ASTRONAUT REALIZING HIS DREAM
When the Soyuz spacecraft docks early today at the International Space Station, Bay State astronaut Scott Tingle’s family and a longtime mentor will watch him finally catch the dream he’s been chasing since he was 4 years old and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.
“My feelings are all over the place,” his mother, Sheila Tingle, said yesterday. “It’s exciting. It’s unbelievable, really. But it’s all he ever wanted to do.”
Tingle, a 52-year-old Attleboro native raised in Randolph, Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are expected to dock at 3:43 a.m. at the station, where they will join Expedition 54 Commander Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA.
The crew members will spend more than four months conducting approximately 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, earth sciences, human research, physical sciences and technology development, NASA said.
Also watching this morning will be University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor emeritus Ron DiPippo, a former chairman of the school’s mechanical engineering department, who remembers Tingle approaching him as a freshman in 1983 and asking to transfer into the engineering program because he wanted to become an astronaut.
“This was stunning,” DiPippo said yesterday. “The kid’s, like, 18 years old, and he was really determined.”
DiPippo signed off on the transfer, and Tingle did not disappoint.
After graduating from UMass in 1987, he went on to earn a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, was commissioned as a Navy officer in 1991 and was selected by NASA in 2009.
“I feel good I gave him that chance,” DiPippo said. “Not only was he a very good student, he was also a really nice person.”
The two never lost touch. Every year, Tingle sends him a Christmas card. And DiPippo, his former instructor in thermodynamics, says he still has a poster Tingle made when he was a senior, featuring a “not too flattering” photo of his mentor with the caption, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back to class, the Thermonator shows up.”
And so at 2:21 a.m. Sunday, DiPippo found himself logged on to NASA’s website, watching his protege lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, chasing his dream.
“It was a great thrill for me,” DiPippo said. “How many times do you get to see one of your students blast off into outer space?”