NASA's original generation of brainpower — the ones who gave us the first moon landing and the heroic Apollo 13 mission — are passing the torch to a new cohort of engineers.
Later this month, six astronauts will board the space shuttle Endeavor and blast off from the Kennedy Space Center on a 14-day mission that will take them some 220 miles above earth. The breath-holding moment of liftoff is sure to be both joyous and bittersweet as Endeavor is slated to be NASA's second-to-last launch before it retires the 30-year space shuttle program later this year.
While uncertainty remains about NASA and the future of human space flight, there's no question that the Cockrell School of Engineering has made deep and wide contributions to space exploration over the years, and it will continue to do so. Alone, the school has produced nine astronauts who have flown in space, and McCombs School of Business graduate, Greg Johnson, will join Captain Mark Kelly and crew when they board Endeavor this month.
Other alumni have and continue to work on the ground, and renowned space experts and NASA legends, like aerospace engineering professor Hans Mark, share their knowledge and experience daily with Cockrell School students in the classroom.
As NASA's original generation of brainpower retires — the ones who gave us the first moon landing and the heroic Apollo 13 mission — they're passing the torch to a new cohort of engineers, and Cockrell School students stand ready to take it.
In late March, the school celebrated Space Week Texas, a statewide educational event that highlights space achievements and celebrates the future of space exploration. It was also a time for the school to look back at its contributions in space and to chart the next chapter of exploration.
Contributions that count
Randy Stone can recount the highs and lows of his 37-year NASA career with vivid detail. The highs: being 900 miles out in the Pacific Ocean, huddled around a shortwave radio to hear the BBC's broadcast of the first moon landing. Five days later, as part of NASA's quarantine crew, 23-year-old Stone would be among the first to welcome Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins back to Earth. And just a few months later, University of Texas engineering graduate Alan Bean would be the fourth human to walk on the moon.
But Stone's biggest high, which eclipsed even the Apollo 13 rescue mission which he was a part of, was launching the first space shuttle in 1981. Stone, a 1967 aerospace engineering graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, who, at the time of his retirement from NASA in 2004, was deputy center director of the Johnson Space Center, helped oversee the launch. For 18 months prior, he had trained with fellow UT engineering alum and astronaut Robert Crippen, who commanded the shuttle.
"When it got to orbit and the shuttle was doing everything we said it would do, I felt an overpowering giddiness. You were almost laughing and crying because we were a part of something that was so important," Stone said.
He and Crippen are just two of many alumni who have made their mark on space.
Marybeth Edeen, a 1989 chemical engineering graduate, now serves as lab manager of NASA's International Space Station (ISS), the most complex scientific and technological endeavor ever undertaken involving five space agencies and representing 16 nations.
Edeen helped perfect a water recycling and reuse program that's essential for ensuring crew at the space station have drinking and cleaning water. The reuse and recycling program she and her team developed also have uses on Earth, especially in remote and developing areas. Edeen currently works to promote research partnerships aboard the station, which have already increased understanding and led to improvements in cancer and salmonella treatment, among other things. At NASA, she works with fellow Longhorn engineering graduate, Michael Suffredini, manager of the International Space Program.
Edeen, along with Terry Hill, a UT aerospace engineering graduate who serves as engineering project manager for the Constellation Space Suit Program, visited the Cockrell School during Space Week and discussed with students everything from career tips, to what their day-to-day jobs are like and how their aerospace degrees helped them.
"It was useful to hear about how we can apply our skills to different problems and to hear what employers are looking for," aerospace engineering senior Kit Kennedy said after listening to a presentation by Hill about his job designing spacesuits for NASA.
Because the language of engineering is universal and extends every culture, alumni said their degrees prepared them in more ways than they could have imagined — whether it was being able to discuss technical applications with the Russians, creating spacesuits that could endure years of wear and tear or making split-second and life-changing decisions.
"My UT experience of having to survive in an academic environment that I really wasn’t prepared for — coming from a little, tiny junior college — helped me improve my problem-solving skills," Stone said. "Ten years into my career I could see that The University of Texas at Austin engineering program prepared me for a lot of things that I didn't even realize."
Of course, there are some things no one can prepare for. Like the worst day of Stone's career, when the Challenger shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight on Jan. 28, 1986.
Just seconds before millions saw the disaster live on T.V., members of mission control ordered the shuttle to "throttle up."
"The call to throttle up usually gets a 'Rodger,' call from the spacecraft and instead what we got sounded like an 'uh oh.' That was the last thing we heard from the crew," Stone said. "The moment when the flight dynamics officer said 'Flight, I’m tracking multiple objects,' we knew we had a serious problem."
There was only one T.V. in the room, and immediately Stone and others in mission control saw the Challenger break apart on the screen.
"I had been working for 18 months with that crew, eyeball to eyeball and shoulder to shoulder. These people were close friends so that obviously took a tremendous bite out of me," Stone said.
Since then, Stone has talked to students about the experience and about how failure can happen, but it's how you deal with it that defines your life.
"It defined me," he said. "It made me work harder and pay more attention to details and try to be the best flight director I could be."
The next generation of space explorers
While there are certainly risks to space exploration, those who pursue it on the ground or 200-plus miles above Earth accept that the opportunity to discover and learn about the world outweighs them.
"Landing on the moon was truly an awesome moment for our nation and the world, and it will be one of those moments from the 20th century that is forever remembered," said Hans Mark.
While funding cuts put human space flight in question and could shift a heavy load of space exploration from NASA to the private sector, alumni, faculty and students are optimistic.
"Things work in cycles and I tell my students not to worry about which cycle is up or down because if you live long enough you'll live through a couple of them," said Mark, a former deputy administrator of NASA, who oversaw the first 14 space shuttle flights, among other things. "We've got new challenges now to [spaceflight] and they're different and they're more subtle. But I tell my students that you're going to succeed — that's our habit — and there are still people around who think that way too."
Already, Cockrell School students are succeeding.
On Nov. 19, 2010, two satellites designed and constructed by aerospace students over seven years successfully launched. Earlier this year, the satellites separated, making them the first student-developed mission in the world in which satellites orbit and communicate with each other in real-time.
Such technology, which is smaller and less expensive than the satellites traditionally used in space, could pave the way for more complex satellite missions that require real-time coordination between small satellites.
They could also help prevent tragedies like the Columbia disaster, which, unknown to the shuttle's crew, had a hole in the left wing that caused it to disintegrate upon reentry to the Earth's atmosphere.
"If they would have had the technology that could go outside the shuttle and inspect it, then the hole could have been discovered," said Glenn Lightsey, the students' faculty advisor.
Lightsey said the satellite project introduced UT engineering students to a field experience in a way that no classroom can.
"It's a great opportunity to get a look at what it feels like to be in an aerospace company or government agency, from design to building and testing it to seeing it launch in space," Lightsey said. "As aerospace engineers, that's what we live for, to see our stuff go into space."
