By Raegan Edelman ’24

---

When I was a little girl, I knew that I was destined for the stars.

I spent months begging my mom for a “Moon in My Room,” and a solar system kit to go with it. I’d drift to sleep hearing stories of the stars and the neighboring planets, dreaming that one day I’d be playing among them.

I didn’t fully understand the implications of going to space. I didn’t know about the dangers. I figured it was only a matter of time before the first kid would go. And with that in mind I wondered, ‘Why not me?’

It had been nearly 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, followed just a few years later by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman. The Soviet Union’s early successes in space led President John F. Kennedy to call for our nation to commit itself to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

For that to happen, Kennedy said on May 25, 1961, it would take the help of everyone. “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon — if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.” 

Where one extraordinary person went, we all could go. 

We invested accordingly. NASA’s budget in the 1960s represented roughly 4% of all federal spending. And fueled by that support, we quickly reached our goal. Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the moon in 1969. 

And then it was done. We’d been there. We’d done that. Excitement faded. It was as if that one step was the final destination and not one giant leap for mankind. By the 1970s, NASA’s budget had fallen to about 1% of federal funding.

Which meant that NASA needed a PR win — and it got one in 1981, when the agency began sending eight astronauts at a time into space using an orbiter launched with two reusable solid rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank. 

And there was something in the word NASA used to describe this vehicle — “shuttle” — that invoked the idea that soon, maybe very soon, we could all take a trip to the moon. The program allowed people to see themselves in the stars.

So when NASA chose a middle school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, to travel to space, the quest drew global attention. Christa McAuliffe’s opportunity was widely publicized. She did dozens of interviews about how she prepared and trained to be eligible for space, and she became America’s scientific sweetheart. 

Where one ordinary person went, we all could go.

The shuttle program was offering a chance for anyone to touch space. There was even an application process to find a journalist to be a citizen passenger on an upcoming shuttle. The hope, journalist John Noble Wilford wrote a few weeks before the Challenger launch, was that eventually “poets, painters, laborers, musicians and others would get to fly.” 

McAuliffe’s well-publicized training happened long before I was born, but my nana, Vikki O’Brien, remembers it well, because she felt a special connection to the fellow teacher. 

“Not only was she a teacher,” she remembers, “but she was a woman, and she was a mother. She could have been your neighbor.”

On the day of the launch, she told me, “I was standing because it was just so intense. I couldn’t sit to watch any of it. I stood, and I stood just feet from the TV. I simply couldn’t sit.”

Finally, space was accessible to anyone.

And then it wasn’t. 

“It took off and everything was normal. And then as I was watching, you saw this object in the sky, and then you didn’t. And then you saw things coming down, and you realized something was wrong,” she recalls. 

Reflecting on the explosion the next day, Wilford wrote, “whenever shuttles are again prepared for launching, the nation will probably follow the countdown with a hushed dread.”

That was true, even as dozens of safe shuttle missions were completed in the coming years. And when the Columbia shuttle fell apart upon reentry in 2003, killing the seven crew members on board, the dread grew. 

By that time, though, space had already become a stomping ground for rich dudes — in 2001, a billionaire named Dennis Tito bought a seat on a Russian rocket headed to the International Space Station. 

Where one rich person went, perhaps other rich people could go. But the rest of us? 

Anyone can grow up to be a teacher, but a billionaire? 

I was 10 when the shuttle program ended with a 12-day trip to space for Atlantis in July of 2011. I was devastated. Most of the nation, though, seemed to just shrug.

Today the shuttles are museum pieces. You can see Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Discovery is at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. Endeavour is at the California Science Center. And the Enterprise is in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

NASA’s big-budget era is a relic, too. Today, the agency works with less than half a percent of the national budget.

In the two decades that I have been alive, there has not been a person on the moon — nor much talk, until recently, about putting one there. And chances are good that, when it finally does happen, it will just be another billionaire pretending that they have the right stuff. And if they do make it there, they’ll take a small step where others have already trod. 

When Atlantic took its final voyage, Wilford wondered about what it all meant.

“Whatever happened to the space age as imagined back in the 1950s and early ’60s,” he wrote in the New York Times, “when science fiction writers and rocket scientists spun tales of travel out in the solar system and beyond?”

