Retired astronaut and now Iowa State University professor Clayton Anderson's photograph of his view of Earth from space in 2007. | aere.iastate.edu/ - Clayton Anderson
Retired astronaut and now Iowa State University professor Clayton Anderson's photograph of his view of Earth from space in 2007. | aere.iastate.edu/ - Clayton Anderson
Competing billionaires launching themselves into space is a great boon for "humans on earth," retired astronaut and now Iowa State University professor Clayton Anderson told a Des Moines news outlet earlier this week.
Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson went up in his own self-funded aircraft and program on July 12. Eight days later, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos slipped the bonds of earth in his New Shepard spacecraft. Both efforts took different approaches to achieve the same goad, Anderson said in a KCCI news story published Tuesday, July 27.
Clayton Anderson flying Iowa State University colors aboard the International Space Station in 2007
| news.iastate.edu/ - NASA photo
"The key here is that they're developing new technologies," Anderson said in the news story. "Virgin Galactic did it one way, and Blue Origin did it another way. Totally different approaches to the same, similar problem, and when you do that sort of thing, you develop new technology, and that's where humans on Earth will benefit."
In 2007, Clayton, the first Iowa State alumnus to become an astronaut, spent 152 days aboard the International Space Station, which he reached aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, according to information about the mission on NASA's website. Anderson was part of a seven-member crew on the mission that included spacewalks and giant solar array wings installation.
"It's extremely difficult to describe in words," Anderson later said about the view of earth as he saw it in space. “Even pictures and video don’t do it justice.”
Anderson joined the university's faculty in September 2013.
Anderson told KCCI that Bezos and Branson's flights are exciting but that it is not yet achievable for all, that right now it's available only to the extremely wealthy, but - ultimately and hopefully - prices will drop and bring space flight into everyone's reach, according to the news story.
Anderson already has incorporated commercial space flight into his curriculum at Iowa State, where he is a distinguished faculty fellow in the university's aerospace engineering department. Anderson teaches introduction to aerospace engineering at the university.
Anderson also told KCCI that he would like to see more people from the Midwest, especially his students at Iowa State, to make it into space.
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