NEWS
THENORTHERNLIGHT TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 2017
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Anchorage resident to become NASA astronaut The Edge Update: An Alaskan in space,
cellphone privacy, UK election disaster
By Max Jungreis KRUA
The Edge Update can be heard every weekday on KRUA 88.1 FM The Edge, UAA's college radio station.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
By Max Jungreis KRUA
Robb Kulin, 33, was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Last Wednesday, NASA announced he had been selected from among over 18,000 to become an astronaut candidate in the agency’s training program. Kulin spoke with KRUA 88.1 FM via phone the day after the announcement. Q. Tell me about the journey that took you from Anchorage, Alaska to where you are now. A. Coming from Anchorage, I think Alaska has always inspired an adventurous look at the world. At some point, I got interested in space as the next big place to explore… Ended up going to school in Colorado for undergrad, did a Fulbright Scholarship in Italy, which was a super fun experience. Grad school in San Diego. Then I’ve been working at company called SpaceX down in California for the last six and a half years as an engineer there, developing one of their rockets that we hope to fly someday. Q. At what point did flying for NASA become a possibility? A. I guess it just became a possibility a couple of weeks ago, when they gave the call. It’s something that I got inspired to think about back in undergrad. Back home in Alaska, I just never thought about the possibility growing up. I just liked getting out and being in new places and seeing what was around. Undergrad opened my eyes a little bit of the possibility of going to space. It was really just a lot of that Alaskan cultural experience that really got me amped up on it… got exposed to it in college and realized, ‘Hey, that’s going to be the next place to go.’ Try to come from the Last Frontier and go to the next frontier. Q. So NASA reached out to you a couple of weeks ago, that’s how this hap-
pened? A. No, so I’ve applied a couple of times actually. Made it all the way through the application process until this last step once before, and then applied a couple of years ago. They whittle it down slowly, this time from 18,300 people down to a total of twelve of us. [They] kind of do it step-by-step, so they whittle down all these resumes and ask for references, then they bring it down to 120 people to bring in for a short round of interviews, and then 50 people for a longer round… This time, I was lucky enough to discover I had made the final selection. Q. What kinds of qualities are they looking for? Q. They’re looking for a big mix. They want to fill out the Astronaut Office to have a lot of different skills. They have people doing the physical sciences, geology, biology… of course, fighter pilots with their past flying skills… and then engineers like myself. With that group, what they’re really looking for when they whittle it down to that final group of people is, ‘Who is the type of team player that I want to hang out with on a space station for a long duration? Who has good humor and is a good time but also gets some work done?’ A. What are the next couple of years going to look like for you? Q. The next couple of years are pretty jam-packed. It’s going to be kind of like going back to school. We’re going to start out doing some flight training and some T-38 stuff [a jet used by NASA to train astronauts]. As an engineer, I’ll be flying backseat on that and doing the support role for the pilot. We’re learning Russia to work with our counterparts. We have training to learn about the International Space Station and its systems… and just a multitude of trainings on the different things we’ll get to work on in the future as actual astronauts and operators.
Local An Alaskan-raised man has been selected from thousands as a candidate in NASA’s astronaut training program. Robb Kulin, 33, was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. After graduating from Service High School, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Denver before completing a Master’s degree in Materials Science and a Doctorate in Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. At the time of his selection, Kulin was employed as an engineer at SpaceX, where he has worked since 2011. In an interview with KRUA 88.1, Kulin said that although he had never considered becoming an astronaut while growing up, it was the adventurous experience of being raised in Alaska that propelled him towards space once he began considering it. “Undergrad opened my eyes to the possibility of going to space. It was just a lot of that Alaskan cultural experience that really got me amped up on it. I realized, ‘Hey, that’s going to be the next place to go.’ Try to come from the last frontier and go to the next frontier.” After going through two years of training, Robb will be assigned technical duties in NASA’s Astronaut Office while awaiting a flight assignment that will take him off Earth. National The Supreme Court has decided to hear a case that will determine whether or not police need warrants to track suspect’s locations through their cellphones. Under current rules, they do not. The court agreed to hear the appeal of a man convicted of armed robberies across Ohio and Michigan. The man, Timothy Simon, contends that the cellular location data
A. Have you had to put your life on hold?
used to convict him constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizures. As in most cases, the police tracked Simon’s location by requesting data from his cell carrier that tracked which cellphone broadcast his calls. The four big wireless carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint — receive thousands of requests per year for this type of data. The requests are almost always granted. The case has raised questions of how much businesses protect their customer’s information, and whether or not giving information over to a third party means giving up your expectation of personal privacy. The case will be heard during the next session of the Supreme Court, which begins in October. Global When British Prime Minister Theresa May called for a snap election eight weeks ago, she intended to increase her Conservative Party’s majority in parliament. Instead, her attempt to consolidate power has backfired spectacularly, leaving the country with no clear majority party and an uncertain future. At the beginning of the campaign, May’s rightleaning Conservative Party enjoyed double-digit leads over the main opposition, the liberal Labour Party. But a poor campaign performance, combined with an apparent U-turn on an unpopular piece of legislation dubbed ‘The Dementia Tax,’ shrunk that lead until the parties were within spitting distance of each other. The Conservatives remain the largest party in Parliament, but lack the majority May had hoped for as she prepares to negotiate with the European Union over the terms of Brexit. Instead of a mandate to bargain as she chooses, she will make the terms of her negotiations palatable to an ideologically diverse group of legislators. Resisting calls for her resignation, May announced she would form a coalition with the tiny Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland in order to maintain a majority.
Q. Yeah, there is a bit of roller coaster on that front. All of a sudden, your life goes from a really small possibility of making it, and you have this vision of the future ahead of you that you’re really looking forward to, then all of a sudden another opportunity comes up and it’s incredible and it totally changes that direction. I’m going to still continue my current job at SpaceX for the next couple of months, but yeah, it’s a pretty huge trajectory change and it happens pretty quick.
Q. One of the things I love most about Alaskans is how passionate they are, and that’s what I would tell them to be. Find something you’re passionate about and go for it. In my case, it was really focusing on the science, technology, engineering, mathematics aspect if you want to go this kind of route. But if you want to be successful, if you want to be liked in life, just find something you can be passionate about and dive into it. Don’t be afraid to be flexible, either. If you run out of steam there, find the next thing that interests you and jump over to it. Take those opportunities as they come. They’re going to lead somewhere else great.
A. Looking over your biography, you’ve managed to accomplish a lot in what for most people is a pretty short amount of time. If you had any advice for kids here in Alaska, what would it be?
Robb Kulin will begin two years of training this August. After completing his training, he will be given technical duties in the Astronaut Office while awaiting a flight assignment.