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Collin College student interns for NASA
Submitted Photo -- McKinney resident Jennifer Hembd frequently saw Walt Cunningham during her four-month NASA internship at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Cunningham, an Apollo 7 crew member, was America's second civilian astronaut.
By Chris Beattie, cbeattie@starlocalnews.com
Jennifer Hembd dreamed of becoming an astronaut, of taking giant steps for mankind far away from her small Montana hometown.
Then high school, kids and life happened.
Her aerospace aspirations faded -- until recently.
"I've been a big NASA fanatic since I was little," said Hembd, who hopes to return for co-op tours and eventually a career. "It's just an amazing environment. It was the most exciting experience of my life."
Her dream revival started in November, when her media professor sent out a class email about the National Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCCAS) program, a two-month, team-oriented assignment for which students could participate at various NASA centers around the country.
Hembd was one of 90 selected nationwide to plan a mock mission to Mars at George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Her team competed against four others in developing a proposal, abstract and design for a Mars rover.
Her long-forgotten lunar interest returned, so she stayed in contact with education staff at Johnson, the NASA center closest to home. They directed her to OSSI Solar, an online application process for NASA interns, co-ops and scholars.
As an e-business media major, Hembd figured she had little chance at an internship, before she got a call asking if she'd like to work on the shuttle retirement project at Johnson. Challenge accepted.
"I'm not a big mathematician, I'm not a big scientist, so I never figured I would get to NASA," said Hembd, who moved to McKinney in 2008. "But I thought, 'What the heck, give it a shot,' and it all worked out."
On Jan. 17, she began gathering and sorting information, media, still imagery and video from shuttle missions throughout NASA history. Film canisters and image negatives had been stored at the stellar repository building at Johnson, separate from thousands of index cards with their related descriptions and information.
Hembd's job was to match them up and reorganize them so NASA can send the information to the national archives by September 2013.
It felt like a dream -- her dream.
"Some of the cards went all the way back to 1959 when Johnson was first being built," she said. "It was all lumped together, so there was no way to get the shuttles' specific cards, so I entered all of it, and I learned so much about the entire space program -- nothing secret, just things you don't hear in history books or in the news."
Through her database entry, she learned about the original seven astronauts' selection and training, Apollo missions, the first shuttle astronauts and the crew with Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Staying just three minutes from Johnson's back gate, Hembd arrived hours before her peers every day, eager to take in all she could. She spent time with Expedition 33 and 34 crews, set to venture into space in July. America's second civilian astronaut, Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7, constantly visited the interns and co-ops, she said.
Another of Hembd's acquaintances was Robonaut, a waist-up, "very humanlike" robot that's designed for the orbiting International Space Station, on which it will take over tasks too dangerous or mundane for astronauts. Sign language and an 8-foot wingspan are two of Robonaut's standout features.
"His arms kind of look like Arnold Schwarzenegger," Hembd said. "He's got these huge muscles, but he can shake your hand."
Hembd and her crew weren't allowed in the current mission control room, but they watched operations from the viewing room. And they toured the original mission control room used during Apollo 13, the nation's best-known manned mission depicted in the 1995 movie with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris.
"It was phenomenal standing in that room, to see history," Hembd said. "You could smell the old cigar and cigarette smoke in the walls."
Hembd, in her mind aboard the nation's storied shuttles, got as close to being an astronaut as one could without a white jumpsuit and helmet. She attended lectures by Apollo 13's flight director Gene Kranz and the mission's warning system engineer Jerry Woodfill, a 53-year NASA employee whose system spurred the famous, "Houston, we have a problem."
"He told us that [the alert] started going off, and they asked him what to do," Hembd said of Woodfill. "He told them, 'I don't know, I just designed the system to tell you when there is a problem; I don't know how to fix it.'"
Before her internship ended May 4, Hembd learned of current projects like the Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket NASA hopes will replace bulkier space shuttles in getting supplies to the International Space Station, a 13-country space station that circles Earth multiple times a day.
She plans to spend at least two co-op tours with NASA and become a full-time employee once she graduates. Whether in graphic design, IT or another space center discipline, Hembd simply wants to work for NASA.
Her dream is ready for lift off, just not necessarily toward outer space.
"It's absolutely necessary research they're doing up there, I just don't know if I have it in me to be the guinea pig," Hembd said. "I'm all about ground support."
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