Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s mechanical engineering lead on the helicopter’s historic first flight

Josh Ravich, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mechanical Engineering Lead, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the helicopter’s historic first flight

Video transcript

- Well, let's now turn our attention to today's historic event. And that, of course, is NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completing its first flight. Now, we want to talk to one person who helped make all of this happen. And for that, we want to bring in Josh Ravich. He's a mechanical engineering lead for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

And Josh, it's great to have you on "Yahoo Finance," and congratulations on this massive feat. I guess, first, just walk us through the emotions that you felt this morning when you realized that this was a success.

JOSH RAVICH: Yeah, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I don't know. I still probably haven't processed the emotions, but they were fairly high, amplified by the fact that it was, you know, 3:30 in the morning when they happened.

It's just-- for all the team, you know, we've been working on this for years, myself about five years, for others even longer. So just the culmination of that, you know, to take part in something, you know, that's changing the way we can explore space, you know, an aviation milestone, it's just-- I mean, it's hard to explain, right? I mean, it's a pretty great feeling.

- Well, we had, Josh, Neil deGrasse Tyson on, who called it one badass accomplishment. So when the world's favorite astrophysicist gives you a compliment like that, it's hard to top it. But let me ask you, how do you top this? Because your own project manager, MiMi Aung, actually said each world gets only one first flight. So what's next?

JOSH RAVICH: Oh, gosh, there's so many things out there to do. A next big milestone for us is actually what Perseverance's main mission is, caching samples to bring back to Earth. You know, this is the first flight from the surface of Mars. However, soon, hopefully, we will have the first return of actual material from Mars. Just like moon rocks, you know, we'll have some Mars rocks as well.

There's another helicopter project in the works called Dragonfly, aimed to fly at Titan in the not-too-distant future. So we're all really excited to see that one, too.

- Josh, will we be able to use this data, you think, for future projects to make even bigger and better and more sophisticated helicopters?

JOSH RAVICH: Absolutely, we will. The data we're getting back is actually the primary return for this, besides, you know, the cool factor of actually having done this. Yeah, it feeds forward to future, larger science helicopters, helicopters that can actually carry science payloads or do more complex things, talking in the, you know, 10-to-20-kilogram range with a couple of kilograms of payload-- you know, about four pounds-ish of payload.

So that can do a lot of things in the future, right? Scouting for future rovers, future astronauts as well-- accessing for science very hard-to-reach areas, up mountains, down ravines, you know, places you can't actually take a rover.

- The geek in me-- my ears perked up when you talked about a helicopter mission to Titan. Is that the moon of Saturn?

JOSH RAVICH: Yes.

- We're going to send a helicopter there?

JOSH RAVICH: Yes, it's called Dragonfly, yes.

- When does it get there? And I'm thinking back to 2010 or 2001, all these worlds are yours except Europa. So I'm glad we're going to Titan.

JOSH RAVICH: Yeah. Actually, it's a mission out of back east. I think one of the other NASA centers and, I believe, APL. So I actually don't know the launch date offhand, but I'm sure that we can find that information for you, or a quick search should show--

- I'll Google it.

JOSH RAVICH: --what plans are.

- Josh, how long does something like this to plan for? I guess, how long have you been working on this?

JOSH RAVICH: I started about, you know, summer of 2016, just as we were starting to build our engineering model units that we tested both for dynamic testing, flying in a very large 25-foot diameter, about 80-foot-tall vacuum chamber, as well as another similar model that we used for testing-- for thermal vacuum testing, vibration testing, you know, how do you survive launch environments. There's some other folks who've been on even longer. I think our chief engineer basically had this idea almost 20 years ago. So it's been in the works for a long time.

- Josh Ravich, congratulations again, and thanks so much for hopping on here to tell us all about it. We wish you all the best. And we hope to have you back soon once you complete more missions like this.