Jim Reilly: 3 Essentials I Learned as an Astronaut

Dr. Jim Reilly’s past is perfect for the future of space. As an astronaut for the Space Shuttle program, he served as mission specialist, training leader, and operations lead, performing five spacewalks along the way. As director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), he led the agency as it built advanced data capabilities to deliver critical insights for hazards determination, critical resource characterization, and ecosystems changes. Today as a Booz Allen leader, he helps clients from the Department of Defense to NASA solve complex space challenges.

Those challenges include an increase in the number of on-orbit assets and increasing threats to them, both in the sheer volume of assets and the growing number of space-faring competitors. To maintain space superiority for future generations of Americans, the U.S. government must dominate the field in space domain awareness and traffic management, ground systems modernization, and space systems integration. ​

Here’s what Jim had to say about meeting those goals and using lessons from his time as an astronaut to protect the future and advance tomorrow.

Here’s my “Exhibit A”: We had an Apollo 13-type situation on Space Shuttle Atlantis during flight STS-117. The mission was to deliver and assemble a truss segment and solar arrays for the International Space Station.

We had a great crew that was phenomenally focused and yet open to changes—Rick Sturckow, a Marine colonel at the time who now flies for Virgin Galactic—was overall commander and managed all requirements for the shuttle side, while I managed payloads and EVA (spacewalk) activities. We also had a great mission control (MCC) flight team for both shuttle and ISS supporting us on the ground. 

When we discovered a part of the thermal protection system (TPS) blanket on the left OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) pod was damaged during launch, our teams immediately went to work. The risk was the plasma generated on our reentry could burn through the TPS to the propellant tanks and we would have become a very expensive meteor! 

The mission control teams operated in shifts to figure out a solution using materials we had on hand, creating procedures and then training videos. When we saw the videos, they were so good that we were able to tell the ground crew, “We’ve got this!” 

I’ll never forget the look on their faces. They had done an absolutely spectacular job with the repair procedures, we rewrote our EVA tasks, and we were able to effect the repair with no problems.

Teamwork was important at USGS too. Having an inclusive environment pays dividends. Recently on a plane flight, I ran into some people who used to work there and they said, “Even though you weren’t there long, you really moved the needle.” I treasure that.

And that’s great for clients, since I can pull in additional expertise from colleagues working in the heart of space transformation—like digital engineers furthering International Space Station development, analysts using artificial intelligence (AI) to calculate optimal Artemis launch dates, teams modernizing ground systems with open architectures, and innovators in space cyber defense. We have an amazing depth to our benches and it shows with our success in winning complex projects and delivering quality results to our customers.

As just one example of many, at USGS, we pulled together layers of information to help California get ahead of the firefighting season—rainfall, structures, tree types and so forth so they could preposition their equipment. It was manual and took a long time. 

In space, you need to operate at the speed of decision—often in milliseconds. So here at Booz Allen, we build open data platforms that we adapt for space missions, so the machine can do in fractional seconds what might take a human 30 minutes or more. 

Our teams are building the digital systems and data frameworks to deliver actionable information at our customers' “speed of need.” We are finding that many of these solutions can operate across different missions and are portable between different applications. This “repurposing” is a strength of our unified business culture that doesn’t always exist with our competitors. I see this as one of our greatest strengths.

For technology, here’s an example. If I were a bad actor and wanted to sneak up on your communications satellite, I’d put in a maneuvering body on the rocket and place it in a highly elliptical orbit so it appears to be an expended booster and is assumed to be space junk. 

Then after a while, I’d start maneuvering slowly toward your satellite. If you’re depending on humans to notice that deviance, you’d likely get away with it. But if you’re tracking it with a machine, you get that warning early if the machine learning systems are optimized for seeing deviance in motions or trends. Then it becomes a game of cat and mouse. 

Now if you’ve built computing at the edge and if the satellite operates autonomously, it can determine where to move even if ground communications are degraded or cut off. In the military, we call that continuing to execute with the commander’s intent. In systems engineering, this is called resiliency.

That’s one example of the many ways we further data solutions for resilience—such as anomaly detection, ways to fuse data for more powerful algorithms to track objects for space domain awareness and space traffic management, the ability to maneuver satellites, and open architectures for computing at the edge. 

Here at Booz Allen, we’re looking at the human as a biological system of systems so we can build a digital twin that will support them on the ground.

As an example, when asked if I was ready for an EVA (spacewalk), my answer would always be “100%”. In reality, fatigue is cumulative and so after the first EVA, I would really be something less than 100%. 

How do we reconcile reality versus perception? The science of performance assessment has come a long way since my days of “high altitude construction.”  Sports teams are looking to assess performance and stamina to deliver maximum sustainable output for the required task duration.  Tools including wearable sensors, behavioral response, and other discretely quantifiable variables are being tested and fielded to help define maximum performance capabilities over desired durations. 

For current space missions, contact-to-flight-surgeon support is virtually 24/7.  But how would this be conducted with a crew 40 million miles away on Mars, where two-way communications may take 40 minutes or longer and there is a two-week period where solar occultation delivers a disadvantaged communications environment?  

One approach we’re considering here at Booz Allen is how to deliver an effective “digital twin” of each crew member with enough fidelity to characterize the individual and their performance.  This sounds like science fiction but it’s a real-life cross-collaboration between biochemistry, digital engineering, and performance.

I discussed this in an interview for Payload about the Artemis mission, and I’ll give a background example here. At NASA, as an instructor astronaut for EVA, I’d watch the crew train in the water. Just think how much faster they’d train if their spacesuit had a HUD (heads-up display) measuring oxygen, blood sugar, and so forth—alerting them they can continue at this rate about 50 minutes longer. 

And then think of taking that HUD concept to a space mission, say to the moon. As a geologist, I’d like to see a spectral signature on rocks in front of me along with the notification, “This could be a calcium carbonite indicating 3.5-billion-year-old fossils on the surface of Mars, and you have enough oxygen to get to those rocks and back.” That’s actionable information we can do something with and it’s not as far away as we might think.

As astronauts, we were often put on pedestals, but we knew the truth—90% of the work was done by the thousands of people supporting us. We just got the golden ticket to ride that rocket, and then our job was to not screw up the mission.