Radio Club contacts International Space Station

“NA1SS, this is W4AQL. NA1SS, this is W4AQL.”

For a few nervous moments of silence a small group of Aerospace Engineering students and the Tech Amateur Radio Club stood cramped inside a small room on the fifth floor of the Van Leer building, waiting for a reply as they attempted to make contact with the International Space Station (ISS).

At approximately 10:05 a.m., the connection was made and a response came through: “What do they say, I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer?”

The emotions of everyone were apparent, as tense expressions turned to smiles of relief, though no one dared applaud and waste a second of the ten-minute window that the group now had to talk to Commander Bill McArthur aboard the International Space Station.

Soaring above at approximately 28,000 kilometers per hour, at a height of a few hundred kilometers, the ISS would travel from Mexico to Greenland in the time that the students asked their eighteen prepared questions, each of which had already been sent to McArthur, a Tech graduate, weeks ago.

McArthur found Meryl Mims’ question particularly interesting, and it is no doubt an important one as public doubts about the significance of manned spacecraft expeditions and research are on the rise.

“What are some of the scientific benefits of continuing the ISS program, and how does the ISS bring us closer to our goals of revisiting the moon and reaching Mars?” said Mims, a Biology major.

“Meryl, I really like that question. The absolute greatest benefit, and the target of the research we’re doing on ISS, especially in the U.S., is in understanding how to make people productive and maintain [their] health while in the fairly hostile environment of space. Right now, we can develop the technology to go to Mars, but the physical and psychological stress is something we need to understand better, and that’s what we’re researching on the space station primarily,” McArthur said.

The most exciting part of the event was “just the fact that they were so far above us and how far they went in such a short amount of time and being able to make that connection from here,” Mims said.

“I learned that EVAs (extravehicular activities) are pretty fun. I’m going to try to get my HAM radio license, so maybe I’ll join the [Amateur Radio Club]. [This] was really, really cool. [The Mars Society] is sending a crew to an analogue Mars environment over spring break and the week after,” said Jonathan Sharma, an Aerospace Engineering major and member of the Mars Society.

The questions the group asked McArthur were a mix of technical inquiries and less formal queries into life aboard the ISS, ranging from “How do you ground electrical systems and interior surfaces of a spacecraft?” to “What kinds of entertainment do you have?” (to which McArthur responded, “The American side has a common ground like an automobile, and the Russian side has a separate ground wire,” and “We use our laptops for watching movies, though the greatest entertainment is talking on the amateur radio”).

“I thought [this] was an excellent experience. I was just blown away. My first semester at Tech is when they started this, and they told us about it, and...to have this opportunity was amazing,” said Jesse Craft, a first-year Aerospace Engineering major.

“I’m glad I got into it, I got picked to come ask them here today. It was a good experience.”

Craft said this event made him more interested in amateur radio. “I did a little bit of [amateur radio] in boy scouts, but this is the first time I’ve ever communicated this far,” Craft said.

Craft also said he “would like to ask [McArthur] a little more about the metal alloy experiment” that the commander spoke about in response to his question about experimentation on the ISS.

“McArthur actually requested to talk to [the Aerospace Engineering department],” said Alex Carver, the president of the Amateur Radio Club, which facilitated the contact.

“Otherwise, normally the schools would submit an application and they get on a waiting list that is up to two years long to talk to the ISS. This one is unusual because we’ve got all the media coming in,” he said.

Both FOX News and CBS covered the event. “We went all out for this one. But it’s a Georgia Tech alum so we’ve got to give him a good showing,” Carver said.

“We found out in October, and since then we’ve been filling out paper work and getting ready to do it today, and picking schedules and everything else. It depends on their schedule and it depends on the passes.”

Carver explained that the club only had one shot at the communication because of the orbit. “As the orbit progresses around the earth, and it doesn’t cross the same point every day. If [the contact] wasn’t today it would have been late February or early March before we could have got the same pass again, so it’s a big deal,” he said.

“It’s been about four months of climbing attenuate towers, calibrating motors and taking measurements of the skyline of Atlanta to [prepare],” said Matt Balaun, one of W4AQL’s operators.

McArthur didn’t seem to have lost his sense of humor during his incredible mission.

“What I miss most about life in gravity is driving my Corvette,” he said.

A full recording of the contact can be found at W4AQL’s website, http://cyberbuzz.gatech.edu/w4aql/.