What we talked about
In this episode we talk with Steve Rodgers, Founder & CTO from EmergenTek LLC. Tune in to gain insights into Steve’s unique perspective on engineering, leadership, and innovation. Discover the driving forces that fuel his passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of materials and process engineering. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, an engineering enthusiast, or simply intrigued by the intersections of science and technology, this episode promises to offer an enlightening and inspiring conversation with a true visionary. He is a former International President, global board member and current trustee of the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE) and recipient of the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology.
Show notes
Steve Rodgers wanted to be an actor, dropped out of theater school when his tuition fell through, and ended up spending 35 years as an internationally recognized authority on graphene commercialization, without ever earning an engineering degree. His path from plastic shops to the Hubble Space Telescope to the National Graphene Association advisory committee is a case study in how generalist curiosity compounds into deep expertise.
What we covered
- Steve worked directly on the Hubble Space Telescope, iterating the fiber angle on carbon fiber tubes over and over, checking each time whether they had achieved close enough to zero coefficient of thermal expansion, because at 17,850 miles per hour, a 25-foot aluminum tube exposed to sunlight would bend two inches from the temperature differential between its hot and cold sides.
- A technique he learned for pre-stretching thermoplastic sheets in vacuum forming translated directly to superplastic titanium forming a decade and a half later, and the titanium team had just applied for a patent on the same concept, demonstrating how cross-discipline knowledge often travels unseen.
- Graphene is not a single material. By 2019, one researcher cataloguing permutations of layer count, stacking orientation, oxygen content, and impurities had arrived at 60,000 distinct variants, each with potentially different performance characteristics, which means buying “graphene” without specifying the type is largely meaningless.
- Steve’s practical advice for anyone investing in graphene applications: before spending on research, first confirm your supplier can actually deliver the volume you would need at commercial scale, because finding a second source that behaves identically is often impossible.
- Adding just one tenth of one weight percent of graphene to a neat epoxy resin produced a 76% improvement in stiffness, a result that only makes sense at the nanoscale, where very small changes produce very large Newtonian-world effects.
- His career advice is to stay curious about how everything connects, resist over-specializing too early, build a network by attending society meetings and conferences, and find mentors, he credits society meetings with giving him access to the people who wrote the books, which compensated for the formal education he never finished.
About Steve
Steve Rodgers is the Founder and CTO of EmergenTek LLC, a former International President of SAMPE (Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering), and a founding advisory board member of the National Graphene Association. He has worked across aerospace composites, titanium, and nanomaterials for 35 years without a formal engineering degree.
Episode 1 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
[00:00:00:01 - 00:00:35:41] Federico Ramallo So welcome to the Irregular Expression podcast, also known as IRREX. This podcast bridges technology and leadership. Our primary goal is to delve deeper into the experiences and stories of our guests. As we uncover their insights, we aim to understand, learn, and subsequently share these invaluable lessons with our larger community. Each episode is an opportunity for both us and our listeners to gain knowledge and grow together in our collective wisdom. Through Irregular Expression, we’re building a repository of wisdom, enriching the community with shared knowledge from leaders and innovators from diverse walks of lives.
[00:00:36:44 - 00:00:44:52] Federico Ramallo This podcast is sponsored by Identity Labs, the number two top IT staff augmentation services company. If you can dream it, we can code it.
[00:00:46:08 - 00:00:51:19] Federico Ramallo It’s great to meet you and I appreciate you coming out to to this new podcast that we’re starting.
[00:00:54:16 - 00:00:57:12] Steve Rodgers I appreciate the invitation. It’s great to meet you too, Federico.
[00:00:58:22 - 00:01:00:40] Federico Ramallo Yes, yes, it’s great to meet you as well.
[00:01:02:08 - 00:01:03:41] Federico Ramallo So tell me a little bit about yourself.
[00:01:05:04 - 00:01:08:11] Steve Rodgers Oh my, it’s a long story, as you can tell by my face.
[00:01:09:24 - 00:01:17:18] Steve Rodgers It began a lot of years ago when I wanted to be an actor and I majored in theater in college
[00:01:18:26 - 00:01:25:56] Steve Rodgers and I dropped out of college to go to professional acting school but I didn’t get my tuition together in time.
[00:01:27:19 - 00:01:48:16] Steve Rodgers So I ended up working for a living. I moved from one plastic shop to another and ultimately got a job at Boeing in experimental plastics and got to learn about carbon fiber and composites and advanced materials and then I got to work on the Hubble Space Telescope and that really launched my career.
[00:01:49:21 - 00:02:13:32] Steve Rodgers It was very early in the days of advanced composites so I learned a lot about the basics and that carried me through my career. I have the distinction of being an engineer for the last 35 years and no engineering degree but I’ve also been the international president of our engineering society
[00:02:14:39 - 00:02:27:16] Steve Rodgers and a founding member of the advisory committee for the National Graphene Association and an internationally recognized authority on graphene commercialization.
[00:02:28:55 - 00:02:30:24] Steve Rodgers Interesting. That’s the short version.
[00:02:34:12 - 00:02:36:56] Federico Ramallo I’m sure you have lots and lots of war stories to tell, right?
[00:02:36:56 - 00:02:49:49] Steve Rodgers A lot, a lot. Yes, I like to write wise sayings in my spare time. One of them is that the tuition is not cheap in the school of hard knocks so I have a lot of war stories.
[00:02:50:58 - 00:02:52:18] Federico Ramallo Right, right. Interesting.
[00:02:54:11 - 00:03:16:21] Federico Ramallo So let me introduce myself. I’m an Argentinian living in Mexico. I’m a software engineer but I actually started industrial engineering so I’m familiar with physical manufacturing I guess. Right, right. But then I was pulled into software. I started working at Microsoft when I was 16
[00:03:17:57 - 00:03:28:40] Federico Ramallo so I got into software development early on my career so eventually I didn’t graduate because working professionally was so much fun, right?
[00:03:29:41 - 00:03:34:03] Steve Rodgers Yeah, that’s right. And you can learn on the job.
[00:03:35:26 - 00:03:40:16] Steve Rodgers Right, right. You will learn wherever you are if you want to learn.
[00:03:41:52 - 00:03:50:14] Federico Ramallo Yes, yes. I think it’s more important than learning something. It’s about the ability to learn something new because new things are coming, right?
[00:03:52:26 - 00:04:10:58] Steve Rodgers I used to say that that’s what a university education was all about. The degree was demonstrating that you could stick with the program for four years or five years, that you could develop a rational thought and that you know how to do the research to develop that rational thought.
[00:04:12:06 - 00:04:19:42] Steve Rodgers Now I’m not certain it works that way all the time but it certainly is what I think of as a university degree.
[00:04:21:13 - 00:04:39:16] Federico Ramallo Yeah, I mean it used to be more about the universal knowledge, give you the basic tools to, yeah. I used to say, right, I used to say, you know, as an industrial engineer you basically are a generalist, you know about everything and nothing at the same time, right?
