NASA Switches Gears
[Music]
hey everybody
coming to you live from nasa’s jet
propulsion lab in pasadena california
right behind me is mission control i’m
going to let you take a look
because on february 18th we’re going to
attempt to land
nasa’s next rover to mars it’s going to
be the most sophisticated rover ever
sent to the red planet
it’s even going to have a helicopter on
so jpl is an amazing place where people
are creating robotic missions that
explore the universe
they also create satellites that orbit
the earth and help us understand this
planet that we live on
but today i’m going to talk about
something a little bit closer to home
it’s going to be about a team of space
engineers that invented a copic 19
ventilator in just 37 days and all
started
when these two people bumped into each
other at the jpl cafeteria
it was right before the very first
shutdown when the pandemic started
they started to talk about work but then
they started to talk about what coveted
might do in the united states
and that there might be a shortage of
ventilators and they started to ask the
question
a really powerful important question
is what i’m doing right this moment the
most important thing
that i could be doing well they went
home everything got shut down
but dave couldn’t get that question out
of his head
in fact that weekend he assembled the
team
he found some funding and on monday
afternoon they ended up having a doctor
come to jpl who had been working on
ventilators for decades
told them all about ventilators what
worked what didn’t work
and what was really specific to coveted
now you can imagine that this group of
engineers are asking themselves are we
the right people to be making
ventilators well after talking with the
doctor more
they started to realize that yes you
know ventilators
are things that are sensing and
responding
to bodies human bodies in our case
we create instruments that sense and
respond to other bodies
like mars or jupiter
ventilators need to be able to work in
really harsh environments
well we create things that go to outer
space the ventilators also they just
like
have to work because if they don’t work
someone might die
in our case we send things to other
planets and when they get there we can’t
go there and fix them so we have a
culture
of testing and testing to prove
ourselves
that everything can work before we send
them
now uh ventilators they’re really
complicated
and they are really expensive there’s
lots of different parts and they can do
a lot of different types of things
so the team decided that they were
instead of doing a complicated
ventilator they were going to do
something that was specific just the
covered 19
and that would make it less expensive
use less parts
and if a bunch of these were in the
hospital they could the people on
that have coveted could be using them
and we could save the really expensive
sophisticated ventilators for those
people who really really needed them
and so what they ended up doing is that
they made
a set of criteria and the criteria
was do no harm don’t use any ventilator
pieces
that are in the supply chain of current
ventilators
make sure that we use as few parts is
really necessary
make sure that we can get those parts
anywhere in the world because we want
people in lots of different countries to
be able to make these same things
and then make it easy to use because if
it’s not easy to use
people just aren’t going to use it well
i was sitting at home because i wasn’t
part of this project and i’m
you know just kind of working from home
and then i got this really
unusual email by way of dave van buren
asking me if i’d like to be a team
culturalist
i’d never heard of a team culturalist
before i actually lead a team
of artists and designers and we we help
people think through their thinking
but i thought you know what i’m going to
do anything to help let me go in
and be of help and so this is jpl
it’s a really big place but they only
led around 200 people
on lab and only a few of those were
people working
on the ventilator but this this is what
i um what i came to when i first got
there there’s flashing lights
handwritten signs all over the place
a line on the ground and
and a sign up sheet and um
you know it’s really strange and i
realized that the people on the on the
project were
in different rooms and they couldn’t see
each other and so i scavenged
cameras and computers and uh cables from
all the computers and people that were
working at home
to be able to set up a system so
everyone could see each other
and in the process i realized that you
know
um this is a really important moment
there are people that are
uh this is really a historically
important moment and so
i need to be taking pictures of all
these different moments and so i was
able to get pictures of all these
special moments when
when things first started to work but
also when things didn’t work
and i was able to send it to the rest of
the team because really only about 20
percent of the team was really
at jpl the rest were at home working and
not really
feeling connected to what was going on
so this was a really great way for them
to feel like they were part of the team
now everything was going super fast and
just an example the chief engineer said
hey we need an
interface for this ventilator that’s
going to be super easy for doctors to
use
and uh could you get it done by 6 a.m
tomorrow
and so our team called up a whole bunch
of doctors all over the country at 8 00
pm
we got together with them got done at 10
pm asking them a bunch of questions
and literally a designer ended up
spending all night
uh working on this and by 6 am he had an
interface done now this was just par for
the course
for what the engineers were going
through because they were trying to
create something they’d never
thought of before and uh you know trying
to get all the parts to work get the
software to work with parts
but the entire time we’re working with
various doctors
and the person in the middle is dr
graves and he’s the person who first
told the team about what a ventilator
was
the person in the computer next to him
is the
person who uh his name is dr levin he’s
at mount sinai hospital
in new york and that was the center the
epicenter
of covid at the very beginning and he
would literally come out of the icu
in his smocks and get on the webcam and
start to
critique what we were creating so 37
days
after they first learned what a
ventilator was
they stayed up the entire night and in
the morning they had finally finished
their first prototype working prototype
of the ventilator
they had to hurry up and package it up
because then they’re gonna send it
to new york to dr levin at mount sinai
hospital where they tested it
on this human testing case where they’re
able to see whether or not the
ventilator worked and it worked
everyone was super excited but they’re
even more excited today
because there are 27 organizations all
around the world
that are creating these things whether
they’re in nigeria
in brazil in india in dozens of other
countries
and it all started with that simple
powerful question is what i’m doing
right now
the most important thing i should be
doing
i’m gonna leave you with this little
video and perhaps you might need a
tissue
thank you
we are designing an easy and rapidly
mass manufacturable ventilator device
and it is
a crazy project
this crisis is unprecedented in our
lives
and and requires precedent action
i’m so amped up i mean it really the
adrenaline rush
it’s exciting but it’s exhausting i
think we all just want to do everything
we can
to try to help
[Music]
i would say the biggest personal
challenges that
i have myself is uh i don’t have time to
sleep
i think what jpl brings to the table is
extraordinary talent
it also brings to the table tremendous
innovation
the third thing it brings to the table
is tremendous focus
the other thing that i felt i see it in
our team and that is a call to duty
i have this talent i’m an engineer or a
scientist
i can do something
[Music]
we have the potential to save human
lives people that we might know
our neighbors our families and that
intensity um
amazing it’s amazing and as stressful as
this has been for everybody in the last
couple of weeks
um not one of us can stop
[Music]
you