Ep377_Mission_Control_Crew_Health.
JSC · 2025-03-21
Ep377_MCC_Crew Health Nilufar Ramji (Host) Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of NASA's Johnson Space Center. Episode 377, Mission Control, Crew Health Consoles. I'm Nilafur Ramji, and I'll be your host today on this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts, all to let you know what's going on in the world of human space flight and more. The Mission Control Center, or MCC is the iconic epicenter of space flight operations. A large talented team ensures mission success, whether in low Earth orbit or elsewhere like the moon or Mars. You may have actually seen depictions of Mission Control in the movies or video of it during a NASA broadcast, there are many seats which are called console positions in the International Space Station Flight Control Room, and each one of them has an important job. We are dedicating six episodes to covering the positions in the International Space Station mission control what they do and how they work together to keep the space station operating smoothly. This is our third episode in our mission control series, and in this episode, we will be covering the following consoles, flight Surgeon with William Fernandez, biomedical engineer, or BME with Nancy Bansbach and environmental and thermal operating systems. Or ETHOS with Brendan Lutes together, these consoles cover health related positions in Mission Control Houston recorders to flight speed. Surgeon, go, BME go, ETHOS, go. We are go for Houston. We have a podcast. Nilufar Ramji Welcome to Houston, We have a podcast. So let's start off by going a little bit around the room, and we will begin with Will tell us a little bit about yourself. Will Fernandez Well, hi there. Yeah. So I'm Will Fernandez. I'm the flight Surgeon that we're talking about health today, and I primarily work at the flight Surgeon Council and mission control, and I'm also the deputy crew Surgeon for crew nine right now, currently on the ISS a quick little background about B so on council, a typical day to day is lot of monitoring what types of medical events crew are participating in and working directly with the BME, the biomedical engineer, who knows a lot more of the engineering side, because I'm just the medical doctor, right? I don't have any formal engineering training. My background is more so in molecular biology, chemistry, and then, of course, med school, and everything from there. But everything that we do in mission control, as a flight controller, especially as the flight Surgeon, it's very collaborative. It's very team based. We work a lot with every other console and the flight Surgeon Council. We work most directly with the with the BME in particular, we work with ETHOS. We work with the flight director. It's a very collaborative approach to really everything we do. So that's, yeah, it's a little bit about me and a little bit about just the day to day what we do. Nilufar Ramji Thanks, Will. And you mentioned BME, and right beside you, we have Nancy. Nancy, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Nancy Bansbach Yeah, I'm a BME or biomedical engineering flight controller. I work with will in the flight Surgeon discipline. And like Well said, with everyone in the flight control team, I was a biomedical engineering background major in my bachelor's and my master's, and then I came right into this job. The BME rule is pretty fun. We own any medical hardware on board, exercise hardware, environmental monitoring hardware, radiation hardware, basically anything you could think of that would keep the crew safe or concern crew health. And so we kind of touch a lot of different areas. It's not just one thing we manage. And then we work with a lot of different teams that aren't in mission control to make sure, you know, our nutrition lab and our psych talks are all involved with the crew health and the mission. And so that's kind of what the BME role is all about. Nilufar Ramji That's fantastic. In keeping with the health theme, we have ETHOS. And let's, let's hear from ETHOS a little bit. Brendan Lutes Hi, so my name is Brendan Lutes. I'm an ETHOS like you said, which is the environmental and thermal operating systems, E, T, H, O, S, big picture, our console is responsible for running all of the machines that maintain a habitable environment for the astronauts. So, you know, as humans, we have inputs and outputs, and in space, it's really hard to, you know, get those easily. So we try and make a big circle of all the inputs and all the outputs. And we have regenerative ECLSS systems, and we have Internal Thermal Control systems that help keep everything inside of station. Of station a nice, comfortable temperature for the crew. We make sure that the water is on station for them to be able to drink, and that the air is well balanced and like Earth atmospheres, so we scrub it of contaminants and reprovide Oxygen. I went to school at University of Colorado. Boulder and got an aerospace enginee