Alan Stern doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t love learning about outer space.
Born in New Orleans in 1957 and raised in Dallas, Stern remembers the great Space Race of the ’60s and ’70s. He remembers marveling at the Apollo space missions and seeing man step foot on the moon for the first time.
Years later, now an associate vice president of Southwest Research Institute’s Space Science Division and an independent science consultant, Stern has contributed significantly to the field that inspired him. He has helped to build the San Antonio-based institute’s space science and engineering division, extend what we know about icy objects deep in our solar system, and push commercial space travel to new heights.
After working on numerous space missions through his career, Stern achieved a lifelong dream earlier this month: visiting space himself. On Nov. 2, he flew aboard the Virgin Galactic commercial spaceship VSS Unity on a suborbital space mission to train for a future NASA-funded flight in which he will perform experiments in space. Stern called the adventure “an incredible human experience,” and said he is proud he was able to be a part of “a new era of space research.” The mission marks SwRI’s first time funding and putting one of its own on a space flight.
During the hour-long flight, he experienced weightlessness for three minutes.
“It was almost indescribable,” he said. “I like to tell people it’s the best day ever at work.”
Roots in Texas
Stern jokes he was “quite a nerd” growing up. While he played “the normal sports” for a kid living in the South — football and baseball — he was happiest at the library, poring over books about space and engineering.
The oldest of three children, Stern spent the first 12 years of his life in New Orleans before his family moved to Dallas, where he graduated from the prestigious St. Mark’s School of Texas. After high school, Stern went to Austin to attend the University of Texas.
“When I first went to university, I didn’t know if I wanted to be a scientist or an engineer,” he said. “I was like a lot of kids, you know, back and forth on a major, and I finally decided to be a physics major, because I thought it was harder than anything else.”
Stern graduated from UT with degrees in physics and astronomy, then went on to earn graduate degrees in aerospace engineering and atmospheric science.
Stern spent the next seven years as an aerospace systems engineer, helping design spacecraft for NASA, Martin Marietta Aerospace and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.
During this time, he also met his former wife Carole, and the two had their first of three children, which made Stern eager to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Stern completed his doctorate in astrophysics and planetary science in 1989 at the University of Colorado.
Failure to launch
After completing his doctorate, Stern took a job with the University of Texas astronomy department, excited to move back to Texas. However, a funding cut meant UT had to call Stern to tell him they no longer had a position for him.
“For the beginning of my scientific career, that was a pretty bad blow because I had already told everybody else no,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a Plan B — it never occurred to me that this could happen.”
This “disaster,” as Stern calls it, would seal Stern’s future in one important way — connecting him with SwRI. Hoping to keep Stern in Texas while UT sorted its funding out, Harlan J. Smith, the longtime director of the university’s McDonald Observatory, reached out to his friend Jim Burch, who had just launched SwRI’s Space Science Division in 1985 in San Antonio.
Harlan died in 199, never able to bring Stern back to UT. However, Stern credits him with much of his career’s success.
“Once I got to Southwest, it turned into my whole career,” he said. “It just completely worked out.”
Passed over for space flight
Stern first worked at SwRI as a principal scientist for the institute’s Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences group before he was named manager in 1991, then director in 1997, then executive director in 2003.
He left SwRI for a short stint during this time to serve as chair of NASA’s Outer Planets Science Working Group.
“We lived in Washington, D.C., as a part of the George [W.] Bush administration,” he said. “Even then, I could see commercial space was developing fast. Virgin Galactic as a company had started, and Blue Origin had started, and some of the others, even SpaceX existed — although nobody ever heard of them back then.”
Stern was selected to be a Space Shuttle mission specialist finalist in 1995, but wasn’t selected for space flight.
SwRI asked Stern to come back shortly after, and he accepted. As part of his return, SwRI launched its own commercial space program with the goal of eventually executing suborbital science missions, he said.
Stern would go on to work with both SwRI and NASA across his career, often working for or with both. Today, he is based in Boulder, where SwRI has a space science office with 115 employees.
In 2016 and 2017, he was elected board chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. The following year, he was named by the Donald Trump administration to a six-year term on the National Science Board. In 2019, he led NASA’s Planetary Protection Independent Review Board.
Advancing space science
Stern has been involved as a researcher in 29 suborbital, orbital, and planetary space missions, including 14 as the principal investigator.
He has developed eight scientific instruments for planetary and near-space research missions, and has significantly furthered what we know about our solar system’s Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud, comets, satellites of the outer planets, Pluto and evidence of solar systems around other stars.
During his time at NASA, Stern led its entire earth and space science program, consisting of 93 flight missions and over 3,000 grants with a budget of $5.4 billion. He also served as the principal investigator of its New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission, which was launched under his tenure in 2006, made the first exploration of Pluto in 2015, and then went on to do the first flyby of any Kuiper Belt object in early 2019.
In addition to working on countless other projects, Stern has published over 350 technical papers and 50 articles, given over 400 hundred technical talks and over 200 popular lectures and speeches, written three books, served as editor on three technical volumes, and recently published The Pluto System After New Horizons as lead editor.
From deep sea to deep space
Stern takes SwRI’s mission statement — “From deep sea to deep space” — literally.
Having already been to the South Pole in the 1990s for research, Stern used his paid time off last year to be a part of an OceanGate Expeditions mission to the Titanic, during which he was the mission scientist.
During the eight-day expedition, Stern and a small team of private citizens dove in the OceanGate Expeditions submersible Titan, which took them to the Titanic’s wreckage on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It took the submersible roughly four hours to dive down to the Titanic, he recalled, with the whole dive lasting about 12 hours. Stern kept small journals of the experience, which are published online.
“I’ve never been involved in deep sea exploration before,” he said. “I found out that there are fewer people that have been to the Titanic than had been to space by a lot — so that’s a pretty amazing human experience right there.”
Just months after his expedition, the Titan submersible imploded, killing Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, and four others.
Stern’s trip to space earlier this month saw him travel more than 50 miles above the earth into space at a height 10 times the cruising altitude of most commercial airliners.
During the flight, he tested equipment that was monitoring his vital signs in preparation for an experiment he will perform in space aboard a second suborbital flight next year.
He also conducted training activities that evaluated how well-suited the spacecraft is for making astronomy observations in space.
“We had set up nine objectives for the flight, and we got all nine on the first try, so feeling pretty good about that,” he said.
Stern said he is hopeful that in the coming years, SwRI will have “quite a number of suborbital research missions” and may someday even do chartered missions that allow customers to see space while SwRI furthers its own research goals.
“I would be very surprised if there weren’t Southwest Research people working on the moon in the coming decades,” he said.
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