If you love to dive and are fascinated by the prospect of working for one of the finest agencies in the United States, you might want to consider working for NASA as an Astronaut Dive Instructor. While NASA’s requirements are lofty and positions are few and far between, the instructors who help provide astronauts with vital skills had dreams of working for the space agency in the past, and managed to work their way into making those dreams come true. As the old saying goes, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you’ll land among the stars.”
Diving as Part of Astronaut Training
The weightless environment encountered in outer space is difficult to mimic on earth, and is best simulated in an underwater environment. Gravity cannot be completely eliminated, but in the water, the weight of astronauts, their tools, and other items can be counteracted by buoyant forces. Astronauts preparing for missions onboard the International Space Station and other space locations need to practice their jobs before embarking on real life missions, which is where the Weightless Environmental Training Facility, which is also known as the WETF, comes in. Housed in building 29 of Houston’s Lyndon Johnson Space Center, the facility provides a weightless training environment for astronauts, and allows engineers and designers to develop and evaluate spacecraft, tools, and procedures for use in the weightless vacuum that is outer space. Despite the rarity of spacewalks these days, astronauts must continue to practice in order to keep their skills sharp.
While astronauts work on perfecting basic tasks while dealing with weightlessness, scientists focus on design, function, human capabilities, and a variety of workloads to determine how best to proceed, and divers provide essential support to both scientists and astronauts.
Working as Part of the Support Team
Astronaut weightlessness training takes place in a huge 78 x 33 foot swimming pool 25 feet deep. Heavily chlorinated, and fitted with special equipment, this is no ordinary pool. Overhead, a pair of pneumatic cranes, each of which is capable of lifting over five tons, stand ready to move full scale mockups into the pool for simulated spacewalks. An adjacent storage area holds a variety of equipment and full size replicas of a variety of work environments commonly found in space, including scale models of payloads, bays, docking stations, satellites, and even the Hubble Space Telescope. When the Space Shuttle was in operation, models of various areas were submerged for practice repairs as the entire shuttle was much too large to place in the pool. Support divers help to put these objects into position with the aid of the cranes, and once training is finished, they help to remove them safely from the water.
The entire pool is under video surveillance, with divers and astronauts being monitored for safety and evaluation topside. A pair of monitoring stations complete with instrumentation that provides feedback on astronaut physiological status plus feedback on the environmental suits the astronauts wear are manned by a team of scientists. A nearby diving locker, complete with a compressor and storage cylinders is equipped with everything the team of more than thirty support divers needs to ensure that simulated missions occur safely.
WETF divers are unique; besides being highly qualified technical divers, they are required to maintain superb physical fitness and unfailingly operate at an optimal level of diving efficiency. Most of the time, these divers are busy working to maintain both fitness and efficiency, practicing astronaut rescues, and working on other safety drills. To practice rescuing an astronaut, a flooded space suit is dropped to the bottom of the pool, then retrieved by being pushed to the surface. Responsible for astronauts’ lives, these divers are extraordinarily skilled.
Before an astronaut training session begins, the divers ensure all necessary equipment has been assembled and is ready for astronauts to use. In addition, they inspect training models carefully to ensure safety. Astronauts, normally working in pairs, are assigned a team of at least two divers apiece prior to every training session. Once in the water, the divers work to ensure that the astronauts are completely neutrally buoyant, by using an elaborate system of weights that are fine-tuned to suit each individual’s physical features. The goal is to achieve perfect weightlessness, so that neither buoyancy nor gravity will affect the astronaut’s movement, no matter what his or her position in the pool.
Once astronauts have achieved neutral buoyancy, the support divers monitor them carefully, watching for signs of equipment system failure. In the event of an emergency, they quickly respond to lift the astronaut to the surface. A special elevator takes the astronauts to the area where they carry out their missions, and during training sessions, they breathe surface supplied air through massive umbilicals that also contain wires which connect them to the topside monitoring stations.
Once the mission has been completed, and astronauts are safely out of the pool, the team of support divers reconfigures the pool and ensures all models and equipment are dry and safely stowed away for next time they are needed. This is a huge job that involves moving very heavy equipment worth millions of dollars; it is definitely not stress free.
There are opportunities for fun, however; divers get the opportunity to wear space suits and test new models before astronauts themselves get to wear them. In addition, divers work with astronauts to teach them dive skills and ensure that they are proficient in all aspects of diving prior to beginning training with models while wearing space suits. In addition, members of the dive support team, like the rest of the many other NASA astronaut support personnel, are able to truthfully say that they get to work with famous astronauts.
Not only has NASA’s space suit technology helped to contribute to better dive equipment for recreational and commercial divers, the agency’s divers get to work on intriguing projects, helping astronauts learn how to anchor to an asteroid beneath the surface of the sea, and work with ROV’s and submarines in a number of different training and simulation missions hundreds of meters beneath the sea. In order to work for NASA, all personnel must pass stringent background checks to ensure that they can receive clearance to work with sensitive equipment which could have an impact on national security. Prior military experience is desirable, as are college degrees. For more information on working for NASA, visit their website. You’ll be amazed at the opportunities that are available.