Space Research at the Ends of the Earth

From the bottom of the ocean to Earth's orbit, KBR's people are helping solve some of humankind's greatest challenges, including preparing astronauts for the rigors of life on the moon and eventually Mars. In this episode, Tiffany Swarmer from KBR's Science and Space business unit, discusses her work as intravehicular activity escape and survival specialist and mission controller, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to conduct space research in the Arctic, and the far-reaching effects her research could have not only for space exploration but also for life on earth.

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IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST

Season 5, Episode 2

Space Research at the Ends of the Earth

INTRODUCTION

John Arnold

Hello, I'm John, and this is In Orbit.

Welcome one and all to the podcast. Long-time orbiter? First time listener? Either way, we could not be more thrilled that you're joining us and staying in our orbit. If you did listen to our first episode of the new season, you heard Eric Biebighauser, vice president of Strategic Growth for KBR's Mission Technology Solutions business, talking about advanced national security and defense capabilities, personal purpose, mission mindset, and what it means to do things that matter.

Now that last part — doing things that matter — is going to be a common thread throughout this season. From the bottom of the ocean to some of the most remote locations on Earth to Earth's orbit, KBR's people are helping solve some of the biggest challenges humankind is facing today. That includes helping prepare the current and next generations of astronauts for what they'll be facing when we head back to the moon and eventually to Mars. But that research often has further-reaching implications than just human spaceflight, including helping scientists better understand climate change and how humans are affecting the environment around the world.

If that sounds interesting to you, then you're in for a treat because joining me today is a KBR expert who's lived that experience and more, and that is Tiffany Swarmer. Tiffany is an intravehicular activity escape and survival specialist and mission controller with KBR's Science and Space business unit, and is currently working on the Artemis II mission at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Welcome to the podcast, Tiffany.

INTERVIEW

Tiffany Swarmer

Thank you much, John. Appreciate you having me on.

John Arnold

We are very, very excited to have you on today. I'm excited for our listeners to hear about what you do for and with KBR as part of the NASA team and also your experience with this pretty unique opportunity. But before we get into all that, I wonder if you'd tell us about yourself and your career?

Tiffany Swarmer

Oh, yeah. Most my career had a very loop-de-loop type pathway. It didn't go very linear, and so I started off looking at marine biology and then moved into looking at becoming a physician. Got into med school and saw the bill for med school and went, "Oh man, I better love this." I took a job at a hospital. I asked for a pause in my mission status and took a job at a hospital and went, "Oh, no, I don't think I can do this."

And so I quickly shifted gears and I got into an awesome program with the University of North Dakota doing space studies and helping them with their analog facilities. They had a station they were trying to get up and running, a rover and a couple of analog spacesuits, and as soon as you step into what your calling is, you just know and everything clicked. So I started to get the opportunity to intern and work down at NASA, and before I knew it, I was working with the Human Exploration Research Analog Facility, helping them integrate and run simulations at Johnson Space Center.

But basically from there, I loved what I was doing and I loved it so much that I wanted to see it in space, and so I pushed into the operations side and took a position that I now have with the flight operations directorate and started to train the astronauts going to the ISS, and then ultimately found this survival and escape team. And as much as they may have tried to get rid of me, I just kind of hung on until they realized, "Oh, she is pretty useful." And that's how I ended up here.

John Arnold

That's amazing. First of all, I wonder if you'd familiarize both myself and our listening audience with what we mean when we refer to analog, especially with regard to space missions.

Tiffany Swarmer

Yeah, definitely. So there's a lot of different places on earth that have similarities to what our astronauts and crew go through in space flight, and so being able to take advantage of these and seeing the similarities so that we can understand what some of our crews are going through, because very few people get to go to space, and so we don't have as much data on that. And it's been really beneficial to see these analogs here on earth and understand, like for example, saturation diving. Hey, this is a very similar platform. They can't just step outside at any time. They're living in these pressurized volumes. And so we can start to understand some of the psychology and physical changes people go through. The analogs that I worked with were a little bit more space flight focused where they were actually simulation facilities, creating a habitat type space like what you might see on the moon or Mars or even in transit.

