W26-12 Space Station NEW
Class | Registration opens 12/7/2025 9:00 AM EDT
We are living in the space age. For the last 25 years, humans have lived in space on the International Space Station (ISS). We will discuss the (ISS) in some detail. Some modules of ISS were put into space by the Russians; some modules were launched on the space shuttle. It was interesting that Russia and the United States worked together on this project, as opposed to the competition during the Moon program.
I have some movies that were shot by Suni Williams to answer basic questions about how you live in space. I think the class will enjoy these movies. And there is another space station which was launched by the Chinese space agency. As with Moon program talks, I have models in the same scale, and I will bring them to the class.
Thomas Benson
 | Tom Benson is a Retired Senior Research Engineer from the NASA Glenn Research Center. He retired in 2015 after more than 35 years of service at NASA Glenn. For the first 20 years, he specialized in computer modeling of supersonic and hypersonic flows in propulsion systems. The last 15 years were mainly devoted to educational outreach.
Tom earned a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Ohio State University in 1971. He then spent four years in the Air Force at Wright Patterson AFB doing high speed inlet testing and installed engine performance calculations for the F-5E, YF-16, YF-17, and B1-A. He returned to graduate school at OSU and passed the qualifiers for a PhD before coming to work at NASA in 1978. He is a board member of the Cleveland Astronomical Society, where he has given talks on the Apollo Moon Program, the International Space Station, and NASA Science Missions. |