Neillsville Graduate Doing Tours at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Part 1
Monday, May 23rd, 2016 -- 11:59 AM
-A Neillsville graduate is making his community proud at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.Nick Thoma is a 2013 graduate of Neillsville High School who’s currently attending UW-Madison and doing tours at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Nick told me more about where he is and the items he’s working on.
"I am in a program called the Pathways Intern Program. It's really similar to a co-op program where I'm going back and forth between school in Madison and working down here at the Johnson Space Center in Houston where I do 4 work tours in total, so that's a semester. Right now I'm in my summer work tour. I just completed my spring one and this fall I'll be going back to school in Madison for a semester and then coming back next spring and next summer and doing my final two work tours and then hopefully graduating that fall of 2017."
"The first tour I did in the spring was in the mission ops for the Orion and Bowing vehicles. Which, hopefully, Bowing will be flying next year and then Orion is scheduled for September of 2018 right now. I was in the Command and Data Handling Group, which is all the computers, data, networking on the vehicles. So, really just different tasks involved with getting that up and running. I just finished up with that and right now I'm working in the Rapid Prototyping Lab. It's pretty cool. We work on the Orion cockpit."
Coming up on Tuesday, Nick will talk about how his experience at NASA has been so far.
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