Departments
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Week of 24 October 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 9 |
Feature
Article
Astronaut touches down at BU
by Eric McHenry
When your job description includes compulsory parasailing over the Gulf of Mexico, what exactly do you do on vacation?
R. Glynn Holt, a new research assistant professor at ENG, is probably the only member of the BU faculty qualified to answer that question. As a former payload specialist and astronaut alternate for the second flight of the United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML-2), Holt has work experience that makes even the least conventional careers look humdrum.
"When you sign on as a payload specialist, your life is NASA's for a couple of years," he says. "You go through every bit of the training that regular members of the astronaut corps go through, and you're ready up to the last minute to step in, just in case."
Besides an education in shuttle and laboratory systems, Holt had to undergo rigorous physiological training that included exposure to extremely high and low levels of gravity, and learn preparation for survivable accidents.
"They would take us up on a parasail to about 1,000 feet," he says. "You assume you're bailing out of the shuttle by hook or by crook, and once you're riding your chute down, you've got safety systems to worry about -- visor up, vest inflated, pull your life raft cord, start your emergency beacon when you hit the water."
These were not the sorts of professional concerns Holt foresaw when he began his postdoctoral studies in the mechanical engineering department at Yale University in 1989. But while there, he began contributing to an experiment that concerned the effects of various surface-active materials on liquid drops. Its results would bear upon many everyday industrial processes, Holt says, but it demanded a gravity-free environment, in which suspended drops could be manipulated using acoustic forces. Fortunately, it got one in 1992. The experiment was selected to fly in the first U.S. Microgravity Laboratory, aboard the space shuttle Columbia, and Holt was retained as an investigator.
"That experiment was not an unmitigated failure," he says, "but a lot of things went wrong, and not a lot of science got accomplished."
"We got a chance, though, to re-fly it in 1995 on USML-2, and this time I was also selected as a payload specialist."
The term designates a scientist who, because of familiarity with a particular Microgravity Laboratory experiment, is invited to be a "guest astronaut." Holt was chosen as an alternate, which meant he would participate in two years of training and preparation with the knowledge that he probably would not fly. He says his arm needed no twisting.
"It's an opportunity that not very many people have," Holt says. "And it's just as much luck -- being in the right place at the right time -- as it is excelling in your field. So it's a very rare thing, and an honor and a privilege to be able to serve in that way.
"From the scientist's point of view, though, it's an even greater privilege," he says. "I'm a lab rat. I enjoy spending time in the lab discovering new physical phenomena, and the chance to do that in a lab that very few people ever get to visit, an orbiting lab where the ambient acceleration is so low that it's essentially a zero-gravity environment . . . wow, that would be just too much fun!"
As expected, Holt stayed behind when USML-2 flew in 1995. But his involvement with the mission was by no means over. As an investigator and crew member, he and the other alternate payload specialist traded 12-hour shifts "on headset" at the Payload Operations Control Center in Hun