Some Texans have talents that are out of this world. Take San Antonian Stephen McNierney, who is helping power NASA’s historic \u00a0Artemis II\u00a0 mission, for example.<\/p>\n
The Northside Independent School District (NISD) announced<\/a> that McNierney, an alumnus, is\u00a0working as NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate at the Johnson Space Center. Per the Houston-based company’s website<\/a>, the department “is the primary organization focused on humans living, working and thriving in space, on the moon and on to Mars.\u200b”<\/p>\n For Artemis II, which launched on Wednesday, April 1, his role is to lead and support the teams delivering “medical, exercise, and environmental monitoring equipment that the crew will be using in the Orion capsule.” Throughout the process, he’s contributed to design work and participated in crew training activities, according to the district.\u00a0<\/p>\n Going forward, McNierney will be busy in NASA’s Mission Evaluation Room and “providing hardware expertise to the Flight Controllers operating the mission from Mission Control.”<\/p>\n NISD, known as one of the largest school districts in Texas, gave a shoutout to all the NISD teachers who helped encourage the past student’s passion for space. As a child, he attended Oak Hills Terrace &\u00a0Locke Hill Elementary, Rawlinson Middle, and Clark High schools.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Space.com<\/a>, the lunar flyby is scheduled for Monday, April 6.\u00a0The full mission will last for approximately 10 days.<\/p>\n NASA’s real-time Artemis II tracker<\/a> shows that as of the afternoon of Wednesday, April 2, at 4:12 p.m., it had roughly 145, 715 miles to go until it was at the Moon. It is moving at roughly 7,100 mph.<\/p>\n No, NASA says the Artemis II mission will fly four astronauts around the Moon. It is the first time since Apollo in 1972 that humans are this close to it. The goal is partly\u00a0to ” provide NASA researchers with an unprecedented glimpse into how deep space travel influences the human body, mind, and behavior,” the agency’s website<\/a> states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some Texans have talents that are out of this world. Take San Antonian Stephen McNierney, who is helping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[847,820,82,84,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-232812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-mysanews","9":"tag-mysastaff","10":"tag-san-antonio","11":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","12":"tag-san-antonio-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}