Profiles in Leadership – Todd May, SVP of KBR Science and Space

“In Orbit” guests are some of the foremost experts in their fields and address some of the greatest challenges facing the world today. But they’re also really interesting people! In our first Profiles in Leadership episode, we were thrilled to speak with Todd May, senior vice president of KBR’s Science and Space business and avid puzzler. Listen as Todd talks about his extraordinary career in space and aeronautics, what’s on the horizon in the industry, and some examples of when pop culture gets space science wrong.

Transcript

IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST

Season 4, Episode 8

Profiles in Leadership: Todd May, SVP of KBR Science and Space

John Arnold

Hello! I’m John, and THIS is In Orbit.

Whether you’re stumbling upon us for the first time or are a long-time listener to the podcast, we’re glad you’re checking in with us and staying in our orbit.

We talk a lot about the latest and greatest technologies and solutions that KBR is delivering to tackle the world’s toughest problems. 

But something we don’t want to get lost in the shuffle is just how interesting the people are who we have on the podcast.

So we thought it’d be fun to intermittently do some episodes that are more profiles in expertise and leadership from some of the outstanding members of our global team of teams.

And today, we’re thrilled to welcome Todd May, senior vice president of KBR’s Science and Space business, to tell us about himself, his career in space and aeronautics, and what’s on the horizon, as he sees it, for the future of that industry.

And maybe before all is said and done, we can convince him to tell us what grinds his gears about how the science of space is depicted in pop culture.

Welcome to podcast, Todd!

Todd May

Hey John, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.

John Arnold

I'm doing great. And I thank you for being on the podcast. We've been meaning to get around to having you on for a while, so this is exciting, to finally get to sit down and talk with you.

Todd May

I look forward to talking with you.

John Arnold

Excellent. So before we get into the nitty-gritty about space and KBR broadly, I wonder if you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how your life experiences sort of led you into a career in space and aeronautics.

Todd May

Sure. Let's see. I was born in a small part of Alabama down in the South, about as far south as you can go before you hit the Gulf of Mexico. And my parents were first generation college students. They were actually still in college when I was born. They were very young, and they were also very ambitious. And from a very young age, they were pushing my curiosity and asking me questions that kind of pushed the boundaries of the way I thought about things. And I guess in terms of my first exposure to space, I remember distinctly sitting in front of a TV and I was born in 1967, so I don't think it was the first landing, but I remember seeing one of the moon landings and the TV was one of those old TVs that had 13 channels in the UHF dial. And it was on a little tray with the casters, the little plastic casters.

But I remember everybody was excited about that and I was probably too young to fully understand it, but I just remember being excited about that. And as I got older, I was very curious and as I said, and I love to take things apart. I mean, I would take my clock radio apart and just sometimes I didn't get back together right. I love working on my bicycle and making lawnmowers run and things. And my mother bought me a, it was called a 60 in one electronics kit, and you could do all kinds of things with it. You could make a little alarm system and you could make lights do different sine waves and things like that. And it was always fun. I had a rector sets and so I loved to build things.

My parents divorced at a pretty young age. And so when I would go see my mother, I would do the camp at the Jacksonville Science Museum and spent a lot of time in the planetarium there. My dad was a geology and chemistry major, so he loves science. He always loved to talk to me about things like that. At some point he bought a telescope, and I can remember getting on the roof of my grandfather's flat retirement house roof and watching, looking at the moon and a couple times going up and seeing eclipses and those kind of things. And I think I had aptitude. By the time I got into middle school it was clear I kind of wanted to be in some type of STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field, although I don't even think we called it that back then.

John Arnold

Right.

Todd May

But I really love biology and science and math. I really wasn't applying myself. I was kind of immature and I had a couple of teachers who straightened me out and I really didn't get a chance to thank them until later in my life. But they really kept me from kind of getting on the bad path. I ended up going to college and studying engineering. I studied materials engineering at Auburn [University, in Alabama], and while I was there, I met a guy named Fred Bickley who was working on his PhD and he worked at Marshall Space Flight Center and he was working on the external tank foam problem and he was getting his PhD in materials engineering. I was getting my undergraduate, but we took some classes together and I just distinctly remember him telling me, "When you graduate you ought look us up." And I actually had a job offer in Atlanta to work for a company called Atlanta Gas Light and work on how grubs eat gas pipelines.

