From theatre lights to starlight: Kiwi engineer’s NASA odyssey

“I don’t think many people believed I’d get to NASA because, I mean, it’s a bit far-fetched,” says Dr Bryan Caldwell. But Caldwell is a master of fetching far-flung dreams. For the past six years, he has indeed been working for NASA at the “awe-inspiring” Johnson Space Center (which also houses mission control, as in, ‘Houston, we have a problem’), and he has been managing NASA research projects (contracting via KBR) since 2020.

And the space agency is impressed. Last year, NASA awarded Caldwell its Silver Achievement Medal, a civilian award for ‘stellar’ achievement (nice pun there, NASA). The medal citation lauded his exceptional leadership during a complex four-year project using bed rest to mimic zero gravity, to study certain physiological effects of space life. The project involved four groups of people lying with their heads six degrees lower than their feet, for 30 days at a time, while various research teams tested for things like near-vision impairment.

Caldwell was ultimately responsible for the project: research integration (ensuring diverse experiments didn’t compete), timing, equipment, shipping.

“You’re finding out how to keep astronauts safe in space,” he says. “And that is quite thrilling in itself – the idea that you’re contributing to human space flight.”

Caldwell specialises in leading such ‘analogs’ – where some of the conditions of space life are reproduced as closely as possible on Earth.

He managed the longest analog mission in the US so far, on Mauna Loa volcano in Hawai’i, in which people lived in isolation on (cold) lava for up to a year, as if they were on Mars. Communication limits included a 20-minute reply delay, and Caldwell’s office was offsite to reinforce the isolation and alien atmosphere.

“We didn’t want them in spacesuits seeing a little office where we were hiding!” he says.

Then there are the hash browns. Caldwell’s postdoctoral research at Cornell University included investigating whether astronauts could cook meals in microgravity on the Moon, or Mars, because cooking is a psychologically ‘healthy and wholesome activity’ compared to ripping open yet another pouch of dehydrated nutrients.

So, Caldwell and his fellow researchers cooked hash browns dyed red during a parabolic flight to mimic the gravity of non-Earth surfaces, and their crimson sauté splatter patterns were photographed – like a crime scene – to assess the likelihood of hot-oil injuries. Then they’d tidy up, the plane would circle around, and they’d do it all again. A hard job, but somebody had to do it.