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Chris Barrs' Belly Pack invention will help astronauts keep their tools from flying off while at work in space.
By KATHRYN WEXLER
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 7, 2001
TAMPA -- As a boy, Chris Barrs would watch space shuttles lift off on TV, then race to the patio of his Ballast Point house to see the little orange triangle breach the horizon and slice the clouds.
Years later in 1998, NASA approached students at Auburn University in Alabama for a design to keep astronaut tools from floating away in low gravity.
Barrs was then a junior at Auburn. Using canvas bought from Wal-Mart and a rented sewing machine, he devoted an entire room in his house to the project. He was competing against 35 other Auburn students who dreamed NASA would pick their design.
"There were all-nighters constantly," and they were fueled by his own excitement more than coffee, Barrs, 24, said in a telephone interview from Auburn, where he is now a visiting assistant professor of industrial design.
His mother, Donna, who lives in South Tampa with Chris' father, Rick, worried the project was wreaking havoc on her son's social life.
Now the sacrifices seem worth it.
On Thursday morning at precisely 6:42, Barrs' creation is scheduled to leave Earth aboard the shuttle Discovery.
Barrs is awed.
"I feel like I'm contributing to something larger than myself," he said.
His parents will drive to Cape Canaveral to see a launch. After all, their son is making a bit of history.
"I don't think I'd go if it were just another launch," said Rick Barrs, a playground equipment manufacturer.
Chris Barrs' device is officially called the Payload Equipment Restraint System, a highfalutin name for what is essentially a carpenter's belt. Fittingly, it is more often referred to as the Belly Pack.
Ken Smith, an Auburn alumnus, was a NASA engineer when he initiated the project. It was uncommon for NASA to go to students for answers, he said.
"We could have solved it ourselves," Smith recalls. "But it wouldn't have been near as much fun."
The problem was that using something as simple as a wrench becomes an exercise in madness aboard the shuttle if the tool floats away whenever an astronaut needs to use both hands.
"It's like working on your car, but every time you set something down, you turn around and it's on the other side of the garage," said Barrs, who graduated in June with a B.S. from the industrial design department of Auburn's College of Architecture, Design and Construction. "They didn't have a way to control these tools."
Barrs' invention took off once a prototype was circulated at NASA, said Smith, now an engineer with NASA subcontractor Raytheon.
"The astronauts said, "We love it. Develop it. We want to fly it,' " Smith said.
Winning first place in the competition brought perks. Barrs got to refine the Belly Pack during a 1999 summer internship at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
He even tested the device in the weightless atmosphere of the famous KC-135 at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
"It was an amazing experience," Barrs said. "You're up there, and then all of a sudden they pull back on the yoke and you're going . . . up and the engines are screaming and then you nose-dive," he said. "You're just floating in mid air."
Barrs was always mechanically inclined, his mom said.
"At Plant High School, his nickname was"MacGyver' because he created solutions from available resources," Mrs. Barrs said.
What emerged three years after Barrs submitted his first draft was a versatile, collapsible device made of Nomax, the fire-resistant material used by race car drivers. It weighs about 2 pounds and can carry myriad tools, including a laptop computer. With straps, mesh pockets and Velcro, the belt will come in handy when astronauts exchange equipment and experiments on the international space station.
NASA will give Barrs access to Kennedy Space Center on Thursday to see the launch of the 102nd space mission to replace the first crew at the international space station with three new members.
Barrs knows the astronauts and plenty of NASA officials by name.
So has all the special access lured him into the field of space design?
Nope. He's looking for a job, but one that does not involve weightlessness.
"I really want to design sporting goods and consumer products," he said.
- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at (813) 226-3383 or at wexler@sptimes.com.