 Welcome back to OpenJS World. We're celebrating 25 years of JavaScript with a lineup of more amazing speakers. I'm Robin Ginn, the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, coming to you from my home in Washington State. Today, I have the honor of introducing our first keynote speaker, NASA astronaut Christina Cook. So who dreamt of being an astronaut when they grew up and wonder, is there still time? You know, when I was a kid, we built and launched model rockets in our science class in school. And today, we're learning about how software is powering space missions. But you know, last year for me, watching the all-woman spacewalk was just like the significant moment in science and technology. And NASA astronaut Christina Cook was on that spacewalk. She also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with 328 days in space. Christina graduated from North Carolina State University with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Physics and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. Please welcome NASA astronaut Christina Cook. Hello everyone and thank you so much Robin. It is really my distinct pleasure to be with you today on OpenJS World. I used to be a coder in former lives and I had to kind of leave that behind to get more operational. So it is just wonderful to be with you guys. Even in my research for this talk, I was lucky enough to end up getting my own account on GitHub. So I'm getting there. I hope to use it a little bit to share some of the apps I've been writing for my nieces and nephews. So today, I really can't wait to share with you guys a little bit more about my side of the things and how we use the things that you guys do to explore space, which of course we completely do depend on the work that you all do. My talk is going to be kind of in three parts. First of all, a little bit just about where we are right now in human spaceflight, kind of story time about my experience, my journey, and my mission, and then just a couple thoughts and insights, like I said, about how our worlds are interdependent. So with nothing further, let's get started. And first of all, where we are today. So this is the International Space Station where I live for about 11 months working on board. And as you know, it is an orbiting laboratory that we use for microgravity research, things that we can't do here on the ground. And that's to bring benefits back to Earth and also to test technologies and operational concepts for how we can actually explore deeper and in longer space missions. Astronauts get to and from the space station in a couple of ways right now. For the last several years after the shuttle was decommissioned in 2011, we had gotten onboard via the Russian rocket called the Soyuz. And that is pictured up here. That's how they look when they're docked to the space station. But as of May of this year, we actually have a new ride to space, and it is the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle. So we're bringing in commercial partners to achieve that role of getting astronauts to and from the space station. We've been using commercial partners for getting cargo to and from the space station for years. And these are two pictures of some of those companies. This is the SpaceX cargo dragon flying docked to space station above the Nile. And here is the Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vehicle. And all of this new reliance and looking into fostering a space economy has really been so that NASA itself can focus our internal objectives even further and deeper into space. We are now working on the Artemis mission, which is going to go back to the moon with people in this decade and then hopefully take those technologies and apply it to a future Mars mission. So it's a really exciting time to be exactly where I am right now and involved in the human space flight mission. Speaking of that, shifting gears, talking a little bit about my journey and how sort of starting it out as an early electrical engineer and physics lab person working on space science instrumentation. So this is working on those space science gadgets that fly on planetary probes and Earth orbiting satellites that study the things that we send those missions into space to do. And obviously that involved a lot of custom software to test our equipment and to develop it along the way. But after getting this job at NASA right out of college, I actually quit that perfectly good NASA engineering job to pursue another dream that I have, which was working in the Antarctic. And I called this the first that I got to do of science on the frontiers. So I did a lot of different sessions that eventually moved me to working both in the Arctic and Antarctic. And it was from a place about 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle that I actually submitted my application to become an astronaut. And much to my surprise, about a year later I found myself here among the class of 2013 astronauts. And the one notable thing about our class that I'm really proud of is we were the first and so far the only class to be half men and half women. And I think that sort of embodies a lot of my experience so far in human space flight. For the first two years after being selected, you're in candidate training. And that means you get to learn a lot of new things. So my engineering brain had to learn how to sort of operate at supersonic speeds. We had to learn how to fly high performance jets, think fast, solve really important problems really quickly. Had to learn how to do spacewalk training, which as you know is something that's both a really huge mental and physical challenge. There were other things we had to learn all about the engineering systems on board the space station, as well as how to operate the robotic arm. And eventually a few years later I found myself assigned to an actual mission aboard the space station. And then we moved into