Leroy Chiao

Leroy Chiao: Call Sign Shandong

His call sign was Shandong, after the Chinese province where his parents grew up before they crossed to Taiwan, met at university there, and emigrated to America for graduate school. On 2 November 2004, from a station orbiting the Earth, their son became the first American to cast a ballot in a presidential election from space. Six weeks earlier he had taken command of the International Space Station — the first Asian-American, and the first ethnic Chinese, ever to command a spacecraft.

Two Chemical Engineers and a Son

Leroy Chiao was born on 28 August 1960. NASA's own biography gives his birthplace as Danville, California, where he grew up and graduated from Monte Vista High School in 1978; other records place his birth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before the family moved west. His parents were *waishengren* — mainlanders from Shandong who had crossed to Taiwan, met at a Taiwanese university in the 1950s, and emigrated to the United States late in that decade for graduate study.

Both were chemical engineers, and they pushed their son toward a doctorate. He obliged with unusual thoroughness: a bachelor's in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, a master's from UC Santa Barbara in 1985, and a PhD from Santa Barbara in 1987, at twenty-seven.

Composites

His first working years were spent on materials that have to survive conditions people cannot. At the Hexcel Corporation in Dublin, California, from 1987 to 1989, he worked on aerospace composites, including a joint NASA-JPL-Hexcel project developing advanced polymer composite reflectors for space telescopes. He moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1989, where he built mechanistic cure models for graphite fibre-epoxy composites — mathematical descriptions of how a resin hardens, which is the difference between a structural part and an expensive failure.

It is worth pausing on this, because the astronaut biography usually swallows the scientist. Chiao arrived at NASA as a published researcher in exactly the discipline that determines what a spacecraft can be made of.

The Youngest of Group 13

NASA selected him in January 1990, aged twenty-nine — the youngest member of Astronaut Group 13 — and he qualified as a mission specialist in July 1991. He would later serve as Chief of the Astronaut Office's EVA Branch, the department responsible for how human beings work outside a spacecraft, and would qualify as both Shuttle mission specialist and Space Station commander.

His first flight, STS-65 aboard Columbia from 8 to 23 July 1994, carried the second International Microgravity Laboratory and more than eighty experiments. It set the Shuttle duration record of its day: 353 hours and 55 minutes over 236 orbits. Chiao came home as the 196th NASA astronaut and the 311th human being to have gone to space.

Outside the Airlock

The work he became known for was the work done in a suit. On STS-72 aboard Endeavour in January 1996 — a mission that retrieved Japan's Space Flyer Unit and deployed and recovered the OAST-Flyer — Chiao performed two spacewalks, nearly thirteen hours in total, specifically to test tools, hardware and techniques for the assembly of a space station that did not yet exist. In doing so he became the first Asian-American and the first ethnic Chinese person to perform a spacewalk.

Four years later he was back to build the thing for real. STS-92 aboard Discovery, in October 2000, attached the Z1 Truss and Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 to the ISS across four spacewalks; Chiao was the EVA lead and performed two of them, totalling 13 hours and 16 minutes, on a mission that covered 5.3 million miles in 202 orbits.

Commander of Expedition 10

On 13 October 2004 he launched aboard Soyuz TMA-5 as commander and NASA science officer of Expedition 10, the tenth resident crew of the ISS, and stayed until 24 April 2005. He ran twenty science experiments and made two more spacewalks — this time in Russian Orlan suits rather than American ones, another nearly ten hours outside.

Two things from that mission outlasted it. One was the vote: on 2 November 2004 Chiao became the first American to vote in a presidential election from orbit. The other was an accident of observation. Exercising on the station's Interim Resistive Exercise Device, he noticed that the vibrations he was generating were exciting the ISS solar arrays. Rather than treat it as a nuisance, the finding was worked up into a deliberate technique, formally used from 2006 — an astronaut on an exercise machine turned into an instrument for probing the dynamics of the structure around him.

His career totals: 229 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes in space across four missions, and 36 hours and 7 minutes of extravehicular activity across six spacewalks.

Why Leroy Is Called a Genius

Chiao's case is unusual among astronauts because the scientific credentials are not decorative. He holds a doctorate in chemical engineering and did real research in composites — cure modelling, telescope reflectors — before he ever flew, and the quality on display throughout his career is an ability to move between the equations and the hardware without losing either. The IRED episode is the clearest instance: most people exercising in orbit would have registered the shaking as an annoyance. Chiao recognised a forced-oscillation experiment running for free on the structure he was living inside, and it became an operational technique.

Add a range that is genuinely rare: fluency in English, Mandarin and Russian, the last learned for the ISS partnership; instrument-rated pilot; qualification on both American and Russian suits; and leadership of the EVA Branch, which is to say responsibility for the entire discipline of human work in vacuum.

The counter-case should be put plainly. He formulated no theory and made no discovery that carries his name. His most-cited distinctions — first Asian-American to walk in space, first ethnic Chinese to command a mission — are firsts of demography rather than of intellect, and they say as much about who had been excluded as about who he is. Astronaut selection rewards broad competence rather than depth, and much of his later public life has been advocacy, consultancy and commentary. Neither NASA's biography nor the standard encyclopaedic account uses the word "genius." What both document is a scientist who became an operator without ceasing to be a scientist.

Afterward

Chiao retired from NASA in December 2005 and stayed in the field from every angle at once: technical adviser at SpaceWorks Enterprises, executive vice-president for space operations at Excalibur Almaz, the first Raborn Distinguished Chair Max Faget Professor in mechanical engineering at Louisiana State University, chairman of the user panel at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, and later roles with Epiphan Video and the Space Foundation. He is co-founder and chief executive of OneOrbit.

In May 2009 he was appointed to the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee — the Augustine Commission — the independent review that reassessed where American human spaceflight should go next. In a CNN piece on 1 September 2011, after the Shuttle's retirement and a Soyuz failure had narrowed the world's options to almost nothing, he argued that China should be allowed into the International Space Station programme.

His decorations include the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 2005, four Space Flight Medals, two Exceptional Service Medals, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale's Korolev Diploma in 2002 and its De la Vaulx Medal in 1994, and a place on A-Magazine's list of the hundred most influential Asian Americans of the 1990s. He flies a Grumman Tiger and skis downhill.

Achievements

• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Barbara and Monte Vista High School
• Worked as astronaut, motivational speaker and engineer