When Alan Stern launches to suborbital space this week on Virgin Galactic’s fifth industrial flight, he’ll accomplish the goal of a lifetime. Nevertheless it won’t be all play — Stern will probably be working during almost your entire mission.
That will not dilute the enjoyment of fulfilling his childhood dream, nonetheless. Growing up within the Apollo era, Stern watched flights to the moon launch with some regularity. Like lots of his generation, he expected crewed spaceflight to grow to be routine, expecting many more trips to the moon and, in relatively short order, voyages to Mars as well. As a substitute, he watched as only a handful of individuals climbed out of Earth’s atmosphere.
Stern, a planetary scientist on the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado and principal investigator of NASA’s Latest Horizons mission to Pluto and the outer solar system, will soon join their ranks. On Thursday (Nov. 2), he’ll take a transient trip to suborbital space on Virgin Galactic‘s Galactic 05 mission.
“I’ve done lots of things during the last 30 years which have led me to be prepared,” Stern told Space.com. To be so near heading into space is “really gratifying [and] a little bit surreal,” he said.
Preparation
Preparing for spaceflight isn’t the same as packing for a family vacation. As a part of his training for Galactic 05, Stern has accomplished three centrifuge sessions and three high-performance jet flights.
The jet flights weren’t like his previous research trips, during which he performed airborne astronomy on board F-18 Hornets and other combat aircraft. As a substitute, the flights reached high levels of acceleration, or Gs, to assist prepare the body for the rapid speeds achieved at launch.
“I can inform you, at the top of those flights, it’s similar to that scene in the unique ‘Top Gun’ movie within the locker room,” Stern said. “You are raining sweat.”
But he doesn’t expect his actual flight to be quite so physically demanding. “Identical to athletes, you train harder than the event,” Stern said.
A lifetime accomplishment
Stern’s fast-moving training is not the only way he has prepared for spaceflight. He has been working toward that goal throughout his profession.
“As a young engineer, after which as a young scientist, I did every part I could consider to make myself a top candidate to be a NASA engineer,” he wrote on Oct. 23, in a piece for The Space Review.
That included scuba diving, traveling to the South Pole, becoming a industrial pilot and even working as a state-certified Emergency Medical Technician. He applied six times to grow to be a NASA space shuttle mission specialist and was at one point approved to fly as a shuttle payload specialist, though he was later replaced by one other researcher.
Over the past decade, Stern has been encouraging scientists to travel into space via industrial space flight. Since 2010, Stern has helped to arrange the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, which brings together a whole lot of suborbital researchers, educators, flight providers, spaceport operators and others.
Stern has also campaigned tirelessly for the research and education marketplace in suborbital flight.
“When Virgin and Blue Origin began their business, they’d just one interest, and it was flying tourists,” Stern said. “I began talking to them about flying researchers and educators. They each try this now.”
“All of the suborbital flight providers on this industrial era are doing research along with tourist flights,” he said.
For Stern’s short flight, he has eight objectives laid out by SwRI. Most of those will help set the stage for his next suborbital flight, which will probably be funded by NASA. That upcoming flight will probably be purely research, Stern said.
While within the air, he will probably be working to familiarize himself with how the actual experience differs from training simulations, a process that can make future research flights flow more easily. He’ll be wearing a bioharness modeled after a design flown on greater than two dozen space shuttle missions, in response to his flight team member Dan Durda, also of SwRI. The harness will measure his blood pressure and heart rate and compare those figures to data from his centrifuge runs and zero-g flights, in addition to to the Virgin-Galactic-provided biomedical band.
As preparation for his upcoming NASA flight, Stern may also carry a functional mockup of the camera that he’ll carry on his second trip into space.
But the entire objectives aren’t strictly business. One thing Stern will probably be doing is to “mitigate the overview effect distractions” — a elaborate way of claiming, getting a glance out the window now so it won’t distract him on the subsequent flight.
“Once we’re there to get a really specific job done…we just about cannot ‘afford’ the ‘distractions’ of the remaining of this amazing experience,” Durda told Space.com by email. “So, getting that every one ‘out of the way in which,’ so to talk, is a crucial risk-reduction aspect of a primary flight like this.”
‘A rattling good time’
Does Stern have any concerns about his upcoming trip?
“You mean, apart from I might be killed?” he said.
He acknowledged that the danger is higher than it could be on a industrial airline flight. At the identical time, with greater than 24 zero-g flights under his belt, Stern has experience with potentially dangerous situations.
His greater fear is smaller than that. Within the week before his flight, Stern flew to Boston for a gathering with greater than 100 people to debate the Latest Horizons mission. “I don’t need to get something from anyone and be sick next week,” he said.
That fear is well founded. During Apollo 13, NASA astronaut Thomas Kenneth Mattingly was kept from launching into space as a result of exposure to German measles, which he never contracted. (Mattingly later flew on Apollo 16.)
While exposure would not be enough to maintain Stern from going to space, being sick likely would affect his flight capability. “I’m masking a good amount,” Stern said.
After several many years of attempting to get into space, what’s Stern most enthusiastic about?
“Accomplishing the objectives and having a rattling good time,” he said.