During a recent training run in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) at the Johnson Space Center, Michael Hess (BSAE '91; BSME '91) and fellow Michigan Engineer Mark Dub (Aero) took a minute to unfurl the Michigan flag. The two were translating on the International Space Station underwater mockups for spacewalk training while conducting emergency drills.
Hess, who directs the NBL, says the flag caper can be chalked up to some good-natured U-M - Ohio State University rivalry. A colleague and friend repeatedly hung an OSU flag near Hess's desk. At least once, the Ohio State flag somehow ended up tied to a weight at the bottom of the 102' x 202' water tank, where Hess oversees pre-flight astronaut training under weightless conditions in preparation for extravehicular space missions. When the opportunity arose to take a photo of two Michigan Engineers in flight suits holding a U-M flag, well, Hess couldn't resist.
Rivalry isn't the only exciting part of Hess's work. As chief of the NBL, manages a staff of more than 200 and is responsible for all underwater astronaut training and testing, as well as for maintaining accurate mockups of the space shuttle and International Space Station. Hess has served as chief for the past four-and-one-half years and says the NBL is "one of the most industrial areas of NASA; it's like running your own business [within the agency], only our product and service is astronaut training."
Each morning, he starts his day with a "go to testing" meeting, which in industry, he says, would be similar to a daily production meeting. With his staff, he reviews operational, safety and medical procedures, and then heads to the deck to meet and greet the astronauts in training and their instructors. "Crews are training here all the time," he says. While one crew is in orbit with the International Space Station, the next is being trained. And 18 astronauts are in recurrent training waiting to resume flying the shuttle. (A typical space walk lasts about six hours, and astronauts must train for 10 hours in the NBL for each hour of their actual mission in space.) From there, Hess says almost anything goes; his days often include back-to-back meetings related to budgeting, project updates and the like.
Hess joined NASA in 1989 as a student trainee in the Cooperative Education Program at Johnson Space Center. He spent five alternate semesters working at NASA in Houston while earning his degrees. It was a lifelong dream come true. "When I was three and four, I watched the Apollo and Skylab missions, and I knew I wanted to work for NASA," he says. "I had thought I would end up working for a contractor for a number of years and, hopefully, by my mid-30s, be able to work for NASA. Instead, I was hired at 19 into the co-op program."
His initial assignment was as an astronaut trainer and mission controller for space suit, airlock and related Space Shuttle systems in the extravehicular (EVA) and crew systems section. His next assignment was the planning, training and mission control of the choreography of space walks, which involved training crews in water tanks and zero-gravity aircraft (when flying on the zero-gravity plane, Hess donned his Michigan t-shirt). He trained astronauts to fly on the Russian Mir space station, cosmonauts to fly on the space shuttle and developed several joint U.S.-Russian space walks.
Hess has also managed teams of EVA instructors and mission controllers to plan EVAs, train astronaut crews and support space walk sorties in Mission Control. He likens his career at NASA, in a way, to the time he spent at U-M: "It's never boring here," he says.