In a lab on San Antonio’s West Side, a group of scientists and engineers are building two suitcase-size devices that may help humanity find space life and an alternate place to live in our solar system.
The Ultraviolet Spectrograph and the Mass Spectrometer for Planetary Exploration, in development at the Southwest Research Institute, are two of nine scientific instruments set to travel to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, in 2024 aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe.
The 390 million-mile journey to the ice-covered moon, thought to have an ocean twice the size of Earth’s, may take the helicopter-size probe six years to reach and cost taxpayers $4.25 billion, but the payoff could be priceless.
“What’s in Europa’s oceans? Is it habitable? Can it sustain life?” asked Kurt Retherford, Ph.D., principal investigator on the Ultraviolet Spectrometer and staff scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “We need to send more missions to go investigate these things.”
SwRI, a nonprofit applied-science research organization, is the linchpin of San Antonio’s little-recognized space economy.
Over the past five years, NASA has awarded more than $1.3 billion in grants and contracts — 208 in all — to SwRI and 23 other San Antonio companies, universities and organizations. Another two area companies are part of the space agency’s $20 billion contract to provide information technology support across the federal government.
Add to that contracts and subcontracts with dozens of companies in the space sector such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX and others, and the financial impact to San Antonio and South Texas is much greater.
That’s work that’s already underway. It’s likely to increase along with the number of commercial space endeavors and ambitious NASA missions, including the possibility of manned space flight to the moon and Mars.
“We are in an extremely exciting time for human space flight,” said Walt Ugalde, NASA’s intellectual property licensing manager. “Believe it or not, there’s a lot of commercialized space technology out there if you just stop and look. We always tell folks there’s more space in your place than you care to realize.”
Ugalde, a Leon Valley native and John Marshall High School graduate, said the opportunities for doing business with NASA are boundless.
“Get real curious — engage intentionally,” he said. “Really take the time to see what kind of opportunities there are for corporations, small businesses and startups.”
Across the region, many are hard at work doing everything from designing spacecraft and sensors, developing the world’s largest telescopes, building space robots, testing the survivability of lunar habitats, maintaining NASA’s ground equipment, helping resupply the International Space Station, providing computer tech support to astronauts and more.
The city’s space history
San Antonio’s space history looms large in America’s journey to the heavens. Scientists here outfitted monkeys for space, learned how human bodies react to extreme altitudes and screened the first astronauts. They also invented freeze-dried ice cream and tested day-glo-orange Tang.
Astronaut Ed White, the first American to walk in space, was born here. Frances Northcutt, the first woman to work in Mission Control, grew up in Luling. Astronaut David Scott, the seventh person to set foot on the moon and first to drive a four-wheeled vehicle there, was born on Randolph AFB and attended the San Antonio Academy from 1943-45. Astronaut Bernard Harris, graduate of Sam Houston High School, logged more than 438 hours and became the first African American to walk in space in 1995. Longtime resident Dr. Lawrence Lamb led development of NASA’s medical exams and evaluated all those who went to the moon. Dr. Tom Tredici, an ophthalmologist who helped design the gold visors on the Apollo astronauts’ spacesuits, still works at Brooks on the Southeast Side at age 97. The list goes on.
Scientists at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph, which later became the School of Aerospace Medicine at now-decommissioned Brooks AFB, laid the foundation for understanding how space impacts the human body. In 1958, Airman 1st Class Donald Farrell spent seven days in a pressurized chamber at Randolph in an experiment that mimicked the space capsule environment.
Randolph’s and Brooks’ scientists trained and studied Sam, a rhesus monkey and one of the first primate astronauts. Sam flew to an altitude of 55 miles aboard a Mercury spacecraft in 1959. Brooks engineers fabricated his biopack survival capsule, and one of the doctor’s wives fashioned a prototype monkey spacesuit out of a silver ironing board cover. Sam retired at the San Antonio Zoo.
Countless astronauts endured physicals and centrifuge training at Brooks over the years, including 30 candidates vying to join the Mercury program in 1962. John Glenn visited again in 1998 before his shuttle mission at age 77.
