John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences

News and information from the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences.

Colloquium Presentation on Apirl 28th to Feature Tracy Gill of NASA Kennedy Space Center

The Spring 2014 Space Studies Colloquium Series will focus on “Human Flyby Missions to Mars” and will feature several leading experts in the field.

The following presentation in this series will feature Mr. Tracy R. Gill,  Technology Strategy Manager, Research & Technology Management Office, NASA Kennedy Space Center

Topic:  From Earth to the ISS to the Moon and Mars: Development Considerations for Space Habitation and Current Efforts at NASA

Date:  Monday, April 28, 2014

Time:  4:00 p.m. (Central time)

Location:  Ryan Hall, Room 111

About the Speaker: 
Tracy Gill works for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in the Research and Technology Management Office as a Technology Strategy Manager.  In this capacity, he is responsible for top level strategic planning of KSC investments in research and technology areas of the NASA Technology Area roadmaps and coordinating those efforts across multiple projects and organizations.  Tracy holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Aerospace and Mechanical Systems from the University of Florida, an MS in Space Systems from Florida Tech, and is a graduate of the International Space University (ISU) Summer Session Program in 2006.  He served as visiting faculty for ISU in 2012 and in 201, he was named as an adjunct professor for the International Space University.

Tracy has nearly 20 years of Shuttle and ISS payload processing experience. Through Spacelab and ISS Utilization payload processing activities, Tracy has worked extensively with employees and contractors from other NASA field centers, from universities, and from international engineering teams from the European Space Agency (ESA), Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan.  This work was in preparing payloads for launch on projects such as the German Spacelab D2 mission, several international Spacelab missions, the Japanese Manipulator Flight Demonstrator, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 payload, ISS Expedite the Processing of Experiments to Space Station (ExPRESS) Racks, and several ESA provided ISS racks such as the Microgravity Science Glovebox and the Minus Eighty Laboratory Freezer for ISS.

Prior to his involvement with the Research and Technology Management Office, Tracy was also involved on the Constellation program supporting the Orion, Ground Operations, Altair, and Lunar Surface Systems projects, developing initial requirements and planning concepts of operations.  After Constellation, he was a deputy project manager for the Habitat Demonstration Unit (HDU) project. He was responsible for leading members of a multi-center team, designing and building a habitat system to support analog testing of advanced habitation systems. In this capacity, he led the systems integration effort, defining how sub-systems would be installed and configured and how they worked together to satisfy the requirements of the habitat prototype.

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A live webcast which includes PowerPoint slides will be available here.   Please note:  this option is currently not operational on portable devices/tablets.

A live webcast is also available here.

Colloquium presentations will be added to the space.edu colloquium website after the live event for later viewing.