Jarret Lafleur...

There aren’t many sure things in life. For all you know, a tree could fall on your house this afternoon, a tree could fall on your car this afternoon, a tree could fall on you this afternoon, or a tree could fall in the woods this afternoon (but would it make a sound?).

Then again, there are some sure things. For example, if you are reading these words right now, you are definitely getting ready to interview with NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). Believe me, nobody else actually reads this far. You are finding all the current JSC co-ops from your school (and a few from other schools) and reading every word of their biographies for some glimpse into the secret traits that NASA likes. This is not at all a bad thing. However, on the day of the interview, I would suggest resorting to the great advice that a wise old JSC co-op told me before my own interview: “Be yourself.”

Of course, since this is indeed a Co-op Biography page, here is a little bit about that “yourself” who, in my case, was me.

I am about to go into my first year as an aerospace engineering graduate student at Georgia Tech, and I have been a co-op student at JSC since August 2003. I received my bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech in 2007, and I graduated from high school in Burrillville, Rhode Island, in 2002. During my first year at Georgia Tech I was able to keep up good grades as well as keep up with music on the side. Also during my first year, I had the chance to help design a single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle named StarRunner, and during my second year I finished a conceptual design for a morphing-wing Mars airplane. Over the next three years at Georgia Tech, I went on to help design a robotic mission to the Earth-crossing asteroid Apophis, help design a rotorcraft for use on Titan, assess power scaling laws for planetary aerial vehicles, and evaluate options for landing humans on Mars.

Windtunnel

As far as work experience is concerned, co-oping has allowed me to jump around and see lots of things. In Summer 2003 I worked at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s acoustic wind tunnel in Newport, Rhode Island. In Fall 2003 I began my first co-op tour at NASA JSC working in the Mission Operations Directorate’s Design Integration Office, where I developed strategic flight planning tools for Shuttle and International Space Station assembly flights. In Summer 2004, I worked in the JSC Engineering Directorate’s Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division on capsule ground impact modeling, lunar architecture sizing, and Shuttle wing sneak flow testing. I spent my next tour in Spring 2005 at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, where my primary task was to develop a solution to icing problems on the Space Shuttle’s External Tank. My last undergraduate co-op tour was in Summer 2006 back in the JSC Mission Operations Directorate and mainly dealt with contingency scenarios for atmospheric entry of the 2009 unmanned Mars Science Laboratory.

As of the writing of this biography, I am in the middle of my first graduate co-op tour at JSC (and my fifth tour overall). Right now I’m on a NASA-wide team looking at how to plan for human Mars exploration. My task is to determine how to best control the lift vector of a human-class vehicle during Mars atmospheric entry. Decelerating on Mars is a tough problem because the atmosphere is extremely thin, and every little bit of lift and drag counts (if you were skydiving on Mars, you would probably hit the ground faster than Mach 1).

As for the future, in Fall 2007 I’ll be back at Georgia Tech, and the next time I’ll be back at JSC is Summer 2008. Being a NASA JSC co-op has been a blast (where else would I have the chance to do all this stuff?), and it has played a huge part in determining where I am today.

I think that covers my biography pretty well, except for the big question of “How did you get to work for NASA?” Everybody here has his own story. Mine started in my first semester of college when I contacted some Georgia Tech alumni working at NASA as part of my “Adjustments to College Life” class. NASA JSC came to interview co-op applicants at Georgia Tech the following spring, and by then I had also corresponded once or twice with Bob Musgrove, who was then JSC’s co-op coordinator. The interview was surprisingly painless, but I didn’t have too much confidence that I’d get the job. After all, why would NASA JSC want to pick me out of all the incredible people it had to choose from at Georgia Tech and around the country? Two months after the interview (by this time I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to make the cut), I got the call from Bob Musgrove asking if I’d like to co-op at JSC. And that’s it. In a nutshell.