Meet the first Australian astronaut to launch into orbit under our flag
Australian polar explorer Eric Philips will turn dreams of outer space into reality when he lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre on Tuesday.
Like many kids who grew up in the Apollo era, Aussie polar explorer Eric Philips dreamt of one day going into space.
Now, Mr Philips will be the first Australian to fly into orbit under the Australian flag.
“I was seven years old when I was sat down with my class in the school gymnasium in South Australia and plonked in front of a TV. We had no idea what was going on, but then some grainy picture came up on the screen and we watched the very first moon landing in 1969,” Mr Philips, 62, said.
“This resonated with me, and perhaps even led to me embarking on my polar expeditions because I felt like I wanted to do something very remote, very distant … which is exactly what this space mission is about.”
Mr Philips, who has been an Arctic adventurer for 35 years, will swap ice climbing boots and thick fur coats for a space suit on April 1 when he takes off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on the Fram2 mission around Earth’s polar regions.
He will be part of a four-man crew aboard the SpaceX aircraft, which includes funder and commander Chun Wang, mission specialist and co-pilot Rabe Rogge, and vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen.
The crew will look to complete the first ever human orbits over the north and south poles. They start at Cape Canaveral and travel due south, entering a circular orbit at an altitude of about 430km.
“We’ll be seeing things no other humans have seen before, in particular the high regions of the Arctic and Antarctic,” Mr Philips said.
The South Australian is the crew’s mission specialist and medic who will respond to any emergencies on the journey.
It was on one of his guided tours in 2003 in the Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway that Mr Philips met Mr Wang, who 21 years later invited his polar tour lead on a very different expedition.
“We were talking about flying to the moon and space travel and Mars … and that directly resulted in my invitation to join him on this mission in space,” Mr Philips said.
The quartet have spent the better part of a year training, undergoing simulations from SpaceX’s Hawthorne facility in California, centrifuge training in Philadelphia and extreme environment training in the fjords of Alaska.
The group will also be undertaking more than 20 research and medical exercises on board to learn how humans will react, behave and endure long duration space flight in the future. As part of the research they are attempting to grow mushrooms in space for the first time under the moniker “Mission MushVroom”.
The fungi, in particular oyster mushrooms, have been identified as an ideal food to grow in orbit due to their fast growth in small spaces and nutritional value that can help supplement an astronaut’s diet on long missions.
The mushrooms will be partially grown prior to take off and continued to be observed by crew for the 3½-day flight to see how the fungi grow in microgravity. As there’s no way to simulate microgravity on earth, the results will only be revealing once up in orbit.
“But there’s good evidence to suggest they will continue to grow up there. Certainly it will help sustain astronauts in future if this does end up being something that is a viable option.”
Mr Philips has looked back on the historic expeditions of early polar explorers and his own experiences as inspiration for his latest adventure.
Even the mission name, Fram2, is aptly titled after the late 1800s Norwegian explorer ship, Fram.
“They used this ship to head north towards horizons that had never been approached before, never crossed, and they had no concept of what was on the other side. It was just conjecture and a little bit of superstition about what was beyond. In many respects we’re doing the same kind of thing,” Mr Philips said.
“Fram2 is an iteration of those early expeditions, seeing things that human eyes have never seen before. We can get on Google Earth, and we can see images of the high Arctic and the high Antarctica, but we really don’t know whether seeing them with human eyes correlates to what we can pull up on the computer.
“Of course, we’re doing something that is inherently adventurous and does come with some risk. But equally, the rewards are pretty spectacular.”
Mr Philips is already looking forward to his return.
He wants to ease up on the adventuring and spend more downtime with his wife Susy, son Kip (who are currently with him in quarantine ahead of launch), and fellow explorer and daughter Mardy.
“I promised to my wife a couple of years ago that I think it’s time to tape it down. I can pretty much relax after this, I hope.”
Oceanographer Paul Desmond Scully-Power was the first Australian-born astronaut, as a payload specialist aboard a NASA space shuttle in 1984. Andy Thomas was the first Australian-born NASA mission specialist and made several space journeys in the 1990s and 2000s.
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