Lichtenberg was the first American astronaut to serve as a Spacelab "payload specialist" in the shuttle program.
This watershed moment in America’s space exploration program is a bittersweet time for Byron K. Lichtenberg.
He’s old enough to be a member of the first generation of Americans to know their dreams of flying into space really could come true after Alan Shepard rocketed into the history books in 1961.
He’s accomplished enough to have landed among a distinguished group of those who are astronauts.
And, as the flight of Atlantis brings NASA’s space shuttle program to a close, Lichtenberg has the experience to provide a perspective from which to ponder the future of how we will explore space.
Nearly two decades ago, Lichtenberg’s second mission as a space shuttle scientist was aboard Atlantis, and if he had his way, this would not be its final journey.
“While I realize that NASA’s budget is tight, I would really like to see them keep flying the shuttles, maybe one or two a year, until we have a demonstrated crew transportation system,” Lichtenberg said this week as he headed to Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the launch of America’s last space shuttle mission and a reunion with his crewmates of STS-45. (That mission was captained by Charles F. Bolden Jr., who now serves as administrator of NASA.)
"I believe we should go back to the moon and set up a permanent base there, so we get experience living and working outside the Earth’s environment."Lichtenberg believes NASA has delivered the nation its money’s worth with the space shuttle program over the past 30 years – $209 billion.
“When we started the shuttle program it was presented as a routine and rapid way to get to space,” Lichtenberg said. “The original design goal was to fly a mission a week for 10 years with five shuttles. As soon as the shuttles were built, the program was then supposed to transition to the space-station assembly. We clearly missed that, big time, but the original goal was admirable.”
The shuttle program became bogged down, Lichtenberg reflected, when the craft had to be refurbished after each journey instead of being able to be more immediately reused on rapid-turnaround missions. And, the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger made the process of preparing for new shuttle missions more time-, labor- and finance-consuming.
“After Challenger, it became even more labor intensive so that NASA could never get ahead of the budget curve and put meaningful money into the space station program,” Lichtenberg said. “We learned a lot, and I think now have made the right, although painful in the near term, choice to work with private industry to provide transportation to low Earth orbit.”
Lichtenberg sees this final shuttle flight as “not the end, just a transition,” as NASA refocuses its mission and civilian companies take up the task – and financial burdens – of moving space travel and exploration forward. “There are four or five companies that have very strong prospects to put together an incredible transportation system,” he said.
Lichtenberg appears to be living proof that you can take the astronaut out of space, but the astronaut may never lose that yearning to explore which landed them among that small group of people to have traveled in space. He completed his two shuttle missions – 310 orbits of the Earth and 468 hours in space – during his tenure as a pilot with the Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing in Westfield.
Ask Lichtenberg what’s next in the sphere of exploring space, and there seems to be no outer limit.
“I believe we should go back to the moon and set up a permanent base there, so we get experience living and working outside the Earth’s environment,” Lichtenberg said. “Then we should head to Mars and the asteroids. The space station will remain as a national laboratory to conduct a range of experiments.”
Don’t be too quick to discount this prospect of an outpost on the moon and of man on Mars or an asteroid; in an interview with The Republican back in 1992, Lichtenberg said he dreamed of running a space tourism program. He went on to start a company called Zero Gravity Corp. (www.gozerog.com) for which he now serves as chief technical officer, and was also involved in the start-up of Spaceadventures Corp. (www.spaceadventures.com) which purchased Zero Gravity several years ago.
Zero G provides 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.”