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Yea so co-ops are a general engineering thing,
all across the country. So what you can do is, it's
basically like an apprenticeship
at a company. So you,
you interview with the company and you get selected to
work at the company for like
a semester and in the summer.
So just about eight months.
And you actually get to work as an engineer
in the field.
And you get to see if that's what you want to do and
what you like about it, and
you get paid
most the time. And it's just a really great experience because it's
the kind of
is uh...
balances out though the theoreticalness
of the school
versus we're actually going to do and so it
makes sure that
you actually want to be an engineer.
So I started out doing structural
health monitoring
of composite pressure vessels,
using non-destructive evaluation techniques.
That is basically like let's say you really like fishing
and you have your favorite fishing rod and take it with you
on every trip
but now you're going on
big trip to Montana
and you want to make sure that your rod
isn't gonna break because it's pretty old.
But you don't want to break your favorite rod to figure out how much strength that has left in it
So you might use
certain ways like look inside material,
like with lasers, or with
the way it sounds. So we used acoustic emission sensors, which is like
little microphones
glue onto the
under the structure.
And if it makes sounds like it's going to break then
you can't take it out of service.
After that
co-op, I got accepted into their official co-op program. And I went down and I did
hyper velocity impact testing.
So over the last
fifty years of space launches from private
and commercial
and government
industry
there's been a lot of debris and trash that's is still like in orbit.
so once you launch something you pay an energy debt to get
that mass into
a stable orbit.
And so that includes everything like the paint chips in between the
stages and all the circuit boards and all, everything.
It stays, it stays in orbit until it decays,
like the orbit decays and that can take a really long time.
So right now there's a bunch of
basically space debris, space trash
just floating around in the same orbits as all the communication satellites,
all the guidance satellites, the international space station.
And the
thing about,
even though the particles can be
down a quarter of a diameter of a human hair,
up to the size of a rocket body
those really small particles
have an immense amount of kinetic energy because
they're moving super fast.
And so especially if people's lives are in danger, like if you're in the
international space station or
you're in one of the commercial crew vehicles that are coming up soon or
you're in the space shuttle,
all of the sudden knowing
how your space craft will respond to being impacted by this debris
becomes very important.
At NASA in White Sands,
at the White Sands test facility, they have a huge
set of guns
that shoots projectiles at
17,500 miles per hour.
And we can actually test cross-sections of spacecraft shielding to make sure that
they can
withstand a certain amount of
debris size
and then there also developing ways to protect
spacecraft by designing the shielding on the outside
to uh...
to ensure that
a certain size of particle
will be absorbed by the craft.
Then I went on to work at the
so
when people, when you build the international space station you have to
do
a ton of work outside of the pressurized
capsule that you're in.
So they call that extra vehicular activity. So it's basically like
spacewalking.
uh... It is space walking.
It's really
different to work in a micro-gravity environment especially
when it is as harsh as
the vacuum of space. You have
temperature swings
from -250 to +250.
I think it's fahrenheit uh...
Anyway so you have like a 500 degree temperature swing
you have a vacuum of space, you have space debris
and you have to have a suit that can withstand that environment in order to even go outside.
And so
that gives you a
a bulky
contraption
that have to be inside while you're working.
And so you have to learn how to work with the suit,
in order to
do things outside.
So they have a huge pool called the neutral buoyancy lab.
It's like 6.3 million gallons of water.
It's basically an indoor lake
and it has a
full-scale mockup of the international space station
in like 40 feet of water.
And so they have a bunch of scuba divers and that's kind of where some of my other
extracurricular activities came in from Mizzou, also known as the scuba club.
One of the coolest things they did
at Johnson Space Center this summer was
work on a project that actually got uplinked to the international space
station.
And I got to sit
in the
that back room of the mission control
room, as kind of
like back up
for when they actually did that the task that my project was on
on the space station. So that was
really cool
to be listening to the loops of the flight director and all the support
engineering
and talk with the astronaut
on station, going
mock 25, to 150 miles above the earth
all right there. And
it just was a combination of,
it was like a dream come true really because I ever since I've been a little kid I wanted
to work at NASA and
just to be that
closely connected and doing the things that
I always thought
I would want to do
just was amazing.