um, that was something I personally wanted to do. It was very important to me. Music was something I almost went down as a career. Um, but at the time, you know, you were allowed to take one or two personal items, generally very small. And so I wanted to take my flute. At the time NASA was saying you could not take a musical instrument in space. Um, and actually I wasn't the first one to take a musical instrument, but I was the first flute. However, one of our smaller objectives is we were supposed to be filming a lot of, uh, scenes for a video that NASA was putting together called Living in Space. And it was aimed at kindergarteners through second graders. And so they filmed some on Earth with kids kind of going through their day. And then they'd, uh. We filmed in space going through our day trying to sort of compare and contrast. Right. So I was like, wouldn't it be great if we could show you could actually pursue your hobbies in space? So I was able to get it on board as part of that. But honestly, um, if we had landed the day we were supposed to, we hadn't gotten around to filming like half of the things we were supposed to film. And I had not had a chance to, to pull out because like I said, you're just so busy. However, we had a weather delay.

Emily Ma: Mhm.

Ellen Ochoa: And so we actually stayed in space. Was it one extra day or two? Anyway, uh, we're like, well, good, we can finish this video now. And that's when I actually had time to pull out the flute and play it for a few minutes to uh, include it in that video on living in space.

Emily Ma: Well, it sounds like there was a little bit of luck involved. There was also threading the needle.

Ellen Ochoa: Just makes the case to bring your

Emily Ma: flute up into, uh, space. And uh, what a lovely story. I think, you know, we think a lot about, you know, here also, what does it mean to be resilient? And actually hobbies are quite important. So I'm glad we spent a few minutes.

Ellen Ochoa: Well, when you think about the people that spend six or eight months on the International Space Station now, um, that actually really is important. And people do have the opportunity to take some things into space with you that would be following up on a hobby that they're very interested in on Earth. And it really is part of, um, maintaining good human performance up there is having the right mindset and being able to do things like that.

Emily Ma: That's a lovely segue to my second question, which is actually about working together as a team and really achieving the highest level of human performance. Because your time is so short when you're on a space shuttle. So I was so taken by watching the Artemis 2 crew sort of debrief their mission afterwards. And astronaut Jeremy Hansen talked about the joy train. It's not about being joyful all the time every day, but it was. They had a commitment to each other, to look at, uh, every task ahead of them, every challenge they might have ahead of them with optimism. Uh, how did you and your crew for 66 and 110, and actually you had four missions. How did you approach that behind the scenes?

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah, well, um, first of all, uh, Artemis II mission. What a great mission. What a great crew. And, um, they just did such a fantastic job, not just technically and operationally, but I think in sharing it with the world. And so I loved, uh, watching it, but it felt very familiar. That's just the exact kind of thing that, um, I felt with my crews. I remember on one of my missions, um, our commander, he had this motto for our crew, which is, if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. So even though what we are doing is deadly serious, and we feel a great deal of responsibility to the scientists, to NASA, to the taxpayers, um, and all of that, and we know it can be very risky, um, you can still figure out a way to have fun. And so you train together for a year. Uh, the Artemis ii, more like three years. Um, and so you get to know each other very well, you know each other's families. Um, but I think the main thing is you have a common purpose, a common objective. And you know that you're all working toward that. And I think that really pulls you together as well.

Emily Ma: Any moments of fun that are particularly other than playing the flute.

Ellen Ochoa: Well, you know, um, obviously when you can twirl somersaults in the middle of, uh, you know, like the note of the international space, that's just something you don't get to do on Earth. It's pretty hard not to play with your food. You just have to be really careful not to leave it floating around the cabin. Because that can really make a mess and potentially gunk up, um, machines and things like that. So you have to sort of follow all the little Particles and make sure you hoover them down.

