ISS - A Home in Microgravity: National Engineers' Week

February 28, 2002

Key: Sherri: Sheri Girls

Craig: Craig Schaffer

Yvette: Yvette Johnson

Laurie: Laurie Keith

Bill: Bill Foster

Questionable words and phrases [in brackets]

Sherri: Good afternoon everyone out there in Worldwide Web land. Welcome to Johnson Space Center here in Houston, Texas where we are broadcasting live with our special guest today with the National Guard. Hello out there. Okay, my name is Sheri Jules and I will be your host today and I would like to introduce to you our engineering guest. His name is Craig Schaffer.

And Craig is a microgravity sciences requirements manager. And Craig, you have quite a background. You have a couple of college degrees, two being bachelors degrees, one in electrical engineering technology and another in physics.

Craig: That's right.

Sherri: You liked it so much you went on and got your masters in physics.

Craig: [inaudible] yes, then liked it so much.

Sherri: And you went to the Southern College of Technology in Georgia, so if anyone out there is from that area, they can relate to that, and then your masters degree is from the University of Alabama.

Well if you would, Craig, take a few minutes and tell all of us how you got to be working here at NASA, kind of your career path and what interests you.

Craig: Well, I really owe it all to my Uncle Bob. Everyone's got an Uncle Bob, and he worked on the Pioneer 10 probe for TRW in California, and he started, as a child, sending me these little pamphlets they would hand out about the mission and patches and things like that. That's what every kid wanted to be was an astronaut.

Well it influenced me so much, I wanted to make a career out of it. I went to Southern College of Technology in Marietta, Georgia, and originally started as a EE, electrical engineer student. And I kind of got into physics, I thought that was kind of interesting. So I started with a minors in physics and it suddenly kind of grew into another degree. So I graduated with two degrees from Southern College of Technology.

And at the encouragement of my professors there, they encouraged me to go on to graduate school, because I liked physics so much. I knew something about electrical engineering, too, so I thought the best way to apply that is as an experimental physicist. So I went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, got a masters degree in physics there.

And while I was there, I got involved in some space research. And before I knew it, I was building [pay loads] for the shuttle as a student. I got to fly too, and then I was recruited by my present employer to come down here and work on the space station.

Sherri: Now as a student working and building those sails as you mentioned, were you a co-op or in what capacity were you here?

Craig: Well, I started it as a student project and I worked on for a brief time a student pay load that eventually flew on the shuttle. But then I got employment from the University. They had one of several NASA commercialization centers there. They had the consortium for materials development in space, and they concentrated on doing materials research in space.

And they needed to understand what the microgravity environment was on the space shuttle. Is it 1 1/millionth of what we feel on Earth, 1 micro G, or what is it? So I got involved developing instruments to fly on there that would actually characterize what the microgravity environment is like. And it's really important for material science experiments because it's kind of like knowing what temperature you're baking a cake at.

You know that if the cake's going to come out properly. Well, in the same way, you need to know what the microgravity environment is on the space shuttle and out on the space station so you can do your research properly.

Sherri: Very interesting. Well, for all of you out there, we have a very special guest with us and we have a place for you to submit your questions for Craig to answer them for you. You can submit them to the e-mail address questteam@hotmail.com.

And send those questions in and Craig will answer as many as he can in the hour that he has to spend with us today.

And with that, let's go ahead and go to the chat room and start answering some of your questions. Well, Jerrick is a 6th grade student. Jerrick, thank you for submitting your question. And he writes in, "Craig, did you ever want to be an astronaut?"

Craig: Oh yes, I sure did, Jerrick. My parents told me that I knew what an astronaut was when I was three years old. And my three-year old daughter now knows what an astronaut is, too, because it was such a big influence on me. Yes, I did want to be an astronaut very much.

I don't think I'll ever make it quite that far, but I got pretty close. I was able to fly our KC-135 aircraft so I've been weightless before and that was kind of a neat experience. So I'm pretty satisfied with where I am now.

And here is a live picture of what the airplane is. We fly it out over the Gulf of Mexico. And we fly parabolas. We go up and down at a steep angle and you see the little picture there, that as we're flying up and then down, everyone floats around inside the cabin.

Sherri: How long does that last? For a long time?

Craig: No, only about 30 seconds, but we get to do that 40 times. That's a little hard on the stomach.

Sherri: Yeah. Now I think I've heard that this aircraft has a nickname because of that.

Craig: Yes it does. It's affectionately called the Vomit Comet. And it lives up to its name.

Sherri: Well, that's an interesting project. Okay. Lila is a 10th grade student from LBJ High School. And Lila writes in, "which do you enjoy more, engineering or physics?"

Craig: Well, Lila, I couldn't make up my mind because I enjoyed them both so much. And in fact I still do today. I still enjoy doing physics in my job, but I also like doing engineering work. My outlet is I'm an amateur radio operator and I like to tinker with computers a lot too, so I have sort of an outlet for that, too. And I like them both very much.

Sherri: Okay, Mary writes in. Mary wants to know, do you get to work with astronauts?

Craig: Yes, I sure do. I get to talk to the astronauts sometimes about some of the experiments that may be going on there or sometimes they need my opinion on a matter that's going on, on the space station, and I try to give them my expert view on it.

Sherri: Now do you find that an enjoyable experience?

Craig: Most of the time it is.

Sherri: Are they usually coming to you with problems that you need to solve or?

Craig: Yeah, for the most part we're kind of in the problem-solving business.

Sherri: Well, we've got a 9th grade student from Edmund's Jr. High, Rebecca. And Rebecca wants to know how does microgravity affect our brains and other body systems since blood doesn't flow the same in our bodies as it does here on Earth?

