November 11, 2005

By Matt Kelly

Just weeks after returning from space, U.Va. alumnus Greg Olsen explained to a packed audience in Newcomb Hall on Nov. 8 that “without U.Va., I would not have gotten into space.” Citing the training and education he received at U.Va., he summarized, “I had a lot of people up there with me.”

Scientist and entrepreneur Olsen, 60, became the world’s third citizen space explorer on Oct. 1, when he began more than a hundred orbits of Earth. He spent eight of his 10 days in space aboard the International Space Station, where he performed three science experiments to study the human body’s reaction to the absence of gravity.
A 1971 Ph.D. graduate in materials science, Olsen enthusiastically praised his alma mater for its support, as well as some of his teachers, including William A. Jesser, who chairs the Department of Materials Science and Engineering Professor Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf.

He also lauded fellow U.Va. alum Eric Anderson (Class of 1997), co-founder, president and CEO of Space Adventures, the company that has organized the spaceflights for the world's first three private space explorers. Anderson shared the stage with Olsen for part of the presentation. Olsen sold his fiber optic business, Sensors Unlimited, Inc, in 2000, and paid $20 million for his flight into space.

Olsen shuns the labels “astronaut” and “cosmonaut,” though he completed 900 hours of training in the Russian system for his flight, saying he has too much respect for the professionals who fly machines like the shuttle. He did have high praise for his Russian hosts and their space program.

Always fascinated by space, Olsen said he was inspired to visit the space station, which orbits with a Russian cosmonaut and a U.S. astronaut, after reading a New York Times account of Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. Olsen said his generation “bought into” President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

While the trip to the moon had been a race with the Soviet Union, Olsen predicted the next leap, a trip to Mars, will be an international effort.

“Mars will be a big bite,” he said.

The space station is important to the Mars effort, Olsen said, because it is a laboratory for learning how to live in space. A cosmonaut currently holds the record for the longest time spent in space — 802 days, though not consecutively. The consecutive record is more than 400 days, Olsen said. This gives scientists opportunities to study prolonged exposure to life in space. There is a lot to adjust to in the weightless environment, Olsen said, noting he slept vertically, in a sleeping bag tethered to the wall. Everything has to be secured or it will float away, including liquids. In a short video clip, Olsen demonstrated drinking water that floated toward him in marble-sized spheres.

While the space station operates arbitrarily on Greenwich Mean Time, Olsen said the orbiter circles the earth 16 times a day, giving them a sunrise and sunset every hour and a half.

“You lose all sense of day and night,” he said, “The first two nights I didn’t sleep well.”

When not sleeping, the view out the window was stellar. Outside of Earth’s atmosphere, more stars are visible, and while familiar constellations could be found, they were sometimes hard to distinguish because of all the other suddenly visible stars. When he looked in the other direction, he was impressed with the frailty of the planet Earth, a blue sphere surrounded by a 10-mile atmosphere like a protective eggshell against the black of space. “You see how fragile it is and you think ‘We live on this,’” he said.

It was more than a sightseeing tour for Olsen, who conducted experiments in spine compression, and for the presence of bacteria in a spacecraft. He had planned an experiment with a spectrometer from the University’s Astronomy Department, but the required camera, built by Olsen’s company, has military applications and was not cleared for the flight. The spectrometer is still in orbit, and Olsen said he hoped to get a camera to to complete the experiments. As a away of thanks, Olsen presented members of the astronomy department with a U.Va. pennant he carried to the space station with him.

His two biggest fears, Olsen confessed, were that he would be afraid, and that he would not go into space at all. He was scrubbed at one point because an x-ray revealed a spot on his lung. While the spot later went away, Olsen was apprehensive, even after being reinstated in the program, that he would still be dropped for something. At the Oct. 1 launch, instead of being scared, he said he was “happy, serene and peaceful.”

“No one can take this away from me now,” he remembered thinking when the rocket started to lift off.

Having returned from space, Olsen’s new mission is to bring that experience to as many elementary school students as possible. He wants to awe them with gloves he wore in space and encourage them to study math and science to be able to follow in his footsteps.

Olsen called the trip life-changing, confirming his scientific beliefs. “It was like magic,” he said. “You can study this in physics, but to actually be the experiment yourself … I carry an obligation to share this with people. It wasn’t just a joy ride.”