Fulfilling a scientist’s dreams
SWRI exec goes to the edge of space on a Virgin Galactic ship
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. — Alan Stern achieved a lifelong dream Thursday, rocketing to the edge of space aboard a Virgin Galactic ship on a flight that was the 65-year-old space scientist’s first-ever experience as an astronaut.
After the space plane he rode for about 60 minutes glided back to Earth at Spaceport America, the Southwest Research Institute associate vice president was already thinking about his second mission.
“Let’s go get ’em,” he said. “I’m ready for the next one.”
After quick medical checks, he and his crewmates were greeted by family, friends and fellow astronauts amid hugs, cheers and high-fives.
Stern, a former NASA associate administrator who applied six times to be a NASA astronaut and was never selected, said commercial space operations such as Virgin Galactic are opening new avenues for research and increased understanding of the heavens.
“I think we’re really opening doors to something really important. We’re finally taking space research out of the realm of robots and letting people do the experiments they do just like in every other laboratory and field environment on the Earth,” he said. “And I can’t wait for more researchers to fly like we did and accomplish their goals.”
Beyond fulfilling dreams held since boyhood, his goals Thursday were to conduct a space physiology experiment and train for a future flight during which he’ll use the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System, a sort of telescope, to observe stars and other objects in space.
He carried some of his own special objects into space Thursday. Each crewmember was allowed to take two small zip-close bags with personal items. He carried pictures of family, mission patches and a ring his late father made and gave to him. He also carried the ground-down nub of a pencil
that he wrote in a blog post before takeoff “symbolizes the perseverance that many of my spaceflight projects have required to succeed.”
Though he’d never been to space, Stern has had roles in about 30 earlier space missions.
He also carried a small model of the SWRI mascot, a roadrunner.
‘Deliberate risk’
Before he and his crewmates boarded the VSS Unity, the plane-launched rocket they rode to space, Stern said he saw the flight as a “deliberate risk” that was “well worth the rewards.”
Under a clear blue sky at midmorning, a Virgin Galactic aircraft dubbed the VMS Eve carried Unity to an altitude of 44,000 feet before releasing the rocket, which fired its own engines to head nearly 50 miles higher.
From the ground at Spaceport, the orange flash of the rocket ignition and the contrails of Eve and Unity could be seen as they separated and the craft flew toward space.
As they reached weightlessness, Stern and the others unbuckled from their seats to perform research experiments and peer out the windows. During about three minutes of zero gravity, Unity did a feather maneuver — basically a back flip — and floated for a time with its cabin roof facing Earth. It continued its rotation to put its nose down, reentered Earth’s atmosphere and glided safely back to Spaceport.
Stern was ecstatic upon landing.
“First thing, everybody needs to do this,” he said. Then, motioning toward Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, Stern said, “You need to make a lot more spacecraft.”
Also on board were commander Mike Masucci; pilot Kelly Latimer; payload specialist Kellie Gerardi, a bioastronautics researcher for the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences; and an unidentified private astronaut.
Masucci and Latimer are Air Force Academy graduates, and Thursday’s jaunt to space was the first Virgin Galactic mission where two academy grads flew in the front seats.
A couple of hundred people including past and future Virgin Galactic astronauts gathered in the main Spaceport building to witness the mission. What they couldn’t see from the ground was available to them on a private video feed.
‘Sobering’
In a Thursday morning blog post titled “Of risk and reward,” Stern articulated his thoughts before taking off.
“At least for me, it’s always a little sobering to take deliberate risks. But I’ll do that today, as I have in the past, because the risks of this flight are so well worth the rewards,” he wrote. “On this mission, I expect to contribute to the commercial opening of space, to the new and powerful future for human suborbital research missions, for science, to bring back experiences to share, and to be able afterwards to inspire others to greater accomplishments than my own.”
Dan Durda, a SWRI scientist and co-investigator, has worked with Stern on space research for more than 25 years. He helped Stern prepare for the flight and was at Spaceport on Thursday.
“It couldn’t possibly be a better morning,” he said. “There are zero issues with the vehicle. The weather is outstanding, the winds actually died down a lot.”
Durda ran through a checklist to help Stern suit up. His gear included the biomedical harness Stern wore as part of his research. The harness, like a halter monitor worn to monitor heart function, included electrocardiogram leads and a blood pressure cuff.
During the flight, Stern also operated a brick-sized simulator of the camera he will operate on a future mission with Virgin Galactic, which will be funded by NASA. Thursday’s flight was paid for by SWRI.
Beyond his work in the institute’s office in Boulder, Colo., Stern is also the principal investigator on NASA’S New Horizons mission that’s exploring Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
He was Virgin Galactic’s 20th astronaut since founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight to space in July 2021. Thursday’s flight was the company’s sixth in sixth months.
In earlier posts on his “My Suborbital Life” blog at the Nasawatch website, Stern reflected on his coming journeys to space.
“To be honest, I have wanted to fly aboard space missions since I was a kid growing up in awe of the Apollo program,” he wrote in one post. “As a young engineer, and then as a young scientist, I did everything I could think of to make myself a top candidate to be a NASA astronaut.”
Those efforts, though, never came to fruition.
“It’s hard for me to process how long I have held this dream and how much effort, most of it unsuccessful (or at best preparatory), that I’ve invested to realize it,” he wrote. “And now it’s truly surreal to write that I am flying on the very next human spaceflight mission.”