vides what are called parabolic flights in a modified Boeing 727 that allow travelers to experience weightlessness. (Its clients, by the way, have included folks from Stephen Hawking to Buzz Aldrin, Martha Stewart to Keith Urban.)
Spaceadventures, Lichtenberg notes, is the company that has been sending “tourists” up to the space station for the past nine years “so I think that I am still really involved in commercial space tourism.”
A permanent manned-base on the moon may still be tens of years away, he says, but Lichtenberg is someone who believes it can happen, complete with a launch site for deeper exploration of space and factories and foundries that can manufacture the structural and other materials needed for the operation.
It was back in 1983 that NASA billed Lichtenberg and others who would follow him in the role of payload specialist as a “new breed of space travelers.” They were more scientists than career astronauts, and they’d be the ones conducting the experiments.
Lichtenberg, a biomedical engineer with credentials from MIT, and his German counterpart, Ulf Merbold, a physicist, were the crew members for the first flight of Spacelab in 1983; his second shuttle flight – the one as a member of the crew of Atlantis – came in 1992.
“I believe the early Spacelab missions were the ones that convinced the administration that a permanent space station was a necessity, so that we could do science in space the way we do it here on Earth. Do an experiment, look at the results, then modify it and do it again until you get meaningful results,” Lichtenberg said.
Now 63, he grew up as a member of a generation who thrived on the thrill and excitement of space travel in the “New Frontier” that John F. Kennedy described to the nation as the “most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”
Lichtenberg says he wanted to be an astronaut from the time he can remember reading science-fiction books in the 1960s.
“When the original astronauts went into space, I realized they were all military test pilots so I figured I would have to do that, too,” Lichtenberg added.
Even after graduating from Brown University in 1969 and completing a tour of duty as a decorated fighter pilot with the Air Force in Vietnam, Lichtenberg didn’t lose the yearning to explore space. It’s what propelled him off active duty and back to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical and biomedical engineering.
“I realized if I was a fighter pilot with a doctorate, I would have a better chance of getting into space,” he said.
His links with the Westfield community were strong during his days as an astronaut; a group of middle-school students and civic and business leaders were at Cape Canaveral for the liftoff of his journey aboard shuttle Atlantis. He worked to inspire a new generation of space traveler who would follow in his footsteps.
It’s been 12 years since Lichtenberg was last in Florida to see a space shuttle launch; that one was the final mission of the Spacelab. “That was the end of era,” he said on Thursday. “This (too) is the end of an era. It’s a chance for me to see a lot of old friends and experience this one last time.”