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| Image Credit to AOL News |
I have to admit, when I first heard that NASA was sending several people to Chile to help with the situation with the trapped Chilean miners my first reaction was: Why? What do space-flight and mining have in common?
People try to draw connections between NASA's work and the rest our lives and those connections do not always seem that obvious. Well, the more I have learned about NASA and the Chilean mine rescue the more I realized that this was a very direct application of NASA's sometimes unique skills. I think history has shown that the pursuit of knowledge and development can have some very interesting applications that were not even close to related to the original goal. Nobody would have thought the pursuit of better radar and communication systems would result in a handy little device that can cook food with a quick zap of a microwave signal.
So what does NASA know about mine rescue? Well, I don't know how much they know about drilling (I am sure they have a couple experts), but that is not really where they provided assistance. But: NASA is fond of putting a bunch of people in a cramped tin can, isolating them from food, water, medical help, family, and knowing the whole time that the tin can that is keeping everyone alive could fail in a number of very possible ways. Starting to sound at all similar?
What may not have been completely apparent from the media is that though the miners had been able to find water in the mine, by the time the drilling teams were able to get some small holes down to the miners they were literally starving to death. You can't just start dropping candy bars and steak down the shaft because a starving person can't process food correctly anymore and you could seriously hurt (or worse) the people you're trying to help. NASA has studied this exact scenario for decades and faces this possibility every-time they send people in a tin can into orbit... they could get stuck up there for a while. So right away NASA provided expert advise about how to rehabilitate the miners. The next question is then, how can we tell what each miner's health is when we only have a 4 inch hole to send medical equipment down? Again, NASA is used to dealing with limited space and size and helped to determine the overall health of each miner and customize the treatment (and the miners did need treatment... remember, they had been starving, experienced a mine collapse, may not see a hospital till Christmas, and would have to ride standing-up in a very small tube to freedom). NASA helped with the design of the rescue capsule (make no mistake, Chile designed and built it and they should get all the credit, but they were humble enough to take outside advice). NASA also provided insight in contingency scenarios... what do you do if the capsule get's jammed in the shaft? Though the connections are probably not super clear, standing in that capsule to come up from the mine is actually physiologically very similar to coming back from the weightlessness of space (you could faint and if you faint when you can't fall over to get blood back to your brain, you may not ever wake up again).... again, something NASA knows all about.
There is also a very real psychological reality that has to be dealt with when you have people in a high-stress, long-term environment like the miners. NASA hopes to send people to destinations that will require months to years to reach and is very concerned about understanding how to make sure their crews are not only alive when they get there, but also not insane. It isn't enough to be healthy, you need them to be healthy and happy. How do you deal with family contact? How do you manage conflicts? What is the relationship between the guys on the surface and those trapped - who's in charge? Do you tell those trapped when you've had set-backs? You can think of a lot of questions that probably can't be obviously answered and NASA has had to learn a lot about many of these questions through some some challenging lessons over the years.
More than all this, I think it meant something to those in Chile when people from the US Space Program came to help. I am sure that the NASA doctors and engineers were nothing but honored to help, but to those trying to free the trapped: these were the guys that put a man on the moon, they did the impossible and brought 3 guys back from a tin can that blew up half-way through the flight. NASA may have fallen from the media since Apollo faded into history, but I think NASA still means something to people.
I don't want it to in any way appear I'm trying to give NASA "all the credit." From everything I've seen, Chile did all the real work, made all the ultimate decisions themselves and did a truly amazing job and they deserve all the recognition. But I do want to take a minute and do a little bragging about NASA and illustrate that there is more to what NASA does than just give some really lucky people a chance to float around.
I'm glad we still have the Space Program in this country. I hope we continue to fund it, and I hope NASA continues to unlock mysteries and do their mission to explore. Show me another civilian organization that has produced so much, inspired as many, produced as much international partnership, and done as many simply amazing things.
The opinions and statements expressed in this blog are that of my own and do not represent NASA. Facts and data presented were not cited or sourced: official sources that conflict with this blog should always be taken as true and the blog errant.
