Rusty Schweickart

• 1. Introduction

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  Rusty Schweickart spent five minutes tethered outside his spacecraft, suspended above the Earth, and felt something shift inside him. Not fear, not exhilaration in the usual sense, but something closer to a philosophical reckoning. He stared at the planet below and began contemplating its place in the universe. That pause in March 1969, high above Earth on the Apollo 9 mission, would quietly shape the rest of his life in ways no flight plan could have predicted.

  Schweickart was born on the 25th of October, 1935, in Neptune Township, New Jersey. He grew up on a 45-acre farm that his family described as hardscrabble, where they raised hay, vegetables, poultry, and cows. His boyhood ambitions were to be a pilot and a cowboy. He would achieve only one of those dreams, and even that one would take him further than he ever expected.

  He would go on to test life-support equipment that twelve Moon walkers would depend on. He would help save the first American space station from catastrophic failure. He would later turn his attention to a threat most of humanity wasn't thinking about: the possibility that an asteroid could strike Earth. What connected all of it was that five-minute pause outside his spacecraft, and the questions it planted in him.

• 2. From a Hardscrabble Farm to MIT

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  When Rusty Schweickart graduated from Manasquan High School in 1952, his family's stated annual income was $1,800. That figure sat at the bottom of his MIT scholarship application. It did not stop him. He earned a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering at MIT in 1956, on scholarship, and later returned for a Master of Science in aeronautics and astronautics, which he completed in 1963.

  Between those two degrees, he flew. Schweickart served with the U.S. Air Force and the Massachusetts Air National Guard's 101st Tactical Fighter Squadron from 1956 to 1963. Over that period he logged more than 4,000 hours of total flight time, including 3,500 hours in high-performance jet aircraft.

  Back at MIT after military service, he worked as a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory. His work covered upper atmospheric physics, star tracking, and the stabilization of stellar images. His master's thesis focused on stratospheric radiance. It was precision science conducted in rooms far removed from open sky, yet every bit of it was preparing him for a career spent at the edge of the atmosphere.

  In October 1963, NASA selected Schweickart as part of Astronaut Group 3. He was the youngest person in that cohort. One of his early partners in jungle training was Clifton Williams. On the 21st of March, 1966, he was named backup pilot for Roger B. Chaffee on Apollo 1, the mission that would have been the first crewed Apollo flight before a ground test accident destroyed it and killed its crew.

• 3. Apollo 9 and the Porch

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  Apollo 9 flew in March 1969 as the first crewed test of the lunar module, and from the beginning it did not go smoothly for Schweickart. On the first day in orbit he began suffering from space adaptation syndrome, the nausea and disorientation that affects astronauts adjusting to weightlessness. The condition forced a postponement of the mission's planned extravehicular activity.

  When he was well enough, the EVA was scaled back. Rather than demonstrating an emergency transfer between the lunar module and the command module along the handrails, Schweickart stood on the lunar module's "porch," a small platform used in transferring to the descent ladder, with his feet restrained. Command Module Pilot David Scott performed a stand-up EVA through the open hatch of the command module at the same time.

  The test Schweickart ran that day mattered enormously. He was evaluating the portable life support system that would eventually sustain all twelve astronauts who walked on the Moon. The equipment worked. Schweickart spent just over 241 hours in space in total on that mission.

  During a five-minute pause while tethered outside, he underwent what he later described as a metaphysical experience. He stared at Earth, holding still while the planet turned below him. Afterward, he took up Transcendental Meditation as a direct result of that moment. It was a detail that would make him, in the eyes of some colleagues, conspicuously unusual for a NASA astronaut.

• 4. Space Sickness and Closed Doors

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  That bout of sickness on Apollo 9 had consequences Schweickart could not have anticipated. Deke Slayton, the Director of Flight Crew Operations who controlled all mission assignments, acknowledged privately that Schweickart would have been a logical lunar module pilot for subsequent lunar missions. The standard rotation of the era would have placed him on the backup crew for Apollo 12 and the prime crew for Apollo 15. Instead, the sickness kept him grounded from further lunar assignments.

  Schweickart made the call himself. He said he "really didn't want to be assigned to a flight" until NASA understood more about motion sickness. For six months he served as what he called a "motion sickness guinea pig." He acknowledged that not much was learned during the testing, though it is now accepted that as many as half of all space travelers experience space adaptation syndrome to some degree.