Craig: Wow, what a leading question. Well, that's a great question, and actually we don't know the entire answer to that just yet. We are doing quite a bit of research back during the shuttle days and now in the space station. That's one of the major research areas we're going to be concentrating on up there.

We do know a couple of things. We know that soon after we get up there, your bones begin to shed calcium, so you begin to lose bone mass. And the way that happens is very similar to the way osteoporosis occurs on the Earth. So when we do research on this, we could find out new ways of treating osteoporosis, or at least understanding it. Now we can't guarantee any results from that, but it's another avenue to understand it.

We also know you get a little bit of, you kind of feel like you have a head cold when you're up there and I'll show you why in this picture here.

That's because when you're on the Earth, your heart has to pump in dense gravity. But when we go into weightlessness, it's still pumping just as hard, but we don't need quite as much fluid in our heads. And what ends up happening is you get a whole lot of fluid moved up into your head.

And if you look here at the picture on the left of an astronaut in 1G and the one on the right is when he's in microgravity.

And the legs get a little thinner, too.

And that's because we don't have quite as much fluid down there in microgravity. And so what you end up, is you kind of like feel you have a head cold. You have so much fluid stuffed up here in your head, and that's actually called fluid shift.

So the astronauts like to bring some spicy things to eat just so they can taste something. Because when you're sick, you really can't taste very much, so they like salsa.

Sherri: Well, does it actually affect our brain?

Craig: Good question. We don't know the answer to that yet. So, stay tuned.

Sherri: Okay. A lot more research on that one to come.

Craig: A lot more research.

Sherri: Well, Donald is an 11th grade student from Missouri and he wants to know, why did you choose the education path that you did, engineering, to begin with?

Craig: Well, partly because I wanted to help, I wanted to build things. I've always had kind of a knack to build things and of course engineering, that was the perfect way to go in my education. Plus I'd had a long childhood-long interest in the space program. And I thought electrical engineering would be a great place for my talents as well as doing my job for the space program. It turns out it turned out rather well.

Sherri: Well, Leo is a student from Texas and he wants to know what were your favorite subjects in school grades 5-12 and then in college?

Craig: Oh, I've got to think back to 5th grade? Okay, well I always loved science. That was definitely my favorite time. I actually got into my English classes as well. I enjoyed literature, I enjoyed writing and that's good now that I'm in the business world because then I can write coherently on some pretty complex topics. And so that's always very helpful.

Then when I got into college, I was really focused on my education. I did really enjoy a class where I got to think up my own physics experiments and carry them out with the help of one of my professors. That was really one of the highlights.

Sherri: What about in college?

Craig: In college, all of my classes came with a laboratory, so I could actually get my hands on the things that we were talking about in class. So those kind of classes were a lot of fun. There were quite a few of them, but anytime I got into the laboratory, it was a lot of fun for me because I like to work with my hands a lot.

Sherri: Well, I don't know about all of you out there, but many of us wonder what does an engineer do? It's a very broad subject and a lot of us are not very clear on it. Well, we have gone out to you in the streets. We've had some students at the Jack Yates Magnet School of Communications take this question out to the streets to find out what we all think an engineer really does, and we've got that here to watch. So let's watch.

Man: There's structural engineers that actually point out as far as how maybe a structure of a home should be. There's I guess thousands of different types of engineer.

Woman: [inaudible] do a lot of them work at NASA, work with numbers, a lot of boring stuff. Not too much action. [I think that's right].

Boy: Well, from what I know, engineers they design or they figure out formulas and they pretty much build things and design structures and [pipes].

Sherri: Okay, I want to know, do you think that's true? Is it lots of numbers and boring stuff and some of those other comments?

Craig: Well, it's definitely a lot of numbers. I didn't think it was boring. In fact I thought it was actually pretty exciting. I could sit at my desk and calculate how something's going to work, then I'd go into the laboratory and actually build it and watch it work. I thought that was pretty neat.

Sherri: So very interesting?

Craig: Yes.

Sherri: All right. We've got another question popped in from Nancy who's a 9th grade student in Oklahoma. And she wants to know how engineering and physics go together, especially in your job?

Craig: Well, physics is the study of why things work, and engineering is the study of how to make things work. And I think they went hand in hand. Electrical engineering, you have electrons flowing through circuits and the electrons obey certain laws of physics. So I thought it was a good idea to understand both of them. And how they imply on my job? Well, the electronics not so much anymore, because I'm involved now in microgravity. But certainly physics does.

I have to understand the physics of how the space station structure works. For instance, all structures vibrate at certain frequencies, and I need to understand how that works. I need to understand the laws of orbital mechanics which is how the space station goes around the Earth. There's actually quite a bit of physics involved in my work.

Sherri: So they do really compliment one another?

Craig: Yes, definitely.

Sherri: All right. Amber is a Louisiana student, 9th grader, and she wants to know what kinds of math do you use regularly and what kinds of things do you use it for?

Craig: I certainly use a lot of trigonometry. I use it to add sine waves together. I use calculus to integrate areas. I don't use anything too advanced anymore like differential equations, although sometimes I have to pull out my books and remind myself how to do that. So I use mainly algebra, trigonometry and calculus.

Sherri: Well, Emily is an 8th grade student and she sends in several questions that I think many of us are very interested in. She says that she's considering working for NASA as some sort of an engineer, when she grows up. And she really likes to explore technology, working with engines, animation, physics, solar energy, etc. And she's also a grade level above in math, so good for you, Emily, keep going.

But here are some of, a couple of her questions. First of all, she wants to know what kinds of high school math classes should she think about taking to help prepare her for college classes?

