Owen K. Garriott

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Owen Garriott
Owen Garriott
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on June 28, 1965
(4th NASA Group)
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		July 28, 1973
Landing of the
last space flight: 		December 8, 1983
Time in space: 69d 18h ​​56min
EVA inserts: 3
EVA total duration: 13h 42min
retired on August 1986
Space flights

Owen Kay Garriott (born November 22, 1930 in Enid , Oklahoma , † April 15, 2019 in Huntsville , Alabama ) was an American astronaut .

Start of career

Owen Garriott was already interested in technology as a child and took evening courses on electronics with his father. At the age of 15 he passed his amateur radio exam . After high school, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Oklahoma with the help of a US Navy scholarship . In 1953 he received his bachelor's degree .

After three years in the Navy, he continued his studies at Stanford University in California , graduating with a Masters in 1957 . He then wrote his doctoral thesis on the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the upper layers of the atmosphere. This theme was inspired by the radio signals from Sputnik 1 that Garriott received along with other radio amateurs at the university. Garriott received his PhD in 1960, then he worked as a professor at Stanford University.

Astronaut activity

Selection and basic training

Through the space flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard , Garriott became aware of the new possibilities of manned space travel in 1961, and by 1963 it became clear to him that NASA would also hire scientists as astronauts in the future. In order to increase his chances of being selected, he got his previously planned pilot license before applying to NASA.

Garriott passed all tests and was one of six scientists selected by NASA for the fourth astronaut group in 1965. He spent his first year at NASA at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona , where he trained as a jet pilot on T-38 aircraft , and later he was also trained on helicopters .

Skylab

From the summer of 1966 he worked at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston , where he was assigned to the Apollo Applications Program . It was investigated to what extent Saturn rockets and Apollo spacecraft could be used for research missions. The only realized project turned out to be a space station that was later named Skylab .

Garriott's training as an astronaut also included survival training, geology field trips, and classes in solar physics. In July 1969, during the historic flight of Apollo 11, he was one of the liaison officers (Capcoms) who were in constant radio contact with the spaceship from the flight control center in Houston.

Of the six science astronauts, two had left NASA and one ( Jack Schmitt ) was assigned to a moon landing. So it was pretty clear that each of the three remaining science astronauts would be deployed on one of the three Skyl departures. On January 19, 1972 Garriott was then assigned to the second Skylab crew ( Skylab 3 ) under Commander Alan Bean .

When the space station was damaged on launch, it was not clear whether the second crew would even be used. However, the first team under Charles Conrad managed to put Skylab into a habitable state. So Garriott was able to start together with Bean and Jack Lousma on July 28, 1973 in an Apollo spacecraft to the space station. The 59 days of this Skylab 3 mission meant a new endurance record for a space flight, which was soon surpassed by the next Skylab crew.

Garriott was involved in all three spacewalks and spent over 13 hours outside of Skylab. On board he made several films about phenomena in weightlessness , which were later shown in class in American schools. He also tested a jet backpack, the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) , even though this was not intended for him in the preparation . For safety reasons, this took place within the room laboratory. The MMU was first used in free space on the STS-41-B shuttle flight .

Upon his return to Earth, Garriott became assistant director of science at NASA. He later spent a year teaching at Stanford University, after which he returned to NASA.

Spacelab

Scientific operations at NASA became increasingly international, as demonstrated by the fact that the European research laboratory Spacelab was developed as a payload for the space shuttle .

Spacelab's first mission was for the shuttle flight STS-9 with the space shuttle Columbia , Owen Garriott was assigned as a mission specialist and so came on November 28, 1983 for his second space flight. The mission was commanded by John Young on his sixth flight into space. The German Ulf Merbold was the first foreigner on board a NASA flight . Garriott also built the first amateur radio station in space on this mission: W5LFL.

Upon his return, he worked as a project engineer in NASA's space stations department. Here he acted as a link between project management and external scientists.

According to NASA

Owen Garriott had hopes of flying into space a third time with the shuttle flight STS-51-H or STS-61-K , but after the Challenger disaster in January 1986, further flights were suspended. Garriott figured he would be too old to have a third nomination once the program resumed, and left NASA on August 1, 1986.

From January 1988 to May 1993 Garriott was the space program director for Teledyne Brown Engineering in Huntsville . Here he was temporarily responsible for over 1000 employees who worked on the integration of scientific experiments in Spacelab and on the development of the American laboratory on board the International Space Station .

Garriott has been appointed Associate Professor at the Laboratory of Structural Biology at the University of Alabama , where he has been involved in various research projects. Among other things, microorganisms were examined that Garriott was able to recover from extreme conditions. One of these expeditions took him together with his son in the Russian submersible Mir to the black smokers in the Rainbow Vent area at a depth of 2300 meters off the Azores .

Three other expeditions led to the Antarctic , where Garriott recovered 20 meteorites .

Garriott was originally an electrical engineer, but covered a broad scientific spectrum. He died on April 15, 2019, at the age of 88 at his home in Huntsville, Alabama.

Private

Garriott was married twice and had four children. His son Richard Garriott became known as the computer game pioneer Lord British and among other things he developed the role-playing game Ultima . Richard Garriott took off on October 12, 2008 as a passenger with the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TMA-13 to the international space station ISS.

Owen Garriott's second oldest son, Robert Garriott , also works in the computer game industry; for example, he was CEO of NCsoft North America until 2008 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Owen Garriott  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sam Roberts: Owen Garriott, to Early Scientist-Astronaut, Is Dead at 88. The New York Times , April 16, 2019, accessed April 17, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Garriott, Owen K.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Garriott, Owen Kay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Enid , Oklahoma
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 2019
Place of death Huntsville , Alabama