Watching the world go byAstronaut Leland Melvin (Grad '91) gets
new appreciation for Mother Earth
Leland Melvin's role aboard Atlantis was to operate the shuttle's
robotic arm.
SOURCE: NASA |
On his recent days off, Leland Melvin (Grad ’91) relaxed, checked his e-mail, called his family, enjoyed leisurely meals and spent time simply watching the world go by.
That doesn’t sound all that unusual until you realize Melvin did all those things from thousands of miles above the earth.
He literally watched the world go by.
That’s not hard to do when you’re an astronaut.
Melvin became tied for the honor of the 300th American to float in space when the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7.
He and six other crew members spent the next 13 days in space, nine of them at the International Space Station.
“When there were no clouds, you could see 1,000 miles inland,” Melvin says. “You could see the sprawl of the lights of the major cities—Capetown, South Africa, New York, Washington.
“When we went up the [East] Coast, I could see Richmond, Virginia Beach, Norfolk.”
Melvin’s role on the flight was to operate the shuttle’s robotic arm, a device he used to check the heat shields on the shuttle and to lift the multibillion dollar Columbus module out of the shuttle’s cargo hold and attach it to the International Space Station.
Melvin, 44, spent almost 10 years preparing for the trip and the job.
SOURCE: NASA |
“The training is so mature and so good that by the time you get to space, you feel like you’ve already done the mission,” Melvin says. “When it came time to install the Columbus module, it felt like I had done it before.
“I made a few adjustments, and the arm flew perfectly, just like the training.”
Melvin was a chemistry major and star wide receiver at the University of Richmond. After graduating in 1986, he had short stints in the training camps of the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys. Hamstring injuries short-circuited both attempts to make the squads.
After being cut by Detroit, and before he reported to Dallas, Melvin began work on his master’s degree in materials science engineering at Virginia. He earned that degree, then went to work for NASA. Nine years later, a former NASA colleague who had joined the astronaut program encouraged Melvin to join the program as well.
Of the 3,000 applicants for the astronaut class of 1998, Melvin was one of only eight who were accepted.
Almost a decade later, he was traveling through space at the speed of 17,500 mph, making a complete orbit of the earth every 90 minutes.
“It changes you,” Melvin says. “You see the earth in all its glory, with no borders. It makes you appreciate how fragile the earth is.”
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