Craig: Wow, great question. Sounds like you're really gifted in mathematics, so I would say just about anything you are able to fit into your schedule. Certainly some calculus. If not calculus, then definitely pre-calculus before you go, at a minimum. That should get you ready.

Sherri: Well, what about a college degree? Is there a specific one that she needs to get in order to enter the field of engineering?

Craig: Well, she can go to any, most colleges and universities have some sort of engineering program. It really kind of depends on where your interests lie. Mine were in electronics and electrical circuits. Yours may be when you get there, it may be mechanical. There's so many different branches of engineering. There's electrical engineering, mechanical, chemical engineering even. You might want to find out which best suits you.

Sherri: Now do we have all of those different branches of engineering out here at NASA?

Craig: Well, I think so. Physicists like myself, or electrical engineers, we have electrical engineers that make electrical equipment for the space shuttle communications equipment. We have chemical engineers, certainly a lot of mechanical engineers, because we're designing so many structures so, quite a few branches are here at JSC.

Sherri: Well, here's the all-important question that everyone always wants to know in planning their career. She wants to know about salary range. When you're just starting out in the field, and what kind of benefits do you get when you've been in the field for a long time?

Craig: Well, it really depends on when you leave school and you start, and you find your first job. It depends on what degree you have, but even more importantly than that can be how much experience you have going into your job. A lot of students will enter a co-op program which means that they will go to school for a semester and then they'll go to work for an employer in a real work situation for a semester and work back and forth. And that really establishes a lot of good experience in you and a good rapport with that employer who may hire you professionally in the future.

So salary ranges, it can vary quite a bit. I could say maybe starting somewhere between the high 20s to low 30s for a bachelors degree, higher than that for a masters. And if you really want to get an advanced education, if you get a Ph.D. you can get even higher than that. Somewhere in the mid-40s to start with. But it depends very greatly.

Sherri: And so the longer you're in the field, the greater your return is?

Craig: Yes, I think so. And when you get older, of course, you always look forward to increases in salary and there are other benefits, retirement programs and things like that, depending on who you end up working for.

Sherri: Well, for those of you who might be looking for different types of work experience to complement your education, we have lots of different educational programs that you can participate in here at NASA. And if you want to read about some of those, we have high school programs. For instance, the SHARP program and we have a high school program if you live in the surrounding area, that you can come work at NASA part-time while you're finishing school.

We also have college programs, the co-op program which Craig mentioned earlier. Where you could go to school and then you take a semester off, you come to NASA, work as a co-op student in a particular area of your expertise and interest, and get credit for that. Plus you get some real-world experience because you do work on real projects, not just school projects while you're here.

If you're interested in any of these programs and want to learn more about them, you can go to Johnson Space Center's education page and read about them.

That Web site is education.jsc.nasa.gov and that is posted here on your screen. And please note there is no www in front of that. It's education.jsc.nasa.gov. Broken down into the different grade levels, so you'll be looking either for high school or college programs available for students here at NASA.

Well Emily, I believe we've got one more question for you for Craig. Emily is looking to know what kinds of qualities would you say a person needs in order to make a great engineer?

Craig: Well, I think you have to be good in mathematics no matter what branch of engineering you end up in. You need to be good in your mathematics. I think it's also very, very important that you learn how to write well, because you have to be able to communicate your ideas to someone who may not be an expert at what you're designing.

For instance, it could be someone designing another piece to hook up to your section of a project, or it could be to a manager, your immediate manager or someone else in the company, some senior manager who may not be even connected with the project. And you need to be able to clearly communicate your ideas. And so it's really most important communicating your ideas to your customers.

And then with that, I think you really need to have a passion for what you're doing. You have to be able to enjoy it. I think your ability to perform your job well comes in part from your liking the job in the first place.

Sherri: Well, what about being a team player? Is it important that you be able to work on a team or is most engineering work done on an individual level?

Craig: Well, I've found you have to be part of a team. You may be working on a team who are experts in different fields. Again in electronics, you may have someone who's really an expert in communications. Someone may be an expert in computers, and you have to be able to work together, and they've got to communicate their ideas back and forth effectively, if the project you're working on is going to work in the end.

Sherri: Great. Well, Emily, thanks for those questions and I'm sure those are questions that many others of us out there had as well. We wish you the very best of luck in your future and hope that you have a very fulfilling engineering career ahead of you.

Craig: Study hard.

Sherri: That's right, study hard. Okay, Robert wants to know what's the most important research that's going to be done on the ISS?

Craig: Well I have kind of a biased answer to that, because I'm so partial to microgravity research. But there are some very important areas of research we'll be doing, not the least of which is studying the human body. Most of what we learned about the human body has been under the influence of gravity here on the Earth.

It's only recently, in the past 50 years or so, we've actually been able to escape gravity and understand the changes in the human body without it. And also, gravity, no matter what area of research we're doing on the space station, gravity is no longer the dominant force in what's going on.

I have a couple of pictures here I'd like to show you. I'd like to show you the pictures of a candle to get this idea across.

This is a picture of a candle in Earth's gravity, in 1G. And it looks like a typical birthday candle. You have a white flame on top and kind of a blue flame down there toward the wick. And notice it's kind of teardrop shaped. And all that is an effect in gravity.

Now let me show you what it looks like in microgravity. This is a candle that was burned on the space station MIR. And you'll see that that white flame is no longer there. And in fact the flame is no longer teardrop shaped either. It's just kind of curved. This is the lowest temperature flame we've ever seen from candles and also it burns about five times slower than what we see on Earth. That's all because of the effects of gravity.

