Few jobs have the allure, adventure and prestige of astronaut. HMC watched proudly as its second astronaut, Stan Love ’87, contributed to the success of Space Shuttle mission STS-122.

Nose pointed skyward, the Space Shuttle Atlantis sat poised on its pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., ready to be jettisoned into space.

“...5, 4...” Hands flew to faces, some covering mouths, some eyes.

“...3, 2...” Breaths were held.

“...1.” The solid fuel rocket boosters fired, the shuttle lifted and the 60 members of the HMC community watching the big screen in Galileo Hall Feb. 7 applauded and cheered with relief and joy.

Another Mudder was launched successfully into space.

At launch time, that Mudder—Stan Love ’87—was experiencing things from a very different perspective. From a seat bolted to the floor of the shuttle’s mid-deck—where the astronauts’ living quarters are—Love was aware of every sound and movement: The back and forth motion beneath him from the main engine swiveling; the huge push in the back when the rocket motors lit; the pull from the first part of the climb; the sag when the thrust from the solid rockets stopped and the main engine took over; the roll to heads up; and the floating sensation when the engines cut off.

Love had been preparing for this moment since his beginnings at NASA in 1998. Most recently, he worked with the Constellation program, helping with the conceptual design and operations concept for the new Orion vehicle that will eventually replace the Space Shuttle. In preparation for his first space flight, he spent two weeks at the headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency near Montreal, Quebec, learning how to “fly” the robot arm on the Space Station, which is Canada’s main contribution to the program. Love trained to perform specific tasks, mainly Extravehicular Activity space walks (EVAs); robotics (operating the robot arms on the Shuttle and Station); and flight engineer tasks (working with the commander and pilot to operate the Shuttle during launch, orbital flight, re-entry and landing). A physics major, Love is a former HMC Bates Aeronautics Program member and a former student of Iris Critchell, instructor of aeronautics emerita, who taught Mudders about the privilege of flight from 1962 to 1990. The Bates Program also produced another astronaut, George “Pinky” Nelson ’72, who flew on three missions during the 1980s and made his mark by being on the first shuttle crew that repaired a stranded satellite.

Love went on to receive a master’s and doctorate from the University of Washington. As a planetary scientist he has studied asteroids, meteorites and impact craters. Of the six-member STS-122 mission crew, Love was one of three flying on the space shuttle for the first time. Love called it the experience of a lifetime.

“It’s absolutely amazing up there. I thought it was a little bit intimidating at first, but you get used to it. They launched us into quite a low orbit (in order to catch up to the orbit of the space station) and the view out the window for the first couple of days when we were that low was really exciting.

“If you get a beach ball and that’s the Earth, then the space station is sort of one-half an inch above the beach ball. It’s somewhat like looking out the window of an airplane except the sky is black. You can definitely see curvature on the horizon and things go by really fast.”

Seventeen thousand miles per hour to be precise.

Two hundred miles up, the team worked almost nonstop for nine days to perform construction and maintenance on the football-field sized International Space Station, which provides data on scientific experiments for Russia and the United States. Love described it as huge and surprisingly comfortable inside, but thinks that future space station designers may do well to add more windows and work on the system engineering. “It’s an American space station bolted to a Russian space station, and it’s very hard to get information and data to flow between the two.”

Atlantis crew members were charged with adding another room to it. The $2.3 billion scientific laboratory, Columbus, is the first European addition to the space station. Monday, Feb. 11, was to be the crew’s first EVA to work on this project. It also turned out to be—rather unexpectedly—Love’s first space walk.

“You may have had this nightmare in college where you suddenly realize that you signed up for this class and you’d never been and the final exam is tomorrow? Well, that was it,” Love says, describing what it was like learning he would be the stand-in for European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel, who fell ill. Love—trained only as a backup for this first EVA— had Saturday and Sunday to prepare for Monday’s space walk. His prior training had prepared him primarily for the spacewalk to be made on Friday, Feb. 15.

Nevertheless, Love had been trained as an arm operator, so he knew what the crew had planned to do. He had seen many of the mechanisms to be worked on at the Kennedy Space Center before the launch, so he had a good idea of what was to be done on the EVA. He did not, however, have the benefit of the typical seven practice runs on the full-scale space station model submerged in a swimming pool at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. “But we managed to get all of the important stuff done anyway,” he says.

On his first spacewalk, Love spent eight hours outside, longer than all but a few other astronauts in NASA history. He and Rex Walheim installed a grapple fixture on the Columbus laboratory and prepared electrical and data connections on the module while it rested in the shuttle’s payload bay, an area for transporting, working and holding.

“Your main concern is whether you remember the correct number of turns to put on a bolt that you are going to actuate in about two and a half hours,” Love says.

Near the end of his marathon spacewalk, Love says he tired before completing all of the tasks the crew had on the timeline. So, he says he hung out for awhile while Walheim continued working. Love also got tangled in the safety tethers, ropes that prevent astronauts from separating from the station, but he was aided by crewmates inside the shuttle who told him how to move so he could unwind himself.

Love’s EVA on Friday, Feb. 15, though less eventful, was productive as well. He and Walheim worked on the Columbus laboratory’s exterior. Once the EVAs were completed, the entire crew was able to take some time to enjoy the view and the wonder of space.

“It was really, really fun to just float around, doing spins and loops and rolls,” says Love. “It’s just a ball to play around and spin in the air.”

After almost 13 days, 202 orbits around Earth and 6.3 million miles, Love says the best part of the trip was landing. It had been a long journey—10 years at NASA, including a year and a half of intense preparation, training and sacrifice—for himself and his family. He was ready to return home to his wife, Jancy, his two young sons, and to food that didn’t have to be eaten from a sealed package (His first craving was for fresh fruit and vegetables.). He thinks his prospects of flying again are good. There are 10 space shuttle missions planned before the shuttle program is retired in 2010.

“It’s possible they might have a Shuttle seat for me flying as one of the two or three experienced crew members they’re putting on each Shuttle flight. But now I need a little chance to ­decompress; stand back and see what I’d like to do next.”

For students interested in aeronautics and wondering about their next steps after leaving Mudd, Love advises them to study hard and expect the unexpected. “With today’s college students that are getting ready to go in to space and the space world, I think it is going to be very, very different.

Right now the only people who can put you in space are national governments. In five or 10 years that’s likely to be very different.”

Steven K. Wagner contributed to this story. For more images and information go to the NASA website.