NASA's Steven Cox explains how he used Excel's shapes and hyperlinks to prototype a rocket launch system in Excel.
For information on NASA Social: NASA Socials
Pictures from the event: NASASocial SpaceX3 and Jared
For information on NASA Social: NASA Socials
Pictures from the event: NASASocial SpaceX3 and Jared
Transcript of the video:
The MrExcel podcast is sponsored by Easy Excel.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast episode 1875.
Launch rockets with Excel. Rapid prototyping.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel net cast. I'm Bill Jelen. Well, that's my picture right there at Kennedy Space Center. And thanks to the NASA Social program, I was chosen along with these other 37 of my new friends to watch a launch at Kennedy Space Center. NASA Social is a great program. If you are at all interested in science or space check them out. They have new programs all the time. And while the launch was postponed during the weekend, we got to see all kinds of great things behind the scenes, things that people would never get to see, even if you go on the tours, the insider tours at the Kennedy Space Center.
So it was an amazing opportunity and they do show off some of the new technology. This is the robot astronaut. His legs are going up on the next SpaceX launch, or the small satellites that are actually have a cell phone inside. And they're like six inches small, and they're, they're launching those. And at one point one of the first things we did when I was taking this very seriously, I'm here as a social media person. This is Steven Cox who runs the firing rooms. And people were asking Steven, all kinds of rocket questions. Like these: “Measures Field Mills. Lightning is not a great thing when you're launching. right?” And so being MrExcel, what did I ask Steven?
I said, “Hey, do you use Excel here?” And at first mentioned some budget things, but he said, you know, we did do something really interesting with Excel. Steven used Excel's drawing tools to mock up a system here.
It is in his words. And while he's talking, I'm going to try and do the same thing in Excel.
[ Steven Cox ] Cool things I did in Excel, but I had to simulate a program that we're going to use out here. And so it works to help the engineers understand what I did. I made like 30 different pictures in Excel for what the console would look like to jump between them. So that's a nice hyperlink to jump between pages. And it actually looked for them to pour and function exactly like the prototype that they built after that. But the cool thing was at the engineer's walked in. I just showed it to him. So that was a prototype of things like Excel. It's an easy tool that people know how to use. Right? And I turned out a prototype, a rough prototype of a system that we've been using over there for eight years now, that's creating the prototype. I did it in a couple hours.
[ Bill Jelen: ] That',s that's wild. And the system was for, [ Steven Cox: ] Well, we had something called a consolidated council. And the idea is that we were taking what rooted up here. We did a years ago, bringing in different platforms. You can post them on one. And so I drew, you know, our video, how we commanded our video on one and how we commanded our data system on another one, how we did our voice system and I made just box diagrams, right? And then you'd have a button. You press a button. You would go from red to green, we'll jump to page, had a green, and then it would go back yellow. If you hit it again, sweet. And it was jumped to another page. It's like, here's a video page. And then here's how you would select video. And it jumped between these pages. Now, if you looked at the bottom, you had like 30 pages open, but it was instantaneously. They work exact functions as a gooey interface, just like we needed to work.
[ Bill Jelen ] So that mock up then it's what they use to build the real thing to him.
[ Steven Cox ] And said, make it look like this. And he turned it into code, no matter what, it's not your, it's not your typical use. It's not your typical use for a Excel.
[ Bill ] It's funny. There's so many non-typical uses. I hear all kinds of things that people do, [ Steven ] But that's really all I used in there was that hyperlink function.
[ Bill ] From the drawing objects. Right. Yeah.
Beautiful. That's good. Thank you.
[ Steven ] Thank you.
[ Bill ] Hey, so isn't that a cool use for Excel? You have to drop some specs and someone's going to program that by having all these different sheets down and then by having these hyperlinks, it goes from one sheet to the next and it shows the functionality isn't that cool. Now Steven works at Kennedy space centre.
That system that he designed was used to launch rockets. Isn't that an amazing use of Excel? And again, I want to point you to NASA social, if you are at all geeky. And obviously if you're watching this, you are just a great opportunity for behind the scenes. And it's not just in Florida. They haven't been at various NASA sites around the country, check it out, watch for an upcoming one and apply. I highly, highly recommend it, but Hey, for more pictures and links from that NASA social weekend, check out the YouTube comments right down there Below this video. I was like, Stephen Cox with that great idea. I want to thank you for stopping by. I'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast episode 1875.
