Space has never seemed closer to Stephen Frick.
Soon, perhaps as early as next Thursday, the 37-year-old Navy flier and Pittsburgh native will make his first trip into space as a NASA astronaut, riding the space shuttle Atlantis on its way to a rendezvous with the International Space Station.
It's been 20 years since Frick graduated from Richland High School, 14 years since he became a naval aviator and 6 1/2 years since he arrived in Houston as a new member of the astronaut corps. A year ago, when he was assigned the flight, it all seemed very distant.
"Even up until Christmas time, it still seemed a long way away," Frick said in a recent interview, shortly after climbing out of a Johnson Space Center flight simulator where he had just spent 4 1/2 hours with the mission commander, Lt. Col. Michael Bloomfield.
Now, he's finally beginning to feel some butterflies as the launch date approaches.
Atlantis and her seven-member crew will be delivering and installing a truss that will become the backbone for future space station growth. Called the SO truss, it is the center segment of what will be a 300-foot-long support structure connected to the Destiny laboratory module.
The shuttle also will deliver a one-ton railcar called the Mobile Transporter and a 43-foot section of track. The space railroad eventually will stretch 130 feet along the station's structural backbone, providing a mobile base that will enable the station's robotic arm to assemble and maintain the complex.
Frick's piloting duties will be limited on this mission. During ascent, the shuttle is under computer control, so he and Bloomfield have little to do unless an emergency occurs. Bloomfield, making his third spaceflight, will handle docking with the space station.
Frick will get some stick time toward the end of the 10-day mission, when he will fly Atlantis as it undocks from the station. Like the ascent, much of the re-entry is computer-controlled. Once the shuttle drops below the speed of sound, however, Frick will again take the controls briefly before surrendering them to Bloomfield for the last several minutes of the flight.
Shuttle pilots typically fly at least two missions as pilots before they are assigned as mission commanders; all commanders are pilots.
"I was very lucky to be assigned this one," Frick said, noting flights to the space station are prized by pilots. Not only is the space station an interesting destination, but the flight involves both the docking and undocking maneuvers and, before returning to Earth, a buzz around the station to take photographs documenting the station's condition and construction progress.
Though the pilots' stick time is limited, astronauts are trained to back each other up and Frick's schedule will be frenzied through the first four days of the mission. Even the fifth day, a so-called "day off," is filled with duties, including transferring supplies to the space station and performing housekeeping tasks, such as cleaning filters, aboard the shuttle.
"We're hoping every now and then to get a glimpse out the window," Frick said. "It's got to be a unique sight."
It was the sight of aircraft carriers and Navy planes in Pensacola, Fla., home of both a Navy base and Frick's grandparents, that first set him on his career trajectory. By the time he graduated from Richland in 1982, Frick knew he wanted to be an aviator and headed off to the U.S. Naval Academy.
Frick followed what he calls "the standard Navy path" for aviators -- he was assigned to an F-18 squadron at Cecil Field, Fla., and, upon completion of training, served an eight-month tour with another F-18 squadron on the USS Saratoga. The carrier was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea, where he flew 26 combat missions to targets in Iraq and Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Storm.
Those combat missions typically would be four or five hours in duration -- much shorter than those now being flown by naval aviators over Afghanistan. "This has been a tough cruise for them," said Frick, a Navy commander. "They're doing things that made what we did look easy."
After leaving the squadron in December 1991, Frick earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and then completed test pilot training at the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River, Md. He was selected as an astronaut in 1996.
He was part of a large class of 44 astronauts at a time when the shuttle flight rate was declining, so Frick waited years to be assigned to a flight.
"I feel pretty prepared to fly now," Frick said. "We haven't just been sitting around for six years." He spent one year as a representative to the makers of the shuttle engines and the solid rocket boosters, visiting the factories and talking with workers there.
"The experience was good for me," he said. "It gives me a lot of confidence that this is really good hardware we're flying."
Frick's parents, Neil and Charlotte, now live in southern Alabama and a brother and sister have relocated to New Jersey and Florida. But he visits the area to see his brother Ted, who lives in Moon, and still roots for the Steelers.