And I remember Fred saying, "Come look me up." And so I texted him and I ended up getting a job with a contractor for a year until a position opened up. And then a year later I went to work for NASA and I started out in the materials and processes lab and got to work on a lot of neat things. I was a lab lead, so I wasn't in one specific area, but they had a program called PIP rotations. And I got to work a lot of different things. I worked in the composites area, I worked in the corrosion area, I worked in the non-destructive testing area. And you do that for about nine months to a year until you settle out and figure out where you want to be. From there, I went to work on the space station program and at some point, I think it was 1993, the program office moved to Houston.

And so as a very young engineer, I picked up my bags and my wife and I moved to Houston and I worked in the program office there for about four years. Got to work with the Russians on the space station and we started having children and we kind of missed home. And so we moved back to Huntsville and I went to work at Marshall Space Flight Center again and spent about three years inside the building where we built the modules for space station. So the node, the lab, and the airlock. Boeing was the prime contractor. And we'd have meetings at 6AM in the morning and go till 10 o'clock at night, five or six days a week, and I learned a lot during that period watching. It's one thing to just sit by and sit in an office and talk about building stuff, but when you're down there and watching those engineers really have to solve very tough problems every day, you learn pretty quick. So that's what I did for about another three or four years. And at some point they asked me to run the Airlock project, which is the module on the station where the astronauts put on the suits and do spacewalking and got a chance to help button that thing up and send it down to Kennedy to be launched. And then I was looking for work, and that's where I met a guy named Rex Geveden, and he was the program manager on a mission called Gravity Probe B, which was testing Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

And so I got into something completely different that led me into the science side of the agency, and I worked that mission until it launched and I was about to go back and get a PhD and they called me up and said, "Would you like to manage the Discovery New Frontiers program?" which is a whole fleet of programs that really do neat planetary probes all over the solar system for various science missions. But the coolest one to me was the Pluto mission. I worked with a guy named Alan Stern who was the PI there and just getting that one off the ground, it was a really tricky one. You had to get it off in a 30-day launch window, and even then it was going to take 10 more years before it got to Pluto. But work missions like Kepler, which is the extra solar system planet finder and Dawn and Deep Impact and Comet and Stardust. And they just studied all these phenomenons all over.

And really the most gratifying thing about that program was these principal investigators who spent their entire careers working towards this mission. And then when the science starts coming in and they actually can prove the theories that they had, there's nothing like it. I've seen grown men and women cry when they get the results of what they've been predicting.

John Arnold

That's fascinating to hear about your journey. Number one, I always love to hear about the influences in people's lives that steered them either directly or indirectly on their paths. And it sounds like you had a lot of support and big shout out to teachers for the amazing work that they do in molding young minds and making sure that people do apply themselves. Also, War Eagle!

Todd May

AH!

John Arnold

Yeah, my grandfather went to Auburn.

Todd May

All right, War Eagle!

John Arnold

And so in NASA, just to backtrack a little bit, material engineering, ISS, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and then these space probes missions — you covered a lot of ground in that time, and that's all prior to joining KBR. Can you tell us about some of the major highlights? You were talking about how these experts have these moments where they're seeing years of their expertise coming to fruition through discoveries or what have you. What are some of the highlights of your time while you were at NASA for all those years?

Todd May

Well, I think through the science missions, and you mentioned the science side of it, but a couple come to mind, I can remember on there was a Phoenix Mars Lander mission. And I actually got to sit on consult during what they call the seven minutes of terror where you lose contact with the spacecraft and you don't know if it's going to land. And frankly, by the time you figure out it's either landed correctly or not because there's a 24-minute delay in the comms, and it was amazing just to be part of that and see the first data come across that the spacecraft survived. But we actually got on a plane very late that night and went down to Arizona with the science team, and that was one of those moments when the pictures started coming in.

And I distinctly remember them seeing what's called the Soccer Ball Pattern when you're in a desert and it's been dried up and the clay cakes, and it forms those five-sided, six-sided little cracks, little pieces of clay. And when they saw that, they had predicted that that's what would be there. And I literally saw tears run down eyes, and that was just amazing to me.