Emily Ma: I love the bit of the video with, uh, floating, um, liquid in space. I can imagine how messy it could get. Uh, after you, uh, were an astronaut, you also then, uh, you were at the helm of Johnson Space Center, 2013-2018. So five years, really, really critical, really important role. Maybe we could take a few minutes to talk about that chapter and some of the leadership lessons that you might want to share with our students during that chapter of time.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah, well, it was, uh, really a privilege, um, to be the director. We have a, ah, wonderful, talented team at Johnson Space center. And again, they're all motivated by. We have a common mission and a common objective, and we're going to work towards that. I think as a leader you really have two main goals. And I will say I learned this from some of the Marines in the astronaut office. Accomplish the mission, take care of your people. It's pretty simple. Now, it's not always simple to do, but your priorities are pretty simple. One of my Marine, um, friends said, yeah, most times there's three things you're supposed to do. But we're Marines, so there's just two fewer priorities. Accomplish the mission, take care of your people. I would say, um, the difference between being the director of Johnson Space center and being an astronaut on a crew is just that you have to define the mission a little bit differently. It's obviously much more broad. You have to think more about, um, how do you set up your organization for the future. So it's not just about today's mission, it's about tomorrow's mission. And I think as a leader, it's always easy to get sucked into today's issues and not spend enough time thinking about tomorrow's and setting yourself up well. So I would think, I thought that was, um, one of the big challenges. Um, and I took over at a time when we had finished assembly the International Space Station. We were working on the Orion spacecraft, but its mission changed two or three times during its development. And so you're always sort of chasing a little bit about what you've been told of whether or not you have an exploration mission or not. Um, but one of the things we were trying to do was make it, um, make the space station a little bit more like a laboratory you have on the ground where not everything does work the first time. And you want the ability to have a quicker turnaround time, which is just very difficult in the space business because it takes a long time to qualify things. It's expensive. And so we had A big change management effort to. How do we take the cost and time out of that? How do we, um, focus a little bit more on, hey, it's okay to fail as long it is not something that affects the safety of the astronauts or the health of the space station itself. And if we can do that, we actually have the opportunity to get multiple, um, variations of something up there instead of all this effort, here's your one shot. And if it doesn't work, you never get another shot. So I think we made a lot of progress on that during the time that I was director.

Emily Ma: That is amazing. You were able to build agility in probably one of the most difficult environments possible. Uh, what a story. Tell me a little bit more about taking care of people. Because accomplish the mission is straightforward, right? You know, you have an objective, you're gonna achieve it. What does it mean to take care of your people? There's a lot of people at Johnson Space Center. Yes.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah. We had about 3,000 civil servants and another six to seven contractors who either worked on site or close by. Most of them, a few of them worked other places, but most of them, uh, worked by. So, um, a lot of it has to do with the culture. We really did focus on a culture of inclusion, um, first of all, and who are you bringing in? But then once they're there, are they getting the opportunities to really. To learn training and development, to move into new roles, um, to move around if they want to have that opportunity, and to build the next generation of leaders, whether that's a technical leader or a supervisory type of leader or overall organizational leader. So we spend a lot of time on that. Um, we, um. Uh, as I mentioned, I was, um, in mission Control, um, when we lost Columbia. I don't know if any of you have ever looked at. Sometimes they use these as case studies. But there was a whole investigation and report that came out. Um, of course there were technical issues, but there were a lot of human, um, nature and culture issues. We continue to try to focus on things like people need to feel. Not only need to feel comfortable speaking up, they need to understand it's absolutely their responsibility to speak up. It's not an option not to speak up. Um, if you have a question, if you think the conclusion that's being reached isn't supported by the data, you have a responsibility to speak up. So a lot of it has to do with not only safety but integrity of, um, really following the data, um, trying to understand if we are appropriately, um, sort of taking care of. Are we doing the Right. Testing. Are we asking the right questions? And if you think we're not, you absolutely need to speak up because people's lives depend on it.

Emily Ma: That's right.

Ellen Ochoa: Um, so that is something that's incredibly, um, important to NASA, was certainly incredibly important to me.

Emily Ma: That is a really important reframe.

Ellen Ochoa: Right.