a phase of our training that was more mission specific. So I finally got to learn about the science that I would actually be doing on my mission. And I got to learn the Soyuz rocket. Now take a look here at our user interface. And I want you to kind of remember that picture because from here we're going to talk about kind of where we're going in the future. I got to train a lot in Russia. So one of the great things about the international space station is that international aspect. And pretty soon I found myself launching from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket. The Soyuz spacecraft makes way from the rocket and it begins its autonomous flight and then eventually approaches the space station. And this very docking mechanism you see here forms the hatch that we open up when we float into the space station for the first time. Not long after we're put right to work that work includes doing maintenance and upgrades on the space station systems. It includes operating the robotic arm to capture from autonomous flight some of these visiting cargo vehicles. And of course that includes science. And that science is science that can only be done on microgravity. And I since I'm talking to programmers I just have to say one of the things I love about this is when I was doing a lot of programming of physics modeling programming I would you know we're always confounded by these boundary conditions and having to code for sort of the edges of what were of the theoretical things that we're trying to explore. Well to me removing gravity as a variable is one of the great things about space flight. We no longer have to worry about you know the kind of nuances of whether the fluid we're studying is on the bottom where gravity is you know causing it to interact differently with the walls of the vessel versus the top and that kind of gives us that edge in industrial settings but we're really trying to probe these absolute fundamentals of different physical processes. In this picture however I'm taking advantage of a different aspect of microgravity which is growing protein crystals which helps us to develop pharmaceuticals. So there's a lot of different ways that microgravity can lead us to really cool discoveries. In this picture it's another example of technological advances in tech demos. This is an older version of an autonomous flying robot that we have on the space station and a newer version. This older version actually relied on separate sensor systems and ultrasound to have it know its location and orientation in space whereas this robot actually has the computational power to map the module that it's in and rely on video processing to understand its location and orientation. And then of course our work on board the space station wouldn't be complete. We didn't talk about spacewalks. This is Jessica and I preparing our suits prior to our spacewalk that we had the honor of doing which was the first time a spacewalk had been done by two women outside the space station. And this is what we look like out there on a day at work and we work of course with ground teams that are walking us through every moment of our seven-hour spacewalk out there so it's a really exciting way to contribute and to keep the space station running optimally. As I mentioned to you before the international aspects of what we're doing is in my opinion one of the greatest legacies of the space program and of the international space station. This is me working with my cosmonaut colleague Alexei of Chenin prior to one of their spacewalks and the Russians actually have their own spacewalk systems in airlocks and I had the honor of suiting them up and operating their airlock working with the Russian ground control systems to do that as we went. We also work really closely with the Russians on emergency procedures and drills so it's truly a group effort. We also had astronauts just during my time up there from Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and we also have partners in the Europe so I had an Italian astronaut that I flew with as well. So it's a truly international partnership and kind of developing those relationships in ways of doing business is just so important. Well it's not all work on board the international space station of course one of the things we love to do together is group meals and group eating. This is us opening up a bunch of fresh fruits straight off of a cargo vehicle and one of our favorite things to do is actually pizza night. Normally all of our food is dehydrated and rehydrated to eat out of packets or MREs so anytime we can figure out a way to make real food ourselves it's really a treat. My ultimate favorite thing to do of course is to look out the window upon earth and you know for this crowd I have to say I could have called this looking down on every spot that uses a JavaScript in the world because I'm pretty sure there's not a single spot that I looked down upon and said maybe the middle of the oceans where JavaScript wasn't running so it's truly a global enterprise but my favorite thing to do is to take pictures. I love taking pictures of the night sky and of course of the earth and I know you all are a global community but I believe you're headquartered in San Francisco so and of course lots of coding happens there so this is a picture that you know you can see the edge of the earth and the earth's horizon and this is the San Francisco Bay and zooming in this is a photo I took with the 800 millimeter lens and I think you guys are right in this neighborhood right around here but of course all good things have to come to an end and eventually it is time to head down back down to earth when we undock from the space station the next thing that happens is our vehicle actually separates so the only part that returns to earth is a tiny little crew capsule that has all the heat shielding so that when we hit that atmosphere and the friction of the