Fortunate Ford

Kevin Ford didn’t join NASA until age 40, but his timing was just right.
During a 15-plus year career with the organization, he spent a combined 157 days in space.
As today marks the three-year anniversary of his last return to Earth, he is working out the details of his next adventure.
Ford, who was born at Jay County Hospital and grew up in Montpelier, retired from NASA in January.
“Everybody has to let the astronaut job go at some point. … It’s inevitable,” said Ford this week from his home in Houston. “It comes to everybody sooner or later. For me, it’s nice to do it when … I can have a third career.”
He’s not ready to discuss his next move just yet as details are still being worked out, except to say that he will be working in academia.
It will be the third career for Ford, a 1978 Blackford High School graduate, who spent 18 years in the Air Force before joining NASA in August 2000. His military time gave him a variety of experiences, including the chance to be an instructor at the Air Force Test Pilot School, and also provided for most of his education — a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, master’s degrees from Troy State University and the University of Florida and a doctorate in astronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio.
After two years of training with NASA he was in the early stages of working on projects related to spacecraft when Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. That changed the course for everyone in the organization as NASA space travel was shut down for about two years.
When flights began again, Ford became a Capsule Communicator, or CAPCOM, an astronaut at mission control in Houston who is in charge of communicating with those in space. He spent the equivalent of a full work year talking to others as they made their trips before being assigned in 2008 to a mission of his own.
Ford piloted Space Shuttle Discovery on a two-week mission to the International Space Station, leaving from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Aug. 28, 2009.
“The feeling when you actually leave the launch pad and the rocket is free is really a great feeling because you know it’s really hard to get to space and you know you’re really heading there,” said Ford, who would later return to space as part of a Russian mission to the International Space Station. “In both cases, when I left the launch pad I was just like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you for getting me off the planet today.’ It’s just a great feeling.”
That trip to the space station to deliver 15,000 pounds of supplies including science and storage racks and a new ammonia tank assembly already put him in an exclusive club. Fewer than 550 humans have been to space.
It was less than two years later that he found out he’d become part of an even smaller group when he got his assignment to leave Earth for a second time.
Ford, who had spent time in Russia in 2004 as director of operations at Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside of Moscow, was selected as a crew member for the Soyuz TMA-06M “Kazbek” mission to the International Space Station. As part of that 143-day trip, he served as commander of the space station for about two-and-a-half months.
“(It) was something I would have never guessed I’d do when I came in in 2000,” said Ford. “That wasn’t something I really thought was a possibility for me. …
“That was quite a different thing than the shuttle flight, but certainly the experience of a lifetime.”
Ford had opportunities to continue his career at NASA, but going back into orbit wasn’t in the cards. And, he noted, the hectic nature of working in the astronaut office is a great job for someone younger than he is at age 55, but probably not the best for the tail end of professional life.
He had been planning for years to end his career as an astronaut, staying on for about 18 months after his obligations for the Soyuz mission were complete. During that time he worked on the new Orion program, which is designed to take astronauts deeper into space than they have ever been before.
Though he’s now decided to leave NASA, he’s not done working with the organization. Over the years he’s thought about several projects related to space travel and the space station, and he plans on using his newfound free time to work on them.
And as he reflects back, he knows how fortunate he was to visit space twice and orbit the earth 2,452 times.
“Just the way things worked out for me to get into the astronaut office and then to get to do those flights was really nothing short of miraculous,” Ford said. “We’re kind of the people who really rolled the lucky dice. We rolled the Yahtzee on the first roll. … Just to be one of those people who gets to fly into space in one of those machines, it’s a super lucky thing.”