NLCS x NASA

Yesterday, Dr Mamta Nagaraja gave a very interesting talk about women in NASA over Skype. As the manager of the Women@NASA program and NASA representative to the White House Council on Women and girls, she answered all of our questions about astronauts and how it is to be a woman in NASA.

We learnt that astronauts have significant bone deterioration when they go into space, and this is a major problem as it’s hard to rebuild even after they come back to Earth. Astronauts are prepared for every possible scenario before they go to space, from dealing with boredom to mending broken bones to fixing space shuttles. Astronauts have very limited help once they are in space so it’s important for them to learn these things while they are still here on Earth.

NASA also has many methods to prepare astronauts for space. In particular, Dr Nagaraja talked about using “mock-ups” of space stations in large pools to prepare astronauts for the sense of weightlessness while working on a station and potentially repairing it. She mentioned that typically the astronauts will spend a day doing the same thing over and over so it seems routine if they have to do it in space. She placed emphasis on how rarely things go wrong in space, and how this can affect an astronaut who has only been prepared for worst case scenarios.

When asked about the future of robots in space, Dr Nagaraja voiced her opinions that robots will never completely take over as they can’t be prepared for situations and decision-making in the same way that humans can. However, there are many science missions, with no humans on board, specifically for data collection and the exploration of space.