David Weaver

David Weaver resigned from NASA on Oct. 11, 2016. This material is being kept online for historical purposes, but it will no longer be updated.

In 2010, a New York City photographer started Humans of New York – a photojournalism experiment that tells a unique story about each of his portrait subjects.

In November 2015, Humans of New York featured Max, a young aspiring reporter who wanted to interview the head of NASA about the agency’s plans for future exploration missions.

Max’s dream to interview NASA Administrator Charles Bolden came true Monday, when the two sat down at NASA Headquarters.

We shared the resulting video this morning on NASA’s social media sites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoTJIzeLtGI[/embedyt]

Max represents the Mars Generation – the young people who will help propel NASA on
a journey to the Red Planet. Max’s curiosity represents the kid in all of us. We share his wonder and awe at the incredible human achievements in space – and here on Earth.

On behalf of the team here at NASA, thanks to Max, his parents, and Humans of New York, for sharing our dream.

Check out the NASA Photo Flickr for more photos!

At NASA, we’re always pushing ourselves to reach for new heights – and that’s what we’ve tried to do with the redesign of our award-winning website.  The new www.nasa.gov focuses on what users have told us is the most sought-after content: mission updates, images and videos. Our new design is more modern and intuitive, and makes content more appealing and accessible to readers across all digital platforms.

It also effectively highlights the significant steps we’re taking on the agency’s journey to Mars. Our website features the cutting-edge technologies we’re testing in space exploration and next generation air travel, the scientific discoveries we’re making, and the insights we’re gaining as we study our changing Earth and infinite universe. And it brings this content to visitors equally well whether you’re on a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer.

NASA imagery is the focal point for the new look, along with other more dynamic content. Image and video galleries are streamlined, and a modern “infinite scroll” means users don’t have to click through page after page of stories.

Our website receives more than a quarter million visits a day and has some of the highest customer-satisfaction ratings in government. And, like most sites, we’ve seen a real growth in mobile traffic over the last few years. Up to a third of our daily users are on mobile devices, and during live events mobile can be more than half our traffic.

The agency’s internet services team incorporated the fruits of the website’s success – user feedback and site metrics – to develop initial plans for the redesign, then validated the redesign through two rounds of user testing. The resulting site has a responsive design that presents content for an optimal and engaging viewer experience across a range of devices.

Enhanced site navigation reflects how the agency itself works. For example, the Journey to Mars topic includes all content related to NASA’s ongoing robotic exploration of the Red Planet, as well as work to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, such as information on the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket. Content about our Launch America initiative is in the International Space Station section of the site, and the Technology section has been expanded with additional related topic pages to underscore the fact NASA technology drives exploration and scientific discovery.

Visitors also have quicker access to NASA Television and a new option for viewing it. The link to NASA TV has been pulled to the top level of navigation, and when a live event airs, a NASA TV player can be embedded in the home page.

Take an online tour of the site’s new features at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/welcome-to-the-new-nasagov and enjoy the new NASA.gov.

By Phil Larson and David Weaver

NASA is laser-focused on bringing more space launches back to America through partnerships with the U.S. commercial space industry. Already two companies – SpaceX and Orbital Sciences – are making regular cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, and later this year, contracts will be awarded to American companies to transport astronauts to the space station from American soil. If Congress fully funds this plan, we’ll bring space launches back to the U.S. in 2017 — and stop shipping jobs and American tax dollars overseas.

As President Obama has said, this is “a capture the flag moment for [U.S.] commercial space flight.”

Cargo services enabled by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences ushered in a new era of U.S. commercial spaceflight. Through the Commercial Resupply Services contract, SpaceX is providing 12 missions to and from the space station for $1.6 billion and Orbital Sciences is providing eight missions for $1.9 billion. NASA recently announced plans to extend operation of the space station until at least 2024. The current CRS contract expires in 2016.

In a synopsis released yesterday, NASA announced it plans to request proposals from SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for cargo delivery services should the CRS contract be extended for one or two years. The optional extensions would allow adequate time for the commercial space industry to propose news space transportation systems for cargo resupply services under a new CRS 2 contract should NASA elect to pursue that procurement strategy. More information is available in the synopsis at: http://procurement.jsc.nasa.gov/crs2

On Monday, NASA also announced a “Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities” initiative, focused on soliciting new proposals from the U.S. private space industry to develop more partnerships in space. We want your ideas for partnerships with NASA so check this out: http://procurement.jsc.nasa.gov/ccsc/.