[00:04:39:16 - 00:04:40:34] Steve Rodgers Yes, right.
[00:04:41:57 - 00:05:02:57] Steve Rodgers And we’ll get along well because I’m very much a generalist and I’m very interested in how everything connects together and I’m convinced that everything connects together somehow. My father used to make fun of me because of my love for trivia and I said it’s only trivia as long as you don’t figure out the right connections.
[00:05:05:23 - 00:05:08:30] Federico Ramallo Right, right, it’s a mystery until you open it up and figure it out, right?
[00:05:08:30 - 00:05:38:46] Steve Rodgers Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. So here I am with a two-year degree in theater and I teach seminars and webinars and tutorials to people with PhDs in organic chemistry about graphene because I’ve taken a lot of little blocks of information and built an understanding, a story that I can understand easily on how this all works and because of that I can reconstruct all those little blocks for other people as well.
[00:05:38:46 - 00:06:05:30] Federico Ramallo Right, yeah, I mean I have people with degrees, with software engineering degrees, that reports to me, right, and I have not graduated, right, and I’ve been training more than 50 engineers so far from a career and yeah, it’s, you know, the degrees becomes, at that point it becomes, you know, not important about the experience, right, and the knowledge that you’re trying to.
[00:06:05:30 - 00:06:10:35] Steve Rodgers That’s right, it really comes down to what you know and how you apply it.
[00:06:11:38 - 00:06:13:23] Steve Rodgers Right, the application is very important.
[00:06:13:23 - 00:06:19:03] Federico Ramallo Right, and having those eureka moments when you fear things out is like wow, you know.
[00:06:20:27 - 00:06:24:10] Steve Rodgers That’s right, that’s right. So it’s interesting because
[00:06:25:12 - 00:06:55:59] Steve Rodgers when I got into composites I became very passionate about composites and working a lot of aircraft and satellite programs, that kind of thing, and at one point my employer decided to make me the titanium expert and titanium is very different from composites. It’s metallurgy, I had no experience in metallurgy, I had 25 years in composites and I was angry about that.
[00:06:57:00 - 00:07:12:18] Steve Rodgers Since then I’ve become thankful because I learned things in studying about titanium, getting to know titanium, that have helped me in a lot of other areas because there’s a lot of applicable crossover technology.
[00:07:13:26 - 00:07:37:18] Steve Rodgers For instance, I was in my early days before Boeing, before the Hubble Space Telescope, I was working in what we call vacuum forming or thermal forming of thermoplastics. And it’s basically you take a sheet of plastic, you get it hot until it does that when you touch it very quickly, you pull it over mold, you pull a vacuum on it, and you create a part.
[00:07:38:42 - 00:07:44:09] Steve Rodgers And what we found was that when you would pull the vacuum,
[00:07:45:29 - 00:08:18:38] Steve Rodgers wherever the plastic hit the mold would be the thickest, and as you would draw down into the depth of the mold it would thin out, and sometimes it would get too thin. So the way we took care of that is we would get the plastic very hot, we would bring down a box and pull a vacuum on that and pull a bubble, which would pre-stretch all of the plastic. Then we put it down over the mold and then suck it down and that made it much more even. It was still not perfect, but it was much thicker in the places we wanted it thicker.
[00:08:20:01 - 00:08:20:37] Steve Rodgers And I was,
[00:08:22:20 - 00:08:40:25] Steve Rodgers a decade and a half later, I was in a conference for super plastic forming titanium, and they were doing the same thing. And basically they’re taking up a sheet of titanium and heating it. You didn’t do this to it because it’s way too hot, 1800 degrees Fahrenheit,
[00:08:41:37 - 00:08:58:15] Steve Rodgers so it’s pretty warm. But heat it up until it’s soft and becomes super plastic, and it only works with certain alloys, but they were having a trouble because they would hit the mold and that would be the thickest part. And as they pull it down and pull the vacuum on it, it would stretch down and get thin.
[00:08:59:21 - 00:09:26:08] Steve Rodgers And so I was sitting in this conference, I turned to the guy next to me, I said, well, what we used to do is build a box and pull a vacuum on that and pre-stretch the bubble and then form it. And just then the speaker said, so what we figured out is if we take a box and we pull a vacuum on it and form a bubble and pre-stretch it, pull it down over the mold, that we get much more even draws and our patent will issue in about six months.
[00:09:26:08 - 00:09:28:12] Federico Ramallo Right.
[00:09:29:19 - 00:09:39:56] Steve Rodgers So he got a patent on something I’d known about for a decade and a half, but it was crossover technology from plastics to titanium. So there’s a lot of that out there if you have your eyes open.
[00:09:42:51 - 00:09:47:49] Federico Ramallo Yes, I can imagine, like, then you start making the connections that otherwise you wouldn’t have, right?
[00:09:48:53 - 00:09:57:15] Steve Rodgers Right, right. So I’m kind of a materials person, and I’ve worked with a lot of materials, which is nice because everything is made out of something.
[00:09:58:27 - 00:09:59:45] Federico Ramallo Yes, yes.
[00:09:59:45 - 00:10:01:25] Steve Rodgers It’s very fundamental.
[00:10:02:32 - 00:10:05:05] Federico Ramallo Material cannot be created or destroyed, it can be transformed.
[00:10:06:14 - 00:10:12:16] Steve Rodgers Well, that’s right, that’s right. And humankind has been described by the materials they use.
[00:10:13:16 - 00:10:17:20] Steve Rodgers We have the Stone Age, the Iron Age, Ceramic Age.
[00:10:18:51 - 00:10:24:15] Steve Rodgers I don’t know what they’re going to call this age. We have so many different things happening in the world of materials.
[00:10:25:29 - 00:10:33:50] Steve Rodgers I’d like to think it’s nanotechnology, but I don’t know that. Nanotechnology is mostly useful when you can couple it with something you can see and touch and feel.
[00:10:35:54 - 00:10:41:47] Federico Ramallo Right, right. Otherwise, it’s such an abstract concept that that’s getting to the minds of people.
[00:10:41:47 - 00:10:58:04] Steve Rodgers Yeah, that’s right. And one of the advantages I have from a career in composites and plastics in aerospace is that we place a big premium on repeatability. When you deal with the FAA,
[00:11:00:03 - 00:11:20:49] Steve Rodgers they want to know that your material is going to work right every time. So we have a string of data that we keep in file cabinets or in file boxes for up to 20 years for the FAA that tell when your composite material came into the shop, what temperature it was when it was manufactured,
[00:11:21:57 - 00:11:26:15] Steve Rodgers what temperature it was when it was being shipped, and how long that shipping took,
[00:11:27:20 - 00:11:38:44] Steve Rodgers how long it sits in your shipping dock before it goes in the freezer, what’s the temperature of your shipping dock, what’s the temperature of your freezer. When it comes out of the freezer, how long do you let it warm up before you use it?