Now how can we use that practically on Earth? Well, we take what we learn in space and apply it on the ground, so we can come up with new products and new understandings. For instance, with combustion, we may be able to increase the efficiency of combustion engines, for instance. We may be able to understand better how fire spreads, either in a spacecraft or down here on the Earth.

So all of it's connected to some real-world problems and I really can't come up with a good answer about one specific thing like the most important research. I think it's all pretty important.

Sherri: Well it obviously has a lot of benefits for us here on Earth.

Craig: They all do.

Sherri: All of these different things, combustion science and material science and all of this research in microgravity and learning about these effects of space on the human body. So many wonderful benefits for us, all of us human beings here on Earth.

Well, in talking about the space station, many of us wonder is it already up there, is it going on, is this a project we've just started? And Yvette Johnson is our student reporter from the Jack Yates Magnet School of Communication, and she investigates whether the space station is fact of fiction.

Yvette: The idea of an orbiting city in space has always been a concept of science fiction. But in the new millennium, sci-fi has become sci-fact.

In 1993, was began on the International Space Station, an engineering, scientific and technological marvel with hundreds of thousands of contributors and the concentrated effort of 16 nations. The Space Station holds six lab modules, and will weigh almost 1 million pounds when it is ultimately completed.

Man: While Space Station has been on the drawing board for 20 years, it's designed to be a laboratory in space.

Where people hopefully can develop and invent things that can't be discovered or produced here on the Earth.

Yvette: Captain William Shepherd served as the very first long-term Space Station commander. He was an Air Force colonel, Yuri [Godzinko] and civilian engineers Sergei [Quikolof] comprise the crew of the expedition one which launched from [Kazikstan] on a Russian Soyuz booster in the year 2000.

The United States and Russia have partnered together since 1994, performing nine shuttle-MIR dockings. That experience provided valuable insight and teamwork necessary for building and maintaining the International Space Station.

Man: The major part of it with being with Russia, is trying to establish the ability to take a foreign enemy and work together with them, trying to use what their countries had to offer that's good. That's teamwork, ...

Yvette: On November 2nd, 2001, the International Space Station marked a milestone in space history. One full year of continuous international human presence in orbit has seen the station become the largest, most sophisticated and most powerful spacecraft ever built.

Man: I really think it's the blueprint for how big expeditions will go in space in the future.

Yvette: Many nations, some once bitter enemies, working together to meet a common goal. If only all such science fiction could become reality. Reporting for station update, I'm Yvette Johnson.

Sherri: Thank you, Yvette, so much. We do now know that it is not fiction, it's fact. And all of these things that Craig has been sharing with us today about the research and things are indeed happening right now on a daily basis and we're getting this information and data brought back to Earth and benefiting us as we speak.

Craig, can we take a few moments and will you tell us about the kinds of things that you're working on right now?

Craig: Sure. I'm still working, of course, in microgravity research on the space station. I'm working on some new elements that haven't even been launched yet. They're still in the construction yard. Some of them even are still on paper. And, in fact, I get to go to Japan next Friday for a week and I'm going to be part of a design review team.

The Japanese, they're one of our partners, one of 16 countries building the space station, and they're building a very large piece of equipment for biological research called the centrifuge rotor. And what we're going to use that for is to simulate gravity on the space station. And the first question you may ask is, why are we going to simulate gravity when we just went to all the expense and trouble to get away from it?

Well, that's because we have to be able to simulate it on orbit, because the only difference we want in our research is the amount of gravity that they are feeling. Which means that everything else has got to be the same.

The same atmosphere, the same radiation conditions, and the only way to do that is that we sort of take our own gravity up there with us.

Now we don't have the ability to make gravity like they do in the TV shows. But if we use centrifugal force, which is spinning around and around, you may have been on an amusement park ride where you stand up against the wall of a cylinder and it spins real fast and suddenly the floor drops out. That is centrifugal force.

Sherri: Now is that the rounded area I saw on the picture inside the space station module that we were just looking at?

Craig: Yes. And we can bring that picture up. That's an idea of what the centrifuge rotor is going to look at, inside its own module. The circle way there in the back is what the centrifuge rotor may look like when it's finally on orbit. And it's housed in its own laboratory module called the Centrifuge Accommodations Module. We just call it CAM for short and you know NASA loves acronyms. And we can put plants or small animals, like rodents in it, or fish even.

And we spin it and we spin it fast enough to simulate what 1 G feels like on Earth. And then we do our research on our weightless samples. We can take them out and then compare them right on orbit. And the only thing different is the amount of gravity that they felt.

And since this large structure vibrates the station a lot, I need to be able to go over there to the design review and understand how it's going to impact other research going on, on the space station.

Sherri: Okay now the question. Since we've taken fish up, do they know which way is up or down when they swim, or do they lose their sense of orientation like we do?

Craig: I don't think that they know. I've seen some video where they are in all different positions.

In fact, we've got some video here.

Sherri: Well, it looks to me like they're swimming sideways and kind of crooked, so maybe they don't know which way is up or down.

Craig: No, it doesn't look like they do.

Sherri: So, not only fish, but other types of rodents, I think that you mentioned.

Craig: People don't know either. People can't tell either. The only way we can tell up and down is which way the lights are.

Sherri: Which way the lights are?

Craig: Yeah, if you've noticed, in pictures of the space station, that there are only lights in sort of the ceiling.

They're not up and down, they're just in one place. So that gives you some orientation. There's a picture inside the module.

Sherri: So I see some blue runners across the bottom of the floor, does that indicate that that's the floor?

Craig: Well, it helps you understand that that's the floor.

Sherri: Okay, so there is, because of microgravity, no up or down in space, so that helps us keep our orientation.