The growing U.S. commercial spaceflight industry is opening low-Earth orbit in ways that will improve lives on Earth, drive economic growth, create jobs and power innovations. And it is enabling NASA to focus on developing the technologies and spacecraft needed to carry out bold missions to Mars and other deep space destinations.

Phil Larson is Senior Advisor for Space and Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

David Weaver is the Associate Administrator for Communications at NASA

by Ellen Stofan

Today I was honored to represent NASA at the Climate Data Initiative launch at the White House. Along with NOAA, Google, and many partners from other government agencies and the private sector, we opened the climate.data.gov gateway with more than 100 curated, high-quality datasets, web services, and tools that can be used by local officials, emergency management personnel and innovators to help communities prepare for the effects of our changing climate change.

For decades, NASA has shown great leadership in assembling a one-stop-shop of space-based Earth science and climate change data. across all disciplines of Earth Systems Science. Given our experience with this type of large-scale data integration, we welcomed the challenge to take on a leadership role in the first phase of the Climate Data Initiative, which integrates government-wide federal datasets across all disciplines that may have an impact on coastal flooding, and to make these datasets easily available.

At NASA, we are working proactively to protect our own national assets along the coasts from the potential impacts of climate change. From Wallops Island, Virginia, to the Space Coast of Florida, we are bringing together our Earth science researchers and our strategic infrastructure managers to provide climate-related decision support in the face of sea level rise and other serious coastal changes. The launch of climate.data.gov opens the door for citizen scientists to get involved in this type of work, in support of coastal communities around the nation.

NASA has a long history of engaging generations of global citizens to use publicly available data to design creative solutions to improve life on Earth, and enable humans to live and work in space. At the Climate Data Initiative launch event, I was delighted to announce that today, NASA and NOAA are together launching a new opportunity for citizens to work with us on this very important topic of coastal flooding.

This coastal flooding challenge is part of NASA’s third International Space Apps Challenge – a two-day global mass collaboration event on April 12-13, 2014. During these two days, citizens around the world are invited to engage directly with NASA to develop awe-inspiring software, hardware, and data visualizations. Last year’s event involved more than 9,000 global participants in 83 locations. This year will introduce more than 60 robust challenges clustered in five themes: asteroids, Earth watch, human spaceflight, robotics, and space technology.

The Coastal Inundation In Your Community challenge is one of four climate-related challenges using data provided by NASA, NOAA and EPA. It invites citizens, students, and all others to create data visualizations and simulations to help people understand their exposure to coastal-inundation hazards. Solutions developed through this challenge could have many potential impacts, including helping coastal businesses determine if they are currently at risk from coastal inundation, and if they will be impacted in the future due to sea level rise and coastal erosion.

I encourage you to roll up your sleeves and get involved in this challenging and energizing event by visiting spaceappschallenge.org.

The Coastal Inundation in Your Community challenge and today’s rollout of coastal flooding data sets are just the beginning. I look forward to the rollout of additional data sets in climate.data.gov, and the opportunity to continue working with this esteemed community of my colleagues at every level of government, our public and private-sector partners and the world’s citizen scientists. And I’m even more also excited about NASA’s upcoming year of major Earth science milestones, including the launch of five missions to study the most important planet in our solar system — ours.

At NASA, we are known for exploring new worlds with rovers on Mars, scientific experiments on the International Space Station, and a vast array of missions exploring our Sun, our neighboring planets and the distant universe. Of all the planets we have explored, none yet have matched the dynamic complexity of our own Earth.

We have a long history of exploring our home planet. For decades we have designed, built, and launched Earth-observing missions to return valuable information about this complex planet we call home. In 2014, we are building on this legacy with five new Earth-observing missions – more than NASA has conducted in a single year in over a decade. These missions will provide global measurements of precipitation, soil moisture, atmospheric carbon dioxide, winds, clouds and aerosols. Your planet is changing. We’re on it.

The author is NASA’s Chief Scientist.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for the first time. I was excited to meet some of the amazing women and men who have made Stennis one of the highest ranked facilities in the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places To Work in the Federal Government ® rankings for the past two years in a row.

