Walker Man Honored By NASA

By ELLYN COUVILLION

Walker resident Bartt Hebert, a chief engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Stennis Space Center, was recently honored for his work in support of the space shuttle’s return to flight in 2005.

The flight of the Discovery shuttle that year was the program’s first after the 2003 Columbia disaster.

In June, NASA presented Hebert with the Outstanding Leadership Medal.

“I was quite surprised and humbled by it, really,” Hebert said.

The award recognizes a person who has “exhibited notably outstanding leadership that has a pronounced effect on the technical or administrative programs of NASA,” according to the space program.

Hebert said that the areas he and his colleagues worked on for the 2005 shuttle flight included studying ice debris, testing of engine-cutoff sensors and determining the flow characteristics of a filter, through which the shuttle’s external tank is pressurized.

For the first area of study – that of ice debris – Hebert said, “We configured a test facility that would grow ice in the same environment” as what the shuttle would encounter at the Kennedy Space Center, Hebert said.

The liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that the shuttle’s external tank carries is so cold it can still “freeze moisture out of the air,” despite the tank’s foam insulation, Hebert said.

Hebert, 48, is chief engineer of the Engineering and Science Directorate, a work group of 90 people at the Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss.

The center is one of 10 such field centers in the country for NASA headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Hebert, who holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has been with the NASA Stennis Space Center for 18 years.

He and his wife, Lynn, have lived in Walker since 1998. She works with the Livingston Parish School system as a tutor. She also worked this past school year with an elementary school computer lab.

They are the parents of three children: Amanda and Brandi, both college students, and Matthew, a student at Levi Milton Elementary in Walker.

It’s a bit of a drive from Walker to the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, but Hebert said that he’s able to carpool with two other Stennis employees from the area, for the commute that’s 95 miles one way.

According to a NASA news release, the engineers at the Stennis Space Center will begin work this year on a new test stand “to test the rocket engines that will carry Americans back to the moon and on to Mars.”

Stennis already has Apollo-era test stands and the new structure will be the first large test stand to be built there since the 1960s, the release says.

“Unlike the older structures, the new 300-foot-tall open-frame design will allow engineers to simulate conditions at different altitudes,” the release says.

“Probably the biggest project we’re going to have for the next two to three years is to actually design and build the new test facility,” Hebert said.

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