Sunday, March 26, 2000
Students get a look behind the scenes
BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
:HOUSTON — The two-week trip to Houston offered much more to students than just a zero-gravity ride. Students got an extensive behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it might really be like to work for NASA. They saw the places, heard the sounds and talked with staff members and student co-ops. Among the highlights:
• Johnson Space Center: Located on NASA Road One, south of Houston, this is the home of Mission Control, which manages all NASA spaceflights once they are launched. The complex looks mostly like a large office park. Except most of the buildings are covered with vertical concrete slabs with no windows and enclose large test chambers instead floors of offices. Building 30 actually houses several Mission Control rooms, one for space shuttle flights, one for the International Space Station, plus support rooms. The original mission control room, which ran all the Gemini, Apollo and early space shuttle missions, is now a national historic landmark.
• Space culture: Tour guides often tout Houston as “Space City” to emphasize its connection with the space program. NASA facilities and offices for several subcontractors do create a noticeable presence in the flat coastal area between Houston and Galveston. Residents live with the roar of astronauts taking off almost every day in their T-38 training jets from Ellington Field.
A local radio station runs a trivia game called “Ask a Rocket Scientist.” And several nearby businesses on NASA Road One with no obvious link to the space program still boast space-related names: NASA Liquor, the Challenger Plaza, Planet Mattress, the NASA Vision Center.
• Working in a secure facility: Picture a science fair going on inside a working aircraft hangar. That's how the students worked at Ellington Field, home of NASA's KC-135A zero-gravity training plane, a U.S. Coast Guard station and a base for the Texas Air National Guard.
Students set up their experiments under the wings of two WB-57 jets that NASA uses for atmospheric research. To prevent spark risk that could ignite jet fuel, electric motors had to be 18 inches off the floor and electric drills were forbidden.
Students were told to keep a sharp eye for loose objects and stay at least 25 feet away from jet intakes and 200 feet away from jet exhausts. A pen sucked into a jet engine has been known to cause as much as $75,000 worth of damage, staff warned.
Black-edged badges gave U.S. students access to exactly two buildings at Ellington Field, plus the right to be escorted to limited parts of Johnson Space Center. Foreign nationals had to wear green-edged badges and were not permitted to join co-op mini-tours of secure parts of Johnson Space Center.
• The Super Guppy Transport: Students at Ellington Field were treated to a close-up view of NASA's one-of-a-kind Super Guppy Transport. This silver and white propeller-driven plane really does look like a fish and it will become much more visible in the next few years.
The Guppy's main job is to ferry chunks of the International Space Station from assembly sites to testing sites and ultimately to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch. The largest part of the odd-looking cargo bay is 25 feet tall, 25 feet wide and 32 feet long. Cargo also can be stored for another 80 feet as the ceiling tapers off toward the tail. To load cargo, the entire nose section swivels open.
• The X-38: Inside Building 220, a non-descript metal shed at Johnson Space Center, students saw a small NASA crew building something quite interesting — a mock-up version of the X-38 crew return vehicle for the International Space Station.
This vehicle — designed to carry up to seven crew members back to Earth in case of an emergency — looks like a ski-boat from space. It has no wings and no engines other than small rockets designed to slow the craft from orbital speed for a glide through the atmosphere. Instead of a splashdown, however, the craft will aim for land guided by a huge, steerable parachute called a parafoil.
Mock-up versions already have been dropped successfully from airplanes. Last week, NASA crews were building the frame of the first spaceworthy test vehicle, which is scheduled to be dropped from orbit in about a year and a half.
• The Neutral Buoyancy Lab: Located in the Sonny Carter Training Facility near Johnson Space Center, this building houses a 6.2-million gallon swimming pool that astronauts use to practice spacewalking maneuvers.
The pool — 202 feet long, 102 feet wide and 40 feet deep — is big enough to submerge objects and move them around with the space shuttle's robot arm. The pool has been especially busy lately with crews practicing assembly for the international space station, which will require more spacewalks than have been attempted in the history of human spaceflight.
• Gene Kranz: Millions saw the movie Apollo 13, the story of a successful crew rescue after an explosion occurred on their way to the moon. Millions more recall watching the drama unfold as it happened in 1970.
These students, nearly all of whom weren't born at the time, heard the tale first-hand from a living legend — NASA flight director Gene Kranz.
Students were told of the many life-and-death decisions that Mr. Kranz and his Mission Control staff had to make under extreme deadline pressure. Then they got to tour the old Mission Control Center, now a national historic landmark at Johnson Space Center.
After hearing Mr. Kranz, students got the chance to sit at the exact same control panel where he worked, push the buttons he pushed, and see the room where so much history was made.
Students who use laptops every day and could barely function without pagers and cell phones marveled at how the United States got people to the moon and back with computers less powerful than today's standard pocket calculators.
• The Hubble "thumbnail' image: During an astronaut presentation, one particular slide from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope captured student imaginations. The idea behind the image was to hold a thumbnail up at arm's length to find the darkest part of the night sky, a place of inky black “nothing.” Then, take a picture at maximum focus with the Hubble.
The result was an image peppered with at least 2,000 galaxies, each with an estimated 200 million stars. And that was just one thumbnail's worth of an entire night sky.
“With that many stars, how can people think there isn't any other life in the universe?” asked University of Kentucky student Christopher Barker.
Photo gallery
Zero G is the ride of a lifetime
InfoGraphic: How plane gets Zero G
Weightless ride churns reporter's stomach, but thrill is worth it
As the oxygen runs out, the mind runs slower
NASA needs to go boldly, hero of moon program says
Students get a look behind the scenes
How to be an astronaut