[00:11:39:45 - 00:11:56:35] Steve Rodgers When you use it, how long is it out of the freezer? How long before you put it back into the freezer? All of these things, every role of material we used had to have that kind of provenance attached to it. And we had to keep those records for 20 years.
[00:11:57:44 - 00:12:05:36] Steve Rodgers So to me, it’s very important that you know that your material is the same from one batch to the next batch.
[00:12:06:36 - 00:12:14:17] Steve Rodgers It has to perform the same way. And we do a lot of physical testing to demonstrate that you ran into that, I’m sure in industrial engineering.
[00:12:15:20 - 00:13:00:49] Steve Rodgers And that’s really difficult to do when you’re dealing with a matter material because you can’t see it. How do you demonstrate that from a chemical perspective, just the way the atoms are arranged, how do you demonstrate that that material is consistent from batch to batch? Because it’s very important that you do. One of the lessons I try to drive home on nanotechnology, especially with graphene, is that there’s a big difference between physics in the nanoscale and physics in our scale, the Newtonian scale, and physics in the quantum scale.
[00:13:01:53 - 00:13:12:52] Steve Rodgers The quantum scale, we call physics chemistry, where you get into quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, that kind of theoretical quantum physics.
[00:13:14:07 - 00:13:26:08] Steve Rodgers And Newtonian physics is what you learn when you learn to drive a car. You get going too fast, it takes a while to stop, you’re going around a corner too fast, you want to slide sideways. If you run off a cliff, you fall.
[00:13:27:09 - 00:13:34:18] Steve Rodgers Big scale physics. And all of that changes when you transition from that scale down to quantum physics.
[00:13:36:06 - 00:13:46:23] Steve Rodgers Physics is very consistent, but the way we understand it, the way we deal with it, changes depending on the size and the scale. Astrophysics is an extension of Newtonian physics,
[00:13:47:25 - 00:13:54:06] Steve Rodgers but it takes very special disciplines to understand and deal with it. So when you deal with nanophysics,
[00:13:55:26 - 00:14:06:24] Steve Rodgers very small changes in the nanoscale, and that would be anything smaller than 100 nanometers, can equate to very large changes in the Newtonian world that we live in.
[00:14:07:57 - 00:14:36:29] Steve Rodgers So we get with some of our materials, we’re getting very big dramatic results with a tenth of a percent addition of graphene. With a tenth of a percent added to a neat epoxy resin, an epoxy resin with no fillers and no fibers in it, we got a 76% improvement in stiffness, one tenth of a weight percent. I mean, that’s pretty dramatic.
[00:14:36:29 - 00:14:51:01] Federico Ramallo That’s pretty dramatic, yeah. And is that in all directions or in specific directions? Because I understand that at that level, you can actually reinforce on specific directions of forces, right?
[00:14:51:01 - 00:15:27:05] Steve Rodgers It’s a little difficult to do in the nanoscale. Certainly in composites, the fiber drives the properties. So the fiber direction can be tailored for the strength. When you’re working with nanomaterials, there may be some things that you can do, but it gets to be very difficult. For instance, there is one theoretical property of graphene that was demonstrated by one university, and several months later, a second university was able to demonstrate it. Nobody else has done it since then, but they achieved superconductivity with graphene.
[00:15:28:30 - 00:15:40:04] Steve Rodgers But the way they had to do it was they needed two sheets of graphene instead of just one, and the two sheets were put together, and they were 1.1 degrees out of axis.
[00:15:41:45 - 00:16:31:58] Steve Rodgers Well, you can’t see the graphene to begin with, so adjusting it to getting two layers only, and then adjusting it to 1.1 degrees out of axis, it’s a very difficult thing to do. In addition to that, I think they cheated a little bit because they had to get down to like four degrees Kelvin to make it work. But by doing that, they were able to achieve and demonstrate superconductivity at that temperature and that level. And part of the reason for that is that, again, very small things in the quantum realm become very big things in the Newtonian realm. And so when you look at what’s holding those two sheets together, it’s the very weak Van der Waals forces, which you run into in chemistry. That’s what causes surface tension on water, for instance.
[00:16:32:59 - 00:16:58:51] Steve Rodgers It’s what holds the water drops together, makes drops out of water. So the Van der Waals forces hold those sheets together, but when you rotate them like this, the atoms are no longer next to each other. So now you drive the layers apart a little bit. They’re not as close together. Now the electrons have the opportunity to bounce between the two layers and not have to do the zigzag around all the hexagons in graphene.
[00:16:59:58 - 00:17:14:24] Steve Rodgers And that lends itself to superconductivity. So I mean, there are a lot of interesting things. And one of the problems I think in graphene is that there are a lot of different sources for making graphene. And many of those sources are
[00:17:15:31 - 00:17:17:57] Steve Rodgers exfoliating it from graphite material.
[00:17:19:24 - 00:17:30:05] Steve Rodgers When you do that, you’re dependent on the graphite that you’re mining out of the ground. Are there impurities in the graphite? Because if there are, that’s going to end up in your graphene.
[00:17:31:28 - 00:17:33:42] Steve Rodgers So that’s going to affect the performance of the graphene.
[00:17:35:58 - 00:17:38:54] Steve Rodgers Is it one layer or is it five layers?
[00:17:40:34 - 00:18:03:44] Steve Rodgers If it’s two layers, are they stacked with the atoms on top of each other? Or are they stacked with one sheet where the atoms go into the middle of the hexagon, and they’re nested that way? Or is it that turbostratic off-axis that we talked about where it drives the layers apart? All of that affects the performance of the graphene.
[00:18:04:52 - 00:18:07:24] Federico Ramallo And they cannot be seen digitally, right?
[00:18:08:31 - 00:18:17:51] Steve Rodgers That’s right. That’s right. So there are a lot of different things that can impact, ultimately, the performance of graphene in specific applications.
[00:18:18:57 - 00:18:21:40] Steve Rodgers Right. I was talking with Bronwyn Fox,
[00:18:22:51 - 00:18:27:16] Steve Rodgers who is a carbon person, a person of carbon.
[00:18:28:17 - 00:18:29:06] Steve Rodgers And she was the
[00:18:29:06 - 00:18:30:44] Federico Ramallo Aren’t we all?
[00:18:31:49 - 00:18:37:22] Steve Rodgers The sixth most abundant element in the universe. Yes.
[00:18:39:02 - 00:18:56:09] Steve Rodgers She was putting together a matrix of graphene types and properties as an effort to try to get her arms around qualification of graphene, quick inspection, characterization of graphene. What are all the possible permutations?
[00:18:57:19 - 00:19:07:43] Steve Rodgers She ended up, and this is in 2019 when I talked to her about this, she ended up at that point in time, 60,000 different permutations of graphene.
