by Laura Sachi

If I were to just list every single event I participated in, speaker I had a chance to listen to and place I visited while attending the NASA Academy at Goddard Space Flight Center this past summer, this article would be approximately the length of a novel. Now, if I decided to include the inspiration I felt this summer, the friendships I made and the lessons I learned, I would have to write an entire sequel. But, for this article, I will try to be brief.

I still remember vividly that first Sunday morning, when all twenty-three Research Associates (RAs) of the NASA Academy piled into two large, semi-air-conditioned NASA vans that took us to the National Air and Space Museum. While eating a reportedly "good-sized" breakfast, each person stood up and gave a little background on themselves. Little did we know this would become a habit for every new speaker we met. After straining to hear people at the far corner of the unacoustic cafeteria, I stood up and gave the speech I had been rehearsing in my mind for the last six RAs: "Hi, my name is Laura Sachi, and I just graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, and I have decided to commit professional suicide by continuing on in this field and going to graduate school at Stanford this fall."

I never realized how wrong that statement was until I spent ten weeks at the NASA Academy. Dr. Gerald Soffen and the staff at the Academy -- Jim Brice, Gene Fujii, Mike Moreau, Brian Roberts and Steve Abrams -- showed me that opportunities are available, but I just wasn't looking in the right place. Well, I definitely found those hidden doors this summer at the Academy. Where else can you go to talk with leaders in the space industry, both public and private? Our first day at Goddard Space Flight Center we spent an hour talking to Joe Rothenberg, Deputy Director and Acting Director for the Center. I learned from the talk that there is truly a lot more to the space industry than just research and engineering. The variety of other speakers we talked to reflected this idea. Sure, we talked to people like John Mater, Chief Scientist for the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer (COBE), who showed us the science that went on in NASA. However, it did not end there. We had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Tom Young, past president of Martin Marietta, who gave us the industrial and management perspective of space ventures. We talked with Chris Chyba, Science and Technology Advisor to Senator Gibbons, who opened our eyes to the role government plays in the advancement of the space industry and inspired us all to talk with our senators about supporting the space program. Our spirits were motivated to also look inward to making space a reality with the help of Peter Diamandis, founder of the International Space University and Students for Exploration and Development in Space (SEDS). Through a little bit of luck, we even managed to gain an audience with Mr. Dan Goldin, Administrator of NASA, and France Cordova, Chief Scientist at NASA. I've mentioned just a very few of the people we had a chance to talk to, but to give you some idea of how many different perspectives we received -- all equally interesting and important. We talked to over 65 people this summer.

I don't know if Dr. Soffen had the same thing on his mind that I had when I came to the Academy, but I believed that a person cannot get a real grasp of what is going on in the space program by just listening to people -- one needs to see the technology, see the scientists and engineers working on the projects that we hear about. Well, that's exactly what we did when we toured various centers for space. Our first adventure led us down to Florida, where we visited Kennedy Space Center in hopes of seeing the space shuttle Atlantis take off from the pad. An historic mission, because it was the 100th human spaceflight mission. Well, we never got to see the launch because of rain (it seemed to rain everywhere the NASA Academy went), but that didn't stop us from becoming awed at the ability of people to create such a remarkable piece of equipment. Of course, standing within the gates of launch pad 39B where Discovery was being prepared for flight, climbing on the crawler that took the shuttles to the launch pad, and having Endeavor remain a few feet above your head while watching people replace tiles on the underbelly helped increase my excitement and wonder.

Before I got carried away with the excitement of human space travel (did I mention we also had the chance to talk to a few astronauts?), we were also shown some of the more everyday missions (everyday in space terms) of the space industry, which center around the successful deployment of satellites. For this, we visited places like Wallops Flight Facility and Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC). Wallops showed us all the technical expertise that goes into building a rocket, as they went through the manufacturing and engineering of a rocket from start to finish, even letting us put our fingerprints on a few of the test articles and final configuration. OSC, on the other hand, turned our attention to other products in the development stage such as a satellite network for data transfer that will hopefully bring more interest to the industrialization of space. Oh, and I can't forget the trip to New York, were we were taken on a tour of Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. The most unique aspect of this place is it is a model for what Mr. Goldin would like to see done with other centers -- joint cooperation between universities and NASA centers in creating centers of excellence for research. For some odd reason we visited this on a Saturday for only a few hours. While in New York, we also visited Lockheed Martin.

Conducting research was also a very important aspect of the Academy experience, which only took up about 1/3 of our time (some may argue with me on that one). I had the fortune of developing methods of creating a blackbody target that would be accurate enough to serve as a calibration target on an experiment to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background at centimeter wavelengths. It was a rather complex project, but everyone at Goddard was extremely helpful. They are so excited and enthused about what they are doing that taking a few minutes out of their time to explain what they are working on is equivalent to giving a piece of candy to a child. For example, I learned a lot about cryogenic cooling and testing, as well as some basic engineering issues that need to be dealt with when constructing satellites for temperatures below 5 Kelvin as experienced in space. My own project was filled with discoveries as I learned that the epoxy I was working with changes the thermal resistance of the thermistor, and that air trapped in teflon will escape and force its way into the epoxy as it cures at high temperatures. Even though the research I worked on was not within my fields of interest, I learned a lot about scientific techniques and science in general.

Finally, one of the most vital and fundamental aspects of the program -- developing leadership among the RAs. Now, with a normal summer internship, one would work during the day, go to a few scheduled activities during the week, and the night would remain free for us to go off on our own. Not this program. When the work day ended, the work didn't stop. It merely switched gears. We were planning and creating activities for ourselves, making things happen that would add fulfillment to our experiences at the Academy. There were two major projects that we worked on: the development of a rocket using off-the-shelf technology that would replace the Pegasus for carrying mid-size payloads to orbit, and the creation of a NASA Academy Alumni Association that would help us to continue to bring more people to the Academy program and keep people in touch with one another who had gone through the academy experience. Everyone became involved in these two projects, basically as an activity which brought us all together to learn to work with one another to get things accomplished. A few people also worked together to create a fantastic web page for the 1995 Academy, others worked to put together a slide show and photo album for the RAs to take home, and still others worked at creating a logo for t-shirts and stickers. Me, well, I spent my time with the fun stuff, and organizing trips to King's Dominion, hanggliding at Kitty Hawk and a picnic for all RAs, staff and PIs to enjoy at the end of the summer. All twenty-three of us took the initiative to work together and create the summer experiences we had.

So, to simply answer the question: "What happens when you bring a bunch of bright students together to learn about the space program?" I would say, "An experience that will never be forgotten or left unused."