atmosphere can start to slow us down we kind of enter into what's like almost like a flameball and that's how we slow down so that we can eventually go under parachute and land on the ground so you can see how burnt the capsule is from that experience and that's actually what's planned before you know it the Russian search and rescue forces are extracting you and that's basically the end of your mission so shifting gears a little bit to the next part of the talk about software so of course to get the mission done and to do all those things that I talked about in the space of a day we have a lot of custom software that we use and it spans the realm of both web-based and standalone so this is just a screen cap I actually happen to have and back here you can see a web-based software that's actually our scheduling software our days are scheduled down to five-minute increments and this software is completely the hub of every single thing we do it's how we learn about the different state of the systems on board the space station and any constraint states those things may apply to our own day and we learn what we're doing we have the procedures for how we're going to do it the interdependencies of everything so it's extremely important and then standalone software this is an example of standalone software for our treadmill because of course exercise is really important to keep our bones and muscles healthy on board the space station but we can't just have any treadmill because we have to actually wear a harness that bungees us down just so that we can be able to run and stick to the wall to be able to get our exercise in so this is a little bit this is the GUI for that exercise equipment during our days we actually run kind of our whole lives off of a tablet that has web-based software that contains all those procedures that we need to run through our day so this is just extremely important for what we do and there's kind of an operational side to it and then we also do have access to the internet through the tablet on a different network so this is absolutely the hub of what we do and enables everything we do also I picked this picture because it's kind of right around our server farm here and we have all these virtual servers and hypervisor servers that are hosting all of our operational products talking a little bit about kind of where we are in technology and even some of the future I'm hoping some of you all are aware that like I mentioned earlier in May we had a launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying crew to the International Space Station and one of the big stories about that was the displays and how the astronauts interacted with the systems on board and they did it through this was the first spacecraft that had touchscreens the gloves of the spacesuit were actually designed to allow the astronauts to use that touchscreen and to do so even in a high vibration environment and even in a different thermal different thermal environments they may encounter there were a couple buttons on the bottom for critical operations like firing pyros if they needed to do some of those dynamic operations and something happened with the redundant computer system and also some of the parachute systems down here but by and large everything was controlled through the touchscreen which was truly a breakthrough and it's one of the reasons that NASA wanted to foster the space economy to really bring out that innovation that's available kind of when you tap into people that don't have that legacy the legacy hardware that has you know tried and proven but may actually be sort of linking you to technologies that are of a different era so it's exciting to see how they kind of started from scratch on a lot of these technologies now the NASA vehicle that's being built currently is called the Orion vehicle and that's the part that's the crew module that's part of that Artemis mission that I mentioned it's going back to the moon and then on to Mars and we also have a really neat thing within the astronaut office where we're actually developing the crew interfaces for this vehicle within the astronaut office and that's one way to make sure that the test pilots and the people that are actually going to be flying these vehicles has have insight early on this lab is called the rapid rapid prototype lab and it's one of the very few development processes within kind of a aerospace vehicle development that it's actually user driven where there's not a requirements document that sort of trickles down to forming the hardware but we actually make the interface GUIs first and then sort of document later and describe how they work we don't have touch screens in Orion but we do have the soft key ability so you don't see nearly as many switches as they in the Soyuz or in the shuttle and these are a couple examples of some of those screens and another innovation is that instead of having standalone procedures that where you know astronauts have to search around for buttons or the different you know thing that they're going to monitor the procedures are actually built into the displays so you run a procedure on the display and it may say pop up a menu that shows you where you need to be looking and then you know to verify a certain state or something like that so it's definitely becoming a more integrated flow where we're taking some of those best practices from industry about user interfaces and applying them and then finally you know the last thing is perspective having done this long mission and having had the privilege of contributing to something I've loved for so long it really helps me to think about the future of exploration and I think that for me living on board for 11 months taught me that yes we can do extremely long duration missions going deeper into space we can't explore Mars it was doable you know it took identifying certain strategies to make sure that we were thriving