Emily Ma: Not only encouraging people to speak up, but really framing it as it's a responsibility and lives are on the line. And so you must speak up. It's wonderful. Uh, I'm going to ask one final question, and if you have questions, please start lining up. We have the microphone here. Uh, we always end, uh, our formal part of the Fireside chat with a question from Tina Selig, who was the professor who started series 30 years ago, which is if you can travel back in time and meet yourself when you were 20 years old at, uh, San Diego State studying, uh, what are a few words of wisdom you would give the 20 year old version of yourself.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah, so I was at San Diego State as an undergrad and then came here for graduate school. And I certainly, uh, learned a couple of things there. Um, in some ways you learn what not to do or who you should listen to. So I would say the overall piece of advice is find your support people, because you will run into people who are going to try to tell you you can't do what you want to do. And you have to be able to sort of tell the difference between what is constructive criticism that you can learn from and build on and what are people just sort of showing their own internal biases. So I'll just give you a couple stories. Um, when I was at San Diego State, uh, I went there not having any idea what I was going to do. Um, I played in the marching band and the wind ensemble, but figured music was really not going to be a good career path. Um, but I'd always taken a lot of math, so I continued that. I was finishing up the calculus series and I thought I really should look into some subjects that actually use this math that I'm learning. I'm just doing it for fun. And, um, so I went to talk to two professors. One was in the electrical engineering department there. And, uh, he said, well, we did have a woman come through here once, but, uh, you know, it's a really difficult course to study and I just don't think you'd be interested in what we do here. Which was kind of ironic because I'd set up the meeting with, you know, I'm interested in finding out what you do here. I mean, I really honestly did not know anything about engineering. Um, so, uh, fortunately I talked to a professor in the physics department as well and got quite a different, ah, reception. He's like, well, I'm really glad to hear you're interested in physics. And then he asked me about my math background. By the way, the engineering professor didn't ask me anything about that. Um, the physics professor did. And I said, well, I'm finishing up the calculus series and I have the highest grade in the class. He goes, well, that's fantastic. He said, you've already learned the language of physics and if you started into our classes next semester, um, you could concentrate on the concepts, whereas most students are trying to learn the concepts and the language at the same time. So I bet you do really well. Well, I never would have thought about that on my own until he said that. And then he also talked about various different careers people could have if they, um, majored in physics, which was also really important because I really did not have a good idea of what you could do with a physics degree. I had not take physics in high school. I had not taken chemistry. Um, so I really did not have that background. So that's an example of, okay, somebody who's really not at all interested in you or your career or engineering in general because, um, I think I have a lot of potential. But he certainly didn't see that. And then somebody else who was really encouraging. Um, so that's one story. Then I came to Stanford overall, had a great experience, had two great advisors. Um, however, um, the beginning, I guess, of the second quarter that I was here, I was taking the PhD entrance exam, um, which at that time was. Each student met individually with 10 different professors for 12 minutes. Nobody in the room except the professor and the student. It's all oral, so nobody knows what happened in that room except the professor and the student. So when people talk about, well, there's good ways to do things and bad ways to do things, that was actually a really bad way to do it. About a week before that exam, one of my friends, another grad student, overheard a professor saying to another one, well, I've never passed to women in this exam and I don't ever plan to because they don't belong in our department. Okay, I was probably naive, but I was shocked that it wasn't just going to depend on how well I answered the question. And I'm sure that it wasn't just limited to women. I'm sure it was, uh, other underrepresented groups, but with a format like that it was so very easy to score low. And you would have no idea why you did that. Um, uh, so, fortunately, I did pass. I did not. First of all, I did not have that professor of my 10. But of course, it made me wonder how many others thought the same thing. Um, and, uh, fortunately, I passed. As I mentioned, I had two great advisors who were very encouraging. But again, you need to find those people who can see what you can bring. You know, whether it's hard work, whether it's asking good questions, whether it's just being really motivated and dedicated to doing well. Um, and so that can be, um, family members, it can be professors, it can be other students. Um, but you don't want to let people who don't know you at all. Kind of, um, really limit your ability to follow, um, what you want to do.

Emily Ma: That is such a good lesson. So it sounds like you could have stopped after speaking to that first engineering professor.

Ellen Ochoa: But you got back at a lot, and thank goodness you did.

Emily Ma: Because we wouldn't let you lead all these missions in Johnson Space center otherwise. So whoever that individual is, thank you. Thank you. Uh, with that, uh, let's open it up for Q and A. I had

Speaker D: a question, uh, about the space station, which is aging, of course, but so important. And, you know, there's all these wonderful private commercial space companies coming online from axiom to vast. Um, so I'm curious what you think about that. And, um, private commercial space stations. But also if you see the spirit of international cooperation that exists on the International Space Station. With different space agencies all working there together at times collaborating. If you see that changing at all when and if the private commercial space stations come online. Or just what that dynamic might be like. Thanks.