And so we would put people inside, you don't ever lock the door. They told me that's not allowed. So you put people inside or you take them to these really remote locations, which is what I got to do, we're going to talk about in a little bit, and you kind of see how it goes in a space flight mission structure, you give them research tasks, they deal with the same food, the same types of stresses, and although they don't have the microgravity, they don't have all of the impacts that you would get from radiation and microgravity. They do really get that confined, isolated feeling and deal with a lot of the same things our astronauts do.

John Arnold

That's fascinating. Would you tell us more about your interest in and your role specifically as an escape and survival instructor? How did that happen? What drew you to that field?

Tiffany Swarmer

Well, I've been lucky enough to train as an emergency medical technician and have found that to be useful in my field research. So I had the opportunity to do some field research opportunities and then also in working with search and rescue groups. And so I never knew that spaceflight had an escape and survival team. It makes perfect sense that they would. And so this little niche is actually built into a group called IVA, which is Intravehicular activities as we mentioned earlier. And this group focuses kind of on all the aspects of living and working in spaceflight, and they also tend to be a bit of a catch-all for areas that are, oh, gosh, I'm going to say it, my boss is going to cringe, but that are more on the squishy side, so more dealing with the humans.

John Arnold

Sure, sure.

Tiffany Swarmer

And so I'm a science trained individual, and so working with a lot of engineers, they tend to cringe when I use my sciency words like squishy. But yeah, I definitely didn't realize that this group existed. And once I found out about them and they were just in this little catch-all field kind of more with the crew system side, it just was a great fit for what I had done previously. And then my research background, because I really had a good understanding of the human physiology and changes that people go through given my work in analogs and science.

John Arnold

There aren't a lot of astronauts, not many people get to participate in this kind of work or do the things that astronauts do. And so there isn't a lot of data. Probably something that a lot of laypeople like myself take for granted. So would you tell us a little bit about as a survival and escape instructor, because that's not intuitive to me. I mean it makes sense, but it's something else that I would never have thought about. But would you talk about what your, I know every day is probably not the same, but some of what your role is in relationship to training astronauts?

Tiffany Swarmer

Well, we do quite a bit of learning ourselves. So a lot of the systems that we're working with are up and coming, and once again, we're focusing on the human side. And so for the escape and survival side, we're really focused on these things called survival suits, which they wear during launch and entry. These are the two riskiest times that the crew will experience. This is when we see most of the accidents in space that we've lost people for. And so these suits are designed to basically provide a safe haven for the crew members. And so we train them how to don/doff, if they find themselves in the middle of the ocean, how to perform an emergency egress while wearing these suits, how to activate emergency oxygen systems. And so we're really focused on helping them understand what their new limitations are while they're wearing these 20 to 30 pound suits that may pressurize.

And so as we developed this, we do it not only for entry and ascent, which is launch, but we also are working on cases like if there's a cabin depress, they now have to live in their suit for potentially six days. Will they get back to earth? You may not think about that, but if you couldn't scratch an itch on your face, all of a sudden life is really frustrating. Right?

John Arnold

Absolutely.

Tiffany Swarmer

Yeah, among other just basic human functions. And so we have to help them understand how to survive and how to continue to do these human functions while they're living inside this suit.

John Arnold

It's an extremely important role. I have a brand-new appreciation for you and your colleagues. Well, now-

Tiffany Swarmer

Well, we love it. So it's easy to do it when you love that type of work so much. And being able to constantly learn is a huge benefit. The engineering, we're one tiny team. We're the operations team, so we're executing. But the engineering teams and the research teams and the integration teams that have all kind of gotten to this point, their work is just, we're always going to them saying, "Hey, can you help me understand this a little bit better?" And there's just been so much work that's gone into get us to this point.

