DEL.ICIO.USFrom Georgia to the stars
3 from Georgia Tech on space shuttle mission starting Friday
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, November 07, 2008
Some dreams are fulfilled with the ring of a phone, the turn of a key. Others are realized only when the earth shakes, the sky tilts and space beckons.
That’s the shared dream of Col. Eric Boe and Lt. Col. Robert “Shane” Kimbrough, who went to high school in metro Atlanta and got master’s degrees from Georgia Tech. This Friday, they are scheduled to be on board the space shuttle Endeavour as it roars into the heavens to the International Space Station.
NASA
Shane Kimbrough is a lieutenant colonel in the Army and attended West Point and Georgia Tech.
NASA
Eric Boe is a colonel in the Air Force and attended the Air Force Academy and Georgia Tech.
Boe, the shuttle pilot, is a 1983 graduate of DeKalb’s Henderson High School, a 1987 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Kimbrough finished The Lovett School in 1985, and followed that with an education at the U.S. Military Academy. Not satisfied with all that education, each augmented his resume with a master’s degree at Georgia Tech.
On board will be a third Yellow Jacket. Sandra Magnus, who got a doctorate from Tech in 1996, is making her second trip into space.
The flight is scheduled to lift off at 7:55 p.m. Fifteen days later, it is slated to return, mission — and dream — accomplished.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert S. Kimbrough, mission specialist
Shane Kimbrough told the 8-year-olds on the football team he coaches that he’s going to miss a few games.
“I’ll be back for the playoffs,” he told the 25 boys, including his son, Zack.
The father of three who grew up in Smyrna will leave his Houston-area home for a very important business trip Friday. As a NASA astronaut, he’s on his way to fulfilling his childhood dream.
“Humans in general want to explore,” said Kimbrough, 41. “This is the ultimate way to go.”
The son of a retired Army veteran got interested in the shuttle program by visiting his maternal grandparents near Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Now Kimbrough is combining his own military experience with this extensive education background as a mission specialist for the STS-126. The West Point graduate flew helicopters in Operation Desert Storm, earned a master’s degree from Georgia Tech, taught college math classes and became a lieutenant colonel before joining NASA eight years ago.
“He was the kind of guy you would hope your daughter would marry,” said Sandy Sturgeon of The Lovett School. She taught Kimbrough math before he graduated in 1985, and only recently realized the lasting affect of her lessons.
Sturgeon received a letter from NASA stating she was “instrumental in helping him get where he is today.”
She believes Kimbrough recognized her because she made calculus fun by showing students its practical use. “She made it real,” Kimbrough said.
Kimbrough played football and basketball at Lovett and was a standout pitcher and first baseman. The lefty was later captain of the baseball team at West Point.
“He just had ‘it,’ ” said high school friend and teammate Matt Biondo of Atlanta. The two helped lead the Lions to the football playoffs their junior year and still keep in touch.
While still a high school student, Kimbrough met his future wife, the former Robbie Nickels, in the youth program at Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta. Robbie attended Wheeler High, and the two were friends for a few years before they started dating. They wrote letters in pre-email days, while Robbie attended the University of Georgia, where she majored in international business.
The Kimbrough family — which includes 11-year-old twin daughters Kaitlyn and Taylor — will make the trip to watch the shuttle launch. Kimbrough will miss Thanksgiving, but he’ll be able to email his family and maybe even call home a time or two.
“It’s just a thrill to go and explore for our country,” said Kimbrough. “I try to be very humble, and I’m just honored to be in this position.”
Colonel Eric Boe, pilot
The thrill of watching metro Atlanta slip underneath his wings wasn’t enough. It couldn’t match the wonders above, in the inky, starlit reaches of space.
So when Eric A. Boe visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 1982, he set his eyes on the beyond. A cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, he looked at a model of the museum’s space shuttle, and knew.
“He said, ‘I’m going to fly that some day,’ ” recalled Philip Bowden, a former CAP commander who escorted the teen and his peers to the museum.
That day is imminent. On Friday, the 44-year-old Atlanta native is scheduled to take the controls of the space shuttle Endeavour and fly it to the International Space Station.
A colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Boe will fly a 15-day mission that some have likened to a home-expansion project. They will prepare the station to accommodate twice as many occupants as it holds now.
“I’ve had a lot of perceptions” about space, Boe said earlier this week. “We’ll see if it’s been worth the wait.”
The wait began when Boe was hardly out of grade school, spending weekends with older kids learning to fly with the CAP. He was so young that he wasn’t allowed to join. “He was more our mascot,” said Joe Knight Jr., another former squadron commander. “I believe his first uniform was ordered in the catalog from Sears, Roebuck.”
But Boe, like his dreams, grew. By the time he was a student at DeKalb’s Henderson High School, he’d become the cadet commander. After graduating in 1983, Boe entered the U.S. Air Force Academy. He finished the academy in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in astronautical engineering.
After graduation, his duty stations ran the gamut — Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas; the Philippines, where he flew a Phantom F-4E fighter jet; and Iraq, where Boe flew 55 combat missions during Operation Southern Watch. He has logged more than 4,000 hours in more than 45 different aircraft.
In 1997, Boe added a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech to his resume. In 2000, he applied to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be an astronaut. The agency accepted him.
Since then, Boe has undergone an array of courses that included a stint at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia.
Now, said Boe, who is married and the father of two, he is ready to take the training to the stars.
“This has been a far-off dream for me,” he said. “This is a really exciting time in my life.”
Now, it’s as far away as Friday, 7:55 p.m. If the launch goes as planned, Boe will watch Earth slip underneath his wings as he stares into the inky depths of space.
Sandra Magnus, flight engineer
The first time Sandra Magnus applied to be an astronaut, she wasn’t selected.
The following year, 1996, Magnus was in her office at Georgia Tech early one morning when the call came from NASA.
“She just started screaming after she hung up,” said Dr. Joe Cochran, an engineering professor at Tech. “We took her out to lunch.”
Cochran’s office was two doors down from Magnus, and he served on her dissertation committee before she earned her doctorate in material science.
While at Tech, Magnus was honored for her work as a graduate teaching assistant.
From Atlanta, Magnus headed to Johnson Space Center in Texas, where she trained until her first mission to space. In Oct. 2002, she traveled on the space shuttle Atlantis, logging more than 10 days in space.
For the upcoming mission, Magnus will be traveling with the STS-126 crew to the space station. But she’ll be catching a ride back a few months later, with the crew of STS-119.
“When someone comes through any of the engineering programs here, they’re ready to solve problems,” said Robert Snyder, chair of Tech’s school of materials science and engineering.
Magnus serves on an advisory committee for the school, and returns about at least once a year to the school, Snyder said.
But she’ll have to miss this year’s visit. She’ll be too far from home.
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