The answer, I think, is that we could no longer envision ourselves touching the stars. 

But that might change soon. 

I was a freshman in high school in 2016 when a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its payload was a spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx, which was destined for a gigantic mass of rock called Bennu — the deep space object most likely to strike our planet, although the odds are something in the neighborhood of 1 in 2,700 (0.037%), and it wouldn’t happen until 2182.

OSIRIS traveled nearly 200 million miles before reaching Bennu on Oct. 20, 2020, touching down for just seconds as it collected its sample — and almost getting stuck in the viscous rocks of the asteroid’s surface — before engaging its thrusters and beginning the voyage home. 

And this was a success, in part, due to the efforts of the Space Dynamics Laboratory at my very own alma-mater, Utah State University.

“When we were selected, we were pretty excited to be a part of such a daring mission,” says Jed Hancock, the director of the SDL’s Civil Space Division. “That’s the first planetary sciences mission that the Space Dynamics Lab and USU have really had a major part in.”

The Space Dynamics Lab headquarters consists of over 540,000 square feet of facilities in North Logan, just north of Utah State’s Logan campus. Around 50 of SDL’s 1,300 employees had the unique opportunity to work closely with the OSIRIS-REx mission. 

“We had a lot of students,” Hancock said. “Students work on everything that we work on. They’re an imperative part of our workforce and everything that we do.”

The SDL was responsible for supplying identical detector assemblies for the three cameras that were attached to the spacecraft. The cameras were used for global mapping, site reconnaissance, high-resolution imaging, and recording the sample acquisition. 

“It’s an exciting time,” says Alan Thurgood, the division director for civil and commercial space. “NASA is doing a lot of really, really great science and a lot of really great things, and we’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some of them.”

For Hancock, and many members of his team, seeing the impact of the mission was awe-inspiring. While attending major reviews of some of the technology, he was blown away by the “hundreds and hundreds of people in the audience from NASA and from all over the country.” 

This mission meant a lot to a lot of people.

“It helped us understand the seriousness and the gravity of what was expected and hoped for. And the expectations were out of this world — literally,” Hancock says.

If the mission was a success, maybe space wasn’t so out of reach after all.

It took OSIRIS-REx about two years to get from Earth to Bennu, where it circled the asteroid and used the OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite, or the OCAMS, to observe the surface of the asteroid and decide the best course of action for the sample grab. 

And it wasn’t easy.

“For two years they were using the cameras to map out the asteroid,” Thurgood says. “When they got there, it had a lot more rocks and a lot larger rocks than what they were expecting from the data from ground telescopes.”

They had expected to see large, smooth areas where they could touch down on the surface and collect the sample. In and out, without a hitch. But that wasn’t what they found. 

“They actually had to change some of their algorithms on the spacecraft to be more accurate with where they touched down so that the spacecraft wouldn’t hit any of the boulders around it,” Thurgood explains.

The team eventually settled on a site they named “Nightingale,” and using the OCAMS, they carefully collected the material from the surface. 

For nearly two years, the OCAMS gathered images and data to create a detailed model of Bennu, map its chemical composition, and produce terrain maps and global image mosaics. And the cameras very well may have saved the mission — shortly upon the capsule touching down, Bennu threw a curveball. 

“I call it the trickster asteroid,” says Dante Lauretta, who heads the OSIRIS-REx science team. “It always surprises us.”

The surface of the asteroid had been hard enough to land on, with the large boulders creating very few possible landing areas. But it also turned out to be viscous. When OSIRIS-REx made contact with Bennu, the spacecraft began to sink. 

“If we had not fired those engines to back away from Bennu, I think we would have just sunk in like quicksand and the spacecraft would have disappeared,” Lauretta says.

But with the help of the thrusters, and the OCAMS, they were able to launch the spacecraft back quickly. They didn’t leave it or the sample behind on Bennu. What they did leave, however, was a giant crater.

The crater was about 25 feet across, when the team expected only 10–20 inches.

“The surface really just erupted in a massive way. And some great science came out of that — we really learned a lot about the nature of these bodies,” Lauretta says.