John Arnold

That's amazing. Well, we want to talk about how your role translated into a unique opportunity that you got to participate in. You had the opportunity with KBR sponsorship to participate in a specialized research mission in conjunction with the Mars Society at their Arctic facility. Would you tell us about the Mars Society, what its goals are, and how you found out about this opportunity? How did you get connected with it?

Tiffany Swarmer

Yeah, so my prior analog work really helped set the stage for me to be approached and asked to apply. Now I had to apply and get approved and accepted to be on the team, but because of my prior analog work, there's a few people that said, "Hey, there's this opportunity to go up to the Arctic to this place called Devon Island or Tallurutit, which is what the Nunavut Inuit population call it. And it's just this amazing, very isolated place. And so I couldn't pass up the opportunity. And so I went to my boss, Tony, and I said, "How do you feel if I'm just gone for three weeks?" Because I don't think there's a remote work option from the Arctic, especially when you're 80 miles from the original North Pole. I think there was only like 80 people that live farther north than we were, which is, I was like, "Wow." It just kind of puts into context just how far you are from humanity, not quite the 250 miles of the ISS, but ...

And so I, talked to Tony Quant, my boss, and he loved it. And he said, "Hey, let's talk to KBR." Because I was like, "I think this could be a good opportunity." KBR is so focused on the future and trying to understand how they can help with these climate change and looking at ways that KBR can give back. I, just thought this would be a great opportunity since our goal to go up really was to look at how climate change is impacting the Arctic, to understand different technologies that may be useful as we go forward, and then to also understand, hey, this is a great space flight analog because you really are, you could be anywhere from six to 48 hours from a human response in the middle of an emergency and that's just normal. And so yeah, it really is a great place to go and test aerospace mission structure, technology, all while collecting real science data that provides direct insight into what's happening here on Earth.

John Arnold

That is amazing to me. So fascinating. I am blown away just by the idea of this mission, but also for our listeners to hear more about the location. This is one of the most remote locations on earth, so would you tell us a little more about that experience and the collaboration it just took to access the facility?

Tiffany Swarmer

Oh, my team that went up with me, I went with six other amazing individuals. All of us were selected for our unique abilities and insights. We all different backgrounds, so no one person went up with the same background. We had people that were focused on logistics. We had a wonderful young lady who was there with a very strong science and integration background. We were there with a girl from Italy, Ilaria Cinelli, who has also done work with the UN on different spaceflight policies. And so it was, apologies for the rest of my team that I did not shout out, they are just an amazing group of people.

And so the selection process that Mars Society did was very beneficial in making sure that we were going to be able to meet the objectives, which for this mission was, "Hey, we're going to take a look at this facility." So during COVID and a few years before COVID, the facility had basically been decided, "Hey, we're going to have to put a pause to missions." And then Covid happened. And so it was almost six years between the last time a team had gone up. And so in 2023, so the year right before ours, a team went up and they took a look and they said, "Hey, this facility is still really viable and it's great for collecting climate data every year around the same time in the same locations. It's really good at understanding the permafrost change. It's really good at looking at nanoplastics in the water." And so with that in mind, they started to work on the facility to get it back up and running.

And so our team had that goal as well as, let's go collect the science data, let's go look at what we can get from permafrost and with the nanoplastics. But we also wanted to start looking at what are some alternate energy options and then taking a look at the human performance impacts for aerospace because once again, this is a great space like analog.

And so to get up to the facility for us to access was, first of all, it was months and months of planning and training and understanding what we were getting into. So we were meeting on a weekly basis for hours. We would always say, "Hey, it's going to be a two-hour meeting this week," and then four hours would go by and you're still trying to figure out how are we going to get all the gear up there? And so once we got everything set, I mean just shipping gear up there takes weeks. It's not as simple. There's no roads. Amazon did not two-day deliver. And so we checked, we were like, "Hey, Amazon Canada, do you happen to deliver to this tiny town called Resolute, which is the last stopping point before you get a little bush plane to go over to Devon Island?"