Before I met with the Stennis workforce, my visit began with an outreach event at the INFINITY Science Center with nearly 150 students from the local area. For a moment it looked like my flight might be canceled due to weather, but thankfully I managed to get to the science center just a little after the event was scheduled to begin. I was so excited to meet with these students and talk to them about NASA’s exploration of our universe, our sun, and our solar system. I also spoke with them about NASA’s Earth science program, including research taking place at Stennis to better understand the local area.

Dr. Stofan participating in FIRST Robotics demonstration with members of the Gulfport High School Robotics Team (Gulfport, MS)

One of Stennis’ specialties is what we at NASA call applied science. The goal of applied science is to use NASA expertise to solve real-world problems. Through applied science, NASA works on the front lines of science and engineering to make a meaningful, beneficial impact on the world. We conduct scientific research, create new tools for monitoring the environment, and generate information to help communities around the globe understand and protect the natural world around them.

For example, in 2007, NASA formed the Gulf of Mexico Initiative to help the Gulf region recover from the devastating hurricanes of 2005 and to address other issues such as water quality, wetland conservation, and more. NASA expertise – centered at the Stennis Space Center – has helped the Gulf region respond to disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, tornadoes and flooding. Researchers from Stennis use information from satellites, aircraft and other tools to observe forests, marshes, and barrier islands along the Gulf. They study this information to detect threats to wildlife habitats, and to look at ways to conserve and restore these habitats for the animals that need them.

My visit to Stennis was part of a series of visits I have been making to all of the NASA centers since I became chief scientist last year. At each center I have had opportunities to meet with early career researchers and have toured dozens of laboratories and test facilities. These visits are very important to me because science at NASA is distributed so widely across all of our centers, and it is almost impossible to comprehend the shear breadth of it. Having face-to-face conversations and behind-the-scenes access to science at our centers is the best way for me to get a clear understanding and appreciation of the results and the impact of NASA’s science investments.

Next time you are in southern Mississippi, be sure to pay a visit to the INFINITY Science Center and the Stennis Space Center. You won’t be disappointed!

The author is NASA’s Chief Scientist.

NASA is developing an ambitious human spaceflight mission to Mars using a stepping stone approach that will take us beyond the Moon, to an asteroid and ultimately to the Red Planet.   Our pioneering work sending humans to the Moon, living and working in space for more than a decade onboard the International Space Station, and our groundbreaking robotic exploration of Mars give us the confidence – and knowledge – that we can carry out these never-before-attempted missions.

As part of this plan, the agency is developing the Orion crew capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to that will allow expansion of human presence beyond low-Earth orbit.The SLS rocket’s high performance and large payload fairings also offer many benefits for a variety of potential science missions to places such as Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. NASA continues to meet important milestones ahead of Orion’s first trip to space on Exploration Flight Test-1 in September, and is making good technical progress to develop the heavy-lift rocket. We applaud the growing interest in exploring Mars, and note the significance of others outside NASA discussing the benefits of Orion and SLS to satisfy their mission needs. It confirms that these two elements are key components of future exploration capabilities beyond low-Earth orbit.

Today President Obama announced that Chicago will be the site of a public-private partnership Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute.. Led by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, the agency will support the new Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute with tools including prize challenges, university research grants and expert advice and knowledge sharing.

The idea behind the new Chicago institute is that manufacturing is being transformed by digital design, which replaces the drawing table with the capacity to work and create in a virtual environment. It has the potential for producing a faster and cheaper next-generation aircraft engine, or drastically reducing the amount of scrap material associated with small manufacturing runs and speeding the design process among multiple suppliers.

Advanced manufacturing is a matter of fundamental importance to the economic strength and national security of the U.S. and the future of NASA. Advanced manufacturing capabilities are essential for turning research discoveries, inventions, and new ideas into better or novel products. Advanced manufacturing is a catalyst for our nation’s ability to innovate. Innovation, in turn, drives U.S. economic growth and growth of U.S. productivity. There are many interrelated elements of an innovation economy, entrepreneurs, workers, tax policies, to name a few, but without manufacturing, the economic power and dynamism of innovation fades.

NASA has long known that investments in research and development enable new missions, stimulate the economy, contribute to the nation’s global competitiveness and inspire the nation’s next generation of scientists, engineers and explorers.

NASA already is a founding partner in the Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office located within the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense-led America Makes National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, which focuses on additive manufacturing, or “3-D printing,” to improve manufacturing across the U.S. For NASA, 3-D printing technology can produce rapid engineering prototypes and fabricate complex designs in a more versatile way than other manufacturing technologies, making the agency able to build, test, and fly its next-generation aerospace systems more quickly and cost-effectively.