and doing our best every single day but to me the future of space exploration is bright and I'm looking forward to seeing just how far we go in my lifetime and with that thank you again for your attention for taking a little break from all of the hardcore coding stuff you guys are talking about and listening to one of the many ways that the work that you do is applied hopefully to bring back benefits to all of humanity I would love to hear what you are curious about and answer any questions you have Hey Christina thanks for joining us and thanks for taking questions from our community absolutely my pleasure thank you Robin great so the first two questions we have are somewhat related you might have touched on it a little bit Ellie Galloway who is a young developer in San Diego wanted to ask if you have the internet in space and my son Nate who's a developer in Seattle kind of had a related question he said are you coding in space and if so can you check stack overflow if you need to those are great questions yes we can surf the internet in space and sometimes it turns out to be really helpful yes we even will google YouTube videos to figure out how we can do little like jobs parts of our jobs up there or just for entertainment to feel connected with the world one interesting thing is that we can only surf the internet on our tablets so they do a really I guess you know for security reasons keep our ability to surf the world wide web completely on a separate system from our operational products that we use to go throughout our day so yes for 11 months I surfed the web only on a tablet but I survived and you know onboard the space station we don't do a lot of coding I would imagine that if it were a hobby and you requested like specific app to do some you could I did not but I haven't so I didn't necessarily access Stack Overflow up there but I have been accessing a lot down here on the ground I'm trying to teach myself how to write apps like I mentioned earlier for my nieces and nephews which has been a lot of fun so I have sort of like gotten into the Stack Overflow world that's very cool so Alexander who's an open source technical leader in Moscow Russia said wow I know NASA is doing tons of things with open source what's the culture of sharing like at NASA oh Alexander thank you so much we have a lot of NASA this time in English yes thank you Alexander for the question we do share quite a bit with open source at NASA as you know an astronaut I unfortunately don't get to do a lot of the coding myself but we have all kinds of hacker challenges that are put out by NASA to solve different problems that we have within the human space flight and of course all of those are can you know be built on open source in addition I think about things like modeling you know the finite element modeling and using open source programs for that like you know the higher level languages maybe are things like that so it is definitely ubiquitous and I think that we all appreciate that there's this culture of sharing the work that we've done and the means by which to do that great and we have Deb from Phoenix Arizona who asked how has aerospace engineering benefited from open source technologies well again I think that everywhere you look you would find examples of it benefiting in our hacker challenges you see options all the time of people sharing open source code and of course having those platforms available to share versioning and things like that are absolutely just fundamental to doing that one example that comes to mind that's really important is in the recent crew dragon vehicle their user interfaces actually were built on chromium and with JavaScript so that's just an exciting thing that I see going forward that we're all utilizing those platforms that are available you know to everyone together okay Joe Sepe from New York asked is node modules really the heaviest object in the universe part of this going around and I have to say I'm not sure but you know if you look at how it bends space time hey if it's you know bending space time more than a black hole then you know juries out gotta go with that he did have a serious question though about what kind of security concerns are there in space do you have cyber attacks for example you know luckily our software engineers and our IT people on the ground make sure that the space station systems are completely isolated and hopefully safe from all of that the three different main computer systems that we have that are isolated are the computer system that actually physically does all the IO you know effectors and sensors on board the space station then there's the operational PCs that we use throughout our day like some of the software that I showed you earlier that's also separate from any kind of external network like I mentioned we can't necessarily surf the internet on that there are very specific things that we can do that require network resources or you know in an interconnected world there and then we have sort of the tablet side of things and that's where if we're on a separate network blah blah blah we can actually sort of access the worldwide web so I would say we do it by separation and you know interestingly when I got to space I thought that I've you know all the Wi-Fi networks are going to be open right because obviously no one's you know in the apartment next door are going to steal your Wi-Fi but no we still had passwords on all of our Wi-Fi networks not quite sure why but you know maybe you can never be too safe and you're not going to share that Wi-Fi that's right cool you got a shout out from a fellow NC State grad Paul Barnum who is a software engineer in Raleigh Durham area so we want to know really how did your university studies prepare you to be an astronaut wow in so many ways I would say the most important way was kind of in those later classes where you're doing a lot of teamwork and you're getting to