Businessman goes from NJ to outer space

WANTAGE - $20 million can go a long way. It took Dr. Greg Olsen all the way into space. Olsen, the co-founder of a Princeton-based company that makes infrared cameras, shared his experiences as the third private citizen to make a paid trip into space with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) chapter in Wantage on Oct. 16. Olsen’s voyage to the outer limits began three years ago when he was sipping coffee at a Starbucks in Princeton and reading about the first two private citizens who paid $20 million each to Space Adventures Ltd. to journey into space. Olsen, whose boyhood idols included Astronaut John Glenn, contacted Space Adventures and was eventually selected to join a two-man crew on a Russian Soyuz rocket that was headed to the International Space Station some 220 miles from Earth. “When I first heard about the first civilian going into space, I knew my brother would follow,” says Valerie Seufort, a Vernon resident who is also the registrar for the local DAR chapter. But in early 2004, when Olsen was two months into a seven-month training program, he got booted out. A chest X-ray had detected a small spot on one of Olsen’s lungs. “I was devastated,” says Olsen, who also owns a Montana ranch and a South African winery. Although the spot turned out to be harmless, it took Olsen nine months of intense lobbying supported by clean medical reports to get reinstated into the program. “Don’t give up,” says Olsen, 61, of the lesson that episode illustrates. “If you want to reach your goals, just don’t give up.” Olsen resumed his training in May 2005 in Star City, Russia. Since NASA doesn’t take private citizens into space, Olsen’s only option was to fly on a Russian-made Soyuz rocket out of Kazakhstan. Training was intense, says Olsen. A typical day started at 6 a.m. with a two-mile run, breakfast, classes from 9 to 4 p.m. and additional training from 4 to 6 p.m. This included zero-gravity training or what astronauts and cosmonauts refer to as “The Vomit Comet,” says Olsen. “Fortunately, I never got sick. After doing this three times, I realized I would enjoy being weightless.” Olsen was teamed with Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and American astronaut Bill McArthur. Ten days before their Oct. 1 launch, the three men were placed in isolation to help prevent them from carrying a cold or flu bug to other scientists on the International Space Station. Then the day of the launch arrived. Olsen donned his space suit and was strapped into his seat inside the rocket. When the rocket began to lift off the ground, says Olsen, “You hardly feel anything.” But then as the launch vehicle accelerates through the atmosphere and reaches a force of 3.5 times gravity, “you have to push back in your seat.” Otherwise, the ride was smooth, he says. Fifty miles above the earth’s surface, a shroud outside of a window in the rocket was intentionally detonated “and then I saw this big, blue sphere receding in the distance,” says Olsen. Meanwhile, back at the launch pad, Seufort sipped champagne with family and friends of other crew members. It took just ten minutes for the three-man crew to reach space. But because the capsule orbits the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, it took the team two days to gently dock the craft with the space station. Olsen showed video highlights of his ten days in space, including clips of him gulping down dehydrated food and water after it floated towards his mouth in zero gravity. Because water isn’t pulled down by gravity in space, Olsen and his crew team weren’t permitted to shower. Instead, they used wet wipes to clean themselves. However, he and the other crew members did change into fresh socks and underwear each day, he says. One of the DAR audience members asked Olsen how astronauts use a bathroom in space. Astronauts use a toilet in which they have to slip their feet into foot straps so they don’t float away while they’re doing their business, says Olsen. Waste is captured by vacuum pressure into a cylinder, which is later discarded with other garbage that crew members accumulate. Olsen also showed a picture of himself sleeping in a zippered sleeping bag which includes an attached pillow. He and other crew members would tether themselves to posts so they wouldn’t bang into the ship’s panels during the night. A shield is placed over the windows at night to keep light out since the space station passes through a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes as it continually orbits the Earth. Not everything went smooth for Olsen. He says he bonked his head several times on parts of the cabin when he was weightless. He also lost a digital camera that floated out of an unzippered pocket. “I looked for hours” and couldn’t find it, says Olsen, who adds that astronauts and cosmonauts claim to constantly lose things in the space station. Three weeks after Olsen had returned to Earth, Astronaut Bill McArthur discovered the camera and downloaded pictures from the space station to a Web site for Olsen to retrieve. Ten days after Olsen arrived in space, he headed back to Kazakhstan with the departing crew in a module that looked very similar to the old Apollo modules that preceded the space shuttle. As the module descended toward Earth, a parachute was deployed about five miles from the surface. Using seismic sensors, the module fired retro rockets to cushion the landing once the module was three feet off the ground. Ten minutes later, Olsen was out of the module and back on Earth. Although he didn’t feel lightheaded, two officials stood alongside him as he walked away from the module because some people who return from space can become dizzy upon re-entering the atmosphere and becoming reacquainted with gravity. Five hours after the module landed, Olsen was back at his apartment in Moscow. “Amazing,” he says. Olsen was also an inch taller than when he left for space, the result of his spinal column decompressing while in orbit. But the Earth’s gravity right-sized him within a day. “The joy of being there was just indescribable,” says Olsen. So would he do it again? “I’d go right back,” says Olsen, “but I’d have to sell another company” to pay for it. Not bad for a guy who failed trigonometry in high school.