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<\/a>A 1991 graduate of the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine Aerospace Medicine Residency Program, Michael Barrett is on his second voyage into space.<\/p><\/div>\n
The crew of space shuttle Discovery, including Michael Barratt, M.D., an alumnus of the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine Aerospace Medicine Residency Program, landed safely back on Earth today.<\/p>\n
Discovery touched down, just before noon at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Discovery undocked from the international space station, wrapping up a nine-day visit. Astronauts left behind a new and improved storage center, supplies and humanoid robot.<\/p>\n
It was the last flight for Discovery which is set to be retired and placed in a museum.<\/p>\n
Discovery retires having logged more than 148 million miles in orbit during 39 flights. It spent 365 days in space during its lifetime.<\/p>\n
Reaching for the Stars: Wright State grad Michael Barratt\u2019s second flight into space<\/strong><\/p>\n Discovery lifted off February 24 from the Kennedy Space Center, Barratt\u2019s second voyage into space.<\/p>\n In March 2009, Barratt lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS). As a flight engineer for ISS Expeditions 19 and 20, Barratt remained on the station for nearly six months.<\/p>\n Wright State\u2014Launch pad for a stellar career <\/strong><\/p>\n Unlike many astronauts, Barratt hadn\u2019t cherished the thought of space travel as a lifelong dream. A passion for science led him to earn a B.S. in zoology from the University of Washington, where he met and married his wife, Michelle. The couple would eventually settle in Houston and have five children, but first they moved to Chicago, where both enrolled in medical school. After earning his M.D. from Northwestern University, Barratt became an internal medicine resident at Northwestern before serving as chief resident at Veterans Affairs Lakeside Hospital.<\/p>\n Toward the end of his time in Chicago, Barratt\u2019s conversations with the Aerospace Medicine Residency Program director at Wright State, \u201creally got me hooked on the whole space medicine thing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just the most interesting thing I can think of. It\u2019s brand-new physiology. It\u2019s research. It\u2019s operational. It\u2019s amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n While a resident with the program, Barratt conducted research on human performance through underwater testing of a new concept for an EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) enclosure.<\/p>\n \u201cFor not being at NASA at the time,\u201d Barratt said, \u201cI had an incredible capability, between Wright State and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to study this, and the data was useful at JSC (Johnson Space Center) as well.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s one of the great things about Wright State. People are used to doing that kind of stuff, and with Wright-Patterson there, they\u2019re all about optimizing human performance in strange environments like flight environments, so it was not that difficult to do.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe academic background that I got at Wright State was a huge thing,\u201d Barratt added. \u201cThat just makes a big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n From Dayton to Moscow via Houston <\/strong><\/p>\n After completing his aerospace medicine residency, Barratt worked for NASA at the JSC in Houston on the Space Station Freedom project. Two years later, in 1993, he became one of the first Americans to attend the landing of a Soyuz spacecraft, and he spent the next several years supporting the new joint U.S.\/Russian Shuttle-Mir project.<\/p>\n Barratt considers his involvement in bringing together the two space programs \u201cone of the most exciting things I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSpace medicine is kind of a small field anyway,\u201d he said. \u201cThen, all of a sudden, we got this new set of colleagues that we didn\u2019t have access to at all before. So the community more than doubled in size. That was just an incredible pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n A long countdown to liftoff <\/strong><\/p>\n Barratt\u2019s work with the Shuttle-Mir program inspired him to give the idea of becoming an astronaut a little more thought, again driven by an abiding fascination with the medical aspects of spaceflight.<\/p>\n To live and work on a space station, Barratt said, \u201cyou\u2019re looking at full adaptation to zero-G. If you look at the big scheme of human spaceflight, we want to go to Mars, and we want to go a lot further, and it\u2019s going to involve a long period in zero gravity. It\u2019s essentially how we\u2019re going to get somewhere outside of low Earth orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n Even as he considered this new path, Barratt served as medical operations lead for the ISS from 1995 to 1998.\u00a0 He then acted as lead crew surgeon for the first expedition crew until he was selected, along with 16 other candidates, as a member of the NASA Astronaut Class of 2000.<\/p>\n After beginning his astronaut training, Barratt would have to wait nearly nine years for his first chance to travel into space.<\/p>\n A bright future for spaceflight and humanity <\/strong><\/p>\n Taking the long view has also helped Barratt to take the inevitable challenges in stride\u2014including the occasional global crisis, such as the current economic turmoil. After all, he points out, the field of space exploration has weathered worse difficulties over the years.<\/p>\n When he arrived in Russia in 1993, Barratt said, \u201cthere was no food on the shelves, and my colleagues hadn\u2019t been paid for months. It was like that for quite a while, for at least a couple of years. These guys went for months at a time just kind of living on home-grown produce and the barter system, and yet they kept their space station afloat. It was the pride, and it was just their lives. It was the right thing to do.<\/p>\n \u201cA couple of weeks after I left here once\u201d during those early years, he added, \u201cthere were tanks on the bridge over the Moscow River, shelling the White House (a Russian government building). We built that whole [Shuttle-Mir] program in circumstances much, much worse\u00a0 than now.\u201d<\/p>\n The space program will and should remain a priority, Barratt also feels, because \u201cit is an international program with an incredibly positive agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of the full scope of human history, he added, \u201cexpanding off the planet, that\u2019s an absolute eventuality.<\/p>\n Economic crises and political events might delay things or accelerate things by a few years here and there, but in the big scheme of things, they\u2019re really tiny blips on a great big curve.<\/p>\n \u201cI have no doubt we\u2019ll be going [back] to the moon and further,\u201d Barratt said, \u201cand it\u2019s just a matter of when.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The crew of space shuttle Discovery, including Michael Barratt, M.D., an alumnus of the Wright State University… Continue reading