'Space is going to be our frontier for the rest of time'

Former astronaut tops stellar program

Former astronaut Frank L. Culbertson, Jr. was the icing on the convention cake.

Culbertson, a veteran of three space flights who has logged more than 146 days in space, received a standing ovation after his opening speech Friday morning June 19 at the 124th Summer Convention.

His moving account of life in space was the highlight of the convention, held June 19-21 at South Shore Harbour Resort & Conference Center in League City.

“Without the press and without the media to spread the word on what we do in space and who we are and how we got there and why it’s important to do what we do, we might as well not be doing it,” Culbertson told approximately 250 newspaper men and women in attendance.

“You are a part of what I think is one of the most important parts of the space program and that is to inspire the next generation to study hard, learn technology and science and math, and to look further than their own backyard when they’re planning their life.”

Culbertson’s missions include STS-38 Atlantis, Nov. 15-20, 1990, a five-day mission conducted for the Department of Defense operations; STS-51 Discovery, Sept. 12-22, 1993, a 10-day mission that included an evaluation of the Hubble Space Telescope; and Expedition-3, launched on Aug. 10, 2001 aboard STS-105 Discovery and docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Aug. 12, 2001. Culbertson lived and worked aboard the space station for a total of 129 days, and was in command of the station for 117 days.

The former astronaut wove a wonderful tale of his first lift-off and other stories that entertained the audience with wisps of humor and candor.

“You’ve got 7 million pounds of thrust pushing you into the sky. You weigh about 4.5 million pounds on the whole stack. You accelerate at over 100 miles an hour before you clear the top of the tower. The whole thing is shaking and rattling and rolling,” Culbertson said.

“Imagine yourself in the back of pickup truck going down a dirt road — and I know a lot of you people have been on dirt roads — shaking and rattling and rolling, trying to hold on. It’s like that in the first few minutes of the flight … And you’re along for the ride. You are not going to do anything for the first two minutes.”

Culbertson described seeing the sun come around the earth for the first time in space.

“It looked like the horizon caught on fire, like a volcano was erupting, this bright red spot and then all these colors of the rainbow started spreading in both directions away from that spot and it was just incredibly beautiful. You could see the clouds on the horizon,” Culbertson said. “And then all of a sudden the sun popped up. It takes about two seconds for a sunrise to occur. And it was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen … And I turned to the commander and I said ‘Wow! Is it always like that?’ And he said ‘Yeah, every 45 minutes.’”

The shuttle travels around the earth every 90 minutes so the sun rises and sets every 45 minutes in a view from space, Culbertson said.

Culbertson showed a slide presentation of images taken from space and life aboard the space station. While in space he talked to many groups of schoolchildren around the world through a live radio transmission.

On one occasion for an elementary school in Ottawa, Culbertson said he thought the wires got crossed somewhere when he realized the local time that he was scheduled to call the school was 4 a.m., but when he dialed up the school there were 200 to 300 children cheering him on the other end.

“They brought all these kindergartners through fifth-graders and their parents in this auditorium at 4 o’clock in the morning to talk to someone in space. It brought tears to my eyes. It was so exciting I could barely answer their questions,” he said.

Culbertson was on the space station on 9/11 and took a poignant photograph of New York City in a cloud of smoke from the burning Twin Towers. The crew observed a moment of silence in space along with the rest of the country, he said.

Astronauts can see many beautiful natural wonders while orbiting the earth, but they also see the harmful aspects such as pollution and smog.

“We can see the effects of humanity all over the world and one of the things we need to keep in mind is that it’s a very fragile place and if we don’t look at ourselves closely from the advantage of space and see what we’re doing to it we’re not going to understand … how fragile the environment is,” Culbertson said.

Culbertson thanked the crowd, mainly publishers from small Texas towns, for all their support during the recovery of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster that unfolded over the state in February.

“Space is going to be our frontier for the rest of time. We will always have further to go there. There will always be new places to discover. There will be things to find up there that will help us down here on earth we just don’t know what they all are yet and we won’t know until we get there.

“But if we ever stop going, we’re going to lose something, we’re going to lose something that humanity has here, inside,” he said.