solve problems in new ways and kind of relying on a diverse team to solve those problems I was actually one of those more like fiercely independent folks in school so I wish I had sort of gravitated more towards team team sports in solving technical problems earlier because I was kind of late to the game on that but you know some of the classes I had an embedded systems development that kind of brought all those elements together I had little green boards I had software I was very happy and I was working with a team of people where we all were contributing and our strength areas was really really cool and then also the extracurriculars I took up rock climbing at NC State they offered that class as a PE class and interestingly in my interview to become an astronaut I think we talked more about rock climbing than we did about electrical engineering and you know I also studied abroad at NC State I studied abroad in Ghana in West Africa and those experience absolutely absolutely lent themselves to me learning how to be adaptable how to survive in new places and how to just kind of like bring a set of tools into a new situation to hopefully thrive and to just appreciate other cultures as well so a lot goes back to that and it's great to hear from another NC State Wolf Becker that's so cool okay so you know you and I you and I may share some experiences of being the only woman in the room so you know what's your advice to the many women in tech who may find themselves the only woman in the room and really struggling to break through definitely I think back to my years working and learning as an electrical engineer and I remember situations like that all the time I remember sitting in meetings being the only female voice and I felt like as soon as I would open my mouth and brick talk you know all eyes just turned because it just stuck out like a sore thumb really funny story too one of my favorites about this and it really to me speaks to how there may not be as many overt things that are going on in our worlds that are barriers when we find ourselves in those situations but there are still barriers and there are still things that make that an uneven playing field and one of those stories is I was in a conference room with you know 10 other men engineers and it was we were taking a break from a big technical meeting we were having and everyone filed out you know for the bathroom break and went in a row to the bathrooms then of course there's a men's room and women's room next door to each other and I was talking with the engineer in front of me in this kind of line of people filtering out and what a gentleman he held the door for me to the men's room so you know it was just one of those examples where it's both transparent and it's tangible all at the same time and for me one of the ways that helped me the most to get through those times was to identify and then strategize so for example when I I knew that knowing I was the only female voice in the room was preventing me from speaking up so I would actually visualize and what we do and actually as astronauts is chair fly situation so I would literally practice speaking up I would practice or visualize the feeling that I would have when all the attention came on me suddenly sort of more so than if anyone else just spoke and I would practice how that felt and how I would work through it and so that's one strategy another strategy for example that was really helpful for me was when I learned about the concept of stereotype threat I'm not sure but just to explain that to anyone who may not have heard of that stereotype threat is kind of something that has been proven through research that when you are aware when you expect there to be a stereotype in the room it actually can negatively affect your performance in such a way to bolster or back up that stereotype so for example if you're a female and you're assuming everyone in the room thinks you're not as good of a coder not as good at spacewalking something like that you're going to have a separate sort of thread in your mind running thinking and worrying about that that's actually going to make you lean on the side of fulfilling that stereotype rather than being your best it's actually going to pull performance away so how I battled that was before all of my spacewalk trainings and just to go back to that spacewalking in NASA is probably one of the areas that we see the biggest difference in terms of men and women and the you know the diversity situation there over 200 men have done a spacewalk and only about 15 women have ever done a spacewalk so it's the the biggest gap that we see so going into my spacewalk trainings we're all used to the strategy of giving yourself a pep talk but I actually develop this strategy of not giving myself a pep talk and telling myself you got this you're going to do great I told myself that everyone around me thought I was awesome at spacewalking I would actually envision them telling each other that I was a really good spacewalker I would envision them saying Christina is really good at this and just bolstering that vision in my mind would actually help me bring as much performance as I had to the situation rather than the opposite where I was thinking that they were up there in the control room rolling their eyes every time I made a mistake so you know learning what the things are that are out there doing some research on what are those still those subtle but very very tangible biases and developing your own strategies to counteract them great turns out you're a pretty awesome spacewalker well but tell me about that moment when you and when you and Jessica were out there for the first time first all woman spacewalk for sure I have a picture I'll actually go ahead and show you while we're while we're talking through that so this is Jessica and I let me know if you don't see that during actually our second spacewalk that was the second all