[00:19:08:53 - 00:19:14:42] Steve Rodgers Any one of which could yield a slightly different performance in the application.
[00:19:15:44 - 00:19:22:57] Steve Rodgers So that makes it really difficult when people want to buy graphene because they’ve read about graphene in their article.
[00:19:24:12 - 00:19:32:29] Steve Rodgers Who knows what they’re getting and if it’s suitable for their operation, for what they’re trying to do. So a lot of variability.
[00:19:33:31 - 00:19:45:39] Steve Rodgers And in my tutorials, one thing that I stress is, because of that variability, before you invest in the research to see if you have an application,
[00:19:46:53 - 00:19:53:06] Steve Rodgers you want to first check and say, in my wildest dreams, if this becomes a global
[00:19:54:43 - 00:20:15:37] Steve Rodgers product, I’m going to need 10 tons a month. Go to your supplier and see if they can supply 10 tons a month before you invest the money to see if their product works. Because if you get the product working, you get the application, you’re excited, everything is working great, and they can’t deliver 10 tons a month,
[00:20:16:56 - 00:20:22:53] Steve Rodgers you may not be able to find a second source that will behave the same way. Right.
[00:20:23:54 - 00:20:28:45] Steve Rodgers Because it comes down to a supply chain issues that are very, very important to consider.
[00:20:28:45 - 00:20:35:14] Federico Ramallo So the graphene industry is not ready for large scale production, basically, right?
[00:20:36:24 - 00:20:51:46] Steve Rodgers Well, I think many of them are ready for large scale production. But the problem is that there are people who are doing development work who are not experts in graphene, who hear the word graphene and say, I can buy it from here or I can buy it from here. And it’s all the same.
[00:20:51:46 - 00:21:03:21] Federico Ramallo So the issue is about people not knowing that thinking that graphene is a single element rather than 60,000.
[00:21:03:21 - 00:21:18:44] Steve Rodgers Right. That’s right. That’s right. And the basics of graphene are very well spelled out in an ISO standard. Graphene is carbon atoms in a hexagon shape, looks very much like bird netting or chicken wire.
[00:21:19:54 - 00:21:39:51] Steve Rodgers Don’t know which term you use, but the wire that you use to hold chickens in a coop looks very much like that in very large sheets. That’s the basic definition of graphene. And the ISO standard allows for you to have up to 10 layers of that and still call it graphene.
[00:21:40:58 - 00:21:53:01] Steve Rodgers But it doesn’t really address what differences happen if, for instance, you have high sulfur content in the vein of graphite that you extracted that from.
[00:21:54:29 - 00:22:04:54] Steve Rodgers Right. Okay. Or perhaps a better example, there are people who are interested in graphene oxide as a product.
[00:22:06:21 - 00:22:29:40] Steve Rodgers Okay. So graphene oxide has oxygen in it. Reduced graphene oxide has less oxygen in it. What are the percentages and how do those percentages impact that graphene? Oh, and then if there’s sulfur in there as well, how does that react with the oxygen content? All of these things become very important. And we’re at the beginning of learning about that.
[00:22:30:45 - 00:22:43:35] Steve Rodgers Having said that, the commercialization attempts have been really pretty impressive up till now. I mean, when I started doing my tutorials back in 2017, 2018,
[00:22:44:44 - 00:22:53:47] Steve Rodgers I had 15, 20 different products that were already in the marketplace with graphene and successful at some level.
[00:22:54:49 - 00:22:57:25] Steve Rodgers It was only discovered in 2004.
[00:22:58:45 - 00:23:11:02] Steve Rodgers So at that point, the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2010. Within the next six, seven, eight years to have a number of products already in the marketplace is astounding.
[00:23:12:23 - 00:23:27:01] Steve Rodgers And one of the stories I use from my old background, my rocket background, is in 2004, there was a prize, the Ansari X Prize, for the first company that could produce
[00:23:28:35 - 00:23:35:23] Steve Rodgers an aircraft capable of going from Earth to the edge of space and back,
[00:23:36:24 - 00:23:40:07] Steve Rodgers be retrofitted and do the same thing 10 days later.
[00:23:41:40 - 00:23:46:39] Steve Rodgers And that went to a company called Scale Composites down in Mojave in 2004.
[00:23:48:29 - 00:23:56:02] Steve Rodgers And so they had demonstrated the techniques they were going to use. Richard Branson bought the rights to that and created Virgin Galactic.
[00:23:56:02 - 00:23:58:06] Federico Ramallo Oh, interesting.
[00:23:58:06 - 00:24:13:45] Steve Rodgers His whole goal was space tourism. Well, he already had a prototype that had been tested. It had gone to the edge of space twice in 10 days. So he had that, he had the basic general design. Last week,
[00:24:15:01 - 00:24:21:50] Steve Rodgers they’ve been doing this since 2004. Last week, they finally took their first commercial guest to space.
[00:24:24:04 - 00:24:52:26] Steve Rodgers So the fact that within five years, six years of the Nobel Prize, we have 15 to 20 products already in the marketplace was kind of a good indication of of how rapidly this whole graphene thing has developed. People keep saying, “Why don’t we see more of it in the field?” Well, it took nearly 80 years for rail systems to become commercialized. So we’re doing okay. We’re doing okay.
[00:24:54:05 - 00:24:58:30] Federico Ramallo We’re doing way better than previous generations of technologies, right?
[00:24:59:31 - 00:25:01:28] Federico Ramallo That’s right. That’s for sure, yes.
[00:25:01:28 - 00:25:18:22] Steve Rodgers And in fact, nanotechnology was really, it was first talked about, to the best of my knowledge, in 1959 by PhD Richard Feynman when he talked about the difficulty of working at that scale.
[00:25:23:57 - 00:25:38:42] Steve Rodgers But he said, “If we can ever work at that scale, you’re going to find that things like gravity and inertia from the Newtonian scale of physics begin to drop off because there’s not much mass there, and those are mass-driven properties.
[00:25:39:51 - 00:26:53:36] Steve Rodgers But you’ll start to pick up elements of quantum physics, elements of chemistry, and that’s where we get the Van der Waals forces, which become really dominant in that scale. It’s electrostatic forces that either attract or repel. In this case, they attract. And the practical outcome of that for us as scientists trying to develop something that works in the marketplace is that there’s a tendency for nanoparticles to want to agglomerate or clump together because of those Van der Waals forces, when in fact, in most cases, what you really want is a nice, even distribution. So disbursement becomes a real consideration. You’ve got to get them out there and dispersed and keep them dispersed, suspended in whatever you’re putting them in. So all of those are the challenges that we face with graphene. We learned a lot of that, and we learned more actually when Smalley and crew invented Bucky Balls, which are carbon atoms that look like a soccer ball. It’s basically made up of pentagons and hexagons put together out of carbon atoms.
[00:26:54:48 - 00:27:06:55] Steve Rodgers And it’s a spherical version of what we know as graphene or carbon nanotubes. They’re all very closely related, but it’s a whole separate allotroped or type of carbon.
