A 33-year veteran of the premier space agency, Jeff Seaton keeps the Earth connected to the stars.
By Alex Knapp, Forbes Staff
Few organizations in the country manage as vast an array of information and communications as NASA. With incoming data from Voyager probes outside the solar system, images from Mars rovers and messaging and scientific data from the International Space Station and NASA’s 10 field centers around the country, the agency wrangles some 113 petabytes of data– 5 times the amount stored in theLibrary of Congress. Responsible for it all is Jeff Seaton, NASA’s chief information officer, who oversees a billion dollar budget and 700 employees across the organization.
Seaton has been with the space agency since 1991, when he started as a robotics engineer. He took on the role of chief technology officer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia in 2004, rising to become that center’s CIO. By 2021 he was CIO of the entire agency. Since taking the role, Seaton has focused on modernizing NASA’s digital infrastructure, which landed him on this year’s Forbes CIO Next List.
Recently, Seaton sat down with Forbes to discuss some of the challenges of managing IT for the space agency. Below are some of the highlights from that conversation, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Keeping decades-old spacecraft secure
We have our Voyager spacecraft that are farther away from this planet than any other human created entity. There’s no way we’re going to upgrade the computers on the them. … And we just have to do our best to mitigate any potential threats because things that were designed 30 years ago never could anticipate the environment that we’re in today. And so we’ve got a lot of creative people in our mission space that are thinking about that all the time.
Protecting NASA’s mission data
We know today some of the threats come through basic vulnerabilities. And so we’ve encouraged folks to do things like multifactor authentication, to implement encryption where it’s possible and to patch our systems. Part of my job is actually just emphasizing the importance of the basics as we work to achieve mission success and building that into how we operate. … If we are collecting data, our scientists and researchers want to be able to give assurances that that data has been validated and is reliable. And so protecting the data and the systems that generate that data is of paramount importance to our entire community.
The mutli-year effort to revamp NASA’s web presence
We had thousands of websites…So starting back in about 2019, we took a look at the overall web footprint and focused on where we had the most interest. And we were able, after several years of effort, to roll out a more modern and more public-focused web presence. That really allowed us to focus the message of NASA in a way that the general public would be able to appreciate and understand.
Why NASA rolled out a streaming service
NASA has a great history of providing content via traditional television. So we had NASA TV, but the world is moving beyond just traditional television media; streaming media is where the real content and emphasis was. And so in the last year, we rolled out NASA Plus, which is a streaming platform that makes it possible for anybody that has a network connection to access NASA video content and programming, as opposed to only those people that might have a cable TV provider. Modernizing the distribution mechanism and providing it to so many more people around the world has been another significant change.
On NASA’s history with AI
We’ve been using AI for years. I started my career back in the early nineties and my first officemate…was using neural networks to try to determine the optimal path for robotic devices. We’ve had AI in NASA missions for years. In our Artemis campaign we’re planning on using artificial intelligence to explore the lunar surface. We’ve got rovers on Mars today that are using AI to navigate in-between when they get commands from the ground. And then we’re using AI to analyze data and images that are collected from spacecraft, looking at space as well as the Earth. That mission-focused AI is built into the overall project lifecycle.
How NASA is using generative AI
Now we do have to be concerned a bit about generative AI–it’s kind of a black box. And so we view humans in the loop as something that will always be important. We can use generative AI to help accelerate some of the work we do, but we still have that validation step at the end.
NASA’s great at experimenting, and so we expect that over the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll continue experimenting with these generative AI capabilities as they roll out. Of course, the government might be a little bit slower to adopt some of the technologies because we have to have certain assurances that the technology is appropriately protecting U.S. data. And so we might be a little bit slower than some companies, but I actually don’t view that as a bad thing because we’re also able to learn from others as we go forward.
Building IT capabilities for Artemis, the NASA program returning humans to the Moon
We’ve got a lot of partners. So there’s NASA internal work and then the work of an evolving commercial space sector. And both are trying to figure out how we can have a sustainable presence on another body in the solar system. There are all kinds of challenges associated with that. Just think about it from a communications and networking IT standpoint. … And so we’re engaging with many of our partners to answer some of the questions that we know about today and then to identify some of the questions that are yet to pop up. That’s only going to help us continue our exploration beyond the Moon to Mars. And that’s really exciting. We are explorers, and one of the most exciting things about Artemis is it continues our legacy of exploration.