NASA’s also a partner in the Department of Energy-led Next Generation Power Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Raleigh, N.C., targeting energy-efficient electronics — critical to future deep space mission hardware as well as the energy saving benefits to be found here on our home planet. NASA also will offer technical expertise to a new Detroit-area headquartered Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation Institute, which focuses on lightweight and modern metals manufacturing.

These new institutes serve as regional hubs of manufacturing excellence. Regional collaborations bring together industry, universities and community colleges, federal agencies and states to accelerate innovation by investing in industrially relevant manufacturing technologies with broad applications. They also support education and training of an advanced manufacturing workforce needed for our future, on Earth and in space.

For NASA, these cutting-edge manufacturing institutes can produce rapid computer designs and engineering prototypes and fabricate complex designs in a more versatile way than previous manufacturing technologies, making the agency able to build, test, and fly its next-generation aerospace systems more quickly and cost-effectively.

As America regains its leadership in high-tech manufacturing and innovation, creating new jobs and services here at home, NASA gains new suppliers and resources for the advanced space technologies needed to enable our future missions. Through partnerships like these, we’ll help out-innovate the world while continuing to explore the high frontier.

To learn more about the exciting work being done by the National Network for Manufacturing Initiative, visit:

http://manufacturing.gov/nnmi.html

Michael Gazarik

The author is NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Technology. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate is innovating, developing, testing, and flying hardware for use in future missions. NASA’s technology investments provide cutting-edge solutions for our nation’s future.

Engineers at NASA’s Langley Researcher Center in Virginia are working to reduce the time it takes space-age composite materials to go from laboratory to market and they are getting strong support from private industry and government leaders, including Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who visited Langley today to get a first-hand look at the great work being done there. 

NASA has been actively involved in the research and development of composite materials and structures for the past 30 years – and Langley has been at the forefront of that research.   Composite materials are found in all sorts of products, such as buildings, bridges, countertops, racecars, bicycles and airplanes because they are strong and lightweight.

Most of the materials used in aerospace vehicles are carbon fiber, which was discovered about sixty years ago. That is a long time from development to widespread use. Finding ways to reduce that time is the role of a new Advanced Composites Project.  

NASA’s Aeronautics mission directorate is funding the Advanced Composites Project, which received $25 million in the Fiscal Year 2014 Omnibus Appropriations, to try to make sure the U.S. aerospace industry has the tools and skills to design, develop, and certify lighter weight aircraft and spacecraft faster and cheaper.

The public-private partnership, which is being led out of Langley, is geared toward reducing the amount of time and money it takes to bring new, advanced composites from test tube to vehicles.

The project is a collaboration between government and six industry teams, including some of the biggest names in aerospace, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, GE Aviation, Bell Helicopter, United Technologies and Northrop Grumman.

The teams were chosen based on their technical expertise, willingness and ability to share in costs, certification experience with government agencies, focused technology areas and partnership histories.

Some recent examples of advances Langley researchers are making in materials science include: a 30-foot wide full-sized fuselage center cross-section that is being built for a test that is expected to happen in 2014. It will be made using an advanced composite materials technique where instead of using bolts or rivets, the structure is stitched together.

Langley researchers are also developing the next generation of materials beyond lightweight carbon fiber composites – looking at carbon nanotubes, boron nitride nanotubes and other nanostructured materials.

All of this work demonstrates NASA’s commitment to advances in technologies in air and space that bring benefits back home for people around the world.

Today, the House Appropriations Committee is marking up legislation to provide 2014 appropriations for NASA. While we appreciate the support of the Committee, we are deeply concerned that the bill under consideration would set our funding level significantly below the President’s request. This proposal would challenge America’s preeminence in space exploration, technology, innovation, and scientific discovery. We are especially concerned the bill cuts funding for space technology – the “seed corn” that allows the nation to conduct ever more capable and affordable space missions – and the innovative and cost-effective commercial crew program, which will break our sole dependence on foreign partners to get to the Space Station. The bill will jeopardize the success of the commercial crew program and ensure that we continue to outsource jobs to Russia.

In the coming months, NASA will continue to work with the Congress to move towards legislation that funds a balanced portfolio for NASA to spur economic growth here on Earth and maintain American preeminence in space exploration.