San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO’
Space: Southwest Research Institute scientist is closer to space after recent Virgin Galactic flight.
Most people who study space will never get there. But their odds are at least improving with the rise of commercial space flight.
In fact, a researcher with strong San Antonio ties is slated to get his chance.
In October, NASA selected
Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and Southwest Research Institute associate vice president, to be the first private-sector researcher to fly and conduct space agencyfunded experiments aboard a commercial spacecraft.
The former San Antonio resident is scheduled to perform the NASA experiments on two flights aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo sometime in late 2022.
With the flights, Stern will achieve a lifelong goal he’d gotten close to but never achieved.
The 63-year-old’s journey to the heavens started during the heady days of the space race.
“Just being a kid, watching the development of the very early space program — the most futuristic, amazing, historic, largerthan-life enterprise you’d ever want to be a part of,” said the scientist, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2007 and 2016. “And it might be a little boring, but, you know, it’s kind of all I ever wanted to do.”
The author of three books and more than 370 papers and articles said his folks tried to talk him out of pursuing a career looking to the skies.
“I really never had any other interests except to be in space exploration and be a scientist, or maybe be an engineer — so it’s pretty deep-rooted,” Stern said. “I’ve been very fortunate that I was good at the technical skills in university, and I’ve been able to have an entire career around spaceflight.”
A career studying space is different from most fields, he said. Researchers in other fields are usually able to do their research on the scene.
“I’ve been working on space for decades and never been there, and that’s perfectly typical of everyone, except for a very few select people,” he said. “And what’s starting to happen now is that slowly but surely, we’re getting to a little bit of a normalization.
“I’m very fortunate and privileged in the vanguard of that, where researchers can finally do their work in space instead of having to automate everything at great expense and risk of failure, because automations oftentimes have the problem.”
Before the Virgin Galactic opportunities, the closest Stern came to space was in the mid-1990s when NASA named him a space shuttle mission specialist finalist, but ultimately it didn’t choose him to fly. Subsequently, NASA selected him to fly as a shuttle payload specialist but later replaced him with a Canadian astronaut.
Striking a balance
When asked about balancing life and work, he said it’s easier
now that his children are adults.
“I work very long hours, every day of every week, even on vacation,” he said. “I really love this business, and I wish that I could live to be 200 years old, but that’s not realistic, so I’m just going pedal to the metal.”
During the SpaceShipTwo flights, Stern will operate a lowlight camera to test astronomical observations from space. The other experiment will monitor his vital signs during the two-hour flight as part of a biomedical study.
The company’s space launch program is still in testing. SpaceShipTwo recently performed its first successful flight to space from its Spaceport America facility outside Las Cruces, N.M. The test marked the company’s third spaceflight and the first crewed flight to space from New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic uses Eve, a mothership, to carry a compact space plane, Unity, to a high altitude. Unity then drops from Eve and fires a rocket for 60 seconds as it accelerates and climbs into space. Each flight provides passengers from four to six minutes of weightlessness before descending back to Earth.
According to Stern, passengers experience five times the force of gravity, or Gs, on the ascent and 6Gs during the descent.
During the recent test, Unity reached speeds three times the speed of sound and an altitude of more than 55 miles. According to Air Force and NASA definitions, space begins at an altitude of 50 miles.
The flight marks a milestone in Stern’s journey to the heavens. The scientist, who currently works at SwRI’s Boulder, Colo., facility, was thrilled to see SpaceShipTwo’s successful flight. He called it “a fantastic success” and “a key step on the road to commercial service for tourism and for research missions.”
Stern, a one-time chief of space and Earth science programs at NASA, said he doesn’t have a firm timeline for his flights but expects the company to fly its first commercial “space tour