When Stephen Clanton graduated from Mississippi State in the late 1980s, the Mechanical Engineering major did not know who he was going to work for in the aerospace industry, but he knew that was his calling.
The 1984 Indianola Academy graduate drove to Huntsville, Ala., home of Marshall Space Flight Center – along with a host of NASA contractors – and began cold calling with his resume.
“I would drive around Research Park, see a company and ask if I could drop off a resume,” Clanton said. “It kind of worked out.”
Clanton did get an offer from Teledyne Brown Engineering, and that launched a career that has allowed him to work on some of NASA’s most prominent international projects, a mission that continues today in his work with another NASA contractor, Jacobs Engineering Group.
The son of Robert and Edith Clanton, the NASA veteran said that he first developed an interest in space from his father, who owned a crop dusting service in Sunflower County.
From there, his love of science grew under IA chemistry teacher Coach Charles Bellipanni and physics teacher Jim Woods.
Clanton began his career working on Spacelab, a project that involved multiple countries, including European nations, which meant that Clanton would spend a lot of time overseas.
Until he went to Huntsville seeking work, Clanton said he had never spent time outside of Mississippi.
“You always hear that slogan, ‘Join the Navy and See the World.’ I never thought I’d say ‘Join NASA and See the World,’” Clanton said.
Clanton spent the latter part of the 1980s working on thermal models, designed to make sure that temperatures on the inside and outside of Spacelab remained within optimal range.
“That was exciting, especially being a freshout,” Clanton said. “Back in those days, we were probably flying about four shuttle missions a year, so it was a quick turnover. We would spend about a year or a year-and-a-half working on a certain mission. When that mission got done, we would just roll onto another mission.”
In the 1990s, the Spacelab mission started to wind down, Clanton said, which opened up new opportunities with the International Space Station.
The project stalled sometimes for years at a time, but a final political commitment to the mission led Clanton to be the lead thermal engineer for two of it’s modules, Node 2 and Node 3.
Marshall Space Flight Center was in charge of the design for many of the space station’s modules and components, and Italian aerospace company, Alenia Space was in charge of the building and integrating both Nodes 2 and 3.
“Since it was being built over there, and we were in charge of the design, we spent an extensive amount of time over eight years in Italy,” Clanton said.
Clanton said one of the best experiences working with NASA was building trust with engineers from other countries and building real teams with NASA’s foreign partners.
“For the small amount of people working on it, I think the whole team achieved something really good,” Clanton said.
Though Clanton was lead thermal engineer on the project, he said his role quickly expanded. He said it was easy for things to get compartmentalized on a project so large, so everyone had to learn about other aspects of the space station in order for all of the small sub-systems to come together as one unit.
“At some point, they all came together on a spacecraft, and they all had to work together,” Clanton said. “They had to communicate. If there was a problem, we had to know enough to know if it was a mechanical, software or an electrical problem. I started out just doing the lead thermal design, and from that, it progressed into testing, then kind of a systems oriented mindset.”
Today, Clanton is still utilizing the skills he learned working on complicated international projects.
Announced in August 2017, the joint NASA-Brazil SPORT CubeSat mission is underway that is set to “study phenomena in Earth's upper atmosphere -- a region of charged particles called the ionosphere -- capable of disrupting communications and navigation systems on the ground and potentially impacting satellites and human explorers in space,” according to a release by NASA at the time.
The CubeSat, Clanton said, is a craft about the size of a loaf of bread, and it will be launched from the International Space Station, he hopes by early 2020.
The Scintillation Prediction Observations Research Task (SPORT) team is working with many graduate students from multiple U.S. colleges, including Utah State, the University of Texas-Dallas and Goddard.
“Working with younger folks, with their energy and motivation, kind of revitalizes me,” Clanton said.
Clanton said that he just returned from a two-week trip to Brazil, where he said the SPORT team has begun to work closely together, something he says is important because of the different sub-systems that have to come together to make the mission successful.
“We have to make sure the instruments and spacecraft integrate and function as a unit,” Clanton said. “We have to make sure that all the sub-systems come together and work together as a spacecraft and not just as a bunch of individual parts.
As NASA gears up for what many are hoping will culminate in another journey to the moon, Clanton said that he is elated to be working on the CubeSat project, which will have more Earthly implications than lunar ones.
Each project Clanton has worked on has led to new opportunities, and it is safe to say that this latest mission will likely not be the final frontier.