Craig: That's right.

Sherri: Oh what a neat trick.

Craig: That's right.

Sherri: Now did you help design that?

Craig: No. Although it's pretty clever, though. Wish I had thought of it.

Sherri: All right. Well any other projects you want to share with us that you're working on right now?

Craig: Yeah, I'm also very happy to have recently been able to do a little bit of side work in NASA's exploration office. And the advanced projects office, and they're the ones charged with dreaming up ways of the next great project we work on, which may be going to Mars. I've been involved in doing some studies using advanced technology to go back-, to go to the Moon, to go between the Moon and Mars, and finally onward to Mars.

Very exciting. It's all up to here, it's all calculations, which kind of leads back into engineering. I have to sit down and study the physics of orbital mechanics and be able to calculate things.

Sherri: Now are we choosing Mars just because it's the closest planet to Earth and the next logical step?

Craig: Well, going to Venus would be really difficult because it's extremely hot there and down on the surface, the pressures are so heavy, that they end up crushing spacecraft that land on it.

Mars, on the other hand, is a pretty interesting place, not to mention probably a little easier to live on there.

The probes we sent there have sent back some very interesting pictures that show that maybe, sometime in the past, water has flowed there.

Water has flowed openly on the surface of Mars, perhaps.

And that means maybe, just maybe, life as either, was there one time or may still be there. That's a question we need to go back, go out there and answer, I think.

Sherri: Well I remember reading somewhere that if we were to travel, leave today and go straight to Mars, it would take us six months just to get there, and that's traveling at 17,500 miles an hour.

Craig: It could take even longer than that. It could last as long as a year, depending on when we launched.

Sherri: Oh my goodness. So we obviously have a lot to learn and study before we can even attempt a trip like that.

Craig: Oh yes, definitely.

Sherri: And that's what you're working on.

Craig: Yes. And also it's part of what we're doing on the space station. We're learning how to live in space for very long periods of time. We need to know how to do that if we're going to Mars some day.

Sherri: How long are we living on the station?

Craig: Well, the astronauts will change out about ever three, four months or so. But nonetheless, as we study, as we do human research aboard the space center, we studied the crew as we're up there, we start to learn about how the body changes.

And we will need that knowledge if we're going to spend very, very long time, which like going to Mars.

Sherri: Now is this the crew that's up there right now?

Craig: I believe so.

Sherri: Okay, so only made up of three astronauts, but they're up there for four months or so, like you said.

Craig: Around there.

Sherri: Okay, well we want to remind anyone who might be just now joining our Webcast that we are broadcasting live from Johnson Space Center here in Houston, Texas, and talking with engineer Craig Schafer as part of our support for National Engineers' Week. And if you would like to-, we have about 25 minutes left. If you'd like to seize this opportunity, ask a question of an engineer here at Johnson Space Center that you might not otherwise have the opportunity to do, send those questions in via e-mail to questteam@hotmail.com. They will pop right over here to our desk up on my laptop computer, and that will give Craig the opportunity to answer your questions.

And with that, we'll go ahead and take the next question that we have in the chat room. And the next question comes from Cassandra who is a 6th grade student, and she says, Craig, do you make things for the station or think up and work on experiments?

Craig: Well Cassandra, I thought things up and built experiments for the space shuttle, and now in my position, I do more management, I do more paperwork and thinking experiments. But the studies that I do and the recommendations that I make to NASA sometimes do get transformed into real things.

Sherri: Well Jessica is a 12th grade student from Louisiana and she want to know, Craig, in your experience, what appears to be affected most by microgravity, involving living things and mechanical and physical things?

Craig: We showed some pictures earlier about what happens to astronauts when they get into weightlessness aboard the space station. They get kind of puffy in the face and they start to shed calcium, so the bones get thinner. Also their muscles really start to weaken. That's why the astronauts have got to exercise a couple of hours a day to make sure that they maintain their health while they're up there. So that can change quite a bit.

Also anything that's affected by gravity changes up there. For instance if you tried to pour a glass of water on the space station, we can't do that. Instead of water coming out of the pitcher, it just turns into a big bubble, so a big blob of water.

Sherri: So a photo.

Craig: There's some picture of it. There it is. There's your glass of water in space.

Sherri: But no glass, huh?

Craig: But no glass.

Sherri: So it doesn't separate into a bunch of droplets, it stays in a spherical shape?

Craig: That's right. That's because gravity is no longer the dominant force there. That's another force called surface tension.

Sherri: Well how very interesting. Do all fluids behave this way?

Craig: I think so. It really gets interesting when you try to mix two fluids like oil and water. Now watch this.

Sherri: He's drinking it right up without a straw or anything.

Craig: He knows how to enjoy a drink in space.

Sherri: Okay now that's surely not how they do it every single time when they're [inaudible]?

Craig: No, it's only for demonstration purposes.

Sherri: Okay. Well the next question we have is from Peter, and he says, you mentioned in your bio that you traveled a lot. What countries have you been to and what were you working on when you traveled there?

Craig: Well I've been to two continents. I've been to Europe and I've been to Japan. Italy I traveled a week to Rome for a meeting with microgravity managers like myself as part of the European Space Agency. And then I travel quite a bit to Japan now. I've spent, with all my travels, I've spent a month there.

And that was really a life-changing experience for me. I just became so interested in the country and the people, that I started learning Japanese and learning about their country and about their language and about their customs. And I always jump at a chance to be able to go back to Japan. I really enjoy it.

