On Friday, students and the general public gathered in Talley Student Union’s State Ballroom in anticipation for seeing and hearing from astronaut Christina Koch, an NC State alum currently at the International Space Station.
The event began at 10 a.m. with keynote speaker Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist as well as assistant professor of physics at NC State. She began the event by talking not only about her work, but also about the connection between molecular physics and astrophysics.
“As a member of the physics department and as a physicist myself, I wanted to be able to share that and to show that you don’t have to go out into space, necessarily, to learn about it and to discover really exciting, amazing things,” Mack said. “I wanted to balance what we can do here, with physics and mathematics, and the kind of studies that can be done with computers and so on.”
After Mack gave her keynote talk, the NC State staff was able to connect to the Johnson Space Center, who established the link between Talley and the International Space Station. After a moment of hearing Koch’s greetings, her image appeared on the projector, and she began to answer the preselected questions. Koch answered a question that asked about some common skills found amongst astronauts.
“One is that we are expected to actually do science even outside our field of expertise,” Koch said. “As you may know, I study physics and electrical engineering here at NC State. But just this morning, I participated in a biology type of experiment, where I had to pipette microliters of biological material over 300 times. So, that’s definitely not something that I learned in my circuits class. The other interesting set of skills that I actually had to have is what we call expeditionary behavior skills. We actually get a lot of training in things like leadership, followership, team care, self care, group living and other ways that we can ensure that we have a successful long-term mission.”
Another person asked Koch how she deals with fearful situations.
“When I think about different situations that might normally cause fear, I like to think about turning that fear into focus,” Koch said. “I am a big preparer, so I prepare for different things in my experience by actually going through a mental exercise and putting myself in those situations and practicing how I’m going to react to those situations, both in my actions and things I’m going to verbalize. In aviation, we call that ‘shareflying.’ You can actually sharefly in any situation; it doesn’t just have to be flying a high-performance aircraft. It can be any situation you’re going into that might cause you a little apprehension or nerves.”
After answering questions for over 20 minutes, Koch said goodbye to all those who were watching.
“I know that when I look down on North Carolina, it inspires me up here,” Koch said.
NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson spoke about how many people had been watching Koch.
“We had links through the internet for over 5,000 people participating,” Woodson said. “There were 110 schools across North Carolina that were sitting in auditoriums watching the same things we were watching… We had 500-600 people in this auditorium … and we had standing room only. But this was only the tip of the iceberg, because students from all over our state were participating.”
After the the Q&A with Koch, there was a panel of engineers who answered questions from the crowd about space and astronauts. The panel consisted of Mack, Laura Bottomley, the director of Women in Engineering and The Engineering Place, as well as Steve Reynolds, an alumni distinguished undergraduate professor from the department of physics.
After the panel stopped taking questions and the crowd began to disperse, Woodson spoke about the importance of this event for NC State.
“It was huge, first of all, to celebrate Christina Koch and her accomplishments and her connection to NC State,” Woodson said. “But to be able to have all these young people here, elementary school and middle school, et cetera, and be able to celebrate what women in science and engineering can do. So it was an inspirational event, for NC State and for the [North Carolina] School of Science and Math.”
To watch the full Q&A with Koch, go here.
