Space expert offers lessons from above

The astronaut Jim Wetherbee recognises he has the ultimate dinner party job. As strangers round the table reel off their respective occupations, the veteran of six shuttle flights can say ‘spaceman’.

‘People often don’t believe me,’ he says. It is not surprising. Few people have the opportunity to fulfil the childhood dream of becoming a real-life Buzz Lightyear.

Wetherbee, who retired from space agency Nasa last year, is extremely down-to-earth – excuse the pun. He is as concerned by didactic matters as matters of the universe.

Computing was fortunate enough to meet Wetherbee last week – he is in the UK to promote Edge, an educational foundation for technological learning in schools and colleges. The organisation is running a children’s competition for inventions that could be used in space.

Wetherbee jokingly suggests that a useful side-effect of the initiative is free research ideas for Nasa. But he also hopes the project encourages tomorrow’s technologists to follow a methodical, spaceman-like approach to intractable problems.

Take, for example, an astronaut petrified that their 17,000 miles-an-hour space shuttle might explode. A coping strategy comes in the form of a ‘withdrawn temporal horizon’, says Wetherbee.

Nasa teaches astronauts to think only about the next 10 seconds and to forget the fear of future events, including worries about what might happen if things go wrong. So at launch time, a controlled spaceman is only thinking of at-hand elements, such as crew and controls.

The space agency can then work on some of the other intractable issues, such as flying and landing a spacecraft, many of which rely on technological systems.

The key, says Wetherbee, is to use computers for what they are good at: as a partner for humans that provides fast, accurate calculations. The shuttle autopilot technology, for example, is more precise than human beings in 99 per cent of cases.

But the one per cent, when the system is not as exact, made Wetherbee prefer human operations for landings.

Yet technology has made great advances through mankind’s attempts to investigate the cosmos, Wetherbee believes. He points in particular to significant progress in health monitoring processes.

But more than that, he says, the human race needs to explore: ‘It is written in our genetic code.’