Sherri: Well I have a neat thing to show everyone out there. We were just talking about water in microgravity and how we saw how it behaved in a sphere and just floated. But as Craig mentioned, that the astronauts don't drink water like that every time that they're thirsty. They actually drink out of a drink bag. Looks like this, kind of like a super-sized bag. This one happens to be a lemon-lime drink, I can tell right here.

So this is how, Craig, they would keep it from floating all over the place? They would just use the straw.

Craig: That's right. Not too different from the juice bags you can find in the grocery store on Earth, except it has a little stopper up here and that's to prevent the juice from leaking out when you're not drinking it.

Sherri: So this clips closed when you pull it out of your mouth then?

Craig: Yes. Exactly right.

Sherri: Wow, I used to use these in my lunch box as well.

Craig: It also comes with a handy dot of Velcro there so it doesn't float off. [Know the problem].

Sherri: Very interesting. Another problem of microgravity, right?

Craig: There's an engineering problem solved for you.

Sherri: Okay. Our next question comes from Benny and he says, he's an 11th grade student and he wants to know why is research so different in a microgravity environment?

Craig: Well that's because gravity is almost zero up there. It's not quite zero, it's about 1 1/millionth of what we're feeling right now here on the Earth. So that's why we call it microgravity. And well gravity is no longer the dominant force in your research.

Other things we can't quite study, we can't quite study very well on the Earth. Some of them are very easy to study. For instance, we saw how the blob of water kind of floated around.

That's because a force called surface tension takes over there. That's something you could see like a calm lake, you may see some insects flittering about on the top of the water. That's because they're riding on top of the surface tension.

And you can do some very interesting physics. You can also do some very interesting engineering things that could go on there. And so there you have it.

Sherri: Okay, great. Well Robert has a very general question and he wants to know what are a couple of the neatest and coolest things that you've seen and done?

Craig: Well definitely the KC-135. The aircraft that we can fly parabolas, and going up and down like this in the airplane, and being able to be weightless for about 30 seconds.

So that's probably one of the two coolest things I've ever done.

The other one is certainly going to Mission Control and operating our experiment from Mission Control when we were working on the shuttle.

Sherri: Well Simon wants to know, where do you see yourself in the future?

Craig: I hope still working on the Space Station; employed. I hope to be working on our next great mission, whatever that is. Now I personally hope that's a mission to Mars before I retire. Maybe my children will be doing that, I don't know. It really depends on what the President, what the Congress what to do. But if they want to do it, I'm happy to help.

Sherri: Well that ties in thinking that your children might be working on that program. Cammy writes in and wants to know if kids are ever going to get to go to space.

Craig: Well you never know. We are starting to fly civilians in space. Up until very, very recently, you had to be an astronaut to fly in space. Which means you had to be a government employee. Now that seems to be changing. We've flown one civilian, Dennis Tito, and we'll be flying another civilian soon, and I keep reading reports that the drummer for N'Sync is interested in doing it too.

Sherri: That's right.

Craig: So that's another one of those stay-tuned kind of things. May happen yet.

Sherri: All right. Okay well Tammy says you mentioned you've traveled to Italy and Japan and different areas. She wants to know what are the differences in some of these cultures that you've noticed in your travels?

Craig: Wow. Well I can speak about my recent trip to Japan. The people are very polite there. And I had to be-, you have to be understanding of their culture, even though they may be a little too polite to tell you you're doing something wrong.

For instance, you have to be careful about for instance how you cross your legs, because if you show the soles of your feet, that's considered rude. So you have to be careful about how you sit.

Sherri: How are you supposed to know that before you go?

Craig: I read a lot.

Sherri: Oh, good.

Craig: That's probably one of the most interesting differences that I've seen. Plus of course the food is different too. You have to understand that you're in their country. Some of the fast-food restaurants we're used to here, aren't that available in places like that. So you have to be accommodating with different types of food. To be willing to try it out. Be a bit of an adventurer.

Sherri: Okay. Well there are lots of engineering type jobs out here at NASA as Craig was mentioning earlier: electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers and so on. Well if you have an engineering background, a very neat job that many of you may be interested in is being a flight controller. And Lori Keith is going to talk to us shortly with Flight Controller Bill Foster her. Let's watch.

Video clip of Lori Keith speaking on screen

Lori: Hi, I'm Laurie Keith with NASA Quest. I work at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston Texas. Today, I want to share with you an area of careers for engineering you might not know about, NASA flight controllers.

Now we all know the scientists and astronauts are important to their jobs, but the flight controllers are the backbone of every mission. It's their job to monitor and maintain what they call the health of the vehicle, whether that vehicle is the ISS or one of the shuttles, and if a problem arises, it is their job to figure out how to fix it or how to work around it.

Their jobs are crucial to the success of every NASA space flight mission. And on that note, I would like to introduce you to

Bill: Hi, I'm Bill Foster. I'm a data communications engineer with a bachelor of science degree in electro optics. I work at NASA as a space shuttle ISS flight controller. My call sign is GC which stands for Ground Controller. The GCs are responsible for all aspects of ground support required to provide telemetry command and voice for U.S. manned spacecraft.

The telemetry is received from the spacecraft, processed by the MCC and then distributed throughout the building to flight controllers here, engineers both here and around the country, and to payload scientists around the country or sometimes around the world.

The command capability gives the flight controllers the option of sending commands onboard the space shuttle or the ISS and those commands are used to control the communication systems on board, the television cameras. We can send up new software loads or even send up e-mail to the crew, using that command system. And then we also have the two-way voice capability which uses both the telemetry, which we also call the down link, and the command, which we call the up link system.

That lets us receive voice from the crew and lets us send voice to the crew. In order to make all of this work, all three systems work, the GCS are responsible for the Mission Control room, for the building that we're located in, all the equipment that's in this building, plus we're coordinating with all the various network elements around the country and in fact sometimes around the world.

