Two weeks a year, Barbara Romig drives around the Arizona desert testing out the latest space suit designs and NASA plans for doing geology on the moon. Back in the Apollo days, NASA blasted their own crater field in Arizona for the crews to practice driving around and being geologists. Now at that same site, Barbara, 28, is the test coordinator for the EVA program, Desert RATS (Research And Technology Studies). She was one of the speakers in todays "Risk and Exploration" Symposium.
Current Astronaut and ISS Expedition veteran, Michael Lopez-Alegria admitted in his talk that sometimes NASA acronyms are in fact made up by coming up with the name they like and finding a slew of words that fit it (shocking I know). Lopez-Alegria works on NEEMO, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, an underwater habitat analog mission that is a good analog for ISS or Shuttle missions, complete with "low gravity" EVA (SCUBA) operations. (Astronauts also do NOLS training in small groups - like kayaking in
Alaska, or looking for water in a canyon).
Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute described the work they were doing in the high Arctic testing operations in a less forgiving environment. Like putting on and taking off the space suit by climbing in through the backpack that is attached to the airlock. (It is a system that is being considered to allow explorers to climb back into a pressurized rover or habitat without having to bring the suit inside.) He also showed a lot of the geology they are doing at the high arctic impact crater, finding cold, icy (versus warm wet)
explanations for the gullies and features seen on Mars.
But no symposium would be complete without a boat load of 4th graders showing up midstream. However these turned out to be no ordinary class. They turned out to be the students who named the node that was just docked to the Space
Station today (Harmony) and they had just gotten back from their trip to NASA Kennedy Space Center to watch the Shuttle launch.
The last talk on my agenda today is Private Space Explorer Greg Olsen, a Princeton, New Jersey based entrepreneur who paid to spend ten days on the International Space Station with the Russians.
Talking about risk and rewards, Greg said it's worth it, whether it be leaving RCA to start his own companies (that turned out well for him), or flying into space (also worked well for him).
Still even though he got to float in space and stare down at Earth- he doesn't have a lunar rover yet either...
