A Mars Odyssey

For Ralf Rudnik, English is his second language.  Hailing room Braunschweig, Germany, Rudnik packed up his wife, Beate, son, Max, 10 and daughter, Johanna, 8; and took an eight month sabbatical in the U.S.  They were 8 months and thousands of miles away from home.  Johanna looked at their time in the U.S. to be an adventure.  Ralf is head of transport aircraft fro the Institute of Aerodynamics and Floco Technology at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).  He is calling his time as a “sabbatical” because he isn’t the head of anything while working at the National Transonic Facility (NTF).  “I’ve been a manager for five years now and it just slips away,” he says of the ability to do research.  “If I do my work at home, every five minutes I have a phone call and I have a couple of e-mails and the day is running over me.  “Here, you work and you have time.  Nobody is calling you on the phone.  You can work in peace, and that’s really good”, Rudnik’s field, which is aircraft aerodynamics, with a focus on validation and turbulence modeling is closely involved with his work which involves testing a commercial aircraft model in the NTF wind tunnel and gathering data that will service the international computational fluid dynamics community for code valuation.  Because he brought the family along, Rudnik feels his work is easier.  “I think if my wife and kids had said we do not want to go there, I wouldn’t have done it”, he says.  “I wouldn’t have gone eight months without my family”.  Though he had attended aerospace conferences in the U.S., the family decided this was the way to assimilate another culture.  “You recognize that you are throwing the family into a different world, where everybody is talking language”, said Rudnik.  “Max had English in school (in Germany) for about a year, but it is a completely different thing when you have a textbook.  You read a little bit and recognize some words while everybody is talking that funny language and you have to catch up.”  “Johanna hasn’t had hardly any of the language.  So, for the first days, we knew she was just sitting there in school and didn’t understanding anything.”  Ask Johanna now what she liked best about living in Virginia

and she will say “Girl Scouts”. 

Getting a home set up in Williamsburg for the family wasn’t easy.  “You couldn’t get a home set up from Europe”, Rudnik says.  “I took a two-week vacation here to get it done.”  “We were supported by our NASA colleagues.  I have a home and a lawn but didn’t want to buy a lawnmower for seven months”, said Rudnik.  Colleagues loaned the family a lawnmower, television, and more.  For a good German family, it is like home away from home.

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