Do you remember the frantic scene in the movie Apollo 13 when engineers used cardboard and duct tape to build a temporary filter for the CO₂ scrubbers, thus saving the mission and the crew? Lori Shannon Motes ’06 does. As a space flight developer at NASA, she works hard to make sure in-flight engineering heroics won’t ever be needed again.

Motes and her team skipped the duct tape when they designed and built a controller for a totally new type of filter, now being tested on the International Space Station. Its function — removing excess CO₂ from the cabin air — is the same, “but the technology behind it is totally different,” says Motes.

Inside the new scrubber is a bed of beads coated with an amine, an organic derivative of ammonia that even some chemists say has “magical” properties. In contrast to the old lithium-hydroxide canisters, which had to be discarded and replaced once a day, the amine filter is reusable.

Best of all, it’s automatic, thanks to Motes’ swing-bed system. Once configured on board, the crew is not needed to operate the system.

While one bed of amine beads collects carbon dioxide from the cabin, the used bed is exposed to the vacuum of space. This causes the beads to release their CO₂. A valve then swaps the two beds, and the canister is ready to take its next turn.

Motes, usually the lone female in the room at work, said the swing-bed project was her first as manager. Rather than take the usual two years to develop the hardware, it was “ready to fly” (to be sent up to the Space Station) in six months. “Now that NASA’s vision is changing to one of long-duration space flight, all technology has to get more efficient,” she says.

Which brings us to a project that really captures people’s imaginations, though it’s probably the idea of drinking their own urine that grabs them.

“Water is actually a big problem in space,” Motes explains. “Manned space flight requires a lot of it. Not only for drinking; the oxygen generation systems also use water. Storing enough of it, especially for a long trip, is a challenge. So on board the Station, the astronauts’ urine is processed and drinkable water is extracted from it. It’s the same principle as distilling liquor.”

But not too long ago the Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) on the Space Station broke down. Evidently, astronaut urine is much higher in calcium than on Earth, due to the bone loss that occurs in space. NASA discovered this, “when the UPA failed due to a buildup of calcium deposits,” says Motes. “To prevent the deposits, the UPA operates at 70 percent efficiency right now.”

Not good enough. So Motes and her team are designing an ion-exchange filter to remove the extra calcium before the urine goes into the assembly. The goal is to bring efficiency back up to 80 percent.

And yes, she’s been teased about the parallel to her work and a character on TV’s “The Big Bang Theory,” which stars a NASA engineer named Howard Wolowitz. In one of the more disastrous episodes, he designs the Zero-Gravity Waste Disposal System (which actually does the opposite) for the International Space Station.

“My parents got a kick out of saying that Howard and I were working together on the space toilet,” she says.

Motes admits that she didn’t stargaze or have a particular interest in interplanetary travel as a kid before landing the job at NASA in 2008. But since then, she has, “basically gone off the deep end in my passion for space. It’s so interesting and so important to the future of our society.”

One of the perks of her job is knowing that something she’s put together is either helping astronauts do their work or keeping them safe. Preferably both. As lead project engineer on the Space Station’s GPS Antenna Project, she repaired and re-certified three GPS antennas, then built and certified three spares. The antennas are crucial to keeping track of the ISS, as they pinpoint the attitude, position and speed of the Space Station as it orbits the Earth.

In 2012, Motes was recognized for contributing to mission success and safety with the Silver Snoopy award. This is an award the astronauts give personally to the engineers who make what they do possible. It’s an honor that can be received only once in a career and is given to less than 1 percent of the NASA workforce.

Motes met her future in more ways than one in TCU’s department of engineering. Casey Motes ’07 first caught her eye in Calculus III. They married in Robert Carr Chapel in 2011. Casey, a mechanical engineer, is a brewer at St. Arnold Brewing Company, Texas’ oldest craft brewery. The couple likes traveling to other breweries in their free time. At home, Lori relaxes by cooking, while Casey makes the beer.

Last year, another member of the family entered the engineering department at TCU: Wesley Mwanzia, an international student from Kenya, who is hosted by Motes’ parents.

“Dr. Stephen Weis is Wesley’s advisor — he was mine, too. I e-mailed him to go easy on my new brother,” Motes says with a laugh.

She didn’t mean it. The thing she valued most about being Weis’ student and advisee was that, “he really cared, and he pushed you. He made you think about whether you really knew what you thought you knew.”