female spacewalk and it was an amazing feeling we were very very focused on our task at hand so we didn't take a ton of mental energy to think about the fact that it was had a lot of eyes on it and it was the first all female the first one that we actually did was a contingency spacewalk it was done it wasn't planned we had never ran it on the ground in fact it had only been practice on the ground one time in the week leading up to it because it was to fix an unexpected repair situation you know I would say what got us through that was focusing on not only participating and doing it but actually thinking of how we could do it really really well so if you focus on okay I'm you know I'm just here to to get the to just do it as opposed to I'm here to be an awesome spacewalker I'm here to lead I'm here to to get this battery fixed as quickly efficiently and safely as possible I'm not just here to go out the door I think that that's what led us to kind of rise above the attention that we knew that it may be getting for being the first all female and just to execute it like any two spacewalkers would that said there was I said the one moment that we had where we kind of recognized how much honor we felt that we were getting and how special that moment was when we first went out of the airlock and we were both holding onto the handrail right outside the airlock in you know the blackness of space and we kind of caught each other's eyes and we just smiled right you know between some communications and we knew we had done it at that moment so it was a really special honor knowing that we just were so grateful for those that paved the way for us to be there in that time and also that there was a chance that we were actually providing the inspiration that so many people had provided for us in the past to be there in that moment it was just incredibly special yeah definitely inspiring to me and I know so many others so wow okay we have Priyanka Sharma from San Francisco also a developer wanting to know what are some of the things you miss about being at the International Space Station particularly given how the world is today yeah that's a good point I do kind of feel like a lot of the isolation that we're all experiencing is a familiar feeling to me you know some people have told me oh god every day feels like a Tuesday and I think oh I can relate but you know the thing I miss the most is the camaraderie of having a crew that you're working so closely with you know working with only five or six other people day to day to solve really tough problems and to get through these challenging 12-hour days was just an experience that as adults we don't really get that very much you know to get to know people their ins and outs or strengths and weaknesses and to contribute to such a close knit team day in and day out is definitely what I miss the most great and our OpenJS program committee wanted to know what is the hardest technical issue you solved and what process led to your success you know that is an interesting question there were so many little things that we had to solve up there but it also goes back to what I was mentioning about how but in becoming an astronaut I actually had to leave behind a lot of the really highly technical things that I did and trade them in for learning how to work operate and think operationally and so a lot of the things that I would say I contributed to or solved were more about finding efficiencies in microgravity rather than you know finding a bug in a code that I had to dig around for but on that point one time before I flew in space and I was a Capcom which is the person that's communicating with the astronauts because of my history as a programmer and just someone who used command line stuff I was able to actually find a bug in one of our procedures and save the astronauts some time that because there was a typo where the little dot prior to the file structure name was missing so it you know wasn't going to say to start in the president directory so that was you know my one moment but up there I would say that again a lot of it was more just looking at the problem at hand and trying to strip away the biases that I had coming from a gravity centric environment so a lot of times when I was working with a researcher on the ground on some equipment that was flying in space for the first time there were a lot of legacy kind of one grab one g things that were causing was causing the equipment to not perform optimally so providing ideas for solutions we had a fiber optic experiment for example that had to be tweaked a little bit because to better account for the lack of convection in its heating processes and things like that so working with the researchers and pointing out things they may not have thought of for microgravity was kind of where I saw our role as hopefully contributing Oh great one last question so just broadly what's a good day at work for you that look good a good day in space I'll take a good day in space is a day where you get to do a little bit of all of our different tasks where you get to and this was most days actually because in our 12 hour day we were definitely doing a little bit of everything so a little bit of science a little bit of maintenance a little bit of photography a little bit of getting to work with the team on doing something you know really high stakes maybe you were going to study that day or do an onboard training for capturing your cargo vehicle or doing a space walk and then you know getting to talk to friends over the the voice over IP phone in the end of the day that that makes for a great day in space and I think the same kind of stuff makes for a great day here on earth great well we really appreciate you joining us you really made us have a great day at our conference and I know people enjoy watching this for time to come so thank you very much yeah great to have you thank you great to have you too