In contrast to most of my talks, I feel very relaxed here because I feel like I am amongst family and I am back home. And that’s good because a lot of these slides and videos are brand new and we are just putting them together. So you are seeing the first result of this and it will be an interesting experience. Getting into space, I owe it a lot to the University of Virginia. I never would have gotten into space without this university and without the education and training that I received. So I am very grateful for everyone that was responsible for training me. I see a lot of my old professors out in the audience and I hope they feel as good as I did about doing it because when I was up on the station, I felt like I had a lot of people with me and I realize it was because so many people had supported me in getting there. Anyway, I am very grateful and I am glad to be back here talking to you. Let me start out with a presentation. I did some space travel. I was trained in Russia and I received cosmonaut training.

Now I want to make one thing very clear. I am not a cosmonaut nor an astronaut. I’ve got far too much respect for the amount of training people like Kathy Thornton go through. I would never consider myself equal to that. It takes years and years of training to fly the shuttle or the Soyuz vehicle. I was very fortunate and I feel very lucky to have been able to be a passenger on that vehicle, but you don’t just go into space. I received over nine hundred hours of training and you’ve got to be prepared. I started off by doing flights as kind of a teaser to see what it was like. And the way I got into space was via a company was called Space Adventures and it might interest you to know that the founder of Space Adventures is Eric Anderson, who is also an alum of the Aerospace Department here at Virginia. And later on, we are going to have a question and answer talk.

All this stuff you are seeing up here has being generated by the University of Virginia so you can take a lot of pride on what’s going on. Flights going up at two and a half times the speed of sound, getting up to eighty thousand feet, seeing the curvature of the Earth. This is the sort of stuff that Space Adventures offers that I think everybody in this room can afford and would be capable of doing. So that was my start and here it is at the end of the flight and I am still alive and I liked it so I took the next step. As I mentioned, I don’t consider myself qualified to fly a Soyuz vehicle, but I am certainly qualified to fly inside of it. And in order to get that, I had to go through about nine hundred hours of training in Star City, which is about thirty miles east of Moscow and there was a lot of physical training, Russian language, which was by far the hardest part for me. We learned all about the International Space Station, the systems on it, primarily emergency training, flyer prevention, depressurizations toxicity, and survival training. I mean suppose you land in water. Suppose you land in a desert or blizzard area - how do you survive in that area?

It was a lot of training. I felt like I was back in college truthfully. I lived in a dormitory room. I had a small two-room apartment. Bill Jessard and maybe a couple other people here got to see it. A typical day for me – I would get up at seven and run about two miles around the lake. We would have breakfast. We had classes from about nine to four. Typically, in addition to the language training, all the systems on the vehicle as I mentioned. Even though I wasn’t flying the vehicle, we had to learn at least how all the systems worked. The safety, the radio, things like that. And then from four to six, we had more physical training. Typically weights, swimming, a little bit of running. And in the end, we had final exams, just like the students here. I would have them at the end of my training sessions at each segment. And the last two months of the training at Star City, we were pretty much working together as a crew. I flew with Valery Tokarev, who is the commander of the vehicle and then Bill McArthur who is a NASA astronaut, was a flight engineer. So towards the end, we trained as a crew and we had to have exams where we would demonstrate proficiency in flying the vehicle. And we were graded and the grading was pretty critical. They would observe us for hours flying and they would throw in what they called phenomenal situations and at the end, they would come down and be quite critical. You did this wrong and you did that wrong. It was like being a student, but we learned a lot and did go through some final exams and I had the same feeling inside when we did these exams as when I had any of your finals.

And I have to mention a lot of physical training. It is hard to imagine how someone out of shape would go into space. I mean you have got to stay in a very confined area for hours at a time. Even in weightlessness, as strange as that might seem, there is fair among of muscular effort required because of a thing called inertia. You know once you start going in one direction, you are going to continue going until that wall gets in your way. So you do a lot of this stuff in the beginning – blocking – and then all of a sudden you are going the other way and then you block there so all in all it takes a muscle skill and a fair amount of physical conditioning to do that so this is all a part of the training. This is a low-pressure chamber in which they pump the air out of it to test your space suit for leaks. There are a number of safety checks, but basically the air is pumped out of this vessel and you see if your space suit will work as it is supposed to in case your Soyuz vehicle gets depressurized. There’s equipment fitting, fire prevention. This is a smoke mask that not only will filter out smoke, but it enables you to breathe oxygen for up to a half hour while you are fighting a fire, if that should happen on the space station. Zero gravity training. They take you up in an airplane and you fly in a parabola which basically freefalls for almost thirty seconds. And I found this to be a good introduction to what it feels like to be weightless because for about, as I mentioned, almost thirty seconds, you are in a weightless condition. And it turned out even then, I knew I sort of liked it. It was a good introduction for me. After doing this flight, if I wasn’t already sold on the program, I definitely would have been. And would have signed up for it.

