Jerry Ross can still remember well his first flight on a space shuttle.
It was Nov. 26, 1985. Ross flew on STS-61B, the 23rd flight of the Space Shuttle program and the second flight ever of shuttle Atlantis. As he spoke in the Grisham Room Wednesday at Mississippi State University’s Mitchell Memorial Library with an image of the shuttle blasting off behind him, Ross described the experience.
“By the time we had cleared the launch pad we were already going 100 miles per hour,” Ross said. “Four-and-a-half million pounds of hardware fully fueled and ready for launch and jumping off the ground with about 6-1/2 million pounds of thrust — it was a real kick in the pants.”
Ross said he knew what to expect. He’d worked with NASA since 1979, and he had carefully reviewed all of the debriefings from the 22 flights before his.
Still, the actual experience was eye-opening.
“Literally, about 15 seconds after liftoff, I caught myself thinking, ‘Ross, what are you doing?'” he said. “It was an exciting ride. But I came back for six more, so it wasn’t all that bad.”
Ross, who is tied for the record of most shuttle flights with Franklin Chang-Diaz, flew on seven missions between 1985 and 2002. His career with NASA stretched from before the shuttle program began until after the last flight. One of his flights, STS-88, included the first assembly mission for the International Space Station in December 1998.
An engineer ‘without borders’
He visited MSU on Wednesday to speak during a ceremony honoring the university’s first Astronaut Scholar, Phong Ly, a senior from Brandon studying civil and environmental engineering.
As an Astronaut Scholar, Ly is one of 50 students nationwide to receive a $10,000 scholarship for his work and research.
The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation’s scholarship program recognizes outstanding junior and senior college students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). MSU was the first university in the state to partner with the program in 2017 and is one of 40 universities affiliated with ASF nationwide. Through the partnership, one MSU student will be awarded the scholarship every year.
Notably, as a member of Engineers Without Borders, Ly worked on a 2016 project to implement wells to provide safe drinking water for people in Simwatachela, Zambia.
“They experience a six-month dry season where they have no water whatsoever,” Ly said. “So in the wet season, they have to dig these hand-dug wells to collect water, and over time those just get ridden with diseases such as cholera and hepatitis and stuff like that.
“What we implemented were these water wells that were scattered across the community,” he added. “In our last year of that trip, we helped to basically assess our impact on that community, as well as checking on the state of the wells and to check the water quality.”
Ly said Engineers Without Borders is now working a project in Ecuador to convert a gravity-fed water distribution well to a pressurized one and use a chlorine tank to treat the water.
He said the biggest takeaway from his work, and what he thinks may have contributed to his earning the Astronaut Scholarship, is how engineering has a key role to play in helping improve the world.
“Working in Zambia made me realize how important it is to have an engineering solution that involves the community,” Ly said, “because without the community you’re not going to have something that really works. I really learned how much inequity there is and how we, as engineers, can solve that inequity, or at least collaborate with others in anthropology, political science and doctors to help solve that inequity.”
Encouraging future engineers
Ross, whose own background is in engineering, said he understands well the value of helping to raise the next generation of engineers who can think outside the box and use their backgrounds to solve problems.
For example, he said, on his third shuttle mission, the 35,000-pound, $630 million Gamma Ray Observatory had issues deploying the antenna dish needed to relay information to the ground.
“We had to go outside on an unplanned, basically emergency, spacewalk to fix it,” he said. “I put all of my Indiana farm-boy ingenuity to good work, and I went out and kicked the heck out of it. … (That’s how) I got a $630 million space satellite to work.”
Ross said he’s tried to focus his talks, through his career, toward young people. He said his career has been full of unexpected turns and setbacks, but that’s part of the path to reach success.
“I studied hard,” he said. “I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I worked hard and I didn’t give up too easily when things didn’t work out the first time. I think you’ll find out that any other human being who is what you’d consider a success will have a similar story. But it’s up to us, collectively, to try to get young people to understand that and encourage them to pursue their goals and not give up too easily.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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