Alum talks on trips to outer space

Some University students stick their blue and red Penn banners on their walls. The more daring might even fly them outside their window. Penn alumnus Michael Gernhardt, however, flew his in a NASA shuttle orbiting the earth. "I wanted the Engineering School to have this," said Gernhardt, a NASA astronaut and alumnus who received his masters and doctorate from the University's Bioengineering program. He made the comments as he handed the space souvenir to Bioengineering Chairperson Gershon Buchsbaum last night after addressing a packed audience in the Towne Building's Alumni Hall. Gernhardt's talk was the keynote address and kick-off event for National Engineering Week, which is being celebrated at the School of Engineering and Applied Science all this week. But Gernhardt gave students and faculty more than a glance at a school momento -- he also shared his firsthand knowledge of three flights, 931 hours and more than 10 million miles in space. Gernhardt began his talk with slides of deep sea divers, momentos from his pre-NASA career as a deep sea diver and project engineer. Perhaps more startling, though, were slides of his silhouette suspended above the white and blue swirl of earth. "The earth is luminous. It literally takes your breath away," Gernhardt said in describing the view from space. "It's true," he continued. "You can see it in photos or an Imax film, but to actually be there is a completely humbling experience." Gernhardt interspersed the slides with a lecture, which began with a discussion on the differences between the hazards of deep sea and space travel. "In both there is extreme danger," he explained, noting how decompression sickness and thermal constraints plague divers, while astronauts have to contend with space suits that hold the body in a pressurized environment equal to that inside a basketball or football. "However, in space, the mobility is much more limited," he said, explaining that astronauts must always be secured to the shuttle before performing any task in space for risk of becoming one more piece of debris orbiting the solar system. These tasks may be relatively simple, like screwing on a bolt or welding a broken plate on the shuttle surface, or they may involve complex scientific testing. "A large part of NASA is devoted to doing life-science experiments in space," he said, noting that certain molecules can only be grown in full in a gravity-free environment. Although astronauts practice these tasks beforehand in huge water tanks at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gernhardt noted that "there's nothing like the real thing." That's why, he explained, NASA hopes astronauts will practice on "easier" shuttle trips in order achieve their larger goal: an international space station. In turn, "the station is part of an even larger plan," Gernhardt, who was specially chosen to work on its construction, said. "In 20 years we hope to put men on Mars," he concluded. The lecture was arranged in association with Chris Lambertsen, the founder of the Institute for Environmental Medicine, with whom Gernhardt studied while at Penn.