I think another one was, I mentioned Gravity Probe B. It was an amazing mission. It was run out of Stanford University and it had taken 40 years for the technology to catch up with the team, what they knew they could do with this mission, and actually test the General Relativity Theory, which is the geodetic effect and the frame dragging effect of the warping of space-time by the earth and by the rotation of the earth. And I won't belabor it too much, but the whole mission was about getting rid of errors or getting rid of noises in the system. And there were like 30 different noises. They had to just really work hard, they had to get it down to triple point, helium temperature, three degrees Kelvin, and they had to make it the most stable telescope ever. And they had to make these gyroscope spheres that were the roundest object ever made. And they saw geodetic effect immediately. They did not see frame dragging. And there was a Marshall scientist who remembered that the spheres before they put the niobium coating on them weren't exactly perfect. And they had mapped out those imperfections, and when they went back and subtracted out those imperfections, they saw frame dragging immediately. And so again, the scientists who had been waiting on this mission for over 40 years finally saw and were able to prove the theory, and that's amazing stuff.

John Arnold

Yeah, absolutely. And then also to consider just in the past couple of years when those first images came up from the Webb Telescope, just mind-boggling and to think that know KBR people have been a part of that as well and will be a part of those new discoveries as they're happening about the history of our universe and solar system.

Todd May

Yeah, KBR folks were very involved in that mission. One of the trickiest parts of that one is that this telescope, which when it's deployed, it's the size of a tennis court, has to be folded up and put inside of what they call a fairing, which is the top end of the rocket. And to deploy it a million miles away from Earth, they have to have about 200 plus mechanisms and they all have to work or this $14 billion spacecraft is dead in the water. And a lot of KBR engineers helped develop, design, test, integrate, build those mechanisms, a lot of involvement in contamination control and quality control all the way through launch and deployment. And while on the KBR side, I'm once removed, I'm not personally involved in these missions anymore. It is great to vicariously see it through our people supporting their customers and they get that same excitement from just being part of that mission.

John Arnold:

Right. Well, we've already talked about some of the significant initiatives you spearheaded while at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Are there any others that come to mind that are a particular note to you that stand out in your career there?

Todd May

I think once I finished in the science world, I came back and after working some staff type jobs for about a year, I picked up a program called the Space Launch System. And I was employee number one on that and helped get that started for almost five years and got it through critical design. But seeing that thing launch several years after I left the agency and just like I said, vicariously being really proud of the team, a lot of the folks that were there when we started it up stayed all the way through and saw it to first launch. And I just saw come across the news this week, they're about to ship the core stage for the second launch, which is actually going to take some astronauts, including a couple that I have a personal relationship with from my NASA days, and humans now are going to go back to the moon for the first time since the '70s. And I'm really proud of that team, I'm really proud of what it took to build the most powerful rocket ever built and to take a Human-rated capsule to the moon for the first time in 50 years.

John Arnold

As someone who was denied permission to go to a space camp in Huntsville, I love talking to people who are living and eating and breathing this every day. So we've talked a little bit about KBR and some of the work that they do with clients through the [KBR] Science and Space business, and I said in the open, you currently serve as senior vice president with responsibility for that business internally as S&S. And S&S provides solutions and expertise to clients like NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Geological Survey, and many, many others who are all doing extraordinarily important work. So I wonder if you could share some insights into the roles and the significance of that work that's being done by KBR people.

Todd May

In some ways, it's a lot like the work we did on the NASA side, except it is broader. It actually includes the Department of Defense, the U.S. Geological Survey, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], Department of Interior, Department of Transportation, but our people are... It is work they're doing for our customers. Unlike working on the government side of the equation and directly leading the projects, we supply the brain power, and the expertise, and the solutions for customers to do these very difficult, very highly technical jobs that have global importance. KBR today does things like supporting NASA flying the International Space Station and training every astronaut. We've been doing that since the '60s. Helping keep all in a neat little nod to my past, we have the folks that take care of the spacewalking suits today and keep them operational every time an astronaut does a spacewalk.

We're working with a commercial company to help them build the next generation of spacesuits. I talked about the work we did on James Webb. We're really proud of that, that there was a whole team of people who waited decade or more to see that thing actually start giving us views of the universe that we've never seen and really understanding things in a new and different way. People might not know this, but if you drive a car and you get a recall on that car for a problem, there's a system called Artemis that is put together at the Volpe Center for the Department of Transportation. It's a fully reimbursable software group up there in Boston. We have hundreds of software developers who develop that system and, in the most recent instantiation, helped move that up to the cloud. In a sense, we're making the highway safer for everybody out there driving today through the work our team does on that.

