Meet: Dave McKissock

Systems Engineer
Glenn Research Center

Who I am and What I do:
Greetings and salutations, as the spider in Charlotte’s Web would say. My name is Dave, and I work at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Yes, there really is a NASA center in Cleveland! As I travel around and tell people where I work, they are always amazed to hear that NASA has a center in the buckeye state.

I support the International Space Station, using computers to estimate the performance of the Electrical Power System. Let me explain my job by using an analogy. If you were responsible for designing the sewage system for your city, one of your concerns would be how much sewage you needed to handle at one time. One of the worst times for sewage system engineers is at the start of the half-time show at a superbowl game. As you may have already guessed, this is one of the few times when many Americans all at once make a restroom break and flush the toilet, thereby sending bucketloads of sewage on its way to the treatment plant.

Consider the International Space Station electrical power system. If the astronauts turn on all of the equipment onboard the Station at one time, the power system would be overloaded. We have a computer program that we run which predicts the amount of electrical power which the system can handle. We run our computer program before every major Shuttle flight to the Space Station, to be sure that there is enough power to handle the projected loads.

Although there are no typical days at NASA, I often go to meetings to review and discuss proposed changes to the Space Station power system operations, read and respond to e-mail questions from Houston, and talk with my five co-workers who are on our power analyses team.

Career Path
I started working on the Space Station program immediately after graduating from college. I was born and raised in Cleveland, but I elected to attend a college in our neighboring state, Indiana. At Purdue University, I earned a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering. My wife is smarter than I am – she is also a NASA engineer, but she has a Masters Degree.

Back in 1993, my wife and I spent a year working at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. We had a great time, doing all of the touristy things such as visiting all of the Smithsonian museums, touring the Capitol, and attending the inauguration ceremony for President Clinton. I attended several Congressional hearings where the NASA administrator was testifying before Congress about NASA. While I was at Headquarters, the administration decided to invite the Russians to participate in the Space Station program. NASA rented a slew of hotel rooms and paid the travel costs to bring the key Russian space program experts to the U.S. I was assigned to work with the Russian responsible for the electrical power system on Mir, the Russian Space Station. We had to develop a plan to add extra power to Mir using a U.S. solar array. My meetings with the Russians tended to be long because I would say something in English, the translator would repeat my words in Russian, my Russian counterpart would respond in Russian, then the translator would tell me in English what my counterpart said. I made one business trip to Moscow to meet with the Russians about the US-Russian power system electrical interface. When the Russians threw us a party on the last day of our meetings, I was surprised to find that the TV channel was tuned to MTV!

I was not positive I wanted to be an Engineer when I went to college. One of the reasons I selected Purdue was their co-operative education program. After my freshman year of school, I alternated semesters between going to school at Purdue and work. My co-operative education employer was the company that made Energizer batteries. I helped to improve the production line to make the batteries faster.

Growing Up
My two sisters and I all attended Cleveland Public Schools, including John Marshall High School. I sang in a show choir called the Marshmello’s (we were from John Marshall and our sound was mellow). Other than that, my High School days were pretty boring. To earn some spare change I worked as a busboy at a local restaurant. Somewhere between washing dishes and clearing tables, I decided that I didn’t want to work in a restaurant my whole life. I wasn’t exactly sure what profession I wanted to pursue. I took an interest survey in Junior High school, which indicated I should be a lawyer, but I wasn’t really interested in law school. I did pretty well at Math and Science in school, so my dad recommended I consider a career in Engineering. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so off I went to Purdue!

Personal Information
Besides working at NASA, I am involved in multiple community organizations. My daughter attended a child care center on-site here at NASA. Like many other employers, most of the NASA centers have on-site child care centers. Most of the child care centers are separate organizations from NASA – NASA provides the space, the organization runs the child care center. These separate organizations which run the child care centers need a Board of Directors to manage the program. I was the Treasurer of our Board of Directors for several years, and I’m currently on the Board of Director’s for two other child care centers here in Cleveland. Besides child care centers, I am also on the Board of Directors for a transitional housing shelter for homeless families, and I am active in my church. In my spare time I ring with my wife in an English handbell choir (to be precise, my wife is both a ringer in the choir and the co-director of the choir).

I’d like to close with a quote from Bill Readdy, the NASA Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Flight. “In July 2003, at the Bethesda Naval Hospital the NASA Administrator was present to dedicate the Naval Hospital's newly remodeled auditorium and training facility in honor of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s mission specialist, Captain Laurel Blair Salton Clark, USN. Laurel Clark wore many hats during her career: that of naval officer, physician, diver, submarine medical officer, flight surgeon and now, most recently astronaut -- explorer of the newest and harshest frontier, space. Regarding the possibility of risk associated with her many careers, a quote from William Shedd was read -- one of Laurel's favorites: ‘A ship is safe in harbor, but then, that's not what ships are built for.’"

Links to learn more about my job and the Space Station:
On our team’s web page we describe our computer program and the analyses we do for the International Space Station
http://space-power.grc.nasa.gov/ppo/projects/iss/epsperformance.html

For the latest news about the International Space Station, check out http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/

NASA has several web pages devoted just for kids with games, art & stories, and activities, at http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forkids/home/index.html or http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/ or http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/