Astronaut's career was launched here

Astronaut Garrett Reisman is giving his professors what every teacher wants - the chance to see a former student achieve his dream.

Reisman, a Wharton and Engineering alumnus, has been working out of the International Space Station since March 12 and will stay there until the fall. With his flight into space, former professors said, Reisman has finally achieved a longtime goal that he gradually came to view as attainable.

Reisman is a mission specialist for the NASA mission STS-123. He is also a flight engineer for two other missions, Expeditions 16 and 17.

Reisman's jobs during his extended stay in space include helping to assemble the Japanese laboratory and the Canadian robot Dextre on the International Space Station.

As a student in Penn's Management and Technology program, Reisman - who has become the first Penn undergraduate to take part in a space flight - met with his professors to discuss his career options.

Reisman decided he wanted to be an astronaut during his senior year, said Management and Technology director Bill Hamilton, one such professor.

Until that point, "it was something he always admired but never considered as a career," Hamilton said.

After graduating from Penn in 1991, Reisman received his master's and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Along the way, he began to consider his astronaut dream more attainable, said Engineering professor Joseph Bordogna, who was the dean of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences when Reisman was a student.

"He began to really want to do this, and he began to realize that he could do it," Bordogna said.

Reisman was close to his professors as a student, and he has since kept in touch with them. His former advisors remember him fondly for more than just his academic abilities.

"He was very bright, to be sure," Hamilton said. "But what I remember was that he was very upbeat. He always had a smile on his face."

Christopher Brennan, a professor at Caltech who was Reisman's Ph.D. thesis advisor, said Reisman has an "adventurous spirit" in general.

The two would go hiking and mountain climbing together, Brennan said.

While undergoing training, Reisman shared his experiences with his family, friends, colleagues and mentors.

For example, Bordogna said, he sent pictures to them when he spent time living in a chamber underseas as part of a special NASA experiment.

"Every photograph he sent had him smiling," Bordogna said.

Reisman took into space with him a medallion made by Management and Technology students as well as a piece of ENIAC, the first computer, which was developed at Penn. When he returns to earth, Reisman's former professors say the astronaut plans to come to Penn, meet with students and return the ENIAC piece.

Hamilton said that everyone in the Management and Technology program is "excited to have one of their own up in space."

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