We primarily deal with White Sands, New Mexico, which is the ground station for the tracking and data relay satellite. That's our primary communications link with the spacecraft. We also deal, for shuttle, for launch and landing operations, with ground stations at Myla, which is at the Kennedy Space Center, and at Dryden, which is at the Edwards Air Force Base in California.

I generally support space shuttle launch and landing operations myself. I work with a partner and we come in a day before launch, go through all of our interfacing to connect the NCC with the space shuttle on the pad. We do that by coordinating with the Myla and ground tracking station at Kennedy, and we spend about an eight-hour shift hooking up all the interfaces and making sure that we can communicate two-way with the orbiter.

We come back in the next day and spend about five hours pre-launch going through all our interfaces with the various network sites around the country and around the world, making sure everyone's set, that the NCC is set to support the shuttle launch. And then we go for about two hours into the launch, when we hand over to an orbit team.

All in all, that's the most exciting shift of anything that we do in the Mission Control center. It's about an eight-hour shift, and from the time you come on to the time you get off, it's like no time has passed at all. It's very cool. I think you'd all like to be doing something like that.

We also come in the day before landing and we do some checks with the spacecraft, with the space shuttle, and make sure that we can communicate with the ground sites we're going to use the next day for landing. The flight controllers in the room are also doing checks, making sure that the flaps on the shuttle work, that all the power systems work that are needed for landing.

So it's an interesting shift. Then they go home, come back in the next day. And about five hours before landing we go through all the checklists needed to make sure that the onboard systems are ready, the crew is ready and the ground systems are ready. Not quite as exciting as being on for ascent, but it's still a pretty neat shift.

All in all, working with this team of flight controllers in the NCC is one of the most exciting jobs I could imagine. Maybe not quite as good as being an astronaut, but it's the next best thing. So I'd like to encourage everyone out there to really hit the books, do your best at that and then hopefully some day, you'll be working either with me here in the control center, or maybe I'll be listening to you talk on the other side of the interface.

Sherri: Thank you so much, Lori, for bringing Bill to the forefront and sharing with us another great opportunity for an engineering type position, available out here at Johnson Space Center.

Well we have about 12-13 minutes left with you today and we want you to take this last opportunity to submit your questions into Craig Schafer, our engineering guest with us. You could submit the questions to questteam@hotmail.com and those will pop right up here on our desktop computer, and we will happily answer them for you.

And our next question comes from Tony. And Craig, Tony wants to know, you say in your bio that you help make sure that the payloads get the quiet microgravity environment that we promise them on the station, how does a launch affect those experiments that need a quiet environment?

Craig: That's a really good question. You're very observant that launches are kind of rough, especially to a sensitive payload. Well what we do is we make sure that everything is nice and secure inside the shuttle's cargo bay before it goes up, so it can survive the launch. There's mechanical engineering right there: how do you get your experiment to survive the rigors of a launch?

Once we get up the station though, we will put the experiment, if it's really super sensitive, we have some places in the space station to put really super sensitive payloads [inaudible] really quiet environment.

And we put it in a research rack that is sort of like a smart shock absorber, called the ARIS which is an acronym for the Active Rack Isolation System.

And what it does, it senses how the station is vibrating around it and then it moves the rack back and forth and counters all the forces it's encountering. So what you do is you're canceling out all the vibrations going on in the space station and it becomes nice and quiet, and then you can do your research.

Sherri: Very interesting. I had no idea about that. Okay, well I know part of the research that is being done up on the space station is protein crystals, and that brings us to Shari's question. She's a 12th grade student and wants to know why protein grows-, crystal grows especially in microgravity is so important.

Craig: Well I've got a picture to show you here and I'm going to show you a picture of an enzyme that was grown on the space shuttle, to give you the idea.

Now, this is an enzyme called isocitrate lyase, you don't have to remember that, that's okay. The point of this picture is look on the left. Kind of the orangy picture. The one on the left is a crystal of that enzyme that was grown in 1 gravity.

And you see it's very disorganized. There's no one specific crystal you can point out that's really, really good, almost perfect. Now if you look at the ones on the right, the whitish picture there, you see two crystals there that are just about perfect. And that's the quality kind of crystal you need for some of the protein crystals you need to grow.

If I remember right, only about a third of the protein in the human body cannot be crystallized very well on the Earth.

But they can be crystallized better in microgravity. And what's really important about that is if you can make these crystals big enough, you can bring these crystals back home, back to Earth, and shine x-rays through them.

Now as the x-ray beam goes through the crystals, it's defracted. In other words the beam is split up as it goes through the crystal and you can detect where the beam is coming out of the crystal. Now if you can do that, you do some mathematics and you can back out the structure of the crystal. Now that's very, very important, because then, if you know the structure of the protein or the enzyme, you can bring it to a chemical engineer -- another engineering profession there -- and say, "Here's what the crystal looks like. Now go and develop a chemical that blocks the active site of this enzyme and effectively neutralize it."

Now up until recently we could only do that by trial and error. But with doing protein crystal growth in microgravity, we're able to hand them that crystal and tell them what it looks like and they are able to go into their laboratories and develop a molecule that will effectively block it.

Sherri: That's fascinating.

Craig: It's called rational drug design.

Sherri: Oh wow. Okay, well Peter wants to know, do motors and batteries and things like that work differently in microgravity, and does it affect their life spans?

Craig: Very good question. The answer is sometimes. For instance motors can operate different because they aren't weighed down like they are on the Earth. The rotor part may float now a little bit and you have to design your motors so that they can operate in a weightless environment.

