As a child growing up in Eugene, Dr. Stanley G. Love dreamt of becoming a spaceman. In late 2007, his lifelong pursuit of that dream will find him strapped to a rocket in a high-speed, cheek-rippling scream into outer space.
Love, who has worked at the University as a lab assistant and computer programming instructor, will blast off to work at the International Space Station.
In an e-mail, the NASA Astronaut and Eugene native spoke with the Emerald about his hopes, history, fears and fascination with space that have grasped him as far back as he can recall.
Love wrote that he feels fortunate for the incredible opportunity and that the danger and importance of his mission will require him to focus on working with drive and efficiency. Still, the trip will be a realization of a dream he has held since his earliest years and his excitement is tangible.
“Riding a rocket to orbit, feeling weightlessness when the main engines cut off, seeing the International Space Station… There’s no part of this that won’t be really cool,” Love wrote.
Love’s responsibilities on the mission, which will aim to add the 23 foot by 15 foot Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station, include operating the shuttle and station’s robot arms and possibly helping the commander and pilot in operating the shuttle.
As far as Love has gone, he still sees Eugene as his hometown.
His parents, Glen and Rhoda, moved to the Emerald City in 1965 when he was two months old, so Glen could teach English at the University.
He attended Winston Churchill High School in Eugene before studying physics at Harvey Mudd College, a prestigious, private liberal-arts school in Claremont, Calif. specializing in math and science. During summers he would come home and work at the University of Oregon to earn money for flight school, he wrote. One year he taught computer programming to junior-high and high-school students as part of a University program for gifted students, and in others assisted in chemistry and physics labs. His senior year he couldn’t find much work on campus so he worked in a corn cannery here that has since closed.
“There’s nothing like cannery work to make you appreciate academia,” Love wrote.
He then earned a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Washington. He worked as a planetary scientist at several universities and before the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena Calif. hired him as an engineer.
“I was well trained for a space-related career… and not so well trained for anything else,” he wrote, “so quitting would have been harder than continuing.”
While working these different jobs, Love applied over and over again to become an astronaut. When he was finally hired, Love jokingly attributed his success not to his own qualifications, but that “after seven annual application cycles and three one-week interviews in Houston (in 1994, 1995, and 1997), the selection board was getting sick of the sight of me! So they hired me rather than having to look at my application again.”
Now, after years of working for NASA, Love is training relentlessly so that on his own journey he will be prepared for every task he and his crew will have to perform and so he will be ready for anything that may go wrong.
On the topic of space aliens, Love wrote the short answer is “we don’t have any data,” and that while aliens are never mentioned with a straight face at NASA, he wrote that if he met one he would make sure to take photographs.
His mother, Rhoda, a biologist, said she heard the news of his trip shortly before her and Stan’s father Glen’s 50th wedding anniversary. Stan developed missions and trained since his selection as an astronaut in 1998, so his family has had adequate time to prepare themselves for his acceptance on a mission, but the news was still shocking.
“It was like it came out of space, as it were,” his mother said.
In his youth Stan idolized astronauts that were public figures at the time like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
“He never got over that,” his father said. “He was that kind of kid. He had a John Glenn picture on his lunch pail.”
Contact the news reporter at [email protected]