Ellen Ochoa: Sure. Yeah. Happy to address it. I was lucky enough to be in on kind of the. The beginning of the International Space Station. Um, one of my jobs in the astronaut office was to head up the astronaut office support to that program. Even before we were, um, building the equipment or had sent anything to space. And that meant, um, essentially negotiating with the other international partners. On, um, how we were going to select crew, how we were going to train crew, where were we going to train crew, what language we were going to train crew in, um, you know, all of these different kinds of things. So, um, I kind of got to see it through its whole evolution. And I think one of the huge, um, successes of NASA and these other international space agencies is the fact that we've stayed together m over 30 years of partnerships. Um, there have been, um, astronauts From, I don't know, 20 different countries who have been crew members on the International Space Station. Um, of course one of our major partners is Russia. And when you think over the last 30 years, country to country, the relationships have kind of gone somewhat sinusoidally. Right. There's been good points and other points not so good. And yet um, NASA and Roscosmos have managed to maintain a um, strong partnership to the extent that um, whenever we launch ah, a NASA crew and it's on SpaceX now, um, there's always a cosmonaut on board. And whenever they launch Soyuz to the station, there's a NASA astronaut on board even to this day. And part of that is um, trying to look at the overall health of the station where uh, what if something happens to one of those two vehicles on either side and you can't use that for some period of time you would be able to continue to have both astronauts and cosmonauts on board. And um, they get trained on their own countries how to um, operate and maintain and repair equipment. So you want to have somebody who's had all that training. It's resiliency. It's resiliency, yes. I'm very proud of that. Now Congress has only authorized uh, NASA to operate the station through about 20, 30. Might get another year, but something like that. 2030. And they tasked NASA several years ago to say, well you need to encourage the commercial M world to be developing their own stations so that once the International Space Station goes away there will be some other station stations on board. So there are a number of companies who are working on that. NASA has put out requests for proposal, has provided um, millions of dollars for um, the development of that. There are a number of companies working on it, but it depends on the company what they might want to use that for and therefore whether there's any international component or not. So that is, um, you know, it really is up to the commercial company. Some are looking more at um, you know, uh, manufacturing or developing advanced materials in space. There may be some companies that are looking a little bit more at providing um, other countries an opportunity to send astronauts from their country into space for a period of time, um, whether or not there's a whole science program or not. But it's an opportunity for countries that have not yet had um, space programs or whatever to do that. So it kind of remains to be seen exactly what's going to come out of that. But I think NASA's working very hard, hard on trying to um, make sure that lessons learned that they develop stations that can actually survive and host astronauts and all that and that are safe. And I say that I'm retired from NASA, so I don't want to act like I'm right in the middle of it now. But I do try to continue to follow along. I, uh, think Acxiom is, um, hoping to put up a, um, module within, I forget the latest, a year or two, which could then separate away from the station, you know, in 2030, and they would send up other modules which would attach to it. So that's certainly one that's coming on.

Emily Ma: Well, we are, um, probably, uh, two more questions if we can fit them in in short form. Looking at the club.

Ellen Ochoa: Sorry.

Emily Ma: And I know, I know we always.

Speaker E: It's okay.

Emily Ma: We also have some spaciousness for informal questions.

Ellen Ochoa: So after this.

Emily Ma: So let's take two questions. Maybe if you could both share your questions back to back and then you could, uh, provide a combined response, I

Ellen Ochoa: should be able to remember too.

Speaker E: Patricia, thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your story. Um, as a math educator, you mentioned failure and our orientation towards it. Trying to, um, make build students who are resilient towards failure and teachers who are also resilient towards failure. Um, what is your suggestion for pushing, uh, STEM fields further into embracing, um, failure as opposed to maybe high stakes testing.

Ellen Ochoa: It's all performance based.

Speaker E: What are your thoughts on that?

Ellen Ochoa: Okay. Ah, and then please.

