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NASA's Low-Gravity Pitch

Posted on: Thursday, 10 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

'Feet down!" Normally, those words are a description of the world as we know it. Feet down. Head up. Horizon level. But up here, where gravity is briefly defeated dozens of times an hour as this jet cycles through up-and-down parabolas 10,000 feet high, it is a command and a warning. It says that the period of weightlessness is ending, that gravity is about to return with a vengeance as the plane swings up and that the passengers need to be in position for a soft landing on the padded floor.

Such is life aboard KC-135, the four-engine military version of the Boeing 707 that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses to train astronauts for weightlessness, to test in-space technology, to help Hollywood shoot weightless scenes and to let dozens of engineering students each year know that the space program might be a cool place to work.

"You are really the hope for the future of this country," Gregory Hayes, director of external relations for the Johnson Space Center, said to several teams of college students who had traveled to Houston for a one-week program that culminates in their conducting experiments aboard the microgravity plane.

Hayes's pitch was urgent. America's pipeline in science and engineering is drying up at a time that the nation is in desperate need of innovation. The year-over-year increase in the number of engineering graduates that China is turning out, he said, is greater than the total number of engineers who are graduating from American schools.

Once the "industry of choice" for technical workers, aerospace now "presents a negative image to potential employees" because of years of cutbacks and stagnation, a study by the Aerospace Industries Association found. Top students with scientific or technological bents are more likely to choose hot fields like biotechnology. At the same time, NASA's brains and hands are aging. Partly because of longstanding hiring freezes that are just beginning to thaw, employees older than 60 outnumber those younger than 30 by 3-to-1, according to the General Accounting Office. Plans to return to the moon and push on to Mars make it even more imperative to attract young engineers, NASA says. "It's all going to happen in your career time," an astronaut, Bonnie Dunbar, told the students.

That is why NASA is looking more than ever to educational initiatives like the student flight program, in which students devise and build experiments that can be performed aboard the KC- 135, also known as the K-Bird. Steven Collicott, a professor of engineering at Purdue, said the program, which began in 1996, is like "a high school science fair on steroids."

The project is to develop and test a new pipe that can be deployed in space, perhaps as a conduit for wires or a boom for antennas. The team has worked far into many nights on the pipe, two pieces of thin flexible Kevlar strips shaped like rounded metal measuring tape and glued together to leave an eye-shaped space in the middle. The two curved pieces can be flattened together and rolled tightly around a reel for storage before flight. In space, astronauts would play out the boom, which would pop back to its original shape and stiffen.

The students maintain a Web site with a running account of their progress at www.livejournal.com/~purduezerog/. NASA is eager to have the students do everything they can to share the experience, including taking a reporter along. The point, NASA officials say, is to spread the word about the space program to people who do not have an opportunity to ride the plane.

Next to them in the hangar at Ellington Airfield in Houston is a team from the University of San Diego. That team's experiment is a refrigerator-size machine that shakes racks of differently shaped containers, each filled with small beads and one larger one. The idea is to test out a physics question known as the Brazil nut problem. That problem asks why in a can of mixed nuts do the Brazil nuts almost always work their way to the top? Understanding the physics of how objects shake out in low gravity could help determine how to pack objects collected on the moon or Mars.

Another astronaut, Daniel Barry, told the students that the microgravity experience aboard the plane was "exactly like being in space." This was not just a pep talk. The sensation of weightlessness aboard the space shuttle and International Space Station is actually free fall, just like the 30-second drops the students will experience. The spacecraft are constantly falling toward Earth, their altitude maintained by their orbital speed. Barry offered this advice: "You don't want to get too wrapped up in the experiments" and miss the experience of weightlessness. "Remember. Very few people are going to ask you how the experiment went. Everybody is going to ask you what it was like."

As a recruiting tool for college engineering students, the flights can be powerful. "I would love to do something for NASA" after college, said Adrianna Zammit, a second-time flier on the San Diego team. "I don't want to be in a cube for 40 hours a week for the rest of my life."

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