A lot of training on the Soyuz capsule. The Soyuz is the Russian vehicle that is used to launch to get up to the International Space Station. Leaves twice a year. For anyone who wants to go, you check in with Eric Anderson at Space Adventures. Here’s a picture of it at the facility, which builds the systems and the rockets and we’re able to see this as it was being constructed. And I was in Star City from early May of this year. Again we launched October 1. Periodically we would go to this facility and be able to inspect the Soyuz to see what we were actually going to fly in. And they would ask us, all three of the crew members, to inspect it and go over it with a detailed list and give them feedback on any changes we might like to make. Anyone who has gone to a launch will know that the Russians really do space well. The whole Russian Space Agency, they’ve got it down to a system. These are pictures of the Soyuz being assembled in the factory, but from here, it only takes about three and a half hours to get it from there to the launch pad. And they do it pretty much systematically like clockwork.

Here’s an example of the vehicle being hauled out to the launch pad. It is pulled by ordinary railroad locomotives. And again, about three and a half hours from inside the factory until it is up and ready to go. By the way, what you are looking at there, when it takes off, a peak of twenty million horsepower gets generated by this rocket so it is a high rate of energy. And here is a picture of us three minutes before takeoff. I’m on the left even though I am called the right-seater. The Valery Tokarev is in the center, the Russian cosmonaut and Bill McArthur is the NASA astronaut on your right and he is the flight engineer. And here is a picture of the launch. Actually it is a video. And you can see what twenty million horsepower looks like. People ask me what did I feel like taking off, was I scared, and what was going through my head. And I will tell you honestly what I felt. You know I went into training last year in April of the year 2004. And I had expected to fly October one year ago. But last June, I had a minor medical issue that was really minor and I was medically disqualified and I was not able to get back into the program until May of this year. So all during my training, the worry I had was that somehow, I wasn’t going to get to go. So I think all of you can appreciate that when the rocket was in this position, I felt nothing but joy when it was taking off. So I can honestly say that as opposed to fear, I felt finally after all of this work and aggravation, I am getting to go so I was a happy camper when that thing took off.

Here’s some video of when we got to the space station, what it looks like from the outside. That’s a solar cell panel you see and here’s a picture of the Earth. It just looks like a big blue ball. The same blue sky you see when you look up. And this is the Soyuz vehicle after it is docked at the station. And you see the Canada arm on the left. Finally, here’s some video of me doing some water tricks that you see most space people do. You can’t resist. I remember, I learned a lot about surface tension from Prof. Bill Jessard so I thought about this. You can’t resist. Everybody has to do it. These are called first timer experiments. But it demonstrates a good engineering thing. I mean without pressure, you are not going to be able to drink water. NASA has internet service and here I was typing an email to someone. You see what happens, even the pressure of typing on the keyboard is enough to force you up into the air. And what I kept thinking about was just mass, momentum, and inertia, these concepts, all these problems you solve your first year of physic classes – how you really get to experience it first hand. This was very special. I did bring a Virginia flag up with me.

And here’s a photograph. I am in the node in the NASA compartment holding up this flag. I’ll tell you a little story about this. I was hoping to take my company’s camera since it was unlimited Infrared camera up on the station. And in order to do that, the folks in the Astronomy Department here had designed a spectrometer to do some nice spatial imaging. It was a really neat and compact instrument and it required our camera in order to use. The problem we had with the camera is that we use it a lot of military applications. We had to get approval from the State Department to take it out of the country. It is a long, long story, but in the end, we were not able to take the camera with us, but I was able to take the spectrometer up and it is still sitting at the station now as we speak. And we hope that in successive missions, we’ll get a camera up there to use it. This is a detail, I am not going to get into the particulars, but this just shows what goes on in the launch with the various stages.

And people ask, “Weren’t you scared when all that happened?” When I went up, I was afraid that I might be afraid, but as it turned out when I actually got there, I wasn’t. It was actually a very pleasant experience for me. You know almost to the second when each one of these events happens. When a stage separates. When the docking occurs. When the undocking occurs. When the parachute unfurls. Each one of these stages is very planned. This has been going on for decades and you know almost to the second when each event happens and it helps give you confidence in the whole process. Here are some pictures of what happens. These are some combination of photographs and pictographs, but you see the Soyuz backs away from the station. When the Soyuz docks, there are some clamps that grip onto each other and when it is pulled in, it is actually spring-loaded so when the vehicle is released, springs actually push it away. It takes almost on the order of three hours to go from the undocking to when you land. But most of that time is backing away from the station and doing one orbit to make sure you cleared the station. From the de-orbit burn, it is only actually on the order of fifty minutes from the time when you start until when you land. Here is just again, a pictorial example of what the Soyuz vehicle looks like. And it is in three sections and we’ll give you a little better detail of what it looks like when it separates. Like here, when you get about roughly a hundred miles above the Earth, the two sections - the top section, the habitat module and the bottom instrument compartment – leaving the middle capsule, it looks like the Apollo system to land in. And you wonder if the thing looks like a lump, how can that fly and the answer is that it doesn’t fly, but when it goes through the atmosphere, it does slow down. It’s all that kinetic energy; you are turning seventeen thousand miles a hour down to almost zero. So you are converting it all to heat.

