Mission specialist Patrick Forrester looked out the back window of Atlantis and saw a triangle-shaped tear in the thermal fabric protecting the shuttle’s rocket engines.
“I remember Pat Forrester just opened up the doors and said, ‘I’ve never seen that before. Have you?’” recalled Danny Olivas, also a mission specialist on the 2007 Atlantis mission. “I said, ‘Uh oh, it looks like a hole.’”
“The tear was significant enough that the analysts couldn’t determine if we could fly back,” Olivas said.
Four years earlier, on Jan 16, 2003, Olivas was at the NASA Space Center in Houston when a piece of insulating foam fell off the Columbia during take-off, damaging a wing and creating a hole in a heat-resistant shield. When the shuttle reentered the earth’s atmosphere, hot air entered the hole, melting the wing. Columbia disintegrated, scattering the remains of the vehicle and its crew over thousands of miles of Texas and Louisiana.
Olivas knew the crew. The experience has influenced much of his life’s work since then.
“Everybody felt the loss,” Olivas said, his voice growing quiet in his office off of Manhattan Beach Boulevard in Manhattan Beach. “The days after Columbia, there was a lot of confusion, chaos.”
But despite that experience, he said he wasn’t scared aboard Atlantis when the tear in the thermal protection was spotted.
“You train not to be scared,” he said. “You get into operation mode.”
The Atlantis astronauts sent the photos of the tear to the team on the ground, which experimented with different ways to fix the problem. There were many complexities to take into account, such as the wind that blows against the ship’s body that could derail any effort to get the blanket back on.
Finally, a surgeon suggested using a medical stapler in the first aid kit. The engineers thought it would work. For backup, they suggested using wire to sew the flap back on.
Olivas was selected to do the repair, one of the first to be done during a spacewalk. The ship made it safely back home.
The experience illustrates the importance of what Olivas calls “mission assurance,” or anticipating problems and coming up with solutions ahead of time.
“It’s what space is all about. You have to think of every scenario and think, ‘What if that happens?’”
The Atlantis crew knew about the wind, so the repair had to be performed in a way that would minimize exposure to it. The plan called for securing everything to the ship in case they weren’t able to get below the wind. Then there were the wires in case the stapler didn’t work.
Mission assurance has become Olivas’s life’s passion. He believes it can be applied to reducing the risk of activities on earth, such as preventing oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon accident, in which 11 people died, as well as in space, such as the recent failure of a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station.
“Life is very fragile,” he said. “To have it cut short or impacted in a life-changing way because of something you knew you should have done but didn’t is not acceptable.”
Into space
In 1998, Olivas was selected with 24 others out of a pool of over 3,000 applicants to become an astronaut.
But after the Columbia disaster, Olivas asked to be taken off flight status so he could dedicate himself to figuring out what went wrong with the shuttle.
“I realized I would serve the agency better by not being an astronaut, not going to space,” he said.
Using his engineering background, he worked with a team on ways to fix a shuttle while it was in space.
He also studied “what the Columbia crew knew, when they knew it, what could have been done, what they should have done.”
In 2007, his flight status was reactivated and he went on Atlantis mission STS-117 to the International Space Station to install additional solar arrays, which were the station’s chief source of power.
In 2009, he returned to the Space Station aboard Discovery. The crew dropped off laboratory equipment, an additional sleeping compartment and a replacement air system to remove the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts. During the two trips, Olivas spent over 650 hours in space and completed five space walks.
“It’s life-changing,” he said. “You see the planet from 250 miles up, it gives you a different perspective. The things that are important in our lives today are entirely diminished against the backdrop of the universe. You see how trivial any single person is to the planet, let alone the solar system.”
The distance also gave him a new perspective on the “divisions and borders of countries.”
“You see earth, water — those are the only borders you see. There are no distinct lines. We, as human beings, create lines that are very divisive to one another. We create a lot of turmoil and stress where none exists. It’s a figment of our imaginations.”
“I wish everyone could have the same perspective, so we could all get along together,” he said.
Bitten by the space bug
Olivas was born in North Hollywood in 1966 and grew up in El Paso, which he considers his hometown. He “got bit by the space bug” at age seven, four years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. That summer he and his family visited the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It lit the spark of the flame of what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. The trip helped him understand the value of his father’s work at a Los Angeles company that made rocket engine parts.
“At the time, I realized my father contributed to what I witnessed at the Space Center,” he said. “My father contributed to putting human beings on the moon, however small…”
Olivas met his wife Marie while getting his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. They grew up six blocks away from each other, unbeknownst to either of them at the time. The couple married after graduation and went to the University of Houston, where they both earned master’s degrees.
In 1996, Olivas received his doctorate in mechanical engineering and materials science from Rice University. He then went to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as a senior research engineer. He and Marie lived in Hermosa Beach, where they “fell in love with the South Bay area.”
In 1998, when Olivas was selected as an astronaut candidate, the family moved to Houston. Throughout that time, they frequently returned to the South Bay to visit friends. When he retired in 2010, he and Marie were “both adamant it was where we wanted to end up.” They chose Manhattan Beach, he said, because of the quality of education. His five children were all enrolled in Manhattan Beach public schools.
In 2013, he started the Center for the Advancement of Space Safety and Mission Assurance Research at his alma mater, the University of Texas at El Paso. The center studies pieces of the Columbia recovered after the accident. The university described it “a cross-functional, multidisciplinary center focused on risk reduction research to make commercial human spaceflight safe and successful.” Olivas serves as its director.
That year, he also founded OMS117, which helps businesses “think like an astronaut.” The letters stand for “Olivas Mission Success.” The number is the number of his first space mission.
“What we’re trying to do is take lessons learned in space and introduce them to terrestrial industries,” he said.
His clients are often companies that have been the target of lawsuits after accidents or disasters. He helps them to prevent similar occurrences from happening again.
“At a lot of big companies, drift occurs,” he said. “They’re so big, no one’s really sure who has the ball at any given time.”
Office Depot hired him after being sued by the Consumer Product Safety Committee, a federal government agency, for not reporting complaints about the safety of two office chairs it sold. In May, the company reached a settlement agreement with the government that included establishing a safety program.
A small step
Olivas’s early understanding of how his father contributed to space exploration gave him an appreciation of teamwork, which he said is critical to the space program.
“A rocket engine is not so much hardware, but all the people it took to build it,” he said. “The space program is about people of different disciplines coming together. People of different capabilities, contributions can do phenomenal things, greater than one individual could ever accomplish. No one element is any more important than another. Astronauts are only one small part. They’re probably the most visible. Our contribution is a very small fraction.”
“Most astronauts don’t set off to become astronauts,” he said. “They set off to be engineers. If I never was an astronaut, I would’ve been very satisfied.”
This attitude probably helped him get selected by NASA, he said. For someone for whom space travel is “all they want to do, it can be a liability, because they’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons.”
“You’re not an astronaut forever,” he said. “You have to be satisfied with what you’re doing, so much so that you’d be okay” if you never got to go.
What characterizes those who do become astronauts is “hard work and perseverance,” he said.
“When you’re passionate about something, you don’t see the effort as hard work. You just do it because you love it.” ER
