Social, Cultural and Educational Legacies - ER - NASA

College EducationUndergraduateEngineering EducationA legacy of building the shuttleis strengthening the teaching ofsystems engineering to undergraduatestudents, especially in design courses.The shuttle could not have beendesigned without using specificprinciples. Understanding theprinciples of how systems engineeringwas used on the shuttle and thenapplying those principles to manyother design projects greatly advancedengineering education.Engineering science in all fields ofengineering was advanced in designingthe shuttle. In the fields of avionics,flight control, aerodynamics, structuralanalysis, materials, thermal control,and environmental control, manyadvances had to be made by engineersworking on the Space Shuttle—advances that, in turn, were used inteaching engineering sciences andsystems engineering in universities.The basic philosophy underlying theteaching approach is that the designmust be a system approach, and theentire project must be consideredas a whole rather than the collectionof components and subsystems.Furthermore, the life-cycle orientationaddresses all phases of the system,encouraging innovative thinking fromthe beginning.The use of large, complicated designprojects rather than smaller, moreeasily completed ones forces studentsto think of the entire system and useadvanced engineering sciencetechniques. This was based on thefact that the shuttle itself had to useKatie GilbertInspired by NASA to become an aerospace engineer.“In the school year of 2000, NASA releasedan educational project for elementary-agedstudents. Of course, this project reached the ears of my fun-seekingfourth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Maloney. For extra credit, we were to groupourselves up and answer the critical question: What product could be sent upto space on the shuttle to make our astronauts’ lives easier?“For weeks, our fourth-grade selves spent hours of time creating anexperiment that would answer this question. My group tested cough drops;would they still have the same effectiveness after being in zero gravity forextended periods of time? We sent it in, and months later we received a letter.Four of our school’s projects were to be sent up on the Space ShuttleEndeavour. Our projects were going to space!“When the time finally came, we all flew down to Florida to watch Endeavourblast off with our experiments on board. This all gave me the opportunity tovisit the Kennedy Space Center, see a real Space Shuttle, and talk to actualastronauts. The entire experience was one of the most memorable of my life.With all of the excitement and fascination of the world outside of ours, I knewright then that I wanted to be an astronaut and I made it my life goal to followmy cough drops into space.“As it turns out, cough drops are not at all affected by zero gravity or extremetemperatures. The experiment itself didn’t bring back alien life forms ormagically transform our everyday home supplies into toxic space objects, but itwasn’t a complete waste. The simple experiment opened my eyes to the outsideworld and the possibilities that exist within it. It captivated my interest andheld it for over 8 years, and the life goals I made way back then were the leadingfactor in choosing Purdue University to study Aerospace Engineering.”advanced techniques during the1970s. The emphasis on hierarchicallevels provides an appreciation forthe relationship among the variousfunctions of a system, numerousinterface and integrating problems,and how the design options areessentially countless when one482Social, Cultural, and Educational Legacies