Control Engineers get Lessons from Moon Man!

Closing Presentation by Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Astronaut and Skylab 3 Commander, at Honeywell User Group 2008

Release Your Inner Hero

Alan Bean gave a great presentation about reaching for goals and teamwork based on his experiences at NASA.   Alan took the audience to the moon with his description of his role as Lunar Module Pilot on the flight of Apollo 12 where he was the fourth man on the moon.

Alan focused on a broad variety of subjects from teamwork, high achievement, risk taking, goal setting, attitude control, achieving maximum potential, creative thinking, and leadership.  He used examples from the space program to focus on each of these.

In November 1969, Al Bean and Pete Conrad landed in the moon's Ocean of Storms—after a flight of 250,000 miles and a launch that included a harrowing lightning strike. They explored the lunar surface, deployed several lunar surface experiments, and installed the first nuclear power generator station on the moon to provide the power source. Dick Gordon remained in lunar orbit photographing landing sites for future missions.

Bean stated "The Apollo program was an impossible dream come true. Sending humans from Planet Earth to explore the moon and return was a glamorous and newsworthy dream, but no more important than the dreams we all have in our hearts right now."

Alan said he was right at home with this large group of control and automation engineers that are everyday heroes because they are the same kind of people that were responsible for NASA's success.

Captain Bean knows about reaching for the stars, organizationally and individually. In 1973, he was the Commander of Skylab Mission II (SL III), where he lived 59 days in space, orbiting 270 miles above our planet Earth. Under his leadership his crew accomplished 150% of their pre-mission goals - a record unsurpassed before or since.

Captain Bean noted that human beings from the Planet Earth are the most extraordinary creatures in the universe because we are the only ones that dream and then work to make our dreams reality.

As a NASA Astronaut, Bean learned that people did not have to be extra gifted or extra talented to do something great. "We were just ordinary people," he said. "No matter what their level of achievement may have been in the past, with extra effort and dedication they can be great in the future. Organizations and individuals are almost always significantly better than they know or believe. We all believed we could find a way."  The saving of the Apollo 13 crew after their oxygen tank exploded is a perfect example.

Captain Bean shared the two most important rules of successful team members he learned at NASA:

1. "Find a way to admire and care about all the other team members."   He talked about how he complained to Pete Conrad about some of the other people he didn’t agree with in meetings.  Pete told him there was no way they could get to the moon if everyone was an Alan Bean.  Other people have different talents and perspectives.  He learned to get to know and appreciate all team members.
2. "You need to look to yourself in good times and bad."  The number one person controlling your success is you.

 "Sometimes it's not releasing the inner hero but controlling the villain within!"

Bean resigned from NASA in June 1981 to devote his full time to painting. Many of his paintings reside on the walls of space enthusiasts. He said his decision was based on the fact that, in his 18 years as an astronaut, he was fortunate enough to visit worlds and see sights no artist's eye, past or present, has ever viewed firsthand and he hopes to express these experiences through the medium of art. He is pursuing this dream at his home and studio in Houston.

As a painter, Bean wanted to add color to the moon. "I had to figure out a way to add color to the moon without ruining it," he remarked. If you look at his paintings, you will see the lunar landscape is not a monotonous gray, but shades of various colors. "If I were a scientist painting the moon, I would paint it gray. I'm an artist, so I can add colors to the moon," says Bean.

Alan Bean's paintings include "Lunar Grand Prix" and "Rock and Roll on the Ocean of Storms." He is the only artist in the world to use real moon dust on his paintings. When he began painting, he realized that keepsake patches from his space suit were dirty with moon dust. He adds tiny pieces of the patches to his paintings, which make them unique. He also uses the hammer used to pound the flagpole into the lunar surface to texture his paintings. View Alan Bean's Online Gallery.

This week's editorial was written by Bill Lydon, Contributing Editor. Thanks, Bill! Due to the July 4th Holiday, we will not publish any newsletters next week. See you in two weeks. For those in the U.S., have a safe and happy holiday!

Enjoy the rest of this Automation Weekly!

Rick Zabel
Vice President, Publisher

Taking out the Garbage: Making Windows XP suitable as a HMI Platform
Windows XP can provide a robust HMI environment, and has several advantages over either Windows CE or Linux. Out of the box, however, Windows XP is not suitable to act as a HMI / SCADA platform. There are several "tricks" that can be performed to "take out the garbage" thus creating a stable, robust, and secure environment for your application.

Read full article by Marty Huff, MSI Tec

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Anyone work with NH3 injection systems?
I am working on an NH3 injection system on an LM6000 CT. The control system is a Foxboro IA DCS. The strategy in place now was copied from our frame 7 CT and it works but just not very well. Basically it uses a curve to determine how much NH3 from the gas flow of the CT then uses our cems numbers for trim. That number is then used as the remote setpoint on the NH3 flow controller...I am not real familiar with the whole process of producing NOX so I am not sure what would be the best approach to control it. Thanks.

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