[00:27:08:46 - 00:27:44:27] Steve Rodgers So when they discovered that, people had big, big ideas of what that was going to do. And then when that kind of morphed into carbon nanotubes, they were very big on that. And yet we haven’t seen the kind of rapid development of carbon nanotubes that was being predicted because all of a sudden they’re working with nanophysics for the first time, and they’re discovering things that they’ve never discovered before. And yes, it was predicted in 1959. Now we have the real practical lessons we’re having to learn.
[00:27:45:36 - 00:27:54:48] Steve Rodgers And so they developed a lot of what we know about nanophysics. And when graphene came along 20 years later,
[00:27:56:18 - 00:28:10:28] Steve Rodgers we had this body of nanophysics, we could fall back, but we’re still learning more new things as we go along with graphene, because now we have graphene, which is a two-dimensional material instead of a three-dimensional nanomaterial.
[00:28:11:29 - 00:28:22:38] Steve Rodgers So we’re still learning, but we have the advantage of all the lessons that they learned. So it’s that whole idea of standing on the shoulders of giants. We get to see farther down the road,
[00:28:23:41 - 00:28:31:55] Steve Rodgers but it’s been thanks, I think, largely to the work that was done by those people in buckyballs and carbon nanotubes back in those days.
[00:28:33:20 - 00:28:54:53] Federico Ramallo Right. Right. Yeah, I still find it fascinating when all these theories that they came up many years ago, and it was all theoretical because they didn’t have any practical access to the materials, right? Absolutely.
[00:28:55:57 - 00:29:06:21] Federico Ramallo And being able to figure all that out. And they are spot on from what I’ve seen 80% of the time, there are a few laws that might not apply in certain situations,
[00:29:07:23 - 00:29:20:57] Federico Ramallo but it is amazing how further they were able to figure it out even without access to it. Right. And that paves the way to the practical applications that we have today. Right.
[00:29:20:57 - 00:29:27:29] Steve Rodgers It really does. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been an interesting voyage of discovery.
[00:29:27:29 - 00:29:29:53] Federico Ramallo Yes. Yes.
[00:29:32:11 - 00:29:49:23] Federico Ramallo I am fascinated about the composite materials. I want to start building things myself with it, but I haven’t had the time nor the space to do it, but it is something that I find very fascinating.
[00:29:49:23 - 00:30:09:55] Steve Rodgers Yeah. It is fascinating. And there’s so many different things you can do with it, depending on the materials you select, because it is a composite, right? It is composed of different materials and you put them together to get the best effect for what your application is.
[00:30:10:59 - 00:30:32:17] Steve Rodgers So your fibers, if you’re using glass fiber, you get very different kinds of effects. And if you’re using carbon fiber or Kevlar fiber or quartz fiber, if that fiber is just straight fiber, that’s very different than if it’s woven as a cloth, you get different kinds of specific effects with that.
[00:30:33:23 - 00:30:34:59] Steve Rodgers And then you pick your resin.
[00:30:36:39 - 00:30:37:18] Steve Rodgers Right.
[00:30:38:18 - 00:30:45:00] Steve Rodgers Yeah. There’s just an awful lot to it. And it’s a whole process of learning.
[00:30:46:05 - 00:30:54:18] Steve Rodgers I think one of the biggest things that I learned from the whole space telescope that helped me out was the whole idea of coefficient of thermal expansion,
[00:30:56:08 - 00:30:58:43] Steve Rodgers because in space, that’s an important thing.
[00:30:58:43 - 00:31:06:49] Federico Ramallo Yeah. There is no thermal barrier, right? It goes from super hot, super cold, pretty quickly.
[00:31:06:49 - 00:31:09:06] Steve Rodgers Yeah. That’s right. And on the Hubble,
[00:31:10:59 - 00:31:32:29] Steve Rodgers they used aluminum tubes as kind of a baseline comparison. They wouldn’t be able to use it in real life, but they would compare it to aluminum tubes so that, again, we can wrap our heads around it. We can figure it out. Right. Get a feel for it. Yeah. And if you had an aluminum tube 25 feet long in orbit in the sunlight,
[00:31:33:31 - 00:32:07:34] Steve Rodgers the sun side of that tube, I mean, it’s going to cast its own shadow, right? The sun side of that tube would be almost 800 degrees hotter than in Fahrenheit than the shade side. What that came out to was roughly two inches above over the 25 foot length, right? Because it becomes like the thermal spring in your thermostat on the wall, right? You’ve got two metals that expand at different rates. It does the same kind of thing within a single member between the hot side and the cold side.
[00:32:07:34 - 00:32:10:37] Federico Ramallo Oh, they flatten now and become bimetals, right?
[00:32:10:37 - 00:32:21:34] Steve Rodgers Well, it doesn’t become bimetal, but it acts the same way. So a tube would bend because you’ve got a hot side that’s expanding. You’ve got a cold side that’s contracting. And so it has the same effect.
[00:32:22:50 - 00:32:47:47] Steve Rodgers So it becomes very difficult to do those things. And then in orbit at 17,800 miles per hour, and forgive me for using English numbers, those are the numbers available on the top of my head, but 17,850 miles per hour in orbit. We had three 10,000s of an arc second aiming stability.
[00:32:48:54 - 00:32:54:45] Steve Rodgers And what that means is every circle has 360 degrees, right?
[00:32:55:56 - 00:32:57:38] Steve Rodgers Each degree has 60 minutes.
[00:32:58:45 - 00:33:00:59] Steve Rodgers Each minute has 60 seconds.
[00:33:02:09 - 00:33:22:11] Steve Rodgers And we had to have three 10,000s of an arc second aiming stability in order to get those beautiful pictures you see from the Hubble, because you’re moving at 17,000 miles per hour and aiming way off into space. And otherwise everything would just be blurry.
[00:33:23:16 - 00:33:32:24] Steve Rodgers The thought and the planning and the lessons and the study that go into making some of these telescopes is astounding.
[00:33:33:26 - 00:34:00:05] Steve Rodgers It’s just astounding, because you have to think through things like that. So with carbon fiber and epoxy, we were able to adjust the orientation of the fibers to give us strength in the right directions that we were able to build tubes that came out with effectively a zero coefficient of thermal expansion, CTE, in plane, even though the thickness is doing this,
[00:34:01:05 - 00:34:19:30] Steve Rodgers because there are no fibers holding it together, in plane it was roughly zero, it was close enough to zero, that we were able to make it work. And it was a very slow process, it was very iterative. We had to do things over and over and over, do the experiment, change the angle just a little bit,
[00:34:20:58 - 00:34:34:56] Steve Rodgers try it again. And each time we tried it, we had resins where we couldn’t control the resin content like we can today. So we had more resin than we needed in the composite preprick.
