NASA: Day 7

Ice Tunnel

I started today off shadowing Brandon, a mechanical engineer. He's been working for NASA for a year and a half after working at a steel mill I believe. He had some background on the educational levels of people at NASA, and I wondered whether I can become an engineer straight out of college. For me, that's the goal. I'd like to be able to graduate college right away, get a job, and not worry about studying for a year or two and then determining whether I want to get my masters. He seemed to think it's necessary, or at least a PE, a professional engineer license/certification. If I went into engineering instead of business/entrepreneurship, I'd definitely try to work for NASA because of perks that I've previously mentioned. Mostly good people and lots of career opportunities. Brandon showed me a few more facilities. I got to see the central water cooling system which pumps cool air through the lab, cooling down HVAC systems as well as lab experiments that don't need, say, liquid nitrogen. The first step of the cooling process is rather neat. When hot air heats up the hot water which returns back to the cooling center, the water gets dispersed and falls down what sounds a rainstorm. The goal is to spread water out as much as they can and allow fans to blow the hot air out before the water gets cooled through other means.

Brandon also showed us some other facilities that were going to be demolished soon because they weren't in use. There's some law that prevents NASA from expanding in their building square footage. If there are two buildings and NASA wants to build a third, they're legally required to demolish one of the buildings to build the other. I don't understand it, and I'm trying to learn more about it as I go, but nonetheless, the policy is in place.

NASA also has a few knockoff buildings. I call them knockoffs because the buildings perform the same purposes as other buildings, but a little less accurately. For example, the building below controls air pressure to simulate altitude changes. Other buildings do the same thing. So do the wind tunnels, but there's a separate, smaller facility that aids in research as well.

This building simulates altitude.

After a $4.99 soup on top of a packed lunch (yikes) that I ate in 5 minutes, I ran to the wind/ice tunnel to quickly catch the tour with the other Walsh students where I got some awesome photos. The Ice tunnel doesn't even reach mach 1 I believe, mach being the speed of sound. However, that's okay because this facility tests ice build up on motors. Other wind tunnels reach mach 3 and one reaches mach 5 speeds. This fan spins at 343rpms (I think) and runs a bit slower than some of the others. Don't quote me on that though.

Wind/Ice tunnels are cool

I went to another safety meeting while I shadowed Cass. I tried my best not to fall asleep, but as always, the people made what could have been a boring safety meeting not as boring with intermittent jokes and laughter along the way.

Following the meeting, I shadowed Dawn who took me to see building 64, which was made up of motors and more motors.

Yes - a lot of motors

He had a lot of personality to him. He reminds me of Big Julie from Guys and Dolls. "Ain't nobody mess with big Julie" kind of gangster, but he's rather nice, very gentlemanlike. We put on hearing protection as he gave us a shouting tour before taking us to the control room, which was much quieter showing us the controls using the same software the double e's did. They run most of their machinery overnight, specifically the third shift, since electricity is cheapest from 12:00am - 7:00am.

Dawn has been working in facilities for most of his 30 year NASA career. He jokes around that he can't be fired after 30 years, but it doesn't look like anyone gets fired or laid off. If a project ends, there aren't layoffs. Just new projects that people switch to.

I asked him what his biggest mistake was, and he told me about a time in building 747 (I think) where the operators wanted to test a motor and were confident that they were doing everything correctly. Dawn was busy, and let the operators run the motor without him. The operators didn't do all of the checks to make sure the motor safely run. They followed the mentality of "Oh, we've done this hundreds of times and it's always worked" and that one time that they didn't check it and Dawn wasn't there, they burnt out a million dollar motor.

A less specific mistake was letting himself get overworked. He said yes too much to things he didn't have time for, which sounds pretty familiar. I ran lights, started robotics, played piano in jazz band, traveled with the show choir, went to early morning Kairos meetings, piano lessons, Taekwondo, and worked as a fitness center. Oh - and also studied and did lengthy amounts of homework/essays that were sometimes turned in late after I took two Red Bull energy drinks to stay up late doing homework. After going to NASA and not traveling back to Walsh do do a million other things and working only once or twice per week, I'm finding that I enjoy this relaxing lifestyle much more, and I think Dawn does too.

Tomorrow I'll be by myself. I'm a little excited because it means deeper conversation and less girls looking at hairstyles on their phones during lunch. I'll hang out with the guys in 77 a little bit.