The OCAMS meant it was possible to further observe this impact.

“After they collected the sample, they continued circling around and mapping it with the cameras. And they could actually see the spot where they had touched down. They could see how much the material in that area had been disturbed,” Thurgood says.

Thurgood has been at the SDL for 45 years. In partnership with USU, the lab has been a part of around 420 successful space missions. But none have been quite like this.

The sample — undiluted by Earth’s atmosphere — could very likely contain secrets to understanding the origin of the universe.

On Sept. 24, 2023, the spacecraft finally re-approached Earth and released a capsule containing the largest-ever uncontaminated asteroid sample, sending it on a ballistic trajectory and into a 63,000-mile freefall. 

“The fact that it was going to return to Earth, that just doesn’t happen,” Hancock says.

The mission has been in the works for longer than I’ve been on the planet, and it just so happened to come to a head in the middle of the sprawling desert in Dugway, Utah, about 100 miles away from where I live.

I was there. 

Starting at five in the morning, I huddled among other journalists and scientists eager to witness the historic landing. Everyone was on their third cup of coffee — at least — but the jitters were better attributed to adrenaline and anxiety as we waited for word that the capsule was successfully deployed and on its final leg of space travel.

We waited for the parachute. And we waited. And then, there it was. People around me were crying.

“That’s when I emotionally just let it go,” Lauretta says. “You know, tears were streaming down my eyes. I was like, OK, that’s the only thing I needed to hear. From this point on, we know what to do. We’re safe. We’re home. We did it.”

A helicopter team was deployed to retrieve it, and in a little more than an hour’s time the capsule was in a clean room where technicians began preparing to take it apart. 

“Boy, did we stick the landing,” Lauretta says. 

I felt the magic, too. NASA — and USU — had inspired me in ways I’d never felt before. I was a little kid again. 

This sample literally contains space dust from the edge of everything. Scientists have managed to bring it to us entirely untouched, perfectly clean from the materials and composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s more than just a pile of rock to me,” Lauretta says. “It’s a scientific time capsule from the very beginning of our solar system. It’s older than the Earth and it really tells us about where we came from.”

Both temporally and geographically, this thing comes from farther away than any of us can even begin to imagine — and this is an opportunity for people to feel connected to space in a way that we haven’t since 1986. And maybe in a way we didn’t even then.

Maybe inspiration comes not by sending us to space, but by bringing space to us.

We have collected things from space before — moon rocks and meteorites. Some of these objects are on display at space museums around the world. But these are things that were relatively close to Earth to begin with or have come here as shooting stars. The closest a human could ever fathom traveling is within our own solar system, and that’s not likely to happen within the next century. Bennu may have existed before our solar system and this sample of it is more untarnished than the moon rocks and meteorites before it.

For the first time ever, humans can have an encounter with something from the furthest edges of our universe.

“I’ll have these moments of just like, ‘Oh, yeah. We’re going to have this asteroid sample. It’s going to be something that has never been seen before,’” says Melissa Rodriguez, who led the team that dismantled the capsule.

And now, the OSIRIS-REx sample is home, and being divided among scientists, like Rodriguez, who work all over the world. 

Thousands of people will have a hand in examining these specimens. 

Future missions to asteroids and other space objects could mean that hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe even billions of us could have our own encounter with the farthest reaches of space and time. 

Where one humble spacecraft goes, we all can go. 

NASA did this, after all, for a fraction of what it costs to put people in space. The idea for the mission was originally drawn out on a cocktail napkin. It was pitched multiple times before it was approved, and when it finally got the green light, the team had to keep its budget extremely tight. They did it all for just over $1 billion dollars. By way of contrast, NASA spends $9 billion each year on human spaceflight.

Both in terms of cost and manpower, making space accessible to everyone is once again possible — and tangible in ways that historic missions simply were not.

I didn’t sleep the night before the OSIRIS-REx capsule came home. By the time I’d returned from Utah’s West Desert the next day, it was growing late in the evening, and I had been awake for more than 24 hours. But I still couldn’t sleep. 

The stars were out, and I was looking at them with a wonder I’d never had before.