Center of space universe
In San Antonio’s space business universe, Southwest Research Institute is a supergiant star. Operating on a 1,500-acre campus, the institute performs the most work for NASA in San Antonio, with 129 contracts worth more than $945 million. Last week, SwRI announced that the institute will be listed in NASA’s Rapid Spacecraft Development catalog that the U.S. government uses to procure proven spacecraft.
“We beat out Dallas and Houston by a factor of 10 in our area of space research,” said James Burch, Ph.D., SwRI’s vice president of space science and engineering. He started the organization’s space program in 1977 and grew it from just himself to its current 470 people. “You look at space research and building satellites in Texas, it’s San Antonio — nothing comes close.”
While most of SwRI’s space business — worth $150 million annually — is with NASA, its scientists and engineers also work with aerospace companies, the Department of Defense, universities and the European Space Agency.
Burch’s team has led missions that sent dozens of spacecraft across the solar system, and he rattles the details off with ease.
Image was the first to analyze Earth’s magnetosphere. New Horizons flew to Pluto and gazed the Kuiper belt. Juno, the first polar orbiter of Jupiter, uses microwaves to peer inside the planet. Magnetospheric Multiscale isn’t a catchy name, but the billion-dollar mission, launched five years ago, has sent four spacecraft to understand the interactions between the sun’s and Earth’s magnetic fields. Punch will stare at material coming off the sun and track it all the way to Earth. The eight CYGNSS satellites are revolutionizing hurricane tracking and analysis. In 2021, Lucy will head into the abyss toward the Trojan asteroids.
“In space science, nobody matches us,” said Burch, an Army veteran of the Vietnam war, whose program holds more space mission primary investigator positions than any other organization in the country. “A lot of people are jealous, but too bad. We’re super overloaded right now with work.”
And SwRI is hiring.
“We like to hire young engineers and young scientists and let them sink or swim with us — that’s the way we do it,” he said. “People that are willing to work hard and work fast are successful.”
According to Burch, the real challenge is attracting the scientific and engineering talent to San Antonio, due largely to the fact that there aren’t a lot of aerospace companies in the area.
“You’ve got to convince them to come to a place they haven’t thought of being before, and there’s a certain amount of culture shock,” he said. “Once they get here, they don’t want to leave, and that’s another problem because you do want to have a certain amount of turnover.”
Burch attributes much of SwRI’s success to its well-funded research and development program.
“I’ve never proposed anything that I haven’t already built a prototype and proved that it works,” he said. “A lot of our competitors don’t have that and so they’re proposing ideas — you know, drawings — and I’ve got a prototype. That gives you a real edge.”
SwRI scientists get one shot at ensuring their spacecraft is ready for flight.
“That’s the exciting part of it because you’re working on something and you know you can’t fix it,” he said. “So, it launches, and it’s got to work for five or 10 years, and you can’t fix it except whatever you can do with software, but not that much.”
Burch is currently lead investigator on the Magnetospheric Multiscale project, which will help scientists understand magnetic reconnection, the process that leads to solar flares and explosions of solar material that can wreak havoc on Earth. He’s also leading Europa Clipper’s Mass Spectrometer mission that may find life-forming compounds erupting from Europa’s ocean vents.
“You want to find if space life exists elsewhere, any kind of life, whether it’s a cell or a critter, right?” he said. While it’s very cold on Europa, and a similar moon of Saturn, in their oceans “down deep it’s habitable for cells, maybe fish.”
“Who knows? You got to take the first steps.”
He’s confident his instruments can find building blocks of life if they’re present on Europa.
Kurt Retherford and his core team of 20 people at SwRI, as well as hundreds of others around the country, have worked on their Ultraviolet Spectrometer for more than five years.
“What really excites me about studying Europa is the potential for finding a new place in the solar system where life could originate,” he said. “That would set us up to do a subsequent mission where maybe we land on the surface and find more solid evidence for life that has existed there or may be ongoing today. That kind of discovery — life in the solar system — we haven’t done that yet, and this would really change our perception of who we are as humanity.”