[00:34:36:18 - 00:35:36:15] Steve Rodgers And all of that resin, all the excess resin had to be taken out. So we had what we called a bleeder system, where we would bag it, we put a bleeder on it, we stick it in the autoclave, put it under pressure, a little bit of pressure, 20 psi, 25 psi, we heat it up to 115, 120 degrees Fahrenheit. We give it 20 minutes at that, we pull it out, and we’d see if we bled off enough that we’re in the optimum range, we needed 65% fiber, 35% resin. If we were there, then we go ahead and cure it. Well, we usually take us five or six times of doing that to get enough resin out before we could cure it. Then we would cure it, and we would check the CTE, if it wasn’t zero, start over again with a slightly different fiber angle. And we did that for every one of the pieces that went into building the Hubble Space Telescope structure.
[00:35:37:21 - 00:35:51:52] Steve Rodgers So that’s where I learned so much about composites. It was step by step, little changes at a time, and learning to understand that. And because I was a shop guy, I had a better union than the engineers.
[00:35:52:54 - 00:35:59:42] Steve Rodgers So I could touch the hardware, they couldn’t, but they really wanted me to understand it because I was their hands.
[00:36:01:16 - 00:36:11:54] Steve Rodgers No, I was their hands, I was their eyes, I was their ears. They could tell me what to do, but they couldn’t do any of it themselves. So they made very sure that I understood everything I wanted to know about it.
[00:36:13:11 - 00:36:15:06] Steve Rodgers And that’s where asking questions gets helpful.
[00:36:16:23 - 00:36:16:35] Federico Ramallo Right.
[00:36:17:46 - 00:36:17:58] Federico Ramallo Right.
[00:36:19:32 - 00:36:29:23] Federico Ramallo Have you seen the new telescope that they’re building, they’re planning to build in the deep phase of the moon using the craters? I have not seen that.
[00:36:29:23 - 00:36:30:42] Steve Rodgers I haven’t seen that.
[00:36:30:42 - 00:36:46:16] Federico Ramallo No. From what I understand, what they’re planning to do is to send a ship there, landed on a crater.
[00:36:47:22 - 00:36:51:31] Federico Ramallo And then have you seen the Arecibo telescope?
[00:36:52:35 - 00:36:52:47] Federico Ramallo Yes.
[00:36:53:57 - 00:36:56:24] Federico Ramallo It went down a few years ago, right?
[00:36:57:32 - 00:36:57:54] Federico Ramallo Right.
[00:36:57:54 - 00:36:58:54] Steve Rodgers Is that Chile?
[00:37:00:04 - 00:37:01:15] Federico Ramallo I think it’s Costa Rica.
[00:37:02:15 - 00:37:03:47] Steve Rodgers Costa Rica? Yes. Oh, okay.
[00:37:03:47 - 00:37:11:24] Federico Ramallo So I know that place from James Bond, right? They had a movie there.
[00:37:13:00 - 00:37:24:29] Federico Ramallo Right. So anyway, they want to build something. Shall we get our best deck? Yeah, I mean, after I’ve seen that movie, I wanted to learn more about the building, you know, because it was a very interesting structure, right?
[00:37:25:30 - 00:37:37:04] Federico Ramallo And there was, I don’t know, eight. So they want to build something similar, but in a crater. And then they want to shoot carbon fiber.
[00:37:38:43 - 00:37:44:00] Federico Ramallo I don’t know if ropes is the right way to say it. Probably. And then wires,
[00:37:45:03 - 00:38:17:54] Federico Ramallo wires probably, and then they want to tense it out. And then they want to build the transmitter and then figure out a way to, you know, have a relay transmitter that go across the moon, right? There is a Chinese satellite that is the first relay transmitter from the far face of the moon to the near face of the moon, right? So whether they use that or another thing, right? But that’s, and they were talking about making the carbon fiber
[00:38:18:58 - 00:38:31:32] Federico Ramallo and the ropes or cables with a different thickness. So the weight would create the shape that it would need.
[00:38:31:32 - 00:38:33:30] Steve Rodgers Ah, okay.
[00:38:34:47 - 00:38:38:03] Steve Rodgers The design gets to be very, very specific, doesn’t it?
[00:38:39:12 - 00:38:52:55] Federico Ramallo Yes. And then they were going to do a mesh instead of making it solid. And then the mesh would have to be multiple, multiple of the wavelength that they want to capture. Right. So right, right.
[00:38:54:03 - 00:38:57:01] Steve Rodgers Yeah. So that’s very interesting. Yes.
[00:38:58:07 - 00:39:04:00] Steve Rodgers And the nice thing is they’re using the carbon fiber in its strongest way. They’re using it in tensile, right?
[00:39:04:00 - 00:39:04:38] Federico Ramallo In tension.
[00:39:04:38 - 00:39:16:18] Steve Rodgers Using tension. Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s not quite as good in compression as we know from the C-gate submersible that was going down to the tannic, right?
[00:39:17:21 - 00:39:25:16] Steve Rodgers Yes. I was going to ask. Carbon fiber was the problem, but if it was the problem, that is the problem.
[00:39:26:34 - 00:39:42:05] Steve Rodgers Right. When you put carbon fiber in tension, it becomes a very, very strong, extremely strong. So a pressure bottle is a very good use of carbon fiber because pressing out, it takes advantage of that tension. Right.
[00:39:43:41 - 00:39:44:24] Steve Rodgers In compression,
[00:39:45:51 - 00:39:52:53] Steve Rodgers especially with repeat cycles, as you’re going down, the pressure tends to make fibers break randomly.
[00:39:53:54 - 00:40:03:36] Steve Rodgers And they were not doing checks in between trips down to see if those fibers are breaking. And they were initially told one trip, one person.
[00:40:05:46 - 00:40:26:03] Steve Rodgers And when it imploded, it was five people on their fifth trip. So they went beyond the design guidelines, went beyond the expert advice of the people who built it. And if it was due to a failure in the carbon fiber, that’s probably what happened.
[00:40:27:12 - 00:40:34:00] Federico Ramallo Right. I’ve seen a lot of the media blaming the composites. And I don’t think that’s,
[00:40:35:05 - 00:40:39:50] Federico Ramallo in my opinion, right, that’s not correct, right? Right. That’s how you use it, right?
[00:40:40:56 - 00:40:48:46] Steve Rodgers That’s right. Yeah. And it could have been the composite. It could have been the interface from composite to titanium.
[00:40:50:38 - 00:40:58:10] Steve Rodgers Because how you put that together is going to be very important. But we’re talking mercy.
[00:40:59:28 - 00:41:00:41] Steve Rodgers 3000, what?
[00:41:01:46 - 00:41:05:08] Steve Rodgers 200 atmospheres? It’s a lot of pressure.
[00:41:05:08 - 00:41:10:59] Federico Ramallo It’s a lot of pressure. It’s a lot of pressure. Yes. I don’t remember exactly how much, but yet it’s a lot.
