Shuttle blast doomed Utah duo's project

PLEASANT GROVE — Nelson Radmall and Michael Judson gave up a lot of fun-time during their senior year trying to meet a NASA deadline.

They missed football and basketball games and the prom as they worked feverishly to ready their Artificial Gravity Growth Unit II for flight on the space shuttle Discovery.

But when the Columbia blew apart on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing seven astronauts, their experiment, along with a dozen or so other high school projects, were also doomed.

Today, NASA engineers are again preparing to put Discovery back into space in mid-May, followed by Atlantis in mid-June — but Radmall and Judson's work won't be aboard.

"Right now, we're not sure when or what their experiment is going to be on. I'm almost positive it will not be on a shuttle," said Keith Koehler, a spokesman for the Wallops Flight Facility. "There is a possibility of going on an aircraft that can re-create the lack or gravity but the type of canister that was being used to hold the student experiments will not fly anymore."

Koehler said a dozen student experiments are left over — experiments accepted from among 1,200 submitted by high school students across the nation.

While some can be sent up in high-flying science balloons — the Radmall and Judson experiment is not one of them.

For their experiment to be useful, they need to collect long-term data on wheat seedlings exposed to a weightless environment. The experiment uses a simple, low-speed centrifuge to create an artificial gravity centripetal acceleration that, according to Radmall and Judson, encourages the seeds to sprout and grow more quickly than they would on Earth.

The two Utah Valley men were hoping to find a way to grow food in space, something that could benefit future space missions and space station ventures.

They spent $3,000 to $5,000 on parts and labor and devoted endless hours to researching, building and honing their project, working with mechanical engineering students under the direction of Paul Eastman at Brigham Young University and assisted by Boeing Engineer and Lindon resident Ken Hardman, who helped secure funding.

In addition to making certain the experiment would survive a rocket launch and perform in space, Radmall and Judson had to make it fit into the parameters allowed by the space available and still be viable after an indeterminate time in storage.