Hannah Jurado | Production of renewable energies to preserve life on Mother Earth

Hola, soy Hannah Jurado, vengo de Texas, de Houston donde está el Johnson Space Center, y hoy quiero hablar no de la NASA, de parte de NASA, pero de mis experiencias allá. Voy a dar mi presentación en inglés.

I am here representing myself; I am not representing the views of my employer or that of their contractors. As a NASA speaker we do not endorse or do any fundraising activities; all the things you will see here today are public information or they are information that I have, that is personal information that I’d love to share with you.

Again, thank you CUMIPAZ for inviting me. It’s a privilege to be here in this country, this is the country of my father and my grandfather’s. And it is an honor to be here. I would not be here if it were not for mentorship leaders and heroes of mine like Dr. William Soto; and like my mentor who always encouraged me, Dr. Velez, to go reach for the stars, and never gave up on me. And one of the results is being there, meeting my hero Buzz Aldrin along with many, many other crewmembers from NASA.

[Slide 3]

So, I wanted to talk a little bit today about Earth itself. It seems large to us, from our perspective, but its important to realize it is not limitless. The world has so many layers, it’s a diversity in human culture, in flora, in fauna, it takes a lot, it requires a lot of resources and we need those to maintain environmental stability. We don’t want to deplete those resources quickly and take them for granted.

So, our challenge today is to: Conceptualize a large world as our large world is having resource limitations. So I am going to give you an analog for that.

Here I have… I wanted to show this picture that recently came out also, Joe Acaba, is of Puerto Rico decent. He is currently on the Space Station and he tweeted this picture of Puerto Rico, and I thought I’d share it with you because it does, from the crew’s perspective, show the big world out there that we live in.

So, I am going to go over a quick description of what an adaptive sustainable environment is. So, a close-loop environment would be one. Here on Earth where everything is exchanged within Earth itself, all the matter. And semi-close loop environment would be en environment in which some matters exchange external of the internal environment. So, the Space Station for example is a perfect semi-close loop environment, because we are self-sustained on board but we still have to take supplies to the crew and exchange hardware that needs to be fixed for example.

[Slide 4]

The International Space Station (ISS) to give you a quick overview, is a habitable spacecraft, it’s been occupied since 2000; about 14 years consecutively by crewmembers, by astronauts. It is orbiting about 220 miles above the Earth’s surface and it is an exploration platform for international research. And it supports the advancement of science and technological innovation.

[Slide 5]

So, there are many requirements for sustaining life on the Space Station. We have water and food supply to think about, we have human health and hygiene to consider, we have energy, the fuel consumption alone to keep the Space Station on board and to keep the lights going, to keep the microwave going, all those things that take energy. We even have to think very carefully about the environmental resource consumption and this is where I wanted to take a moment for you to think about the fact that on the Space Station, it’s about the size of a football field but all the living space is fairly small.

We are able to see the data that comes through, for example, when there are several crewmembers breathing or exercising. The CO2 levels increase, we are able to see that, we are able to see the different chemical impacts that we have on board the Space Station for example the possible experiments; we are always doing the research. Unlike on Earth, where we don’t have a ready system that tells us “there’s exactly this much carbon dioxide and we need to reduce it,” at the Space Station we can see that. We also have to consider maintaining the oxygen, nitrogen, all the different levels so that the crew can have livable space.

The logistics and maintenance required is also very, very important because we have to consider what if something breaks in space. If something breaks in space then we cannot simply send something over right away, we still have some time, we still need some time to get up and send things onboard, some things to exchange, to swap out hardware. So, logistics and maintenance is always required, we have to thing ahead of the game, we have to think about sparing plans, the trends on failures for hardware. So, all of those things are similar to what we do here on Earth with transportation, with starting to look at CO2 levels, starting to realize that we are depleting our resources. On board the Space Station of course you can see that right away.

So, I wanted to use the Space Station as analog, just to my experience alone and you can see here I’ve had the amazing opportunity to train crew for these sorts of activities and astronaut Tracy Caldwell here is studying daily life on the ISS. You take those small things for granted, but you have to learn how to relearn how to do daily activities, so to speak, for space travel.

[Slide 6]

So, again, how does this relate to Earth? Sustainability on a global scale. If we were divisualized our own homes as a close loop system, like the International Space Station, the results of the resource consumption and waste output and emissions like CO2 would become really, really obvious. The same system sustains the concepts used on the ISS can be applied on a global scale. That is because Earth’s environment is complex and it’s an integrated system and we must research, plan, design and develop new innovative technologies so we can approach the problems of increasing CO2, better waste management, logistics, transportation, all the things that you would normally see on a global scale that I’ve learned myself on a smaller scale with the ISS. And in order to do that, the point of doing that is that we achieve mission effectiveness, and in our case for Earth, our mission is to maintain Earth’s environmental stability as much as possible through sustainable development.

Let me share this video with you because all of these things I talked about also have to do with impacting the global temperatures, and I think it is a very interesting video to show.

[VIDEO Link: How NASA Scientists measure Global Temperatures

NASA Goddard, Earth Right Now]

Now, I did want to go back for a second and talk again about the CO2 levels, things like that, that the environmental sustainability of the ISS and I do also want to share this quick video with you to give you an idea of how that works, to what degree we have to think, on what level of chemistry we have to think to recycle, to recycle what we have in our environment.

[VIDEO Link:  NASA Now Minute: Life Science: Human Life Support on the ISS]

Going wrap up a little bit here.

[Slide 7]

Sustainable development through innovation technological development was kind of what I wanted to talk about. Much like the International Space Station we have limited resources here on Earth and we must continue to apply those sustainable methodologies here in Earth, similar to what we did with the Space Station. We have to address issues like climate change, and if a potential problem exists it’s fundamental that we approach it with problem solving skills and define solutions or alternate solutions to our current issues. Air quality, fuel consumption and renewable resources are obviously key for us to move forward and move forward through sustainable development.

Recycling methods and atmospheric pollutant scrubbers are great technologies that we can move forward with to help our environment. Improve disposal and treatment systems as well. I wanted to also share with you that view of the Space Station. It serves as a reminder that our Earth is beautiful and its integral complexity and beauty. We have to recognize her, remember we are one global community and that it has a boundary though, Earth has a boundary just like the Space Station. And therefore, its resources are limited and we need to take care of our Earth, we need to take care of our environment, our people, and though it may take time…

Continued effort in the acquisition of the knowledge of our environment and sharing that knowledge through education to achieve sustainable development through innovation will contribute to a positive environmental change and it will yield effective results. And that will be through the participation of communities around the globe like all of you here; which again, thank you very much for having me here, I will leave you with one more short video and it was an honor to be here.

[VIDEO link: Earth Right Now: Year One in Review]

Thank you.