Local man an engineer for Orion spacecraft project

Growing up in Montana, Dan Baca had an amazing view of the stars, but he had no idea the stars were in his future.

The Kalispell native and 1996 Flathead High School graduate is working with NASA on the Orion spacecraft that’s on track to make its first launch on Thursday. Baca will be at the Kennedy Space Center on console, watching the data from the spacecraft for any anomalies.

Baca is a member of the team that ran a full mission simulation in mid-November for Orion’s launch, testing pre-launch through ascent, orbit, entry and splashdown/recovery.

He’s one of many who are excited to see the first step of the next generation of human space flight. The Orion spacecraft is expected to carry astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond.

“It’s a bittersweet compliment to work on console,” Baca said. “I always thought I would watch the launch from the ground. But it’s been a longtime dream to study, build and fly my own spacecraft. This is as close as I can get for right now.”

Life wasn’t always easy for Baca and his family. He was raised in Kalispell by a single mother who was struggling to put herself through school while raising him and his two siblings.

His hard-working mother’s advice turned out to be prophetic, though.

“My mom always told me I should be an engineer,” Baca said. “But I was a rowdy high school student, and it was hard for me to nail down what I wanted to be when I grew up. And given our circumstances, it wasn’t really expected that my siblings or I would be able to afford college.”

After a few rounds of bad grades, Baca discovered the structure and discipline of jujitsu and was able to improve his school work for the rest of high school.

He also had a couple of teachers who were integral in shaping his young life. Baca cited Karen Longhart, his math teacher, as one of his most influential instructors. Linda DeKort, his advanced biology teacher, “always encouraged my curiosity,” he recalled.

Graduation came and went and Baca started working full time at Zauner’s Ace Hardware (now Montana Ace) and continuing his jujitsu training at Shin Mei Kan west of Kalispell.

As his jujitsu practice intensified, he was required to take an anatomy course at the Flathead Valley Community College.

Little did he realize that this one class would spur an ongoing thirst for knowledge. He started taking as many classes as possible and received two associate’s degrees from FVCC while maintaining his full-time job.

Now convinced that he wanted to learn more and more, and after receiving a few scholarships, Baca enrolled at the University of Montana, studying math and astrophysics. Even with these complex degrees, Baca soon realized the job market for astrophysicists was small to nonexistent in Montana.

Slightly downtrodden but not deterred, Baca found out about a space conference in Colorado Springs – the National Space Symposium.

After realizing he wouldn’t be able to afford the conference fee, Baca signed up as a volunteer and drove 1,000 miles from Montana to Colorado Springs to stay with his godparents and soak up all the National Space Symposium had to offer. This was 2004. The space shuttle was grounded and the space industry was in a state of limbo.

“I was at the symposium, eager and ready to join the industry, and once again realized my career options in space may be limited,” Baca recalled. “It was definitely disappointing.”

But, in a stroke of luck and timing, then-President George W. Bush announced Return to Flight and a reinvigoration of America’s space program. Baca knew instantly that’s what he wanted to do, to be a part of the next generation of space flight. However, even with a great undergraduate degree, Baca’s work experience was limited to managing the hardware store. He knew he needed to take another step to turn his dreams into a reality.

That meant taking a position in the graduate aerospace engineering program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his new role as a graduate student and teaching assistant, Baca emphasized his studies in bio-astronautics, looking at how to support life in space and studying the physical and psychological impacts of human life in space.

The university ranks in the top five U.S. universities for the number of astronaut alumni and is the top NASA-funded university in the world, so Baca was well-positioned to get hands-on space experience.

One of the programs Baca worked on as a graduate student was a space-suit simulation, where researchers and students could understand the capabilities of astronauts inside a reconfigurable mockup of the Lunar Surface Access Module. Now armed with the education and the experience, Baca’s career in space was within reach.

In another instance of timing, Lockheed Martin had just won the contract to build Orion as Baca was graduating from college. He got a job at Lockheed to work on a team chartered to fix the weight overages on the initial Orion design.

His role morphed into a margin management position where he was responsible for looking at the power of the spacecraft, the consumables and other factors that must be considered in understanding where there may be padding or excess in the system-level design. Baca had the opportunity to brief the Orion program managers frequently, developing a rapport and gaining leadership exposure early on.

“Just as I was really starting to get in the groove of my position, my manager threw me a curveball,” Baca said. “He asked me to work on an avionics task force to develop the fault protection architecture for Orion. I had to jump into a world of software and avionics, which forced me to gain a whole new level of experience that ultimately helped shape my role today.”

Now, as a senior systems engineer and the European Service Module fault protection lead, Baca works in fault protection and risk assessment, looking at where the project is most susceptible to the loss of crew in a future manned mission of Orion and where it may be likely to lose the mission during Orion’s unmanned exploration flight test.

 “I’m really lucky in my role in that I get to work with nearly every discipline across the Orion program,” Baca said. “I get to consult with the hardware teams, the software teams, people working on console, the flight crew, the ground systems. Plus, I frequently get to be hands-on with the vehicle itself.”

Baca also helps run mission simulations that are essential to ensuring flight readiness for launch.

“We purposefully inject faults into the system to test the fault protection software and vehicle response,” he explained.

“This is essential so that the team can be ready for any situation that may occur and allows us to tweak parameters or create contingency commands.”

Baca and a team in Denver worked with teams at Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center recently to run two mission simulations.

Meant to test the teams on console at the three locations, these simulations test the response to the environment pre-launch. This gives the console team practice for making a call on a launch or scrub decision based on technical and weather factors.

“We actually ran one test where the team in Houston was able to work through numerous sneaky faults that needed to be resolved in order to launch,” he said.

“But the fictional weather situation predicted a rough sea-state at splashdown, forcing a scrub decision. Even if everything is fine technically, we have to be very aware of the weather at both the launch and the recovery sites.”

Daily Inter Lake Features Editor Lynnette Hintze contributed to this story.