MANUFACTURING in EKU Grad Tracie Prater Is Helping Turn Humanity into a Spacefaring Species
“We’re building the ‘replicator’ from Star Trek.” That’s how engineer and EKU alumnae Dr. Tracie Prater describes for the layperson her role at NASA. For those who aren’t familiar with the long-running sci-fi show, the replicator is spaceship technology that can create almost any item seemingly from thin air by rearranging subatomic particles. In the real world, such advanced technology is a long way off, but recent advances in 3D printing could meet similar needs, and Dr. Prater, ’06, is at the forefront of figuring out how. Her true job description is more of a mouthful. Dr. Prater is the technical integration lead for the In-Space Manufacturing Project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She is part of a team developing processes, skills and systems that will allow humans to fabricate tools and components on-site in zero- or micro-gravity environments to support long-duration human exploration missions. “Currently, everything we use in space is manufactured on and launched from Earth. That works well for the International Space Station, which is just 200 miles above the planet,” she said. “But that paradigm can become a huge logistics problem
32 SPRING 2018
when we look at a 500-day mission to Mars, a sustained presence on the moon or a deep-space habitat.” One of the biggest priorities for Dr. Prater and NASA is the completion of an all-in-one manufacturing capability for space stations called the Multimaterial Fabrication Laboratory, a refrigerator-sized unit that will print intricate metal and plastic components, inspect them for integrity and also recycle materials. The possibility that the project could be seen as the first-generation replicator is a dream come true for Dr. Prater, who has been fascinated with outer space since childhood. Her interest in engineering blossomed later, during a foretelling field trip in high school as part of the Governor’s Scholars Program. “We went to the headquarters of Lexmark, the printer company, and I had lunch with a female engineer there. I had never considered printers to be exciting, but it seemed incredible to me