Small business, big impact
A low-key ’60s-era building on the city’s East Side serves as home base for the Rothe family of companies — Rothe Development, Rothe Enterprises and Rothe San Antonio Calibration. Founded by Wilhelm “Bill” Rothe, a member of Werner von Braun’s Operation Paperclip team of rocket scientists, Rothe Development opened in 1967 and has collaborated with NASA since 1973.
Today, the company oversees 15 NASA contracts worth nearly $300 million that employ 125 people around the country. Rothe also works as a subcontractor on another seven space contracts.
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In a wood-paneled conference room, company Vice President Dale Patenaude and his son, Eric, director of business development, both University of Texas-Austin engineering graduates, laugh and banter as they recount their business’s contributions to space exploration.
In the early days, Rothe ran various engineering projects at Brooks where it maintained centrifuges, tested equipment and, at one point, designed a small treadmill for dogs. Later, Rothe took over the machine shop and services contract at Johnson Space Center and performed machining, painting and precision cleaning.
Cleanliness is an important part of space flight, and for years Rothe was responsible for removing all germs and hydrocarbons from items going to space.
“The last place any kind of hardware that would go up on a space shuttle was our cleaning rooms,” said Eric, who worked at Johnson Space Center before returning to the family business.
The company also made the cables that went on the gantry for the shuttle, said Dale, who’s been with the company since 1971.
“In the first space shuttle launch, they didn’t think they needed them so they didn’t put covers over the cables, OK, and the first launch burnt up all the cables,” he said, “and we got an immediate reorder — ‘Hurry up and redo us all these cables!’”
Over the years, the company designed and produced the shuttle’s joystick controllers, upgraded simulator software for the shuttle’s arm and redesigned interior instrument panels. Rothe engineers even designed and built a model of the space station that Christa McAuliffe was planning to use as a teaching aide during the doomed Challenger mission.
Managing the NASA machine shop was often a hectic endeavor.
Dale recalls one satellite that “didn’t start — it was a dud for some reason — and so they suddenly had a hurry-up program to make a satellite capture device” for the shuttle.
The problem: The satellite wasn’t designed to be captured, nor was the shuttle’s arm designed to grab a satellite.
“We were busy making iteration one while they’re designing iteration two and iteration three,” he said.
Eric said, “When you’re a service provider in the machine shop at a place like NASA, you’re constantly asking, what’s this new thing we’re doing?”
After the Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, Rothe machined a replica shuttle wing of aluminum and carbon fiber for testing at SwRI. The problem was that the specific type of aluminum needed wasn’t available anymore.
“So we had to go to the aluminum mill and make a special order of this alloy of aluminum,” Dale said. “And we had to use the same kind of tooling that (the original builder) used, so we had to look through all the diagrams and everything and figure out exactly how they put these wings together.”
Rothe had about 100 projects going at any one time while operating the Johnson Space Center machine shop.
“The biggest hassle is not making the stuff, it’s accounting for all of it,” Dale said.
The company has supported NASA’s neutral buoyancy lab — basically a 40-foot deep swimming pool used for training astronauts — since 2003. And the biggest thing it’s working on now for NASA is running information technology for flight operations, which includes direct support for astronauts and the flight directors.
“We do the help desk for the astronauts,” Dale said. “It doesn’t matter what time of day. They’re VIPs.”
Rothe also supports cargo missions to space, packaging materials in custom foam cutouts and Kevlar bags, and escorting the cargo to the launch pad.
“The type of cargo you send up is everything from food for the astronauts to clothing and science experiments and hardware you use to fix stuff on the space station,” Eric said. “All sorts of stuff.”
And then there are contracts for ground support equipment, laboratories, calibration, radar, space launch weather instrument, welding and sheet metal work.
“So there’s all sorts of big jobs and all sorts of little jobs,” Eric said.
Dale said he’s seen the contracts ebb and flow over the years.
“NASA has this habit of taking small business contracts and making them part of a big contract, and then they go for a number of years,” he said. “And then they make it back to small business again, and it goes back and forth between small business and big business.”
Eric said many contractors in the NASA sphere form teams.
“It’s a process by which you can use your capabilities with someone else’s capabilities to have a team that covers all the capabilities necessary for any kind of contract,” he said. “So, on any given contract where you’re a prime and a company is a subcontractor to you on this project, you’ll be the other way around on another contract.”