Batteries I'm not so sure about. I suppose if we were really using liquid batteries, that these could change with them. We use mainly gel batteries, alkaline batteries aboard the Space Station.

Another thing that does affect batteries is of course temperature. As we go around the dark side of the Earth, or the far side of the Earth, it gets very cold there. And then as we go around to the light side of the Earth, it gets very hot, so they have to be able to withstand temperature changes too.

Sherri: Extreme temperature changes.

Craig: Extreme temperature changes, yes.

Sherri: Same with the astronauts when they're doing their space walks.

Craig: That's right. That's where they wear a little air conditioner and heater in their space suit.

Sherri: All right, well Marilynn and Christi are 6th grade students and they want to know if you do a lot of research and if so, on what?

Craig: I'm afraid I don't do much research anymore. Because now I'm advising the Space Station program about how to better do research on the Space Station. But I did do a little bit of research. In graduate school I researched how atomic oxygen affected materials. And that may sound a little obscure, but actually it's a very real, not only scientific problem, but engineering problem on the space shuttle and the Space Station.

Now because, even though that the atmosphere is very rarefied, there's not much there, there's certainly not enough to breathe up there, but there are a few molecules of oxygen for instance. And what we're breathing down here on the Earth are two oxygen atoms put together: O2. That's maybe you see that on oxygen bottles on the Earth.

Well, up toward the top of the atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun can break them apart. And they become two single atoms. Well they're highly reactive when they're like that. They really want to bind to something, so these single atomic oxygen atoms would then bind to different materials, and that can cause corrosion. For instance silver, if you put a very thin layer of silver on something, it will very rapidly corrode. In fact it turns transparent. It oxidizes.

And that becomes an engineering problem because your materials can become brittle. So I did some research on how atomic oxygen affects materials up in space. And I got to do research on samples that actually flew in the space shuttle's cargo bay, and was taken down. Now I did an analysis for them on Earth. And then when I was on the, in the space shuttle, is I've developed experiments for it, I did research about how the space shuttle vibrated, how it kind of wiggles and jiggles.

Even though you can't really see it on the camera, your sensitive microgravity experiments really can. It goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of the program, it was good for the other researchers to know what the vibration environment was like, the microgravity environment was like on the station, just like you need to know the temperature when you bake a cake.

Sherri: All right. Well Bridge says is the ISS at least 50% done yet and if not, when is it going to be finished being built?

Craig: Well I'm sorry to tell you we're only about a third of the way done, actually. You're going to see a lot of growth in the Space Station in the next few years.

Here's a little animation just to show you how far we got to go. That's about where we are right now. And now over this next year, we're going to be adding the truss that will hold the solar arrays way out there. So it may be around 2008 before it's finally finished.

But the really neat thing about how we're putting this thing together is that we are already doing research on it, so it's kind of like living in a house you're still trying to build. And it's really quite amazing that we built the Space Station so that we could do research and live aboard it, even though it's not finished yet. It's already getting quite a bit of use out of it.

Sherri: It's hard to tell from that animation, but how big will it be when it's finished being built?

Craig: Well it can sit pretty comfortably in a football field.

Sherri: Wow.

Craig: And then in fact there's a graphic right there.

Sherri: That looks more like two football fields. So it's obviously going to be very large and no wonder we have to take it up piece by piece.

We can't launch it built from the Earth. We'd never get it off the ground.

Craig: No. And it's a million pounds if we weighed it all on Earth. So we don't have anything to lift it. We've got to take one piece at a time.

Sherri: DJ and Jacob are 6th grade students and read that you have traveled a lot. And they want to know if you had a favorite country that you have visited?

Craig: Well I'll tell you, my favorite country to visit is Japan, just because I really kind of fell in love with the country when I was there. Starting to learn the language, I'm trying to write it. I can speak it better than I can write it. And the food and the people and the sites to see there. It's really a wonderful country to visit.

Sherri: All right Craig, well we're about out of time. We have about three minutes left. Do you have any final words of encouragement or advice for the students who are out there today watching our Webcast interested in pursuing an engineering career and maybe even more specifically, an engineering career here at NASA?

Craig: Well you definitely want to find an area of interest that you really enjoy, you really have a passion for. Otherwise you're not going to enjoy what you're doing. And personally, I think that's very important if you're going to be successful. So whether it's electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, even technical writing, like we talked about today. Those are all very, very important skills and I think those are skills that we need at NASA.

You're going to be the next generation. My generation's building the Space Station, your generation will go off to do other things. Maybe you will be the engineers and scientists who build a spacecraft to go to Mars or even beyond that.

Definitely study all the math you can. No matter what area of engineering you end up in, you're going to be using mathematics. So you have to be good at mathematics.

Also I'd suggest to you take a lot of writing courses too. So you are able to effectively communicate your ideas. It won't do anyone any good if you're the only one who understands it. You have to be able to communicate your ideas. So technical writing is extremely important.

And also take a few science classes too, because for instance like physics. No matter what engineering field you end up in, there's going to be some physics involved, and physics helps you understand why things occur.

Sherri: Okay, well thank you Craig so much for spending this time with all of us today.

Craig: Well thank you for inviting me.

Sherri: And answering all of our questions. We hope that we were able to answer most of your questions. We did the very best we could in the time that we had. We want to encourage you to keep studying, remain interested, follow up with questions with your teachers and educators if you're still interested in looking forward to a career in engineering.

From all of us here at the Distance Learning Outpost, and NASA-Ames Quest, we thank you very much for joining us today and we have a closing rockumentary video about the International Space Station that we will share on our parting today. Bye-bye.

Craig: Study hard.