[00:41:10:59 - 00:41:16:05] Steve Rodgers It’s huge. Yeah. And again, I apologize for using English
[00:41:18:28 - 00:41:24:18] Steve Rodgers numbers. But for every point you go down, it’s about a half a PS die.
[00:41:24:18 - 00:41:26:45] Federico Ramallo And it relates to the metric system.
[00:41:27:45 - 00:41:44:26] Steve Rodgers So yeah. And I grew up dumb in the United States. I used to be able to do all of the number conversions in my head, but I haven’t been a real engineer in a decade now. So I rely on my calculator. And it’s back under my computer somewhere.
[00:41:44:26 - 00:41:51:06] Federico Ramallo I still have trouble with the fractional bolts, right?
[00:41:52:07 - 00:41:55:59] Federico Ramallo It’s like, you know, why? Why? Yeah.
[00:41:57:39 - 00:42:01:50] Federico Ramallo And then everybody here in Mexico does use the fractional system.
[00:42:03:42 - 00:42:13:36] Federico Ramallo So that adds to me a little more troublesome on figuring out what’s the right bolt for socket. Yeah.
[00:42:13:36 - 00:42:44:46] Steve Rodgers Yeah. Yeah. I think in the very beginning, Airbus did a very smart thing because they were all using scientific units since they were European based. Right. But they made sure that all of the hardware was easily converted to English system because every mechanic in the world had worked on Boeing aircraft. Right. So they made sure that all of that was very easily translatable.
[00:42:44:46 - 00:43:01:38] Federico Ramallo Right. It’s a cultural barrier, right? That the cost of making a cultural change at that level of nature is so high that nobody’s willing to do that. So we continue purporting the same systems basically, right?
[00:43:01:38 - 00:43:05:00] Steve Rodgers Right. Right. And I really prefer the metric system.
[00:43:06:10 - 00:43:13:25] Steve Rodgers It’s much easier to do calculations. I have fewer problems with forgetting orders of magnitude.
[00:43:15:00 - 00:43:17:46] Steve Rodgers Orders of magnitude are important. They’re very important.
[00:43:20:04 - 00:43:23:34] Steve Rodgers And it’s so easy to make a mistake when you’re dealing in the English system.
[00:43:24:46 - 00:43:33:47] Steve Rodgers But that’s the country I live in. Those are the numbers that most people use here. If I use metric, then I have to convert it over to English so they understand what I’m talking about.
[00:43:33:47 - 00:43:42:47] Federico Ramallo Yeah. So I usually try to think in my head about doing the conversions in my head and then eventually I convert everything to metric. Right.
[00:43:42:47 - 00:43:46:40] Steve Rodgers Right. Exactly. Because that’s something you can understand.
[00:43:48:06 - 00:43:49:59] Steve Rodgers When I deal with things,
[00:43:51:44 - 00:43:59:38] Steve Rodgers with those kinds of numbers, I like to have a physical model that I can relate to because again, everything is relatable. Right.
[00:44:01:44 - 00:44:15:30] Steve Rodgers So when I had somebody tell me, well, it’s only 10 PSI. That’s just a vacuum bag at 10 PSI. That’s not much pressure. I started thinking about that. What does 10 PSI look like?
[00:44:17:13 - 00:44:20:07] Steve Rodgers And 10 PSI is two thirds of an atmosphere.
[00:44:22:01 - 00:44:23:12] Steve Rodgers All right. So two thirds of bar.
[00:44:23:12 - 00:44:26:08] Federico Ramallo Basically. Right. 0.7, 0.68.
[00:44:27:22 - 00:44:36:01] Steve Rodgers Right. Right. What it looks like is about 300 millimeters high, roughly,
[00:44:37:02 - 00:44:43:08] Steve Rodgers and 25 millimeters square on the bottom out of steel would be one PSI.
[00:44:44:18 - 00:44:58:06] Steve Rodgers So when you’re talking 10 PSI, you have almost a meter of thickness of steel for every square inch of surface area. That’s a fair amount of pressure. If it’s on my body, I’m going to say that’s a lot of pressure.
[00:44:59:06 - 00:45:44:32] Steve Rodgers And then we start throwing around things like 50 PSI in your tires and 300 PSI in a pneumatic system, 3000 PSI in a pneumatic system. I ran into one pneumatic system that was 22,000 PSI, roughly. That would be a sheet of steel, the height of Mount Rainier in Washington state. That’s a lot of steel. I mean, that’s a lot of weight. It’s a lot of pressure. So when you start talking 200 atmospheres or 400 atmospheres for a submersible like that, that is a lot of pressure. It’s easy to throw around the numbers without appreciating what that really, really means. Another one that I deal with a lot is nanometers.
[00:45:45:33 - 00:45:49:13] Steve Rodgers And I talked to scientists who deal in nanometers all the time.
[00:45:51:17 - 00:45:56:11] Steve Rodgers But you ask them what a nanometer looks like. They’ll say, well, it’s one 80,000th of a human hair.
[00:45:57:48 - 00:46:14:47] Steve Rodgers Okay, I’ve never tried to slice a human hair and down the middle. 80,000. I can’t really relate to that. I mean, I’m, it says it’s really small, but I’ve, I’ve walked to the store.
[00:46:15:49 - 00:46:25:00] Steve Rodgers I’ve driven to the store. I’ve driven to the airport. I’ve been on an airplane. I’ve flown 14 hours to Korea.
[00:46:26:03 - 00:46:32:05] Steve Rodgers So I have a little bit of a feel for how big Earth is as a planet.
[00:46:33:45 - 00:46:50:25] Steve Rodgers So what I came down to was if, if the Earth were one meter in diameter, we call that one meter, then a nanometer would be one centimeter. That now tells me that a nanometer is really,
[00:46:50:25 - 00:46:52:17] Federico Ramallo really small.
[00:46:52:17 - 00:47:00:07] Steve Rodgers Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that, that to me says that, that gives me a feel for exactly how small that is.
[00:47:01:11 - 00:47:15:14] Steve Rodgers And when you talk about the craziness of design of space telescopes, I lost one of my designers to a company that designed part of the James Webb space telescope. And he became the lead designer for them.
[00:47:16:39 - 00:47:26:05] Steve Rodgers And he gave a presentation one day, I was sitting in it and, and he said, we have parts that have a tolerance of 37 nanometers.
[00:47:27:35 - 00:47:36:44] Steve Rodgers See on that scale, that’s what like this, you know, right? Maybe like that. Yeah. I said, Tim, how do you inspect that?
[00:47:38:06 - 00:47:46:18] Steve Rodgers He says, I don’t know, but that’s what we needed. They tell me they can inspect it. So that’s what the tolerance is. Plus or minus 37 nanometers.
[00:47:48:30 - 00:47:49:37] Steve Rodgers That’s crazy.
