Space Shuttle Endeavor Commander Mark Kelly would have liked to have been the first person to walk on Mars. But during his career as a NASA astronaut, he has had no shortage of amazing experiences, including launching into space, which he shared with a Flagstaff audience on Saturday, June 7.
“It is literally like the hand of God coming down and grabbing you and ripping you off the planet,” he said.
The retired astronaut, former Navy captain and test pilot adds that seeing Earth from space is remarkable, too.
“When you go up in an airplane, you kind of get the sense that you’re on something round, but not really. If someone told you that it’s flat you’d believe him, right? But in orbit seeing this big blue ball just floating there in the blackness of space, no strings attached just floating there, is pretty incredible.”
Previously reserved for astronauts, Kelly is working to make that incredible experience available to private citizens, too. He is one of the founders of the Tucson-based space tourism company, World View.
“We’re going to take people in a spacecraft, not quite into space, but really, really high, like above 110,000 feet, so above 99 percent of the atmosphere where you can see the Earth as a planet from that very high vantage point,” Kelly said. “You don’t have to ride in a rocket ship. It’s a longer flight. We’re starting to do some subscale testing and we hope to be flying people here by 2016 – passengers – so that’s pretty exciting.
The World View website states, “Your view of the world is about to change.” And for the introductory ticket price of $75,000, you can book your trip now! The website explains, “A small security deposit of $5,000 guarantees this price and the earliest available seat.”
Meanwhile, Kelly says there is a lot out there to be discovered. He says the Kepler planet finder, a space observatory launched by NASA, recently conducted some studies that reveal the number of potential Earth-like planets is huge.
“As we get better at astronomy and better at astrophysics and places like the Lowell Observatory here in Flagstaff improves its capability, we’re going to start to learn more about these planets that we’ve just started to find – and maybe not too far in the distant future. Maybe we’ll be able to tell if a planet that’s in another solar system somewhere else in our galaxy has life on it. It’s not unforeseeable that that could happen.”
His last space visit, a 10-day trip that launched May 16, 2011, included four space walks for the Endeavor crew, docking with the International Space Station and the installation of a $2 billion cosmic particle detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which Kelly describes as “kind of like a telescope” that searches for material that was around at the beginning of the universe.
“What this thing’s looking for is dark matter, dark energy and this thing called anti-matter, which should be in abundance when the universe started, but we don’t know what happened to any of it.”
For space study here on Earth, Kelly acknowledges the importance of cities like Flagstaff, which in 2001 was designated as the world’s first International Dark Sky City.
He says he and his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, are strong supporters of dark sky legislation. “One of her [Giffords’] first successful pieces of legislation when she was in the state house was a dark skies bill to put some regulation in there on how we light the skies, whether from billboards or buildings or streetlights, what kind of streetlights we use, light bulbs, to try to preserve this great resource we have here in Arizona, which is dark skies. We’ve got telescopes all over the state. And there’s a reason they’re here and they’re not in places like Los Angeles, for instance, because you can’t see the stars.”
Kelly, who has been to the International Space Station X times, says astronauts who have spent six months there can recognize a city by the color of the light.
“A city like Moscow, for instance, looks totally different because of the kind of gas that are in the light bulbs and the kind of filament they have, like in all the streetlights. But you can see a lot from space at night. The brightest place on Earth is Times Square. And after that, it’s the Strip in Vegas.”
Kelly also says quality education is important to the future of the U.S. space program, as well as to our nation’s national security. As a Navy aviator who flew 39 combat missions in the Persian Gulf War, he says one of our biggest threats is related to education and the decrease in the number of scientists, engineers and mathematicians our country produces each year.
“Any time you can get kids engaged in science and math, whether it’s through the space program or something the Navy’s doing now with the military and an aircraft carrier that’s kind of like Space Camp, any of those things that make kids think about math and science and can motivate them to go into that field is a really big deal.”
Kelly visited Flagstaff as part of Lowell Observatory’s Speaker Series with his presentation, “Endeavor to Succeed.”
He ended with a message from Giffords, who continues to recover from a gunshot wound to the head when she and 18 others were shot in a Tucson-area parking lot on Jan. 8, 2011. “Be passionate, be courageous, be strong, be your best.” FBN
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