And so it took us about three days travel to really get, we all met up in Ottawa, Canada, and then we took a plane up to Iqaluit, which is the capital of Nunavut. And from there, we quickly stopped at the Arctic College who gave us permission, gave Mars Society permission to do their research. They're a fantastic university or college with lots of opportunities up there for the Inuit who I can't believe they live up there. That area is just, it's hostile to humans, but they do an amazing job and they're still holding onto some of their cultural roots and encouraging the growth of, "Hey, this is how we make clothes just like we used to make clothes," while also growing a nursing program and different international type of research collaborations, which we got to be one of.

And so after a quick stop off there, we went up to this tiny town called Resolute where we promptly got stuck. The weather said no. The weather was like, "Hey, we're so glad your researchers are here, but we're going to ground y'all for a couple of days." And having not really landed in the middle of nowhere in a plane before, I didn't understand why, but after about three days, the weather let up and we flew over some of the, the ocean is still ice-locked at that time, and it's July, but we flew over. It was starting to thaw. We flew over, headed to this just desolate island. You're looking and it's just this red landscape. You can see why Mars Society picked it. It just has such similarities to what they're expecting humans to see on the red planet.

And as the bush pilots circled the facility, I kept saying, "Where is the runway?" They said, "There's a nice flat stretch of land," and these bush pilots amazingly landed on this tiny little incline, tiny little flat stretch with a slight incline. And the first thing we noticed was it's muddy. And so they didn't get stuck, but it took them a little while to get the plane in a good orientation to turn around so that they could eventually fly away and leave us, which is a very weird feeling when you realize you're the only seven people on a massive island and that no one's going to probably come back and get you for a very long time.

John Arnold

Well, yeah, it takes doing to get there. I love hearing about the collaboration with the college and the work that they are doing, not only to, I guess modernize and help the tribe integrate into the 21st century, but also to preserve heritage. That's fascinating. I use the word fascinating a lot.

Tiffany Swarmer

It's a great word. Fascinating is fantastic.

John Arnold

It is.

Tiffany Swarmer

It's fascinatingly fantastic word.

John Arnold

It's fantastic to be fascinating. So you've already mentioned some of the aspects of the research that's being done, permafrost change, nanoplastics. So tell us more about that and then I'd love to hear more specifically about the research that you were doing for this analog environment.

Tiffany Swarmer

So John, it's a really good question you ask because one of the biggest drivers of us continuing to use this facility is that we can give back to the scientific community and we can also give back to the Inuit who are allowing us to go and conduct this research. And so we're trying to focus on research that impacts those areas the greatest. And so what we really focused on was water purity quality. Something very interesting that was found in 2023, they took water samples and inside those water samples, they found something called nanoplastics, which nanoplastics is as expected smaller than microplastics and can or is considered to be able to permeate the blood brain barrier of animals. And it definitely has impacts. One of the reasons why we were really interested in it was it's not well understood how it gets around the Earth.

And so if we're finding it up in this place where there's very little human interaction, there are researchers up there, but it's very controlled and it's not very often that you are not building these massive facilities. There's really no human presence, and yet we're finding in this water quality that hey, there are nanoplastics, so how does it get there? And that's something that we can directly contribute to with our data. We can say, "Hey, this is what we found here. You're not going to get this data from another group necessarily because there's no other group up here. So hey, here you go."

And then we also get a chance to assess the ecology and the ecological changes going on. So we can, there is some plants growing, and oddly enough, some of the most beautiful flowers, it might've been because I was so deprived of plant life, but these hearty little flowers were some of the most beautiful I'd ever seen. And interestingly enough, we were walking out on EVA, which is what we call, and because of the risk of polar bears, you always have to have one person who is not in a spacesuit because if a polar bear hops up over the ridge, you need to be able to get everybody away and you need good assay. And for safety reasons, it was decided, "Hey, we need one person not in a spacesuit."

John Arnold

So you were all out there in spacesuits conducting these experiments or doing research?