[00:47:50:41 - 00:48:13:43] Steve Rodgers That’s mind boggling. But even, even with carbon fiber, where you’re dealing with the zero CTE structure, something is zero coefficient thermal expansion, right? The temperature at which you measure 37 nanometers is still going to count. Because it’s as I tell people, and we’re talking about tolerances,
[00:48:14:55 - 00:48:19:20] Steve Rodgers I can always inspect it at a level where I can find it out of tolerance.
[00:48:20:51 - 00:48:27:54] Steve Rodgers Tell me what tolerance you need. Don’t tell me it has to be perfect because we can always find a place where it’s not perfect.
[00:48:29:22 - 00:48:40:49] Steve Rodgers Right. So, so you’re going to have to specify, okay, let’s see in deep space, it’s going to be X number of degrees below zero. On one side, it’s going to be X number of degrees above zero on the other side.
[00:48:42:13 - 00:48:44:17] Steve Rodgers So what temperature do you inspect it at?
[00:48:45:20 - 00:48:46:04] Steve Rodgers Room temperature,
[00:48:47:07 - 00:49:05:10] Steve Rodgers 13 C, 17 C, minus 40 C. I mean, what temperature do you pick for inspection? Because I can guarantee you that at 37 nanometers, I can find a place where it probably isn’t going to fit, even if you think you have a zero CTE structure.
[00:49:05:10 - 00:49:11:30] Federico Ramallo Right. Right. At that level, you always have, are going to find an imperfection, right?
[00:49:12:34 - 00:49:15:23] Steve Rodgers That’s right. That’s right. What, what is perfection?
[00:49:16:45 - 00:49:18:08] Steve Rodgers It’s pretty elusive.
[00:49:18:08 - 00:49:25:22] Federico Ramallo It’s something that is right in front of us, but impossible to achieve.
[00:49:26:35 - 00:49:29:34] Steve Rodgers That’s right. It’s a great goal. It’s a great goal.
[00:49:30:52 - 00:49:31:04] Steve Rodgers Right.
[00:49:32:11 - 00:49:33:59] Steve Rodgers Right. But you can’t pay the rent with perfect.
[00:49:35:32 - 00:49:38:06] Federico Ramallo That’s true. Yes.
[00:49:39:49 - 00:49:55:51] Federico Ramallo So let me ask you something, you know, different, you know, is I wanted to ask about what advice would you give to an engineer that wants to start, you know, to follow your steps, basically, right? What advice would you give him or her?
[00:49:55:51 - 00:49:58:03] Steve Rodgers Don’t follow my steps. Follow your own steps.
[00:49:59:51 - 00:50:18:36] Steve Rodgers It’s my, my walk has been so unusual that it would be very difficult to follow my steps. But the advice I would give is be curious about the world around you. See how things fit together. Look at the big picture and then see how that distills down to small picture.
[00:50:19:51 - 00:50:37:21] Steve Rodgers If you get a feel for that, you begin to think of things on a different scale. But if you, if you start out by specializing in zeroing in on one thing, you miss so much. It’s like, it’s like looking at a photograph of the Swiss Alps.
[00:50:38:45 - 00:50:38:57] Federico Ramallo Right.
[00:50:38:57 - 00:50:45:23] Steve Rodgers And you start out by looking at the top of one mountain, and then you just get closer and closer and closer until all you have left is a pixel.
[00:50:46:27 - 00:51:23:54] Steve Rodgers That’s valuable in some ways. There are people who need to know about that pixel. And I’m glad there are people who want to study that pixel so that the rest of us can make use of the knowledge they have. But I need to look at all the pixels in the picture. I need to see all of them and how they fit together. And by doing that, you gain an understanding of the physical world around you. And it doesn’t matter what discipline you’re in. It gives you an understanding of the world around you so that you can apply those lessons and apply that to your thought process is a very important thing. The other thing I would say is don’t try to do it alone.
[00:51:24:56 - 00:52:13:14] Steve Rodgers It’s always about the team. Right. And part of a part of a good team is not just your team members, but it’s also having a good mentor and being a good protege. Right. You want to be a good learner, you want to have someone who’s willing to teach you. So it becomes really, really important from my perspective. To network, to get out into your field, into your area and network. And I, I started networking because I didn’t have a degree. And I found myself with the title of engineer at Lockheed Missiles in Space, building satellite hardware. I was an engineer with my own program. And I had come out of the shop just six months earlier.
[00:52:14:15 - 00:52:29:00] Steve Rodgers So how do you gain the knowledge you didn’t get in school? I went to society meetings, and I got to meet the people who wrote the books. See, back in those days, we actually had books, we didn’t have the internet.
[00:52:30:19 - 00:52:45:47] Steve Rodgers So in order to gain knowledge, you first of all had to find out what book you needed to read and where to get it. And then you couldn’t order it online because we didn’t have online. So you had to send a check to somebody who would then mail the book to you.
[00:52:46:57 - 00:52:51:48] Steve Rodgers And then you would have to read the book. And maybe the book didn’t have the answer you’re looking for.
[00:52:53:07 - 00:53:08:00] Steve Rodgers So you have to get another book. Or you can go to a society meeting and meet all the people who wrote the books and say, “Hey, Les, I’m curious about this. What happens when you’ve got a compound contour or a mold, and your part starts to do this?
[00:53:09:18 - 00:53:30:53] Steve Rodgers Les can tell me in three or four sentences what he knows about, or if he doesn’t know about it, we can talk about it together. We can formulate that together.” Actually, I came up with a magazine article back in my very early days as an engineer by just talking through a problem like that with another engineer who had a PhD. And we came up with something that I was the first person to publish.
[00:53:32:40 - 00:53:33:21] Federico Ramallo Right. And I think that’s a very interesting thing.
[00:53:33:21 - 00:53:44:34] Steve Rodgers So getting to know the person, being able to pick up the telephone and call that person and ask him a question and get the answer immediately was huge in my career.
[00:53:46:12 - 00:53:59:02] Steve Rodgers So networking is very important. Don’t ever think it is. Go to conferences, hang out with people in your industry, get to know them, ask them questions, develop a personal relationship. It’ll be rewarding on a lot of levels.
[00:53:59:02 - 00:54:00:20] Federico Ramallo Not only professional.
[00:54:00:20 - 00:54:04:29] Steve Rodgers It’s been a fun career. I’ve enjoyed it a great deal.
[00:54:04:29 - 00:54:15:00] Federico Ramallo So I appreciate very much, Steve, for joining me. And I’m glad to meet you and share a little more of these insights. Right.
[00:54:16:32 - 00:54:19:46] Steve Rodgers Absolutely. Yeah. And feel free to call me at any time if you want to talk about something.
[00:54:19:46 - 00:54:29:59] Federico Ramallo Great. So I appreciate very much, Steve. We were able to connect. And yeah, I’m sure I’ll reach out again. And, you know, ping me if you need anything on my side. You know, I’ll be around.