Launch rockets with Excel. Rapid prototyping.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel net cast. I'm Bill Jelen. Well, that's my picture right there at Kennedy Space Center. And thanks to the NASA Social program, I was chosen along with these other 37 of my new friends to watch a launch at Kennedy Space Center. NASA Social is a great program. If you are at all interested in science or space check them out. They have new programs all the time. And while the launch was postponed during the weekend, we got to see all kinds of great things behind the scenes, things that people would never get to see, even if you go on the tours, the insider tours at the Kennedy Space Center.
So it was an amazing opportunity and they do show off some of the new technology. This is the robot astronaut. His legs are going up on the next SpaceX launch, or the small satellites that are actually have a cell phone inside. And they're like six inches small, and they're, they're launching those. And at one point one of the first things we did when I was taking this very seriously, I'm here as a social media person. This is Steven Cox who runs the firing rooms. And people were asking Steven, all kinds of rocket questions. Like these: “Measures Field Mills. Lightning is not a great thing when you're launching. right?” And so being MrExcel, what did I ask Steven?
I said, “Hey, do you use Excel here?” And at first mentioned some budget things, but he said, you know, we did do something really interesting with Excel. Steven used Excel's drawing tools to mock up a system here.
It is in his words. And while he's talking, I'm going to try and do the same thing in Excel.
[ Steven Cox ] Cool things I did in Excel, but I had to simulate a program that we're going to use out here. And so it works to help the engineers understand what I did. I made like 30 different pictures in Excel for what the console would look like to jump between them. So that's a nice hyperlink to jump between pages. And it actually looked for them to pour and function exactly like the prototype that they built after that. But the cool thing was at the engineer's walked in. I just showed it to him. So that was a prototype of things like Excel. It's an easy tool that people know how to use. Right? And I turned out a prototype, a rough prototype of a system that we've been using over there for eight years now, that's creating the prototype. I did it in a couple hours.
[ Bill Jelen: ] That',s that's wild. And the system was for, [ Steven Cox: ] Well, we had something called a consolidated council. And the idea is that we were taking what rooted up here. We did a years ago, bringing in different platforms. You can post them on one. And so I drew, you know, our video, how we commanded our video on one and how we commanded our data system on another one, how we did our voice system and I made just box diagrams, right? And then you'd have a button. You press a button. You would go from red to green, we'll jump to page, had a green, and then it would go back yellow. If you hit it again, sweet. And it was jumped to another page. It's like, here's a video page. And then here's how you would select video. And it jumped between these pages. Now, if you looked at the bottom, you had like 30 pages open, but it was instantaneously. They work exact functions as a gooey interface, just like we needed to work.
[ Bill Jelen ] So that mock up then it's what they use to build the real thing to him.
[ Steven Cox ] And said, make it look like this. And he turned it into code, no matter what, it's not your, it's not your typical use. It's not your typical use for a Excel.
[ Bill ] It's funny. There's so many non-typical uses. I hear all kinds of things that people do, [ Steven ] But that's really all I used in there was that hyperlink function.
[ Bill ] From the drawing objects. Right. Yeah.
Beautiful. That's good. Thank you.
[ Steven ] Thank you.
[ Bill ] Hey, so isn't that a cool use for Excel? You have to drop some specs and someone's going to program that by having all these different sheets down and then by having these hyperlinks, it goes from one sheet to the next and it shows the functionality isn't that cool. Now Steven works at Kennedy space centre.
That system that he designed was used to launch rockets. Isn't that an amazing use of Excel? And again, I want to point you to NASA social, if you are at all geeky. And obviously if you're watching this, you are just a great opportunity for behind the scenes. And it's not just in Florida. They haven't been at various NASA sites around the country, check it out, watch for an upcoming one and apply. I highly, highly recommend it, but Hey, for more pictures and links from that NASA social weekend, check out the YouTube comments right down there Below this video. I was like, Stephen Cox with that great idea. I want to thank you for stopping by. I'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
