Howdy y’all from Houston.
I’m in this steam room of a city because waaaaay back in 2002, when I was but a young lad of 16, I came here to participate in a thing called International Space School. Needless to say, I had a blast. We got to do some cool things like:
- visit the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) — the massive swimming pool which astronauts use to train for Extravehicular Activities (EVA),
- go into the historical Mission Control room and sit in the Flight Director’s chair (see below),
- check out the Thermal Vacuum Chambers,
- sit in the Guppy,
- play around with the shuttle simulator,
- meet real life been to space Astronauts,
- plan a mission to Mars, and
way way more stuff which I have forgotten in the intervening 22 years.
Needless to say this experience left an indelible mark on this lil’ ol’ teenager from rural-ish New Zealand ☝️ I made lifelong friends and a strong connection to the NASA community here in Houston. Part of that connection is being able to come back every so often as a mentor/teacher for the latest crop of students.
These days it’s called United Space School and it is run by an organisation called the Federation for International Space Education (FISE). We bring together around 40–50 young people from ~25 countries every year to the University of Houston at Clear Lake (Go Hawks!) to learn from engineers, scientists, astronauts, and leaders in the aerospace industry as they work to plan a mission to Mars.
We split them into teams:
- Gold: Responsible for the budget, politics and earth-side logistics.
- Red: Designing and building the craft to will take humans from Earth to Mars orbit.
- Maroon: Designing and building the lander which will take astronauts from Mars orbit to the surface and back.
- Blue: Exploration and research on Mars.
- Green: Building the habitat and looking after the humans while they live on Mars. This is the team I am looking after this year.
While they’re planning their mission we have subject matter experts drop by to deliver lectures and lessons. Here are a couple of my highlights.
O2 production
John Graf from NASA spoke to us about his “magic rocks” which convert CO2 to breathable Oxygen. MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) is paving the way on ensuring astronauts can breathe on Mars. The wafers (pictured) are a special ceramic which will — if heat and electricity are applied — spit out O2.
EMUs
Cinda Chullen has been working on space suits — or Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU) — for almost 40 years. She very obviously loves her job and is super excited to be working on the Advanced EMU and will this week release a paper about the suits they’re making to use on Mars. She said her approach to design was “Build a little. Test a little. Build a little. Test a little. Build a little.” She also bought one of the old EMUs from the International Space Station for us to check out.
Mission Control / Johnson Space Center
While I didn’t get to sit in the Flight Director’s seat this time, we did get to go into the viewing gallery (where family and friends of the astronauts sat 55 years ago as Neil Armstrong took his first step on) and watch footage from the original Apollo 11 landing sequence. This was wonderful and my eyes got a little bit teary.
Also, as a hack and a fraud communications professional, I took great interest in the way NASA planned to broadcast the landing and first step. As you can see in the below picture, they had the Public Affairs Officer moving around paper cut outs of the astronauts within the camera’s fields of view. They had a feed running to the major TV networks controlled from Mission Control. NASA did, and still does, a fantastic job of public relations and science communication.
If you’re reading this: PLEASE GIVE ME A JOB, NASA!
CADRE + rovers
Former United Space School student Marcel Kauffman presented on the CADRE project which will soon be sending three small rovers to the Moon! The rovers are autonomous and will work together to 3D map on-ground and below-ground conditions around Reiner Gamma. Interestingly, they are made almost entirely from off-the-shelf components and will hitch a ride on a commercial space craft, which has made it an affordable and practical project to get up and running.
We also had a lecture from Alexa Costin who has been working on the VIPER rover mission which will hunt for water ice and other resources on the surface of the moon. The rover is about the size of a golf buggy and will be able to “sniff” for ice and drill down almost 1 metre.
I’ll have more to say on space school once things wrap up next week. It’s always a bit of a whirlwind with the students designing and building their mission. Plus I know you really want me to just get on with my…
Spicy takes about the USA
Politics
What a time to be in the USA.
In case you are living on Mars: it’s a Presidential election year here. On the weekend I arrived Trump got shot and on the second weekend Biden stood down as the Democrat nominee. An already cooked situation has somehow gotten even more cooked.
Luckily none of this has manifested in any negative way down here in Houston. So far. Perhaps there are a few more Trump flags. But we’re in a fairly liberal enclave, so nothing too crazy to report, although I did see a woman with her ear bandaged in sympathy with the former President.
As someone with a degree in Political Science, I used to find American politics relentlessly interesting. Now… I don’t even know how I feel.
Driving
I low key love driving in the USA in general and driving in Houston is like the funnest real life game of GTA-V ever. No one obeys the signposted speed: at minimum people drive +10mph over the speed. The pickup trucks are all the size of tanks. We saw a dude driving a car who literally had scythes as hubcaps! Photographic evidence 👇 Honestly, it is wild.
So far I have driven more than 1500 kilometres because in Houston if you don’t have a car you are completely screwed. There is a pretty decent bus system and what they call a train (but it’s actually a tram) and they even have a contactless card payment system (called the Q Card, and yes I do already have one). I caught the bus from IAH to my hotel in Houston city. It took about 40 minutes, was super comfortable, and best of all it only cost $US2! An uber or a taxi would have cost at least $US60 and probably more by the time you tip the driver.
I haven’t been able to catch the train/tram yet because when I got in they were still repairing damage from hurricane Beryl. Don’t worry, trains are back up and running and I intend to give my Q Card a decent work out before I leave.
Waste
Holy. Moly. I don’t think I have ever thrown out so much stuff. We truly live in a land of plenty where everything is disposable. It is honestly mindblowing how little thought has been given to reusing and recycling. I feel very bad. But there literally is no other option.
Portion sizes are also insane. Like, I don’t know how anyone can eat this much. I don’t eat about ½ of what is served up to me. Which is sad because…
Food Not Bombs
On my first night I went for a walk and came across Food Not Bombs Houston by City Hall distributing food and mutual aid to people in need. I helped out by making PB&J sandwiches for 45 minutes and chatting shit with the other volunteers and people.
Food Not Bombs is facing a huge challenge in Houston. A while back the city started enforcing an ordinance which essentially bans what they do. Police started fining members for, you know, providing the literal basic essentials of life to people who need them.
In a land where almost everything is single use, it seems the people most in need are put on the trash heap too. As a vaguely anarcho-socialist it heartens me to see mutual aid in practice at an individual level, but it disturbs me that here, in a country with so much abundance, Americans don’t seem willing to help others.
This a a sufficiently bleak place to end, but I’ll have more to say next week. In the meantime…
Stay safe, stay sane
<3
JJW