Speaker F: Hello. Thanks so much for being here. This is really inspirational. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the science that you do onboard the International Space Station. As a mission specialist, um, how much do you work directly with PIs? I assume on like, really directed projects and deal with equipment that I assume is like, for the first time flying in microgravity. And how much work are you doing basically on engineering these instruments and understanding very specific and directed scientific projects? Um, how does that collaboration work? Thank you.

Ellen Ochoa: All right. Thank you for your questions. Um, the first one, failure. I think, um, engineering is the perfect subject to talk about.

Emily Ma: Yes, for sure.

Ellen Ochoa: When was the first time an engineer ever put something together and it worked exactly the way you wanted it the first time? So you have to think of that. Um, I think you have to reframe failure a little bit. Is, um, the only time you've really failed is if you haven't learned anything from it. Uh, and occasionally there have been experiments where something happened and you didn't collect any data. Uh, but most of the time you have information and a lot of what you are trying to do. Um, when you are Doing something, whether it's on Earth or in space, is what are you actually measuring? Um, because that is what's going to tell you what's actually going on. And it's not going to work the right way the first time you do it. That's just the nature of engineering, I think. It's actually, um, a great subject in which to talk about failure and to realize as long as you learn something from it, it's really not a failure. It's allowing you to take that next step. Um, I would also say, um, sometimes I think students, um, get the idea that if something's really hard and they don't get it at first, that it's just not for them. I'm like, that's not true, Stem. Like, it's hard. It's very hard. It can be really hard. I used to, uh, grade papers when I was a physics major as an undergrad, and my little brother would walk by and, um, you know, uh, like, I would grade a test and it would have a very low score, like maybe less than 10 out of 100. And he goes, how can you do that? And I said, I give partial credit. But look, it's blank. Like, it's blank like they, you know, they didn't put in the formula they were going to. You know, you just. You have to. And so, um, you know, it can be hard, but, um, you know, professors have office hours. I can't tell you the number of times I went to office hours, especially as an undergrad. And then, of course, I had an advisor here to ask questions of, um, and other students, um, you know, other grad students that could help you out. So it's about, okay, when I'm stuck or I don't understand or I'm not sure what to do, where do you go seek help? Um, and it's generally out there. But you have to realize that's part of the process. Not that, oh, that means I'm a failure. It's like, no, this is exactly part of it. That process is supposed to work.

Emily Ma: Do you want to quickly touch upon the final, uh, question?

Ellen Ochoa: Yes.

Speaker E: Yes.

Ellen Ochoa: Yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, at Johnson Space center, we have mission control for, uh, controlling the spacecraft itself and working with the astronauts. However, there's a second mission control, second US Mission control. There's also international ones at Marshall Space Flight center in Alabama. That is the payload, um, control center. They are the ones that specifically talk to astronauts about an ongoing, um, experiment that they may be working on. And they can get them in touch with the PIs and so sometimes you will hear actual principal, uh, investigators talking directly with the astronauts on board. Um, uh, generally in the operational mission control, there's just one person there that talks to the astronaut. And everybody funnels the question through that person. But you can, um, get the actual principal investigators. So when something isn't quite going right, actually, even when something is and they want to understand, hey, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? You know, you want to get that very direct feedback to the principal investigator. We work through the payload control center, but certainly when a piece, ah, of equipment isn't working right, and we have all different kinds, we, we do a lot of material science. There's combustion research, there's a lot of, um, biology and biotech research going on, um, um, different people in all of those. But you do have the opportunity as an astronaut, um, both to train on the ground with that, but then also to talk directly when you're in space to help make sure that, uh, the best data can be collected.

Emily Ma: I love ending on that because so much of your story has been about continuous learning. And you keep learning new things while you've been in space and in leadership roles. And, uh, I encourage you all to take that away with you as we consider what it means to be an entrepreneur, which is to always be learning because the world changes so quickly. So with that, let's give Ellen a huge round of applause. Thank you so, so much. Hey, so, uh, next week we will have, uh, Perry Kleban, my colleague over at D School, host Jake, uh, Miller from Fellow Products. Uh, I will not be here next week and I will be back for the final week. So thank you again and, uh, please come back to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series next week.

Narrator: The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series is an original production of Stanford E Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures program. To learn more, please Visit us at STVP Stanford. Edu eCorner.