Jan. 26--HAMPTON -- So one day you decide to take some simulated moon dust and mix it with aluminum powder and then heat it. Really heat it. Say, to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

And all you get is a little puddle of melted aluminum.

Would you call it a day?

Not if you're Kathryn Logan. She just changed the recipe a little bit and tried again, and that time she got the mixture to burn partway through before it produced a second, bigger puddle of melted aluminum.

Along with five grad students and two undergrads from Virginia Tech, she kept revising and testing until the mixture burned all the way through and what was left in the oven was a little moon brick. A brick that astronauts could mix themselves and bake on the lunar surface. A brick that could be stacked to make radiation and meteorite shields. A brick that could be made from recycled bits of used-up spacecraft in the garbage dump, and from the moon itself.

The recipe is still evolving -- they want to use solar power instead of electricity -- and the researchers are back to the puddle stage, but Logan and her students are winning awards and NASA is watching intently.

You could say that now these engineers are really cooking.

Logan grew up in Atlanta, loving geology.

"I liked to go find rocks. All around in that area there are a lot of very pretty ruby and sapphire and corundum, very nice rocks. I did have high hopes to go to the Colorado School of Mines. At that time they were not allowing young ladies to go into mines because it was felt to be bad luck. Things have changed quite a bit for women over the past 30 years."

Logan has emeritus status at Georgia Tech, where she worked for 32 years. She retired once, but then Virginia Tech came calling. She turned down the job offer.

"I was ready to play with the grandchildren and consult and do things. I make jewelry, and I make it from scratch. I was going to use my ceramic engineering know-ledge to make some very unique gemstones."

But it was a unique position she was being offered, as a Tech professor at the National Institute of Aerospace, a research and graduate education consortium of seven East Coast universities that support NASA. She had second thoughts, asked her family's advice, and they told her to go back to work.

So here she is, five years later, commuting among Georgia and Blacksburg and Hampton, teaching classes in person and via the Web, working in a lab at NASA Langley Research Center and, now, because of that lab work, juggling interviews with the Discovery Channel and science magazines.

It makes for some long days, but she can squeeze all her interests into a tight schedule. She's done that since at least the 1960s, when she and some friends went cave exploring on the day of their high school baccalaureate service. They explored the cave, washed their hair in the creek, and scooted into place at the very end of the line of graduates, just in time to march in.

Logan has always had good timing.

Titanium is a metal prized for its strength, and titanium diboride is a ceramic nearly as hard as diamond, and not as popular as its metallic cousin because of its high melting point and grain size. One day, Logan decided to tinker with it.

Because she likes to make things from the ground up, she invented a new and improved titanium diboride by applying a process called by scientists self-propagating, high-temperature synthesis, but you can call it SHS. What it does is make something cook itself quickly and thoroughly at extremely high temperatures.