United Space School at NASA By Tori Weston, U6 TXD Over the summer I was selected as the English representative for United Space School 2019. This two week internship with NASA in Houston, Texas gathers together 50 students from 25 different countries to plan a manned mission to Mars. After a competitive entry process of a 3000 word essay and an hour long Skype interview, I was awarded a place on the programme. On day one, and while most of the students were still jet lagged having literally flown in from the four corners of the globe, we had another series of interviews designed to separate the 50 students into 5 teams of 10, with each team having a specific responsibility and specialist area of the mission. I was lucky enough to be assigned to the blue team whose focus was on Mars Surface Operations and was subsequently elected captain. Following team assignments, we had a whole group debate on some key mission parameters such as duration and purpose of the mission along with the number of crew and rough landing zone. This would get everyone on the same page before planning started. Then we had to learn, utilising the programme’s deep roots within the NASA community. It has access to some of the highest ranked people within the agency who came in and gave us talks on everything from Space Laws and Politics to the best materials for radiation shielding, to the ECLSS (Environmental Control and Life Support System) where our speaker John Graf brought in the used CO₂ removal canisters from the Apollo 11 mission. To aid us in our research we were given unrestricted access to the NASA archives which document the entire history of the USA space programme from before it was even called NASA We were also lucky enough to have a Skype session with renowned astronaut Chris Hadfield to answer all of our burning questions about life in the space programme. The group then spent a day at Mission Control Houston, the same site the moon landing was coordinated from. We were given behind the scenes access to the space shuttle avionics facility and the
7
