Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, December 13, 2010 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Reg Mitchell
"NASTRAN: Programming, Personalities, and Politics"
ABSTRACT -- If your car is under thirty years old, there is a high probability it was designed using Nastran or one of its commercial descendants. Besides spacecraft and automobiles, Nastran has been used in designing everything from disk drives to aircraft carriers. That's an impressive reach for a program that got its start in 1964 in Goddard's Building 7. Nastran is one of the most successful examples of NASA technology transfer, even if some of the process has been unofficial.
Obviously, personalities and politics played an important role in the creation of Nastran and its spread, as this talk will show.
This talk will not be a tutorial, but we will look at some of the technical and other details that led to Nastran's success and longevity. In particular, we will show some of the innovation in the programming methods used in this mostly FORTRAN application program. Computer Sciences Corporation, the MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation, and The Glenn L Martin Company overcame many obstacles in the implementation of Nastran on a variety of 1960s mainframe computers. Then we will cover how the program was adapted to modern virtual memory machines and its migration from main frames to work stations and even large capacity PCs.
After the end of the formal program, those wishing to enter the Twilight Zone can view the Nastran promotional video "Meanwhile, Back on Earth", narrated by Rod Serling.
SPEAKER -- Reg Mitchell first joined Goddard in 1964 as a summer Engineering Aide while still attending The George Washington University. Later he received BSME and Master of Science in Engineering degrees from GWU in 1965 and 1967. After a second summer at GSFC he went full time in June 1966 in the Test & Evaluation Division and stayed another 42 1/2 years before retiring from the Mechanical Systems Division in January 2009. Throughout this 44+ year period he was never far removed from the Nastran program.
That first summer he was hired by Thomas Butler, the future "Father of Nastran" and was thus introduced to the relatively new field of finite element structural analysis. After working with Butler on documentation quality control during Nastran program development, he went on to maintain and improve the NASA IBM version at GSFC for some years. He was also Goddard's representative on the NASA HQ based Nastran Advisory Group (NAG) for 15 years until NASA decided to use only commercial versions of the program. After that he managed a competitive procurement of Nastran, finding unique ways to save the government money in the process. And finally he was a member of NASA's Inventions & Contribution Board for over 15 years. Reg is known for a passion for all things railroad, from HO scale models to the real thing and has ridden trains in all 48 lower US states and 8 of the 10 Canadian Provinces. His personal mascot is the Eastern Gray Squirrel.