In Whitmore, CAL FIRE did some of its yearly aerial firefighting training with the Shasta-Trinity US Forest Service.

But there was another organization there you might not expect.

"We are from the airspace operations lab over at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley," said Researcher Lauren Claudatos. "We are out here as part of a research effort looking at scalable traffic management for emergency response operations."

That means they help map the airspace for air traffic, which can help in emergencies, especially in rural areas like Whitmore.

"I can’t even send a text message here, so in an emergency response situation, you don’t get all the benefits of high-speed internet for a good [communications] network. So our kit works off-line," explained Lauren.

And that’s just one way the Northstate is out of this world.

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