Every week, Pars3c profiles an interesting person with connections in the space field. This time it’s Kevin Ford, an astronaut, CAPCOM and retired U.S. Air Force Colonel who has flown in space once so far, as the pilot of STS-128 in August. (Unlike most High 5ers, he’s not on Twitter).
As Ford tells Pars3c, space outreach is something that is simple to do with online tools, and is an important part of education given how important space exploration will be in the coming decades.
1) I note that one of the experiments for STS-128 was concerned with measuring vibration on crew seats during the launch, in conjunction with research on how a crew member’s vision might be affected as he or she is jolting around. You were on your first mission, so you probably remember this quite well — what sort of differences did you observe in your eyesight during launch?
I wasn’t the test participant, actually. Because I was a pilot, and one of the benefits of being a pilot was they left me alone to do my job, because we do have a lot of duties to do on ascent.
We do have to read some pretty small cathode-ray tube displays, that sort of thing, so we’re reading a lot of small print. We’re looking through a lot of data for the different engines that are firing at different times. So I did have a chance to kind of compare my vision, and it is much harder to see.
In that first two minutes of flight on the rocket there’s quite a lot of vibration, your head is moving around quite a bit. But your eyes have kind of a way of adapting to that motion, so I could read the displays pretty well.
2) You were trained in Canada on how to work the Canadarms, and during your mission used it to move some equipment as well as one of your crewmates, Nicole Stott. Compared with, say, operating a joystick on a computer game, how different is it to work the Canadarm in space?
For the mothers out there, I don’t know if I should say this, but having some motor skills with hand controllers and stuff is actually a pretty good thing.
We do spend some time imagining how the whole thing works, and we sometimes have to hold these hand controllers in zero g, too. So if you’re floating away, you don’t want to pull yourself back with the hand controller. You might make the robot do something it’s not supposed to do.
A lot of these skills we try to think of ahead of time for zero g, but we do have, when we’re flying the Canadarm2, which I flew almost daily when we were docked, you have a hand controller to move it in all directions, at the end of it, and also to rotate it in all directions. And so kind of imagining that geometry and everything, through a video type of environment, it’s pretty valuable to have had some experience doing that.
If you don’t have it, though, and you want to become an astronaut, we can train you to have those skills at a later time. They let you play. Last week I had two, two-hour sessions where I played video games with these particular trainers for robotic operations, so you can get them where you need them.
3) During the mission, you and the crew also tested out TriDAR, a prototype advanced docking system developed by Canadian firm Neptec. Was there anything about the operation of TriDAR that surprised you, compared with what you had expected through your training?
No, when we ran TriDAR it was the first flight of the system, and so we didn’t use it for the rendezvous because there are times when we don’t have all the data we needed — really, one of the reasons they are developing TriDAR. It’s a better and more continuous sensor that doesn’t depend on reflectors, those sorts of things.
So we ran it on the middeck just to get the data on STS-128. Since it was its first flight, we started it up, we took the data, and we saved that data and all that stuff for (Neptec) in the end and brought it home to them. But we didn’t actually use it for the rendezvous and docking on our flight.
But I did see some results from it this morning, and it would have been beautiful to have. So hopefully in the future, for rendezvous of spacecraft, we’ll have that type of system. It’s very promising.
Neptec is one of those companies all over the world that make up an international space effort. They’re a big part of STS-128. It’s interesting. You always think NASA is really big, but NASA is made up of all these companies like Neptec, bringing technologies together, putting them all onto a space shuttle, putting a crew on there that’s trained to use them, to a certain extent.
None of us are the experts on what these guys do; they’re their own experts. But then we take it to space and through all this teamwork, we make these space missions happen. So having Neptec as part of that space team is exciting and for me, to come visit them is very special.
4) In an interview with Space.com, you talked about the weird smell emanating from your crewmates after they came back from doing each spacewalk. Can you describe in a little more detail what the smell was like?
I kind of wasn’t the very first person to mention it, but the day that we took the big interview I got the question. Somehow it started to get attributed to me. (laughs) But it was there, and I smelled it.
Typically, the interesting thing is you don’t have a lot of smells and stuff in orbit. It’s a very clean environment, of course. It’s like a laboratory — it is a laboratory! So when the spacewalkers would come in, we’d pressurize the airlock hatch and we’d open it to bring them inside, and their spacesuits had this smell from being outside all day.
Speculation is it might be particles that they pick up outside, that’s what they thought it might be, or maybe the textile of the fabric itself gives off little gases or something like that. But very noticeable.
It has a bit of a burn smell to it. I thought maybe a little bit of a wet fur smell, if you’ve given your dog a bath. So not horrible, but not something you’d be looking to smell if you can help it. And then it goes away in just a few hours. It was very, very strong when you first bring them in.
5) Finally, the initial reason we got in touch was your visit to Ottawa July 19 to give a presentation at Neptec and to talk to 11-year-old Laura Newcombe, a spelling-bee champ who won a Canadian competition after correctly spelling LIDAR (a part of the TriDAR system). Including the word in the spelling bee seems to be a great way to get kids thinking about space. What ways do you find are useful to get kids interested in space, and science in general?
Well, the space thing I think is coming along really nicely. One thing I always thought about space is if we can get teachers really educated in space, and maybe aviation and space in general sciences, they can get interest and have somebody in every school that would share this information with kids so they have an understanding of where the space station is, what the different kinds of spacecraft do, and the fact that they can even look into the sky on a given night.
They can look online now and find when the spacecraft is going to fly over and be visible, and look up and see it — and maybe get a spark of imagination from that. The web-based sources on that really are starting to offer a lot of information to the kids and the parents too, to share with the kids.
In this new millennium, space is going to be a big thing for the future. The more people understand about it, like they do about machines and buses and airplanes, the better off they’re going to be.