We take care of the archive of the Landsat data, the 40-year archive of the Earth, and that is the premier archive of the earth change and things like urban sprawl, or just the way rivers change courses, and the ebb and flow of the Arctic, and deforestation, and things like natural disasters, earthquakes. Mount St. Helens, the earth up there looks different now that that's erupted, and volcanoes, and hurricanes, and floods, and things like that. That data is used all over the globe by all kinds of people. It's used in private industry, for commercial purposes. It's used by scientists. It's used by nations to understand all of these things. I'm just really proud that we get to be part of that.

John Arnold

That's awesome. Yeah, to think about the breadth of everything that Science and Space does with KBR is just amazing. For our listeners who may not know this, there's an episode, and you'll forgive me of not knowing off the top of my head whether it was last season or the season before. We had a great conversation with one of our folks that works on the Landsat program. They were getting ready to launch Landsat 9, it was, I believe, and so definitely worth going back and listening to get a more comprehensive view of that. You were just talking about some of the partnerships that we have with space industry commercialization. We've talked a little bit about NASA saying we're going back to the moon and the potential ramifications of what that means from commercialization to colonization. I'm wondering what are some advancements do you believe are going to be driving innovation in space and aeronautics in the foreseeable future?

Todd May

That's a great question. That's one of the fun things about space is it's almost limitless in terms of distance and scope, but it's also limitless in it is the final frontier. There are technologies that in order to go further and further, that you have to master. I think probably one of the bigger ones that has already changed the industry is the reusability of vehicles that get people and things up into space above the Kármán line. That is lowering the cost to get mass to space, which has been a problem for many, many years, because getting out of the gravity well is probably one of the more complicated things, just getting stuff off the Earth, but that's not the only one. There's a lot of things.

Advanced manufacturing techniques, like added manufacturing, has significantly reduced what it costs to make rocket engines and rocket parts. We are going to need things like zero boil-off cryogenic storage systems, because when you go up into space for long periods of time and you need to refuel your cryogenics, developing low leakage, high thermal systems that store things thermally and do not leak, not only the material but the [inaudible 00:25:33] to boil off so you have it, those are important. Other things are, we do this on the space station today, we have what's called closed-loop life support. As one of the astronauts likes to say, my friend Don Pettit likes to say, tomorrow's coffee is yesterday's coffee. They recycle water, they recycle urine, they recycle sweat so you don't have to bring that up from the Earth.

When you're in low Earth orbit, you're only a couple hours away from Earth once you launch. But when you're at the Moon or you're at Mars, you could be days or months from being able to get to that, so being able to regenerate your air and your water is really important, and so higher reliability systems, higher efficiency systems are really important. Advanced propulsion systems like nuclear thermal propulsion are really going to enable things like Mars exploration, because without something like that, you can't come back at any point. You have to wait until the Mars, and the Sun, and Earth are in the right position to come back, which can be months. Optical communications are going to change things. You don't have to have these giant antennas that are the iconic look of all the old satellites from the '70s or this big antenna that looks like the kind that people used to have in their backyards here.

Space beam solar power and nuclear thermal power systems, nuclear thermal surface systems for if you're going to be on the Moon for a long time, there's a lot of darkness on the Moon at times, being able to get power systems that work through the dark are important. If you're going to have humans in space for a long period of time, you've got deep space radiation protection. If you have low gravity, you have countermeasure systems. The space station has really been a great proving ground to prepare for those kind of things. As I mentioned, the next generation spacesuits, we've got to get suits to allow us to move around and systems to allow us to move around on the surface.

John Arnold

It's really interesting to hear about all of the — I'm going to use the word “tactile,” for lack of a better word, because I think, so many times, when you think about advances and innovations that are going to be needed to do something, and I'm not trying to discount things like AI, and machine learning, and things like that because I feel like there are already aspects of that being used — but there are a lot of tangible things like the nuclear thermal propulsion, and the spacesuits, and more practical things that are going to make space exploration possible to the extent that we have ambitions to do.

Todd May

That's true. Absolutely. It's physics at the end of the day. When you're pushing technology, typically, you are pushing the laws of physics, and so it ends up being a very tactile set of technologies that you have to solve for X.

John Arnold

Really, really interesting too to think about circularity and reusability, something that I had never thought about before. With your long relationship with NASA as an employee and then with KBR working with NASA, and as you said before, KBR's relationship with NASA goes back to the '50s and '60s, with the Saturn V moving the large quantities of hydrogen that would be used to power that rocket, what's it been like for you personally to continue supporting NASA through the work that you're doing with KBR?

