hey
this is the nasa johnson space center
home of america's astronauts and control
center for the nation's manned space
missions
it is also the center for a team of
highly qualified aerospace engineers who
are shaping tomorrow
but before we have a closer look let's
see if we can answer a few questions
like what is an engineer
what does the engineer do
at what point does an engineer start to
specialize
would the field of engineering decrease
as more people study or go into the
field
what type of background
and knowledge must the aerospace
engineer have to obtain a good job with
a place like nasa or mcdonald douglas
what are the newer fields of engineering
and what does a biomedical engineer
doing nasa
people help with farming
and policemen
and doctors do
but what about engineers let's talk to
some engineers from nasa's johnson space
center to see if we can find out how
they became engineers
and what they think is important about
their jobs this is the atm science room
during skylab we monitored the apollo
telescope mount from this room this
console monitored the white light
chronograph which was an instrument to
look at the sun in the visible spectrum
the coronagraph worked in such a manner
that there was a disc which blocked out
the full face of the sun
and we were really interested in what
was called the corona this was a big
mass of material and we were able to
capture with the white light runoff
during skylab we had to work with
scientists across the united states and
helped them design scientific
instruments which would study the sun
we designed those instruments from an
operational standpoint the scientists
designed it from a scientific standpoint
knowing what their scientific objectives
were
we got involved and helped them to
design the instruments in such a fashion
that they would be controllable from the
ground
we could look at the right type of data
from the spacecraft and sit at the
consoles and determine how the
instrument is operating it looks like
where to talk the instrument
what to do with it
correct for any malfunctions that
occurred during the flight
i got interested in engineering
back during my high school days
when i was influenced by my teachers
my parents
my father was an automotive mechanic and
ever since i can remember i've been
interested in mechanical gadgets
repairing them taking them apart
and
i thought at that time i wanted to be an
automotive engineer
however during my senior year in
high school
i had a
research project
assigned to me in a chemistry class
which involved
determining or finding out how a gadget
word called a cyclotron
during the process of that research i
found out that this instrument was
something used in the field of physics
some magic field of physics that split
small particles atoms
into smaller parts
so
i then became interested in this field
of physics and decided to go to college
and major in the subject of physics
in 1963 i started working at the johnson
space center with the group responsible
for designing the lunar module
the spacecraft which landed on the moon
and later was assigned to a group to
study the lunar surface and to try and
find suitable landing sites for this
lunar module
in 65 i was graduated and at that time
or during that time is when i sat at
this console
and monitored the skylab mission
coming from a
poor family my dad certainly couldn't
afford to send me to school and
the only way that i could go was if if
somewhere i was managed to
get the money
either through a scholarship or
through the military which is one of the
areas that was certainly open to me and
i went went ahead through school and i
finally got involved in the classes such
as
math and science and physics and these
are courses that i really enjoyed and
the thing that distinguished
students that were in the math and the
physics area you know this type of
scientific type courses was that hey if
you're taking these kind of courses
you're able to say that you're different
from the average type student which
taking the related math courses or the
easy way out through school and this
this was a challenge to me to be able to
say that i was taking the hard courses
and was still able to get the grades
and this was important to me as far as
as a golden life i always wanted to to
be able to do good in school
and once once i got through my junior
year in high school i had taken most of
the courses that would
make me able to go to college and i had
always been interested in electricity
and it kind of fascinated me and playing
with radios when i was smaller had
helped me to have respect for
electricity and engineering as a whole
and so i stayed with engineering all the
way through school
and finally when i graduated in 74 i
came to work here at nasa and i've been
here for now two and a half years
working with with the electrical
distribution system of the
shuttle itself and we're in charge of
making sure that the right amount of
power gets to the right places now
cheryl and chavarri works in the other
section which is the equipment section
they're in charge of the components
themselves the testing of the components
just to go through the chronology of
what it takes to be an engineer here
take one of my components maybe the
remote power control
we start out with a vendor coming in
with the conception they
they think they've got a design that's
going to
do all the great things for the space
program so they come in and tell us
about their designs
we have to look over the design so you
have to have
some engineering background and you have
to keep up with state of the art because
when people are coming in with something
new it's really new you have to know the
state of art at that time
so they come in with this idea we have
to look over their divine and say yep i
think it will do what we wanted to
and
we go on contract to these people to
maybe make us up some prototypes and
they bring those prototype models in we
take my laboratory and run evaluation
tests and see if they really perform as
they're supposed to once they get all
the bugs out we go up to management and
say these people have a real good idea
it's going to save us money and it's
going to save us space and weight which
is you know our primary concerns on the
shuttle well we have to attend design
reviews to make sure they're doing all
the things that we need to have done we
have environmental requirements that are
different from what the average
industrial person might require and we
have to know something about their
manufacturing techniques because we kind
of have to foresee any problems that
might show up later on when we've
launched something out in space we can't
have any batteries happening
so you have to have a pretty good
background you have to know something
maybe about a little
business you have to know a little
something about production and you have
to know something about engineering so
it takes a very background to do work
here other nasa engineers are looking
beyond the year 2000.
