WAYNE

NASA, Passaic County Tech are partners in space

Richard Cowen
Staff Writer, @RichardCowen123

WAYNE — With a swipe of a pen, it was one small step for man and one giant leap for students at Passaic County Technical Institute.

A Passaic County Technical Institute student signing the storage box that NASA plans to place aboard the International Space Station. Students at the school designed precision screws for the box.

Students in the Manufacturing Technology program on Wednesday got the chance to launch their names into space when they signed a metal storage locker that is bound for the International Space Station. The students designed the precision screws for the locker.

"(Few) people who have worked on the space program have gotten a chance to sign anything," said Stacy Hale, the NASA scientist who started a program, called HUNCH, that allows high schools to design hardware for the space program. "How do y'all feel about that?"

The students, all of them juniors, giggled somewhat nervously at the thought of an astronaut one day seeing their names scribbled across the top of the box as he orbits the Earth, miles above the PCTI campus in Wayne. "It's something that I'm going to tell my parents when I get home tonight," said one student.

Hale explained that even the felt-tipped Sharpie pen that the students were using was specially designed. Sharpies tend to emit a very strong chemical odor from the tip, and the smell would be even stronger in the International Space Station, where the atmospheric pressure is low, Hale said.

The process, known as "out-gassing," could make an astronaut sick, so the Sharpie has been specially designed. Hale joked that the Sharpie pen probably cost $20.

Hale began the HUNCH program in 2003 as a way to involve high school students in solving hardware problems for the space program. "It made the problems real to students," he said. HUNCH stands for High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware.

NASA representative Stacy Hale, in a visit to Passaic County Technical Institute in Wayne, talks about the storage box that NASA plans to place aboard the International Space Station. Students at the school designed precision screws for the box.

This is the second consecutive year that PCTI has designed precision screws for the HUNCH program. The first storage box, dubbed by NASA as Storage Locker No. 1 and also signed by PCTI students, will be aboard the Space X rocket that is due to launch on Feb. 25 and rendezvous with the space station.

NASA supplies the design specifications and the blueprints. The students and their teachers at PCTI, Andrew Ruskin and Robert Eckrote, do the rest. The designs are fed into a computerized lathe and milling machine, which shapes and cuts the screws.

The screws are tiny, about half the size of Abraham Lincoln's head on a penny. There is no room for error; each screw must be measured within five one-thousandths of an inch. "That's thinner than a single strand of hair on your head," Hale said.

Ruskin said working for NASA teaches students to handle specifications with precision. "It's really very stringent," he said. "Everything you do every day is problem-solving."