Tiffany Swarmer

Yeah, we did do some non-suited collection to make sure we could get good quality research data, but yes, we would go out in spacesuits and now they're simulation suits, so they have padding, and we did have a pressurized spacesuit. So there's a tiny company, Star Helix, who had brought their pressurized analog suit out. And so we did have a pressurized suit, which is very rare for analog facilities. And people are walking or to the best of their ability walking or on ATVs, getting to locations to collect permafrost samples, look at different geologic items of interest, and then geotag them. We don't necessarily pick up the fossils because that's not our field of expertise, but if we find something like a stromatolite that's potentially 33 million years old, we don't want to touch it, but we will geo-tag it and let the Canadian government and the Nunavut government know. But yeah, it is always interesting when you see three or four people just walking by in a spacesuit.

John Arnold

Well, you're already painting for how the work that you all were doing at the facility there on Devon Island would translate to a human spaceflight mission to the moon or to Mars that once there for extended periods of time, ostensibly, there'll need to be a lot of research conducted. So could you tell us more about how this experience and the science that you were conducting will translate potentially to the space environment and what it will prepare astronauts to do?

Tiffany Swarmer

Oh, yes, I definitely can talk about that, John. Yeah, I can hear my research crewmate saying, "Yes, she's finally going to talk about the research that she really, really understands." So the environment up there is just unlike any analog that I've ever experienced. NASA does have a facility not too far from where the Mars Society facility is. It's a mile and a quarter as the crow flies, but it takes a little bit more time to get there than expected. It's a little bit more of a windy path. So there's one other research facility up there, but Mars Society is particularly positioned right on the rim of Houghton Crater and its location was selected because it's thought that that would be very similar to where you would land for a mission to be able to access things of interest near the crater.

And it's isolating and the resource limitations really allow us to engage a spaceflight mission con-ops even if we didn't have suits, even if we didn't do airlock protocols, which is where you have to do a pre-breathe and you have to wait to equalize before you can open the airlock, things that we do in spaceflight. Even if you didn't have those, the environment is hard and it's so hard that it lets you know, the physical and mental impacts that our crews are experiencing are something that I think you can see pretty heavily here. And so we're able to test out the mission con-ops, we're able to look at, "Hey, how would we do data collection? What's the most efficient way to plan out? Is it to do all the hard EVAs in the beginning?" It allows us to look at a lot of different aspects. To me, and I'm going to say to me, the particularly interesting thing about the Mars Society facility, I don't know how many people are familiar, but commercial space is becoming real, right?

John Arnold

Right, yeah.

Tiffany Swarmer

Being able to fly up to low Earth orbit and potentially the moon is something that we could see in the next 20, 30, 40 years. There's not a lot of facilities that provide a platform to understand what that would look like from a commercial aspect. Now, NASA, they have this amazing infrastructure and support and funding from the government, and when you see commercial entities go about this, its structure is just slightly different. They still are looking at making it safe and making it cost-effective just like NASA, but they're normally focused on commercial endeavors. They're focused on, "Hey, how do we make this productive? What can we produce that will help grow this industry?" And so with the Mars Society, the structure much more closely mimics what you would see in the commercial environment.

John Arnold

I see. KBR obviously saw value in this expedition and people might not know. We've talked about it in our season opener, but right now KBR has launched a global awareness campaign couched around the message of we do things that matter because KBR really has built its business around delivering solutions that are helping solve these major global challenges. So I wonder if you'd give your elevator pitch how this work matters and how KBR's investment in support of something like this, what does that mean to the scientific community?

Tiffany Swarmer

Yeah, I was super excited and thankful that KBR saw the value in this opportunity. And when I went to talk to my boss and his boss and his boss and finally made my way to Lori Labra, and she was just super excited because she instantly saw how well this aligns with what KBR is looking to do, which is make an impact.