This was the most exciting part of the dissent. It’s when, through my window, I could actually see the plasma lighting up and to realize that I am in the middle of a blast furnace here. And even thought it felt like room temperature inside the capsule, I realized it was thousands of degrees outside. And we were surrounded by ionized particles. So it’s scary and it’s a little vibrating. Scary in an exciting way, but we know this had been done over a thousand times, both manned and unmanned successfully so we did not have too much worry about the end result. At about twenty thousand feet, parachutes began to deploy. There’s a whole serious of drogue and primary parachutes that come down and this slows your motion. And when the parachute deploys, that’s probably the most physically violent part of the dissent because you get not only the jerk from the parachute, but then the motion is kind of violent and shaky afterwards. But again, the thing that got us through this was knowing exactly when it was going to happen and what was going to happen even though I didn’t know what a parachute deployment was going to feel like, I knew it was coming and I knew that these violent actions were a part of the overall plan. Again you drift down and there’s some very interesting aerodynamics, which I’ll leave for your professors to go through on it. But a vehicle like that actually does have some lift to it even though you are largely at this point under the force of gravity, there are some minor controls that you do have with the dissent module. By rolling it, you can change whether you land ahead of your target or behind your target. It’s interesting, just having the weight off center, you can generate lift. The actual landing, about one meter off the surface, retrorockets flyer, which further soften the dissent.

People ask me what did the actual landing feel like. The closest thing is l could say is like someone tapping you in a car at about five miles a hour. It’s a bump, but I didn’t feel like it was anything violent. So our landing went very smooth. We landed only nine kilometers from our target, which is very close. Within two minutes of our landing, I heard helicopter blades in the air and I think in less than fifteen minutes, we were out of the vehicle. It was very successful and again, we all had a great time and it was a great experience for me. I am glad I did it. And I am glad I had the opportunity presented to me. And I am glad I went to this University, which gave me the training to do all those things that I did to get there.

Some closing comments. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. I had a great experience. I loved it. I did have any formalities when I was up there and just a really great time. What I learned – the Earth is round. Not only is it round, it is a sphere. And when you see how thin the atmosphere is around the Earth; that just struck me. It’s like an eggshell on a hardboiled egg, even thinner relatively. It just really struck me how thin and how fragile the atmosphere is. What impressed me the most? I have to say, I used to wake up every morning and just float in the air. It was like magic even though we are all trained about what’s going on, you know the gravity is still working and going seventeen thousand miles this way. But I felt like it was magic everyday when I would just float and I sat there and I felt like a kid and I felt how lucky I was just to get to experience this. So just in closing, this is the end of my formal presentation. I think Eric and I are going to be available to answer questions and again, I want to thank everyone here at this University very much getting me into space. Thank you all.

Audience Member #1, Question #1:
I have two quick questions for Eric. How close are you to offering short sub-orbital flights?

Response:
Probably three to five years away.

Audience Member #1, Question #2:
And for Mr. Olsen, where are you going next?

Response from Gregory Olsen:
Well Eric has this moon trip that I should tell you to ask him about that I don’t know if I am going on there, but it sure sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll let Eric give you a piece on that.

Response from Eric Anderson:
As Greg mentioned during his speech, the Soyuz spacecraft is a very a reliable spacecraft. The Soyuz rocket, the boost that it is launched on is actually launched almost seventeen hundred times in its various evolutionary forms since the very first launch. And so it is a very reliable system. And in fact, the Soyuz was designed originally to be a lunar spacecraft, but the Russian Soviet Union at that time lost its space race and decided that they would prefer to use their space program for developing space stations in other orbits after we came back from the moon. But that didn’t change one of the original design capabilities of the Soyuz, which was the ability to be able to travel between the Earth and the moon. And in fact, over the last couple of years, we have been studying the idea with our Russian partners of actually taking the Soyuz spacecraft, the same type that Greg used to go to the space station and after the space station flight, to docket, to rendezvous with another upper stage, which would hold fuel and give it the required energy to be able to go on a trans-lunar or circumlunar flight. So it would actually got to the space station, spend a week there, and then undock, rendezvous with a separate, let’s call it a fuel module that was launched by a different rocket and then to use that to go on a different circumlunar flight, which would be like figure eight around the moon. It’s actually a free return, but it would take the passengers on more to within sixty-eight miles lunar surface on the far side. So we analyzed that, actually in August at a press conference. And Greg actually talked about what that experience might be like, rather eloquently and maybe he might participate in it one day. We have a couple other people we are talking to about that. That is actually something we could launch within the next three or four years so it’s pretty exciting.