Former Manchester resident Lee Morin, who on Thursday became at least the 10th astronaut to visit and speak at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, is unusual in that he touches both NASA’s past (he rode in a space shuttle) and its future (he’s leading a team helping to build the next manned space capsule, Orion).
But even better than that, he told more than 50 people at the Discovery Center, is the work he did during several spacewalks around the International Space Station back in 2002.
“The space station is held together . . . by 30 bolts, comparable to the bolts that hold a tire on a truck. We had a big torque wrench we used to tighten those bolts,” he said. “I personally tightened 12 of the bolts that hold the space station together. And that is the pinnacle of my career.”
After a moment’s calculation Morin, who has both a Ph.D. and an M.D., added: “That works out to about two years of education per bolt.”
This self-deprecating humor probably resonated more with the adults in the audience than the dozens of children who came to hear about life in space, including 24 members of the center’s new after-school science and engineering club, whose inaugural meeting prompted Morin’s appearance. But the students’ interest in space is strong as shown by the flurry of questions at the end of his talk, including:
Why don’t you build everythng on the ground and then put it into orbit? (It would weigh too much for any rocket to carry.)
Why don’t satellites cause an eclipse of the sun, like the moon does? (They’re not big enough.)
If the space station orbit is only 250 miles up, why doesn’t it still feel some gravity? (It does – but it’s traveling so fast sideways that the gravity is effectively negated.)
For the past 10 years, Morin, whose family once owned a chain of shoe stores that were sprinkled across New Hampshire, has been part of the Orion Spacecraft project, building the capsule that will carry up to six humans into space atop next-generation rockets, perhaps even Mars.
In Houston, he leads a team developing the controls for Orion, in which much of the information and controls will be on touch screens, or “the glass.”
“The shuttle had 250 pounds of books and manuals. Almost all of those books are on the glass, on the screen – except for one book, which tells you how to reboot the computer,” he said. “On the shuttle flight deck during dynamic flight – takeoff, landings . . . there were 1,247 switches and 10 computer screens, and maybe 50 pounds of books.”
NASA has changed since Morin first joined more than a decade ago, following stints in submarines and flight crews with the Navy and a private medical practice. Despite NASA’s reputation as a hulking bureaucracy, Morin says NASA has supported his team and lets it be relatively agile.
It now works with two private firms – Boeing and SpaceX, founded by electric-car pioneer Elon Musk – to develop spacecraft. Morin’s team is in regular contact with both, he said.
And in case you’re wondering: Yes, he has met Musk but no, he doesn’t own a Tesla aumobile.