And the fact that we are going to go and collect climate data in an area that almost no humans get a chance to see, and that we were really able to focus on ways that we can give back to the community and the earth while looking at how humanity is going to make that next step or float through that next step, however you want to, they saw how valuable it was for KBR as a company to support an endeavor like this. And it's something that Mars Society really benefits from as well as all of the different researchers, and Earth in general, when we can better understand what's happening as the climate shifts and how that will impact our world.

John Arnold

Yeah, that's fantastic. The implications are much further reaching than even spaceflight because it has a lot to do and a lot of implications for what's happening right here on our home planet and making life better here. Well, Tiffany, is there anything you'd to add before we let you go? I hate that the conversation's coming to an end, but we do have to, I guess we have other things to do.

Tiffany Swarmer

No, John, I'm very, very thankful for this opportunity to talk about this. I was super thankful to KBR that they were like, "Hey, let's go ahead first of all and let you go for three weeks and find a way to backfill what you're going to do so that you can go and support this expedition up into the Arctic." They're doing some amazing work, and Mars Society is focused on how to get humans to Mars. That's what they really are trying to do. And it just so happens that while they're doing that, they have a very unique ability to also provide insight into what's happening here with climate and essentially the ecology up in the Arctic. So I felt very, very lucky to be a part of it.

And there was one moment, I just want to share one tiny moment here as we're closing. There was one moment that I think summed everything up so well. And I was out doing some collection. I wasn't suited because we were doing the initial baseline science collection to make sure we got good samples. And I'm just looking around at this desolate, lifeless place and I'm thinking, "How in the world is anything going to survive?" And then I hear a buzzing noise and realize, "Oh gosh, it's only been a couple of days in and I'm already going crazy," and I am just trying to find this buzzing noise, and the people with me are looking at me a little weird and all of a sudden I see a bumblebee. And I couldn't believe it. I had no idea. And I know there's lots of people who probably know there are bumblebees in the Arctic, there's flowers, so there has to be, but I had no idea that there was a bumblebee.

What really struck me about that wasn't until several weeks later when I'm sitting in my office back in Houston, and I'm trying to figure out, I can't remember the issue, but it was some technical issue with this spacecraft, and it just hits me that our humans going back to the moon and going to Mars are going to have some of the same, "Oh my gosh, no one knows this moment," that I had in the Arctic. And I know that sounds really cheesy, but it just summed it up so beautifully for me that we're very curious creatures. We're constantly trying to learn, and we want to understand the world around us as well as outside of our Earth. And so that was just to me, what really summed up everything about what I had gone through and dealing with all the different isolation and the difficulty and the lack of, you do have plenty of food, but the lack of human conveniences. Everything got summed up kind of with this one moment of clarity where we're going to go off explore and discover.

John Arnold

That's an amazing story. Thank you so much for sharing that. A great way to close out this episode. Tiffany Swarmer, thank you so much for your time and for sharing with us about your experience in the Arctic.

Tiffany Swarmer

Thank you. Really appreciate it, John.

CONCLUSION

John Arnold

Well, I don't know about you, but now I'm just sitting here thinking about throwing my name in a hat for the next Arctic Research mission. A huge thank you to Tiffany Swarmer for taking time out of her busy schedule at NASA to tell us about her adventures that could have far-reaching effects on human spaceflight and on our understanding of how humans affect the world around us.

If you want to learn more about the work Tiffany and other KBR experts do with our science and space business unit and our total space capabilities, which include national security and space superiority, then you can check that out over at kbr.com or think.kbr.com or if you're out there looking for a place where you can belong, connect, and grow and do work that matters, you can learn about careers at KBR by checking out think.kbr.com/careers. And if you like what you heard today and want to let us know, or if you have an idea for a future episode or if you just want to drop us a line, let us hear from you at inorbit@kbr.com.

Before we close out, as always, I want to give a big shout-out to you, our listeners. You don't need me to tell you that there's a lot happening on our tiny blue dot at the moment. There's a lot competing for your attention in this attention economy, and we just want to let you know that we appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen to the podcast and for keeping us in your orbit. Be kind to each other and take care.