September 29, 2015
Andrzej Stewart, BS ASE ’05, is one of six scientists selected for the yearlong Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation mission (HI-SEAS) IV, a NASA-funded Mars simulation project located in a solar-powered dome atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii.
Stewart, a light aircraft pilot, has worked as an interplanetary flight controller for Lockheed Martin and was involved in another simulation project, NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA), where he was the flight engineer in a simulated two-week journey to asteroid 1620 Geographos. He has also worked on console for GRAIL, Juno, Mars Odyssey, MAVEN, MRO, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Stewart will be posting updates throughout his mission on his blog, Surfing with the Aliens. We asked him a few questions about the HI-SEAS mission that began this August.
What motivated you to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering?
I was an Air Force brat, and grew up around airplanes. Naturally, I wanted to be a pilot when I grew up. My dad suggested that with my aptitude for mathematics, a degree in aerospace engineering would be a better fit, and lead to more opportunities than an aviation degree. It’s a decision that has led to a world of opportunities, not only flying planes, but also controlling spacecraft and becoming a simulated astronaut.
You are one of six scientists selected for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation mission (HI-SEAS) IV. How do you feel about this? What are the main objectives of the mission?
I’m excited and honored to have been selected as part of the crew! The mission itself is focused on astronaut psychology. As astronauts travel farther into the solar system, they’ll be both isolated from friends and family and sealed into small spaces with other crew members a long way from home. NASA wants to understand how these effects will stress the astronauts, and develop ways to counteract these stresses.
What will be your major contribution to the mission?
My role on the mission is Chief Engineering Officer. We all have a responsibility to keep the habitat up and running. It’ll be my job to have full understanding of the habitat systems – power and water, for example – monitor their usage, and coordinate repairs on any that might break along the way.
Since you will be in a closed habitat, what will the crew have access to and what will you all not have access to? How do you plan to keep in contact with “earth,” or will there be no communication at all?
Although radio signals travel at the speed of light, the Solar System is a big place, and it can still take minutes to hours for those signals to travel from point to point. At worst case, it can take over 20 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars. We simulate this by not allowing any real-time forms of communication: no phones, no Skype, etc. We do have e-mail, as well as file transfer. All of those transmissions will similarly be delayed by 20 minutes.
We’re also limited on the types of food we have. Real missions to Mars will take years, and the provisions taken will have to last a long time. We have a wide variety of dehydrated and freeze-dried foods – more than I ever knew existed! – but we’ll have to wait a few weeks for our plant growth experiments to start producing before we get a chance to eat anything fresh again.
What are you looking forward to in this yearlong mission? The most difficult part?
I’m looking forward to the experience itself! I’ve wanted to be an astronaut for most of my life. Although this isn’t an actual trip to Mars, it’s a big step toward becoming an astronaut. At the very least, I’ll get to act like an astronaut for a year.
The hardest part of the mission is the duration. There’s never a good time to carve a year out of your life to leave everything behind (the same goes for real astronauts too). The world will move on without us. We’ll miss weddings and funerals, births and deaths, reunions and graduations. With only six exceptions, I’m guaranteed to miss the birthday of everybody on planet Earth.
This mission is a Mars simulation project in a solar powered dome atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii. What do you imagine life in Mars to be like?
Life on Mars will be similar to what life is like here in the dome. In addition to the stresses from the isolation and separation, astronauts on Mars will have to contend with limited resources. We simulate those limited resources too, and have already been instituting measures to limit our power use, conserve water, and recycle waste.
How did your aerospace engineering degree from UT prepare you for the work you are currently doing now?
Although the academic experience I gained at UT has undoubtedly been important to my career, what I find has been more important is how my time at UT shaped me as a person. As Longhorns, we all learn a certain amount of pride: we dress in burnt orange, we sing the fight song, and we display the hand sign. In short, we believe in something bigger than ourselves.
Whether it be flying a spacecraft studying the gravity of the Moon, building a space capsule to carry astronauts into deep space, or living in a dome in Hawaii to help NASA better understand astronaut psychology, we carry this attitude on to the teams we work with during our professional careers.
There’s also a personal dimension to this. Being a Longhorn is something to be proud of, and it brought me a new level of confidence and belief in self that I hadn’t possessed before I walked the Forty Acres.
What is your life-long aspiration?
My life long aspiration is to fly – to become a pilot and an astronaut. Fortunately, I’ve achieved the first, and am working hard the second.
Do you have a favorite memory of when you were a student here at UT that you would like to share?
I’ve got countless fond memories from my time at UT, but one that stands out is the SHOT II workshop. In support of the Space Systems Lab’s FASTRAC satellite, we rapidly built a test payload in a couple of weeks, then traveled to Colorado to fly it on a high altitude balloon. Somewhere between chasing the balloon down the highway at 90 mph in a convoy of vans and hiking through a field to retrieve the payloads, I realized that I really enjoyed the hands-on aspect of engineering, and wanted to do something with my career beyond a typical desk job.
Any advice for our current students?
Opportunity often comes wearing the disguise of hard work. Find the tasks that people don’t seem to want to do, and see if there’s an opportunity for advancement hiding there. For example, a few months into my time in the Mission Support Area at Lockheed Martin, volunteers were needed to fill the overnight shift – 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. – for Juno’s launch simulations and operational tests. I jumped at the opportunity. Through filling that role in the simulations, I gained enough of an understanding of the overnight operations that I was chosen to fill in the same role for the actual launch team.
