My First Few Months

Within my first few months as a research scientist at Ames, I was asked to join a spaceflight team, which took me out of the laboratory environment and down to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I was involved with an embryology experiment that was the predecessor of the one that I subsequently flew on the shuttle in the early 1990s. We flew a variety of organisms--plants, insects and frog eggs that were fertilized on the ground and taken into space--on some biosatellites in the mid-1960s. It became incredibly exciting to be a part of that process, in which things are developed, put on a rocket, sent into space, and received back several days later.

Following the early biosatellites, there were not many opportunities for space biologists to gain access to space. In 1978 NASA requested proposals for flights onboard the new space shuttle. I submitted a proposal which was a logical extension of the early frog embryology experiments. It passed peer review and went into the queue awaiting a flight opportunity. It was very interesting and exciting to be a part of taking an experiment from an idea stage, through the hardware development and training of the astronauts, to the actual interaction with them during flight and conduct of the experiment. Fortunately, this experiment was very successful. We received excellent results. This was a developmental biology experiment studying how organisms could develop in the absence of gravity. The model was just simple frog eggs for study, but it was fairly complex to do in space because of the difficulties of conducting any kind of research in the absence of gravity.

We are now on a threshold of putting a permanently occupied space station into orbit and beginning human exploration beyond the Moon and Mars. If we get the station up, it will give us the opportunity to do things we couldn't do on the shuttle. There will be more time and people in space and more power to do things with. If we do continue exploration to the Moon and Mars, we will have unlimited opportunities to expand our horizons.