What It Feels Like...

To almost fly in outer space.

Dr. Greg Ojakangas has a Ph.D. in planetary science and teaches at Drury. He once worked at NASA. In 1994, he earned a one-in-a-thousand chance to be one of two dozen finalists for the U.S. astronaut program. He has yet to make it to space, but he still consults for NASA occasionally.

I went to CalTech. I tell my students everything happens at CalTech. I was fortunate to go there. CalTech is a place that administers a lot of space missions. It started out as just a few geeks in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains making little rockets and shooting them off... then it turned into this gigantic facility where we have sent missions to every planet now.

I later took a job at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where all the astronauts live and work. They launch from Florida, but they live and train and have their families in Houston. I worked there years as an orbital debris scientist, which basically is a space garbage man, studying space garbage. I still do that.

There are more than 800 pounds of moon rocks in this little building in Houston where I worked. It’s the only place in the world where there are moon rocks just right upstairs. When you go away from there, you realize people think of NASA as “Oooohhh, this amazing place,” and it is, but when you’re working for them, you not only see the good, but also you see the bad. You realize it’s full of fallible human personalities, and some of them are pretty silly. In some ways, it’s like any other place you might work. It’s not like this magical place full of geniuses. There’s a lot of neat stuff going on there, but you see both sides.

I worked three years at the Johnson Space Center. A lot of my friends were astronauts. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut. It’s very difficult to become one, though. There are so many people who want to. When you’re there, it’s sort of an interesting place because there are astronauts all over, and they’re ordinary people who are very smart and just got to be astronauts. From seeing that, it sort of becomes more possible in your mind to become one, so I applied while I was there. You have to update your application every year. You fill out a huge stack of forms. They ask you every possible question you could ever imagine.

The one I remember being sort of odd was “Have you ever burped and tasted a sour taste in the back of your throat?” Sort of weird. I checked yes. They ask you about everything else in your personal history.

After three years, I had taken a position at the University of Minnesota physics department, but I kept updating my application. One day I got this call from the astronaut selection office. I’ll always remember that moment because I’m sitting in my office early in the morning, and I get this phone call, “Dr. Ojakangus, this is the astronaut selection office. We were wondering if you’re interested in coming down as a finalist in the astronaut selection program.”
And I pretended to look at my schedule, and I said, “Yes, I, uh, think I can make it.” So it was August of 1994 that I went down to Houston for a week of testing at the Johnson Space Center. They bring down about two dozen people, and they put you through all these bizarre tests. They put you in this tiny zippered sphere called a rescue sphere, and it’s supposedly for rescuing astronauts from hazardous situations. You’ve got wires attached to you—they want to know if you’ll have an anxiety attack. It’s really small, so that was peculiar.

When I was down there as a finalist, I met Rick Husband, who was a finalist the same week as me. He made it in as an astronaut. I was disqualified because they ask you if you’ve ever had any loss of vision. When I was in college, I had migraine headaches, and sometimes with that I’d have spots in my vision, which is typical. I didn’t still have a problem with it. Unfortunately, that disqualified me. Then the medical director changed the rules just for me, so I was requalified. But then they never called me back. So I’ve been waiting now for 13 years. I don’t think it’s going to happen. It was an interesting experience.

Rick Husband made it into the program, and we stayed in contact by e-mail. He was a really humble guy. He was the commander of the Columbia, which burned up [on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, in 2003]. I met the pilot of the Columbia in Houston the summer of ’94. His name was Willy McCool. It turned out he went to the same middle school I did in Duluth, Minnesota. He was the pilot, and Rick was the commander. It was a particularly emotional experience when that burned up. My son, Leon, is a real goofball, and most the time isn’t very serious, but when that happened, I remember him saying, “Dad, I’m glad you weren’t in that space shuttle.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t, too.”

In fact, there’s a good chance that if I had made it into the program that I would have been on there, because it takes years to get to your first shuttle flight. Three of the people on that mission were in my own selection year of finalists.

So you know, I’m glad to be alive.