i'm our electrical engineer here at the
johnson space center in houston
right now we're located in building 32
in a vacuum chamber
this vacuum chamber here is probably the
largest in the free world it's an
engineering test unit designed to
simulate the conditions and outer space
it's approximately 120 feet high 65 feet
in diameter
and this door alone here weighs about 40
tons
but for the moment i want to talk to you
a little about
how i got into engineering
i grew up in a small town in central
texas
and my childhood experiences
work very much different than what you
have experienced
as a kid i was a neighborhood bicycle
mechanic
got involved in other activities
involving fixing carburetors on
automobiles and so forth
well my interest in engineering
only flourished after i got into high
school
i had a high school math teacher
who
more or less
explained to me what engineering was all
about
and encouraged me to pursue that field
right now we're looking at systems which
will collect energy from the sun
bring it back to the earth and form a
microwave energy and convert electricity
to be used by people like you
these systems are aimed at
solving the problem we have in energy
right now
it gets us away from using coal oil and
natural gas
natural resources that are in short
supply in addition to
collecting solar energy from space
in the future we're going to be looking
at using space in other ways
perhaps by the year 2000 to the year
2025
we'll have thousands of people living
and producing in space
uh we'll have manufacturing
uh production facilities in space
at this point in time
i probably won't be here or even
involved but you will
and these are going to be the kind of
problems that are going to be left to
people like you
and your peers to solve
let's talk to a biomedical engineer and
see what that job's like at nasa i was
really interested in the space program
so that's what i started
really working towards was trying to get
in into nasa and working for nasa
i was i took all the prerequisites for
all the science and engineering courses
in high school once i got into high
school i took just mostly science
courses my in my major was in biophysics
that
really
is also made up of a lot of biochemistry
i have a minor in chemistry and a lot of
physics courses a lot of mathematics
courses started getting interested into
the engineering aspects of it when i
started to look at nasa more seriously
and i started looking for a job with
nasa
i am currently taking courses at the
university of houston as a graduate
student in electronics and i think my
field has really has come
started to be more into electronics
background now
some of the things that i've been
working here at nasa have been three
cardiovascular experiments that had
mainly to do with fluid shifts in the
cardiovascular systems and the way that
the blood circulated within your body in
zero g
now here before you see the lower body
negative pressure device
a device just like this one was flown in
skylab
what this device did
is that the person gets in it
and
the legs first
and it seals at your waist then we
reduce the pressure within the module
in zero gravity since you have no
gravity pulling down all the fluids in
your body really collect around your
thorax and your head well this puts a
great strain on your cardiovascular
system we'd like to be seeing what type
of stresses the astronauts are exposed
to
we're taking ekg
blood pressure
and then we've got these capacitance
bands that were put around the legs
and these would measure the difference
of cardiovascular effects both in zero
gravity and here on the ground
before an experiment is actually flown
it goes through a series of tests some
of the tests that we do is deployed in
the zero-g aircraft this aircraft
performs parabolic flights
and it there's a state in the parabola
where you are in zero gravity
now in there which has similar equipment
to this and other experiments
in january of 1975 we had a space lab
simulation in which cardiovascular
experiments and other types of
experiments like vestibular experiments
rat experiments
plant experiments where the hardware was
tested out not only that we test out
procedures we tested out the crew
crew procedures the hardware itself and
the timelines and power that it took for
the experiment
this engineer is working to see that
when payloads are constructed for the
shuttle they will fit and work well with
the shuttle systems one of our prime
responsibilities in the program office
is to make sure that as the development
of the space shuttle
is completed to try to integrate various
payloads
into the space shell
the space shell
here shows a
payload bay
and the payloads are those pieces of
hardware that have been developed out in
the scientific community an example of
some of the
payloads that will be flying on the
space shuttle
are the space lab which is a carrier
that is designed by the european
countries
and once the space lab is designed it
will be flown on the space shuttle
i think that not only should one be good
in the field of
math physics or chemistry
but he should also be good in english
you know he should be good in writing
because it is very important that one be
able to communicate with people the
ideas that he has been able to come up
with and if he's not able to express or
get his thoughts over
to the person that he's trying to sell
the idea
the math and the physics in my opinion
really doesn't help him
so i think that if the person is good at
changing their oil on his father's car
if he's good in the field of mathematics
if his good was just doing things with
his hands if he want to be a builder i
think that this is an interest that was
generated from within
i think that that's the most important
thing the most important thing is to be
in an atmosphere whereby one can be
exposed to the field and once he's been
exposed i think it has to be left up to
the student
it has to be generated from within as to
the kind of person that he wants
building
solving problems making choices
only you know if you want to be an
engineer
but if you make that choice the doors
are open to go as far as your
imagination will take you
in just 60 years mankind progressed from
the first short flight at kitty hawk to
the giant leap to the moon
and beyond that now
to the routine access to space with the
space shuttle
this achievement was attained by a team
of specialists who perhaps like you
wanted to play their part in shaping
tomorrow
you