Seth Lambert ’18 used his game design skills to develop software that helps people understand NASA’s Artemis missions. The email said Seth Lambert ’18 had just six hours to apply for an internship with a NASA contractor. It was 2019, more than a year after he transferred from FLCC to Rochester Institute of Technology. As part of his bachelor’s program, he had applied for more than 100 other internships with no luck. The contractor, Universities Space Research Association, needed to fill this post quickly. Soon Seth was headed to Johnson Space Center in Houston for an eight-month internship that led to a full-time job working as a contractor for the Orion program on the Artemis missions. Artemis consists of a series of progressively more complex flights designed to take humans back to the moon and beyond. The first flight, Artemis I, sent an uncrewed craft in orbit around the moon. Seth used skills developed at FLCC and RIT to create AROW, short for Artemis Real-time Orbit Website. When the Orion 4 | theLAKER GAME DESIGN MEETS SPACE EXPLORATION spacecraft blasted off Nov. 16, 2022, the AROW website allowed people to track its progress in relation to the Earth, moon and sun. AROW, he explained, “listens to an enormous amount of data coming down from space and uses that to create a very literal visualization of what’s going on, so this is as if you were traveling through space alongside Orion. The goal was to make something that wasn’t just for internal use but that could communicate the mission to everybody.” With Orion’s successful flight and splashdown in the Pacific on Dec. 11, Seth’s attention turned to the next phase, Artemis II, a lunar flyby with a human crew in late 2024. “Artemis II is a slightly different mission,” he added. “It’s going to be much shorter, and the flight plan is also quite different, so there’s a lot of work necessary to bring the software up to date for the new mission. We’re adding new features and working on other exciting ways for people to visualize and track future missions.” Family connection Seth’s grandfather, Hubert “Norris” Lambert, was a contractor for the space agency during the shuttle program. “I unfortunately never met him, but I grew up hearing stories about when he worked at NASA and that was always something that sounded so fantastic.” from the cover On the cover: Seth Lambert, a visualization developer for a NASA contractor, visited Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch the Orion spacecraft roll out of the vehicle assembly building in March 2022, several months before the agency launched it on a flyby of the moon. Seth built the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW) so people could track Orion’s fight.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTcyNDA=