THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
INNOVATION WITH INDUSTRY “Over the last 50 years, NASA has done a lot of research on rock- ets … on living in space, on working in space, on satellite repairs, on all these great things,” McClain said. “And now it’s our job to share that with commercial entities within the United States and let them take that research and make it even better, and make it more accessible and do more research than what NASA does in and of itself.” About 10 years ago, NASA wrote contracts for commercial companies to develop space flight systems that would bring astronauts to the ISS, she explained. Boeing and SpaceX were among the businesses that stepped in to fill that need. Now, NASA has completed two manned flights on the SpaceX Dragon vehicle—the most recent on Nov. 14—and Boeing will conduct another unmanned test flight of the Starliner vehicle in the first quarter of 2021, in preparation for crewed flights to the ISS later in the year.
In fact, these partnerships are an integral part of NASA’s plans for the future—not just in transporting astronauts back and forth from the ISS, but also in putting another crew on the moon and exploring deep space. “For the first time in NASA’s history we have astronauts training and trying to fly on four different vehi- cles,” McClain said—the SpaceX Dragon, the Boeing Starliner, the Orion space craft, and, of course, the Russian Soyuz. NASA is designing and building the Orion in partnership with Lockheed Martin as part of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—the most powerful in the world, according to NASA—for deep space exploration as part of the Artemis program.
Te Artemis program aims to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024 for further exploration of the lunar surface. On Dec. 9, 2020, astronauts were selected for the Artemis Team—McClain among them. She said, “We’re not just going
“I feel a burden, a responsibility to say, to kind of spread that word and say, look what we can achieve when we do something together.”
118 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2021
WALK, RUN, FLY
“STEM is a full-contact sport,” said Maj. Karoline Hood, engineer and space operations officer. She told her math students at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that very thing when she was teaching—STEM is something she’s passionate about.
And that passion has seen her through 14 years with the Army. “I’ve had pretty much all the kind of standard Army jobs—platoon leader in Iraq, company commander in Afghanistan, battalion S-4 [logistics] job,” she said. “I’ve also had some pretty unique assignments as well.” She’s worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engi- neers Seattle District and is now a project engineer stationed at the Army NASA Detachment at the John- son Space Center in Houston. She considers her job at the space center one of the more unique roles she’s had, in that she helps support human space flight as a space operations officer.
Functional Area 40—space operations—is part of the Army’s larger space capabilities, and these capabili- ties are more extensive than you think. The Army is the largest user of space-based capabilities in DOD. Space- based GPS, communications, weather and intelligence collection platforms—like satellites—are critical for maintaining situational awareness and to protect and sustain the force. Space is “ingrained into every aspect of Army ground operation,” according to the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC), from weapons to maneuverability. USASMDC is respon- sible for most of the Army space enterprise—including the development of space operations officers and providing NASA with astronauts. It is home, specifi- cally, to the Army Space Personnel Development Office (ASPDO) in Colorado Springs, Colorado—where the space operations officers are trained.
“We are a pretty small group,” Hood said. “The basic rule of an FA40 officer is to utilize and integrate space capabilities with terrestrial-, sea-, air- and high altitude- based systems owned and operated by the DOD, the [intelligence] community, civilian agencies and commer- cial partners.” In other words, space operations officers figure out what the warfighter’s mission is and then integrate space capabilities within that mission, she explained.
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