  The testing period stretched long enough that by the time it ended, the Apollo 12 backup crew assignment had already been filled. Al Shepard, Slayton's deputy, placed him on Skylab instead of returning him to the Apollo rotation. Schweickart was candid about the political dimension of this: he said he was "not one of Al's boys," a reference to the political liberalism he shared with his then-wife, Clare. Slayton had reportedly felt that her civil rights activism created friction with some of Schweickart's colleagues.

  A Houston radio broadcaster captured the oddity of his standing among NASA peers by calling him "the closest thing to a freak astronaut" after Schweickart was photographed escorting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on a tour of NASA headquarters.

• 5. Saving Skylab

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  Skylab 2, which flew in the spring of 1973, launched into crisis. The space station had lost its thermal shield during launch, and one of its solar array wings was jammed. Without intervention, the station would be unusable. Schweickart, assigned as backup commander alongside backup science pilot Story Musgrave and backup pilot Bruce McCandless II, took on the problem from the ground.

  He assumed responsibility for developing both the hardware and the procedures the crew would need to perform emergency repairs in space. The work involved designing an emergency solar shade that could be erected during a spacewalk and figuring out how to deploy the jammed solar array wing. The Skylab 2 crew executed those procedures successfully. The station was saved.

  For that work, Schweickart received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 1973. He had already received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969 for Apollo 9, along with the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale De la Vaulx Medal in 1970. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave him a Special Trustees Award, an Emmy, in 1969 for transmitting the first live television pictures from space.

  After Skylab 4's support crew work was done, Schweickart found himself weighing whether to move into Space Shuttle development. He had worked Gemini in a support role, then everything on Apollo, then Skylab. The Shuttle wasn't going to fly for perhaps six to eight years by most estimates at the time. He described the prospect as "been there, done that." He chose a different direction.

• 6. Life After the Agency

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  Schweickart left NASA in 1977. Before departing, he had spent time at NASA Headquarters in Washington as Director of User Affairs in the Office of Applications, a role he held beginning in 1974. His job was to transfer NASA technology, primarily applications from Landsat 1, to outside users including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and water resources managers. He came to regard it as a "thankless position" and a "very hard sell," largely because potential clients resisted adopting new processes.

  From NASA he went directly to Sacramento. California Governor Jerry Brown appointed him assistant for science and technology, a post he held for two years. Brown then appointed him to the California Energy Commission, where he served for five and a half years, including three years as chairman.

  His post-government career moved into satellite communications. He founded Courier Satellite Services, Inc., a global satellite communications company developing low Earth orbit satellites for affordable data services worldwide. He later served as Executive Vice President and Director of Low Earth Orbit Systems at CTA Commercial Systems, Inc., where he led development of GEMnet, a second-generation LEO communication satellite constellation designed for commercial electronic messaging on a global basis. From 1996 through 1998 he was President and Chief Executive Officer of ALOHA Networks, Inc., a wireless internet access equipment company, before retiring from that role in 1998.

  His satellite work pulled him into international policy. He participated in the World Radiocommunication Conferences of the International Telecommunication Union in 1992 and 1995, and served as a U.S. delegate at the 1995 conference. He also worked extensively in Russia and the former Soviet Union on scientific and telecommunications matters during this period.

• 7. Asteroids and the B612 Foundation

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  Schweickart co-founded the Association of Space Explorers in 1984-85, drawing inspiration from his friendship with Michael Murphy and involvement in the Esalen Institute's Soviet-American Exchange Program. The founding members included cosmonauts Alexei Leonov, Vitaly Sevastyanov, and Georgi Grechko. The organization's membership is open to anyone who has flown in orbit around Earth. Schweickart chaired its near-Earth object committee, which produced a report submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space under the title Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response.

  In 2002 he co-founded the B612 Foundation with fellow former astronaut Ed Lu and two planetary scientists. The organization is a non-profit dedicated to defending Earth from asteroid impacts. Schweickart served as its chair before transitioning to chair emeritus.

  In May 2005 he testified before the U.S. Congress on the dangers posed by 99942 Apophis, a specific asteroid whose trajectory had drawn attention from planetary defense researchers. In 2010 he co-chaired, alongside astronaut Tom Jones, the NASA Advisory Council Ad-Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense. He has advocated for increasing NASA's annual budget by $250 million to $300 million over a ten-year period to more fully catalog near-Earth objects and develop a deflection capability.

  The concern wasn't abstract to him. The same man who stood tethered on a spacecraft porch in 1969 and felt the weight of Earth's fragility from above was now arguing, decades later, that the planet required active defense. A main-belt asteroid was named in his honor, a small but concrete acknowledgment from the scientific community that the work was worth taking seriously.