UTC junior Ian Tidwell is participating in a NASA internship at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Photo courtesy of Ian Tidwell.
Ever since he was little, Ian Tidwell has loved space. After high school, he decided that he wanted to go to space himself.
When the opportunity to intern for NASA appeared in the spring of 2023, Tidwell, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, jumped at the chance. He traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to work in field operations as part of a team creating screen displays for ground control.
Tidwell said that these displays keep an eye on the mission from Earth’s surface, giving ground control members accurate altitude measurements and positioning for the rockets.
Another part of his internship was creating virtual reality training for International Space Station astronauts. Tidwell and his team trained with two cosmonauts to recreate about 15 different emergency scenarios.
“We’re trying to recreate that same training in virtual reality and not only make it as effective as training in person but more effective,” he said, “because if you’re in virtual reality, you can float around in the environment.”
Photo courtesy of Ian Tidwell
For Tidwell, the most rewarding part of the spring 2023 semester was his proximity to the astronauts. He spent every day steps from the astronaut offices.
“I loved being around and walking right next to astronauts and people working with astronauts,” he said.
Often, he would come across someone in the Johnson Space Center elevators who spoke a different language.
“It would be a different language every time. It was super awesome and kind of funny,” Tidwell said. “Sometimes you have people complaining that they had to go to Japan for a month or had to go to Russia and train people there. There was one lady there saying that she would try and get away with only staying 29 days instead of 30.”
While in Houston, he applied for and landed a second internship at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
His internship this spring involves research and experiments to create centrifugal nuclear thermal rockets. These rockets are powered using liquid uranium, Tidwell said.
He said his current research objective, along with another intern on his team, is to learn the properties of uranium at 5,500 degrees Kelvin. That is as hot as the surface of the sun.
“There really isn’t any documentation at all because no one’s ever gotten uranium that hot. Well, at least not in a controlled environment,” Tidwell said.
He said the new rockets are meant to significantly reduce the time of a Mars trip, which takes almost a year each way.
The nuclear engines would be used as a secondary energy boost once the rocket is outside Earth’s atmosphere. Tidwell said that current chemical rockets achieve about 450 seconds of impulse, solid nuclear rockets provide 900 seconds, and liquid engines are predicted to provide 1,900 to 2,000 seconds of impulse.
Tidwell has done all of this while remaining a full-time student. He has found that much of his learning directly correlates to his work. Before a recent meeting with his team, he took two exams that had questions about the topics they covered in that meeting.
He hopes to further his career by studying aerospace engineering after he graduates in 2025.
“I love doing it,” he said. “Every time I meet with a team, it’s always a little motivation to finish my homework.”
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