The man behind the mission

“It was an absolute rush” when the SpaceX capsule and Falcon 9 rocket took off Saturday afternoon on the first U.S. launch to the International Space Station in almost a decade, Port Washington native Mike Hess said. 

While that feeling was shared by people around the globe, it was especially true for Hess, a 1986 Port Washington High School graduate who is operations integration manager for NASA’s commercial crew program.

“In launch control, they were hugging. In our room, we were giving virtual high-fives,” he said of the aftermath of the launch. 

“We were pretty worried the weather wasn’t going to cooperate. We were watching the radar like a hawk. An hour-and-a-half before (the launch) we were a no-go, but we proceeded hoping it would clear.”

Unlike Wednesday, when the launch had to be scrubbed due to weather, this time it cleared and Hess and his crew called the mission a go, sending astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken hurling toward the International Space Station.

Hess and his crew monitored the flight and watched 19 hours later when the capsule docked with the space station. On Monday Hess was on a video chat with Hurley and Behnken, asking them about the flight — everything from how the capsule handled to the noises the astronauts heard enroute.

“It’s a new ship so we ask about everything,” Hess said. “It was good to hear them.”

Both Behnken and Hurley have been to the space station before, Hess said, adding they are “super professional, exceedingly smart and great test pilots.”

While they are tasked with performing a number of experiments and other “space stationy things” while on the space station, Hess said, they have one other important mission — retrieving a small American flag left at the station by the last shuttle mission from the U.S. and returning it to American soil. 

Ironically, he said, Hurley was the pilot during that last trip in 2011.

Although it had been an exhausting weekend, the excitement of the launch was still evident in Hess’ voice when he talked Monday. 

After all, not only was this the first manned launch to the space station from U.S. soil in almost a decade, it was the first launch of a ship developed by private business — in this case, SpaceX.

The company founder is Elon Musk, who Hess has met several times. Musk, he said, is “very mission focused.”

Hess, who has wanted to be a rocket scientist since he was 4 and watched the Apollo missions, has had a front-row seat to history since joining NASA when he was 20 and a student at the University of Michigan, where he earned degrees in aerospace and mechanical engineering.

He applied to become an astronaut, Hess said, and made it fairly far but realized that with asthma and allergies, space travel wasn’t for him.

Instead, he started with NASA as a co-operative employment student working in the propulsion division.

He has worked as a systems engineer for the space shuttle, then spent a decade working on spacewalks, doing everything from planning the walks to training the astronauts and directing them from mission control.

“It was super exciting and super stressful,” he said.

As part of that program, Hess donned a flight suit and flew in zero-gravity planes and trained in buoyancy pools meant to simulate conditions in space.

“It was the stuff of dreams,” he said. “I would say, ‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff.’”

He’s worked on the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the space station, spending three months a year in Russia from 1995 to 2000 in preparation for its construction. He conducted the checks of the first two modules of the station, the functional cargo block and service module, named Zvezda, or star, and Varya, or sunrise.

His assignment to Russia came after his boss asked him a few simple questions, Hess said.

“He said, ‘You’re from Wisconsin? You still have a warm jacket?’” Hess recalled. When he answered yes, he was told, “You’re working with the Russians.”

Hess later ran the Neutral Buoyancy Lab for five years, was the division chief for NASA’s division of space medicine and served as acting associate center director at Johnson Space Center.

About 18 months ago, he joined the commercial crew program, which is working with SpaceX and Boeing to replace the past practice of paying Russia for seats on the Soyuz spacecraft to get U.S. astronauts to the space station.

The first flights were unmanned, Hess said, noting he was the launch manager during the SpaceX Demo-1 mission and its in-flight abort mission, as well as Boeing’s ill-fated orbital flight test. 

But working on the manned mission was different, he said.

“You really understand how much risk is involved in this business,” he said before the weekend launch. “We’re going to put people on top of a rocket, which is a controlled explosion. You’re going to put them in space where there’s a vacuum two feet above their heads.”

Adding people to the mission means adding life support and other systems to the capsule that weren’t needed on the unmanned flights, he said.

When the Dragon capsule docked and Behnken and Hurley joined the space station crew, there was a huge sense of relief, Hess said.

But even as the astronauts put the Dragon capsule to sleep and the Falcon 9 rocket returned to earth, Hess and his crew are looking ahead. They will determine when the crew will return to earth and prepare for the next missions.

After all, in late summer there will be another SpaceX flight, this one taking a four-man crew to the space station, and later this year Boeing is expected to launch another test flight.

“We’ve been working on this for years and years and years,” Hess said. “But there is not a finish line. There are just intermediate milestones. We splash this one down and in the next weeks or months we will fly again.”

Eventually, he said, NASA will alternate flights between SpaceX and Boeing.

“Think of them as Uber and Lyft,” he said, noting the U.S. has contracted with the firms to transport astronauts to the space station.