Posted on: September 21, 2018 12:42 PM
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Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Terminal Area Energy Management (TAEM)
| A Team *CAN* Solve A Difficult Technical Problem
THE PROBLEMThe shuttle lifted off in a roar. There were flames, sound and vibration that would beat your chest like a drum as it made its way to orbit. It was massively powerful and highly complex machine. When it reached altitude, it orbited backwards, upside down, cargo bay doors open - AND - without only a tiny bit of fuel left. You can see a problem with this elegant engineering solution. “How do we return the Orbiter to earth, land it on a runway of our choice and have a nice rollout (stop)?” If you were a future crew member, this might concern you. A large, and wildly diverse, dedicated, strong-willed and skilled team of physicists, mathematicians, aerodynamicists, fuel / rocket experts, crew members and even a few lowly engineers (including a younger Dave) were assembled as a project team to solve what became TAEM (Terminal Area Energy Management). If you’re interested in the math, you can download it at: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19920010688.pdf At first I just couldn’t understand what the other project members were talking about. It was all in English, just a completely different discipline. It was certainly a lifetime learning experience for me. One key to the solution was clear from the start. Where it was, the Orbiter had a great deal of potential energy. This is the energy that an object has due to its position to other objects – the Earth in this case. The orbiter was at a great height! That potential energy could be converted to kinetic energy as the orbiter returned to earth, (the kinetic energy of an object is the energy due to its motion) but converting that potential energy to useful kinetic energy was a challenge. It couldn’t just fall! My role in this was programming an analog computer. WHAT? Yes! It was a Pace231R. A beautiful machine. I worked closely with the team “programming” the latest equations. It was a great deal of fun patching in integrations, square roots, derivatives, and whatever best fit the latest group-derived equations. I’d often take a patch panel home and work on it until I fell asleep. The output of my patched-in equations drove rows of strip-chart recorders that the entire team examined for hours in a quiet that a librarian would be proud of.
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