Dale said Rothe will likely do more information technology work for NASA, and keep an eye on the agency’s budget.
“It’s a matter of priorities,” he said. “How much priority do you put on space?”
Both are optimistic for the future.
“I’m excited to see that NASA has been given the opportunity to let the private companies take care of some of the small stuff so they can think about the big stuff,” Eric said. “I think NASA should be in the mode of dreaming big and doing the hard projects and letting the contractors fill in underneath.”
Looking to the stars
Both the University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio hold contracts with NASA. But those aren’t the only efforts at local universities to advance space exploration. One UTSA professor is leading an international project to usher in the next generation of massive telescopes to better understand the universe.
Chris Packham, physics and astronomy professor at UTSA, studies exoplanets. These planets orbit stars other than our sun, and they could unlock knowledge about life in space and the development of the universe. The nearest exoplanet is more than four light years away, and there currently are no telescopes or technology to study them from Earth.
“To move things forward, we need to think about the next-generation telescopes,” Packham said. One example is a 30-meter telescope in planning for construction in Hawaii or La Palma, one of the Canary Islands.
“I’m leading part of a group to build an advanced infrared instrument for the 30-meter telescope,” he said. “And part of the key drive there is to understand exoplanets, understand their atmospheres and deep-probe the formation of these exoplanets.”
He said scientists could also use the proposed “instrument to peer into the centers of galaxies far away from our own galaxy and understand the effects of the always-present supermassive black hole.”
Collaboration between UTSA and SwRI, as well as experts in California, Hawaii, Japan, Canada, India and China, is the only way such a complicated instrument can be built, he said. The project could take decades and cost many millions of dollars.
“It’s thrilling to think that we can go out and command this kind of exciting exoplanet scientific venture, but it’s also really nice to think that this brings these worldwide collaborators here to San Antonio,” he said. “It’s a real thrill for me for San Antonio to be kind of the home base for this proposed next-generation instrument.”
At the crossroads
Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO XArc Exploration Architecture Corp. and board chair of the WEX Foundation, has a vision of San Antonio being a space hub. In 2013, he saw Houston redeveloping an airport into a spaceport and SpaceX scouting locations at Boca Chica and McGregor, and realized San Antonio was in a good position to develop into a major space player.
He believes San Antonio can become a “space construction and habitation” leader.
“The expertise and abilities for terrestrial application in road construction or even companies that do refurbishment of aircraft,” he said, are examples of the kinds of companies that could transfer their knowledge for space applications.
“Whatever you do in your profession, passion or application, you can apply that in space,” he said. For any profession, “I can give you a place where you can fit into the space community.”
Ximenes sees San Antonio’s diverse culture, military ties and proximity to Houston as important factors in attracting talent, and he’s helping children learn about space and pursue space careers via the WEX foundation.
“Whatever is put up there is going to have a benefit down here,” he said. “Nobody thinks about San Antonio being part of the space program.”
On Aug. 6, the San Antonio industry group Tech Bloc hosted a Facebook Live event that brought together a panel of space experts — including Packham, Retherford, Ugalde and two other NASA scientists — to discuss “S.A.’s growing role in off-planet exploration.”
At least 90 people watched the event, and the recorded broadcast has more than 3,000 views, according to Ileana Gonzales, Tech Bloc’s operations and community engagement manager.
The goal was to use some of the San Antonio space research “as a distraction and a way to think about things other than the COVID situation,” Packham said.
Ugalde sees a bright space future for the community.
“I’ve been trying to embed myself back into the San Antonio market so that NASA can begin to leverage the expertise of industry and innovators in the region. We are reaching out to businesses interested in participating in the technology development aspect of commercial space particularly for the moon and Mars,” he said. “There’s a way for people in San Antonio industry and businesses to become an active participant in their space program.”
He said San Antonio’s biomedical, cybersecurity, engineering, tourism and art industries are ripe for business with NASA.
“We do know one of the cool things about San Antonio is its thriving arts community,” he said. “We’ve always found that folks that can apply a little bit of artistic, abstract thinking to engineering challenges usually come up with novel solutions to complex problems.”
Brandon Lingle writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org.
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