Belcourt Theatre Nashville, TN
Tracie Prater
Habitation Systems Development, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
Solaris— Deep space habitats and NASA’s five hazards of human spaceflight
Program Description
An overview of the physical and psychological hurdles that must be overcome to allow successful human exploration of space and how habitation concepts and design are informed by these issues. Touching on the countermeasures––specifically the psychological––that NASA implements for longterm spaceflight, Prater also explores the ways the organization studies long duration missions on earth and using the International Space Station with analog habitat missions which allow NASA to better understand hazards and develop mitigation strategies.
Presented At
Belcourt Theatre Nashville, TN
Film Synopsis
A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.
Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris centers on widowed psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donata Banionis), who is sent to a space station orbiting a water-dominated planet called Solaris to investigate the mysterious death of a doctor, as well as the psychological problems affecting the remaining cosmonauts on the station. Finding the crew to be behaving oddly, Kelvin is more than surprised when he meets his seven-years-dead wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) on the station. It quickly becomes apparent that Solaris possesses something that brings out repressed memories and obsessions within the cosmonauts on the space station, leaving Kelvin to question his perception of reality.
About the Speaker
Tracie Prater is in the habitation systems development office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), where she helps manage formulation activities for future space habitats and commercial partnerships. She is also part of the systems engineering and integration team for Mars Transit Habitat. Previously she was an engineer in the Materials and Processes Laboratory at NASA MSFC, where she supported advanced manufacturing research, in-space manufacturing, and the Centennial Challenges Program. She has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University.