Thermal Blanket Technician

You’ll surely get wrapped up in this episode of Surprisingly STEM featuring Paula Cain, a thermal blanket technician at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She covers why things sent into space need to be protected by a thermal blanket, and shares how two of her passions – fashion design and Star Trek – were interwoven into an exciting career at NASA!

What is said in the film

I envisioned my name up in lights for fashion design, you know? There's no way to describe it when you think about where I came from, that I do not have a math background. I'm not a scientist. I'm a fashion designer. I have a fashion design major, and to say I'm working here at NASA, and things I've touched have gone up in space, I have things that are on the International Space Station, my name is up there, you know?

These are things I've done. It's really cool. Surprisingly STEM. Thermal Blanket Technician. Hi, my name is Paula Cain.

I'm a Thermal Blanket Technician. Anything that goes up in space either has to have a special coating on it or blankets, and I design and make those blankets. If they didn't have blankets, a lot of things couldn't go up in space. So if they didn't have us, it couldn't fly. If they can't put a special coating on it to regulate the temperature, they will say they need blankets on it and our thermal engineers will run tests and analyses to see how cold they need it to be or how warm or if they want to keep the temperature steady, and what our blankets do is help regulate that.

The gold side is your Kapton. That's probably the side most people are familiar with, like in movies. International Space Station, they have some. And then you have your aluminized Kapton on this side, and then inside, you have these layers, and depending on what the testing says, that'll determine how many layers you have in here, and, um, we just cut these into whatever we need 'em to be. This is a, uh, 1 mil, and 1 mil is...

is thinner than 2 mils, so if this was a 2 mil, it would be darker, and with the thinner mil, we can work in more intricate, smaller areas. A lot of our things are small, but we do work on big things, too. If it's a thicker mil, it'll be on a larger, uh, spacecraft, so it could be as big as some of the satellites you see out here. The biggest was probably a 10x10. We had to cut it into different sections and do it like a puzzle piece.

Some of the awesome NASA projects I worked on, um, are things that have gone to the International Space Station, things that have just gone up in space, Hubble, MMS, OCI, RST. But I think the most exciting one was the MMS one because it was four at the same time and had never been done before. Because it was such a big project, they had an MMS day. You got to bring your family, so I really got to show my family what I do. Some of the big differences between designing, let's say, for a body and designing for a hard structure is that your body has give.

Structures do not have give. So you do need to be exact in your measurements. We use a clear film that we call Mylar. I can take that clear film and lay it up against it and literally draw my pattern right onto it, so with this, it is a line support plan, and once it's formed, it's gonna fit right on top of the line support. It has slits on the sides, because it has to fit around.

My mother taught me how to sew. Growing up, if I said I wanted to do something, you better not say, "Oh, I can't do that," 'cause she's like, "Yes, we can," and my mother used to watch soap operas, and she'd see an outfit, and she'd say, "We're gonna "go make that today. " And she'd go to the fabric store, get the fabric, and she'd have that outfit by the evening. I loved "Star Trek," and I was like, "See? "I can do that with space suits "and astronaut suits," so anything I wanted to make, she would help me figure it out, and we would make it.

And then from there, I started designing clothes, and, uh, started having fashion shows, so then that's what inspired me to go to school to get my fashion design degree. And then once I got that, I still was sewing for people, had a business, and happened to see an ad in the "Washington Post" that said, "Do you like space? "Do you like 'Star Trek'? " And I was like, oh. And then it says, uh, come for an interview for a thermal blanket technician.

I didn't know what a thermal blanket technician was, so I called, and then that's when I found out it was here, so then I came for the interview, and, uh, that's how it all started coming here, and then I fell in love with it, and I just never left. One of the biggest challenges I have had to overcome is having dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning disorder that causes difficulty reading due to the brain having problems identifying speech sounds and connecting how they relate to letters and words. It's not as bad now as it was when I was younger. But it still flares up.

There was a time I thought, like, oh, I'm stupid because I can't learn these things like other people. I would write everything backwards, and then I would skip words so... and then flip numbers and leave numbers out. But I had a supportive family who carried me through and let me know that it does not devalue me in any way to have it. It actually can be a blessing.

When you have encouragement, you can end up anywhere. You can do anything you want. So never think if... that you have to be a genius to be in some part of STEM. Because that's not the case.

It's not. I am a fashion designer who's here and doing it and have longevity. It's not like it's a fluke. It's... I'm here, and I'm doing it, and I think I'm pretty good at it.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/NHQ_2024_0313_Thermal Blanket Technician). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.