Saturday, February 17, 2007
Astronaut from Mesquite to be on next Space Shuttle flight
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NASA
James Reilly
James F. Reilly is a mission specialist on STS-117, which will blast off March 15, take a bunch of stuff to the International Space Station, then come back on March 27. Technically speaking, the mission will deliver the second and third starboard truss segments (S3/S4) and another pair of solar arrays to the space station, says NASA.
Reilly, who calls Mesquite home, flew on STS-89 in 1998 and STS-104 in 2001. He has logged more than 517 hours in space, including three spacewalks totaling 16 hours and 30 minutes. He graduated from Lake Highlands High School in 1972. From there, Reilly earned his Bachelor of Science degree in geosciences from UT-Dallas in 1977; he earned his Master of Science degree in geosciences from UT-Dallas in 1987; and he he earned his doctorate in geosciences from UT-Dallas in 1995.
Fascinating interview with him on the NASA site about this upcoming mission, if you're into space stuff. You want to know about a S3/S4 Truss and the sticking guide wires during retraction of one of the P6 Truss solar array wings? Because I sure as hell can't tell you what those are. This guy will tell you in plain English. Yes, astronauts are smart. But these folks are also brave souls who have a big picture perspective of humanity. Says Reilly:
The future of human space exploration for me, is the thing that we have to continue doing. If we don’t go out to the edges of the frontiers, as we have always done as a human species, then we’re basically just starting to slowly compress and eventually, as a society, we’ll die. So as we continue to go to the frontiers, we’re going to be learning things that we don’t know we don’t know, which is one of the most important things any scientist will tell you. A lot of times it’s not the “Eureka!” moment that you have when you’re going to the frontiers, it’s the “Gee, that’s funny...” And then, several years later, you realize that’s a fundamental change to something that we do here on the ground. As we go farther and farther out we get a chance to, in the case of the moon, see what our earliest Earth looked like. The moon’s basically a frozen body that stopped at about three billion years. So we can look at what the chemistry of the Earth might have looked like, which we can’t see here. And in the case of Mars, just getting there will be a challenge enough from the engineering standpoint. But once we’re there it has all the components that look like it could support life in its earliest forms. We can’t see that here on Earth, either, and so it may again be the museum piece that tells us everything about how we are, who we are, how we began, how our, how our environment began, and what it could have looked like in its earliest form. And of course any historian will tell you, you really can’t know who you are or where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. So all of that plays together to give us the role for what we hope to do in the future.
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Minnie Payne Staff
Very interesting, Blair.
1 year, 4 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
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