Sasha's Aerospace Page

(under construction)

For useful aerospace logos (for proposals or just for fun) please click here.
For information about the SWAS program (a SMEX, or Small Explorer, astronomy satellite) and additional SWAS links, please click here.

The University of Colorado has got a great Aerospace Department where many people get to work on a varity of aerospace projects. Research centers include: LASP, Space Grant College and BioServe Space Technologies to name but a few .
At BioServe I worked on a team project developing the most advanced plant growth chamber (PGBA) ever designed to fly on the space shuttle middeck to date (1997). PGBA stands for Plant Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus. You may think it is a silly name for a payload but it follows a trend of giving experiments names that are as general (and meaningless) as possible so that if you change you mind about exactly what science you are really doing you don't have to change the name of your experiment!

Click Here for more information about BioServe and PGBA

Working on space shuttle payloads is quite challenging. It typically involves rather a lot of late nights (that run into early mornings with no sleep inbetween) when you get down to a few months before the launch and you realise that not all of your stuff works quite the way it is supposed to! There are also lots of constraints imposed by NASA such as maximum power, mass, and types of materials that you are not allowed to use incase something goes wrong and the astronauts come in contact with them . Even something as basic as glass can cause a problem and has to be housed in a non-frangible container.
Here is a photo of me (and Jon, who happens to be one of my room-mates) working on the guts of PGBA. This photo was taken down at the Cape in Florida a few days before the launch on STS-77.