Astronaut addresses audience at Engineers Week banquet

  • Published
  • By Paul Kelly, Contributing Writer
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, TENN. --  Andy Allen, former astronaut and general manager for a Jacobs Technology contract at Cape Canaveral, Fla. was the keynote speaker at the Tullahoma area Engineers Week banquet on Feb. 25 at the Manchester/Coffee County Conference Center.

His talk followed presentations by the locally supported FIRST® LEGO® League team, Electrons, who titled their presentation, "Flood on Bugscuffle Road"; and presentations by Harry Clark on the MathCounts® competition, Jim Link on the Engineer for a Day program and Paul Kelly on the Student Design Competition. These programs represent outreach by engineers to the young people in the Tullahoma/Manchester area.

Allen was selected for astronaut training in 1987 and became an astronaut in 1988. Prior to that, he was a test pilot for the Marine Corps. He went into space three times aboard the Space Shuttle, two of those times as the Shuttle pilot and once as the commander.

He first reminded the audience of where we are in relation to the Milky Way galaxy. He said that there are billions of stars in the galaxy, and possibly billions of planets. We, on planet Earth, are a small speck in the galaxy. A reporter asked him, after he returned to Earth from a Shuttle flight, if he felt important now that he had been to space and he replied, "My overwhelming feeling is how insignificant I am."

Allen talked about how hard the astronauts train for the flights. He said that they "train, train, train for errors," and once in flight that training takes over. He described liftoff as the best ride of your life, "Better than any ride at Disneyworld." He stated that for the ground observers there is a lot of noise at liftoff, but for the astronauts, they don't hear it because they are riding ahead of the sound.

He called the Shuttle the greatest invention of the 20th century and said that the only way it was possible for him and the other astronauts to make the ride into space was due to all of the engineering and science that happened on the ground.

"It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to get strapped into a seat, but the real intelligence is all the people that work together to make the flight happen," Allen said. Because of this, "ordinary people get to do extraordinary things."

Showing photos of the space toilet, otherwise known as the Waste Containment System (WCS), he stated that the "simplest things on Earth require lots of engineering to make them work in space." He also stated that the area of biggest benefit from the space program is the medical field. He and his fellow astronauts referred to themselves as "lab rats" because they were hooked up to medical sensors much of the time that they were in space.

On one Shuttle flight, he called his family from the Shuttle after 10 days in space for a medical conference and spent most of the phone call refereeing an argument between his daughters over whose turn it was to talk. He said that talking with his children acted as a good reality check. It kept him grounded on the Earth, while flying 250 miles above.

At the conclusion of his talk, he opened the floor for questions. One middle school student asked him if he was afraid that his Shuttle would blow-up. His response was, "Yes, but I tried not to think about it too much." If it did blow-up, then it would have been over quickly for him, and there wouldn't have been much he could do. He did say that "it was always a good thing to be a little bit afraid because it makes you pay attention."

Another member of the audience asked him to compare his experiences as a test pilot to those as an astronaut. He replied, "Being a test pilot is harder. The test pilot flies the plane and acts as an interpreter between the plane and the engineers. Test pilots can't make mistakes."

At the conclusion of the question and answer session, AEDC Commander Col. Raymond Toth presented Allen with a copy of "Beyond the Speed of Sound", a history of AEDC.