Todd May

Well, I touched on it earlier, but I think watching my colleagues that I worked with for many years, some of which I worked for, some of which worked for me, some of which we work side by side, watching them carry on, it's very gratifying. Just seeing them, and their successes, and their challenges, because there are challenges in this world. Just playing a different role and really being able to enable them and help them where we can, bringing our KBR people and solutions to the table to help them on their missions, that's just a very satisfying role. It's different. It's different than feeling like you are the program manager, or you are the center director, or you are the decision maker. It's more of an enabling type thing. You mentioned the teachers. It's almost like that role now has shifted where I'm helping other people achieve their goals.

John Arnold

That's outstanding. Well, let's close on a lighter note. I wonder if you'd share with us one fun fact that people might not know about you, Todd.

Todd May

I don't know. People that know me probably know this, but I'm a big puzzle nerd. I love escape games, number puzzles. And I'm a little bit OCD about it. I'll play it over and over and over again if it changes. Like Kakuro, I think I'm on puzzle 2,400. I just do them for fun. It's a way to disengage my brain a little bit and use a different part of the brain. I love adventure point and click games on my iPad and those kinds of things. I've probably done every one out there. That's probably a fun fact about me.

John Arnold

Very cool. No, we're a puzzle family over here too, so that's awesome.

Todd May

There you go.

John Arnold

And then we teased about this in the open. Space and or space exploration have been popular in pop culture for since the 1910s and before in science fiction. So we know that they're depicted a lot in film and TV. I'm wondering, this is a two part question. What are your favorite movies or TV shows that feature space prominently? And number two, what's a movie or show that really grinds your gears because the science isn't right?

Todd May

Yeah. I think this is probably true of a lot of people, but I was probably 12, 13, years old when “Star Wars” came out.

John Arnold

Yeah!

Todd May

And that was really exciting. I watched Star Trek growing up, although it wasn't until later in life you realize there's some other themes in other than just exploration, the human species. Grinding my gears?. I think whenever it's something that I know a little something about and they get it wrong or maybe they don't get it right. And I love [the novel] “The Martian.” I've been on a panel with Andy Weir [author of “The Martian”]. I love the book and the movie [2015, starring Matt Damon] and everything about it, except when they show the rockets in that movie, they're not the right rockets for Mars exploration. And they got a lot of it right. A lot of the technologies of what it would take to live on Mars and things like that. But they just didn't do a lot of consulting on the rockets. And I asked why did they use those particular ones? And they said they didn't want to use graphics. They wanted to have a rocket that was flying. When they showed it launch, they wanted real fire." And I was like, "Well, you could have used Saturn V." And it was really because they were using smaller rockets.

John Arnold

Right.

Todd May

And I was like, "Why would you do that?" So that kind of gets to me. I remember on [1998 film] Armageddon, I think that was the movie where they had two shuttles on the pad at the same time, and that just doesn't really work that way. So those little things just kind of get to me. But I'm really more of a fan of the ones that are, like I said, “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Interstellar,” that are more thought jogging or something that's not really possible today, but what it could be in the future.

John Arnold

I love it. I'm a big “Star Wars” fan too, but I love talking to smart people that are like, "That rocket — that's not the right rocket."

Todd May

Yeah.

John Arnold

Well, do you have any final thoughts to leave with us before I let you go?

Todd May

Well, John, I just want to thank you for having me today. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I hope it's engaging and somebody might want to listen to it. But I love talking about my passion. I love continuing to pursue my passion. And again, just thank you for allowing me to speak today.

John Arnold

Well, it's been my absolute pleasure. The passion comes through loud and clear on my end, so I'm sure that our listeners, whether they're driving home or to work today, are getting a lot out of it too. And hopefully they've enjoyed it as much as I have. And we'll talk to you again soon, I hope.

Todd May

All right, thanks a lot.

John Arnold

Thank you.

Todd May

Take care. See you.

CONCLUSION

John Arnold

Having the opportunity to talk to Todd was a good reminder of why I love this job.

I want to thank him for his time and openness.

I hope all our listeners enjoyed the episode and that, if nothing else, it reminds us all to encourage curiosity and learning in young people — and definitely send them to space camp!

I want to thank my colleagues Rachel Lytle and Kimberly Schwandt for helping set this episode up.

Big thanks to our producer, Emma, for the work she does in getting the episode out in the world.

And as always, thanks to you, dear listeners, for spending some time with us, wherever you are in the world.

We know there’s a lot going on in the world, and we appreciate you checking in with us and keeping us in YOUR orbit.

Take care.