Jessica Culler...

Senior in aerospace engineering, University of Oklahoma
Hometown: Moore, Oklahoma
First Tour: Mission Operations, Flight Planning Branch, Station and Shuttle Ops (Fall ’01)
Second Tour: Engineering, Advanced Development, Advanced Design Branch (Summer ’02)
Third Tour: Flight Crew Operations, Aircraft Ops Engineering (Spring ’03)

How I got here:
The OU AIAA chapter was taking a field trip to Houston to tour the NASA-JSC facilities in January 2001. Someone arranged a meeting with the JSC co-op coordinator. He gave a short presentation and afterward, accepted our résumés. I emailed him a couple weeks later, and a while after that (he’s a busy guy), I got a message about scheduling a phone interview. We did the interview (my first interview for anything ever), and he said they’d make offers around February. Eventually, after a few more emails, I got the acceptance call.

The next little sequence of events involved the typical flow: call mom, page dad at work, call grandma, talk to dad, run down the hall to tell the guys, ‘cause man, I’m working for the freakin’ space program. [Hint: It’s really fun to call your dad at work and say, in a very serious, somber manner, “Dad, I’m not going to school next semester,” but he doesn’t really appreciate the moment as much as you do, even after he finds out it’s because you’ll be working at NASA.]

Background and Interests:
The summer before I got the co-op, I worked long but rewarding days at the WildCare Foundation wildlife rehabilitation center in Noble, Oklahoma. I had never had an engineering job before NASA. On my days off, I trained in Hung Gar kung fu in Edmond. Here in Houston I’ve been training in aikido and iaido (Japanese sword drawing/cutting) during all three of my tours. The co-ops here are into just about anything you can think of, and we’re way more well-rounded than your stereotypical sits-at-a-computer-all-day engineer. Most sports are represented somewhere in the co-op crowd, and there are even all-co-op softball and soccer teams through JSC. And we do a lot of other extracurricular activities like concerts, parties, dinners, pro sports games, live theater performances, and trips.

College:
Because of the semesters here in Houston, I’m doing the 6-year plan with three years of being a senior. That’s one of the things some people may find as a negative effect of co-op-ing. But what better job could an untrained college student possibly have? AND how many college students can say they’re already working for NASA, driving past the big Saturn V on their way through the gate every day? I’m currently the only co-op from OU, but I’m working on getting that changed. If you’re an OU student looking at my bio and you’re interested in being a co-op, definitely get in touch with me.

Actual Co-op Work:
For my first tour I was assigned to the Mission Operations Directorate (MOD). The branch I was assigned to, Flight Planning, didn’t seem very engineering-related to me, and it’s not really, but I had a lot of special NASA experiences that the co-ops actually doing engineering don’t get. I became very familiar with the shuttle mission STS-108 because I read and reviewed every single activity the crew did while up there (flight planners make the schedules). I knew the experiments they did and the EVAs and deployments. And when the mission launched, I was working in a backroom supporting the Flight Activities Officer in the front room you see on TV. Besides that, I had three main projects and a couple of smaller projects. First, I manually updated the as-planned crew activities metrics (read: I made a spreadsheet and kept track of how much time the crew spent on activities and put each one [some of which were in Russian] into one of about 11 different categories). Second, I worked toward automating the process so no one would have to manually do it anymore. Third, I went through training and certification to become a flight controller and work the MATS (Message and Timeline Support) console position for STS-108.

For my second tour, I chose Advanced Design, which is like the engineering of things future. Past projects of the office include studies on crew transfer vehicles, lunar and Mars bases and vehicles, and design reference missions, which lay out the basics of what some people think would be required for a big mission like the moon or Mars. It’s a very awesome place to work, but because the things you’re doing are only studies, they may not happen for 20+ years, or not at all. For my primary project, I was Human Factors and Habitability Lead for a preliminary study of an artificial gravity vehicle for space transit. In this position, I got to start thinking about things no one has ever worked through before, primarily, “How is living in space going to be different if there’s significant gravity?” Also, because of the unique environment of the Advanced Design office, I worked with people from all over JSC in different areas of human spaceflight that were designing space systems for a gravity environment. Through interaction with them I learned a little bit about everything that would go into designing long-term human spaceflight vehicles.

During the summer, I was also involved in Education Outreach activities, which is where NASA people share their enthusiasm for science, math, engineering, and space with non-NASA folks. I was a co-op mentor for High School Aerospace Scholars and International Space School, both programs involving teams of high school students working for a week to design missions to Mars. While they’re here, they get to see some of the coolest things at NASA, like this giant vacuum chamber.

My most recent tour, in Flight Crew Operations Directorate, Aircraft Ops Engineering, was out at Ellington Field. Ellington is the airport out of which NASA runs its astronaut-training aircraft: the T-38 training jets, the STA (Shuttle Training Aircraft), and the KC-135 “Weightless Wonder.” The Super Guppy, used to carry satellites and parts of the space station around, and the world’s last two flying WB-57s, high-altitude science mission aircraft are also flown out of Ellington. Over the tour I had several design projects, including a strap to make experiment hookups safer in the WB-57, a forklift guide to allow the Guppy pallets to be easily moved, a tripod support for an WB-57 wing inspection x-ray exposure and a few projects that involved doing research for other engineers to learn more about the aircraft. Working in Aircraft Ops Engineering allowed me more hands-on experience and much quicker turnaround than many co-ops ever see on the main JSC site. I was told a problem, then could ask people questions to gather information, come up with a way to fix it, draw up what I wanted, observe the production and testing of the product, and watch it be used for the first time.

Because I was an Ellington Field co-op, I also helped out with the KC-135 Reduced Gravity Student Campaign and even got to ride on the plane and experience zero gravity, which is one of the most amazing and indescribable experiences ever.

At this point I have two more tours ahead of me (summer 2003 and summer 2004), so I’ll be around in the co-op world for a while. My email address, in case you ever want to write me about OU, engineering, co-ops, or NASA (or wildlife rehabilitation, martial arts, or space stuff in general): mstsooner@ou.edu. Thanks for taking time to read my bio!