Eustace grad talks about working for NASA
By Pearl Cantrell
Monitor Staff Writer
CEDAR CREEK LAKE–Those who pay attention to news about NASA may remember a short time ago a report of a female astronaut who, while getting ready to put some lubricant on the solar panel assembly on the International Space Station, lost her tool bag in space.
Apparently there was a leak in the grease gun and some of the “gunk” got onto her tools. When she tried to clean the gunk off in zero gravity she lost the whole bag of tools.
A 2008 Eustace graduate helped conduct a study on how best to apply the lubricant to the assembly for this mission.
Yep, it’s a small world and getting smaller all the time.
That study occurred July 9, 2008, which is memorable because it was also the graduate’s birthday.
Alex Schlebach was participating in an inaugural paid internship program with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and this was part of his job that day.
“I thought it was so neat to see something I had helped study being used in space,” Schlebach said.
He added that the grease gun worked fine when he used it. Of course, it could have been a different grease gun, he added.
His job had been to test different patterns of application to find the best one to insure the smooth movement of the solar panels along a metal bar.
As fascinating as this is, it wasn’t the high point of his eight weeks with the NASA Interdisciplinary National Science Program Incorporating Research and Education Project, or INSPIRE.
No. The highlight was when he got 30 minutes in the shuttle mission flight simulator to conduct a launch, short glide path and landing.
Of the three fellow interns in the program, Schlebach said his performance was the best.
“It’s the simulator that the astronauts train on all the time,” he said. “It was very realistic, not at all like a video game.”
He experienced all the noise, vibrations, movement and vistas of a real launch and landing.
The cockpit was wall to ceiling buttons and various controls, but the actual maneuvering of the space craft was done via a very sensitive joystick, he described.
Mission Control talked him through every step, and a navigator showed him which controls were he needed to operate.
When coming in for a landing, a circling flight path was executed to slow the craft down and a parachute deployed at just the right time to help bring the shuttle to a stop on the ground.
“I had to focus all my concentration on it and landed and stopped within 60 feet of the end of the runway,” he said.
“Afterwards, I called home and said, ‘guess what I just did,’” he said.
Another highlight included a job shadowing five hours in the mission control room while a team of astronauts were training in the flight simulator.
He was allowed to wear a headset and hear everything that was going on.
He was also allowed to ready several of the computer programs and turn on the three large displays, showing mathematical operations, flight path map and camera views of inside the simulator and outside view of the craft during landing.
Immediately afterwards, he was invited to party with mission control operators to celebrate one of their birthdays.
A third highlight was when he nearly got to fly in the zero-gravity plane, affectionately known as the “Vomit Comet.”
The plane is used to experience the weightlessness of space, which does high climbs and sudden dives, much as a rollercoaster does.
They were just about to get going, when Marine One, the president’s helicopter, landed on the tarmac at Ellington Field.
Everyone had to clear out as the president’s plane, Air Force One, was expected to land.
“Of course, I wanted to stay and meet the president. But that didn’t happen,” he said.
Actually, Schlebach learned later that the president’s flight plan was changed and he never landed at Ellington Field. “It seemed a close miss, though,” he said.
Schlebach was an employee of NASA, with all that entails, especially quite a few rules about security, procedures and protocol.
“Orientation lasted three hours,” he said, including how to talk to the media.
“We were required to wear our identity badge at all times,” which also gave them some authority, he said, when it came to seeing visitors or maintenance workers infringing on some of the rules.
Most of the work he got to do entailed setting up camera equipment to monitor experiments and tests.
The most exciting monitoring job was at the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility, where a complete model shuttle and its payload is housed along with several NASA land rovers and an entire span of the International Space Station.
The hanger is a full football field long and 60 feet high, he described.
“I set up four cameras and ran the cables to monitors on the floor,” to videotape a test of the shuttle’s life support system to seven astronauts over four hours in a simulated rescue scenario, he said.
The test is in preparation of sending a team to make repairs on the Hubble Telescope, in orbit 372 miles above the earth, he said.
“The neat thing was, the NASA high school interns came through while I was in there and they saw me eating a donut,” he said.
Two Eustace High School students – Chelsea Truitt and Kelsey Robertson – made the cut for one of the week-long NASA Aerospace Scholars Programs this past summer. (Look for their stories in a future issue of The Monitor.)
Schlebach, a freshman at Texas A&M University at College Station, credits the wearing of an Aggie lanyard holding his badge with the reason he was given so many hands-on work experiences.
“A lot of the guys that work there are Aggies,” he said.
And what are his plans for this summer?
Those may be complicated by many factors, he said.
His options include participating in one of three internships, one of those with NASA, or doing some training with the Air Force.
“They definitely told me the door was open for me to return again next summer,” he said. “I just have to see how things work out.”
One other experience of the summer, not related to NASA, includes a skydiving adventure.
They dropped Schlebach with a tandem jumper at 14,000 feet to fall freely for 8,000 feet before deploying the parachute, while traveling at a speed of 120 mph.
“I loved it. It was so cool. It was cold and windy and exciting,” he said.
Schlebach was told to keep his eyes on the horizon when pulling the ripcord, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the ground and nearly lost his lunch as a result when the strong jerk of the wind catching his parachute shot him upwards.
Recovering, he steered the parachute to the landing zone.
“That was an amazing experience I will never forget,” he chuckled.
(Editor’s note: Students interested in the NASA INSPIRE Program may learn more about it at http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ education/programs/descriptions/INSPIRE_Project.html)