With the 50th anniversary of the Apollo
11 Moon mission upon us, interest in the US space program has been
back in the news.
On Sunday, July 14, retired Space
Shuttle Astronaut Jay Apt shared some of his experiences with a large
audience at the Stone Memorial High School Auditorium. The program
was put on by the Fairfield Glade Community Church. Glade Resident Jim Kukowski helped arrange the appearance and worked with the public affairs and communications office for NASA from Apollo 11 into the Space Shuttle Program. Kukowski also consults with the Stone Memorial High School Panther Rocket Club.
Apt holds a Ph.D. in physics, flew on
four space shuttle missions and has logged over 35 total days in space. He
worked for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory starting in 1980, then 1982 through 85 he was a flight controller for Shuttle payload
operations at the Johnson Space Center and was selected as an
astronaut in 1985.
Space Shuttle Astronaut Jay Apt answers a question
asked by young Matthew Parker
Photo by Jim Young
A powerpoint presentation with amazing
photos, many taken by Apt during his missions, impressed the crowd
and he shared stories of his time in space such as his two spacewalks during the 1991 STS-37 mission. On that trip to space, he had
his partner had to manually deploy the high gain antenna on the gamma-ray observatory when it failed to do so automatically. Their
scheduled spacewalk the next day tested hardware that would be later
used on the International Space Station.
Dr. Apt also flew on STS-47, STS-59 and
on STS-79 when the Shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian MIR space
station.
He recounted how as a college student
he had attended the Apollo 11 launch as part of his work on the
magazine Model Rocketry. In addition, as a child, he and many others
were inspired by the books and art of the space artists and writers
of the time.
Jay Apt showed some of the examples of space
art and writing that inspired him and others
to explore space. Photo by Jim Young
Questions from the audience took up the second half of the program and in answering some of those questions
Dr. Apt said he expects the commercial company Space X to get
people into orbit within the next 12 months.
He was asked about the possibility of
extraterrestrial life in the universe and with the number of starts,
the potential number of planets that here was certainly a chance of
that. He explained that the question of extraterrestrial life will
be what will it look like? Would it be just a single-celled organism
“like mold in the back of a refrigerator” or something more
advanced, asked Apt?
Jay Apt chats with members of the SMHS Rocket
club before his talk. Photo by Jim Young
Apt added that the history of life on
earth was affected by a number of unlikely events and even with a large number of possible life locations in space he figures that if
man is either alone in the universe or not alone, either answer would
be equally astonishing.
One question from the audience
concerned the possible threat of asteroids to the planet. Said Apt,
“Earth is my favorite planet.” He added that what was needed was
a way to detect asteroids that could threaten Earth and to detect
them out far enough that something can be done about them. He said
blowing them up was not really a good solution because then you had lots of debris that could still strike the planet.
The solution to redirecting asteroids,
Apt said, was similar to what was imagined on the Star Trek TV show,
like a tractor beam. That, he explained would actually be gravity.
By sending a spacecraft to travel beside the asteroid with enough
mass and enough time it could pull the asteroid enough to miss the
earth.
Asked about people who believe that man
never went to the moon elicited a chuckle from Apt who said he had
met and talked to all 12 of the men who had been on the moon and as
hard as it was for two people to keep a secret, the 400,000 who
worked for NASA during the days of Apollo means there could be no
such secret.
Jay Apt and Jim Kukowski
Photo by Jim Young
