Star Man
Ahead of receiving the Club’s Distinguished Achievement Award this month, astronaut Koichi Wakata discusses his career in zero gravity.
Joining the crowds of morning commuters funneling into the monorail station, Koichi Wakata stopped off at a small kiosk to pick up a newspaper, just as he did every day on his way to work.
On this particular morning in 1991, an article in the paper caught his attention. The piece detailed how Japan’s space agency was accepting applications for an astronaut candidate to join NASA’s space shuttle program in the United States.
By the time the train pulled in at Haneda Airport, where Wakata worked as a structural engineer with Japan Airlines, the 28-year-old had resurrected a boyhood dream.
“I had a strong longing for going to space after I saw the [1969] Apollo lunar landing, when I was 5 years old,” he says. “At that time, of course, [Japan] didn’t have an astronaut, so I never thought of being able to fly in space. For a Japanese small boy, going to space seemed like an unreachable goal.”
On January 11, 1996, just five years after that monorail journey to work, Wakata was blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, in the space shuttle Endeavour.
As the shuddering shuttle accelerated to 28,000 kilometers per hour (around 30 times faster than a cruising jumbo jet), the six crew members felt a huge pressure, three times the force of gravity, pushing down on their recumbent bodies. After approximately eight and a half minutes, the engines cut off and instantly the astronauts were weightless. The shuttle had reached orbit.
“You couldn’t see the blue planet right away, but once we made it into orbit the sunrise was happening,” explains Wakata, sitting in the Space Dome museum at the Tsukuba Space Center one July morning. “The view of the Earth was so, so magnificent and beyond description. It was better than anything I had ever seen.”
From more than 450 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, Wakata says he was struck by the planet’s diminutive size amid the vast expanse of space.
“It looks so fragile. It really is spaceship Earth, and if you break some part of the carbon dioxide-removal system and oxygen-generation system—basically, the forests and trees—we could easily destroy the environment,” he says.
During that eight-day mission, Wakata used his years of preparation for tasks that included operating the shuttle’s robot arms. Since those early days of astronaut training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas—when Wakata, as the youngest on the course, received a pacifier from his teasing classmates—he has forged an impressive career that has spanned spaceflight milestones, from the retirement of the space shuttle to the completion of the International Space Station (ISS).
“On that very first mission, 20 years ago, Koichi impressed his crewmates with his leadership, technical prowess and engaging personality, all of which are characteristics that he has continued to exhibit all the way through to today as the ISS program manager,” says Club Member Chris Blackerby, NASA attaché at the US Embassy in Tokyo.
Wakata, 53, has now clocked up 347 days in space, over four missions, most recently spending six months aboard the space station, between November 2013 and May 2014. In the last leg of his stay, he assumed command of the station, a first for a Japanese astronaut.
“It’s a marathon to work in space for six months, as opposed to a 100-meter sprint for short flights of a week or two weeks when time really goes by quickly,” Wakata says of the contrast between his space shuttle and ISS expeditions. “[A short spaceflight] is like a business trip to a foreign country for a week. No matter how tough it is, you can just survive—work, work, work—and come back and relax.”
Born in Saitama, north of Tokyo, Wakata had an interest in aircraft and flying from an early age, diligently constructing model planes as a boy. After earning a master’s degree in applied mechanics from Kyushu University in 1989, he joined Japan Airlines’ maintenance department. Later, as an astronaut, he received his doctorate in aerospace engineering from his alma mater.
Now based at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) headquarters in Tsukuba, in Ibaraki Prefecture, Wakata is a passionate proponent of the ISS project, to which Japan contributes ¥40 billion a year. In particular, he extols the success of Kibo, Japan’s ¥300 billion laboratory module on the space station.
“The International Space Station is a very symbolic program and thought of as a testbed for how [international] cooperation in science and technology will proceed,” he says. “So far, it has been amazing, and there’s a possibility that the ISS program could receive a Nobel Prize in the future.”
While Japan is committed to the ISS until 2024, there are questions surrounding its long-term future. The project is jointly sponsored by the US, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan, and Wakata is quick to highlight the range of cutting-edge scientific experiments that are carried out in microgravity.
During his second stint on board the ISS, he oversaw experiments related to the development of groundbreaking medicine for the treatment of muscular dystrophy and osteoporosis, as well as tests in fluid dynamics and material science.
“Eventually, everybody on the planet can benefit from this technology developed from the experiments in space,” Wakata says. “We know that our sun will not be able to provide light in 5 billion years from now, and we need to be able to prepare for our own survival. That seems to me the ultimate goal of human spaceflight exploration.”
Standing next to the museum’s full-scale mockup of the Kibo module, a youthful-looking Wakata, dressed in a blue flight suit, discusses the obvious dangers associated with spaceflight and explains the rigorous training all astronauts undergo to deal with a multitude of possible emergencies. Much was learned, he says, from the Mir space station accident in 1997, when a resupply vessel collided with the station and forced the three crew members on board to hastily salvage their home.
In an interview in 2014, Wakata’s wife, Stefanie, said she found her husband’s launches stressful to watch. “There have been accidents in the past and that is when I am most scared. You hold your breath, you grit your teeth and your hands shake. But you know, deep down, that is what is going to get them into space,” she said. The couple met at Kyushu University when Stefanie was studying there for a year as an exchange student from Germany.
This month, the Club will recognize Wakata’s remarkable high-flying career at an award presentation. NASA’s Blackerby says the honor is well deserved.
“If the Distinguished Achievement Award is meant to showcase individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the US-Japan relationship, then Koichi is the ideal recipient,” he says. “He is the embodiment of the strong and enduring relationship between NASA and JAXA that is evident not only in our collaboration on human spaceflight, but also in our partnership on Earth science, space science and aeronautics research.”
Wakata says he feels humbled to have been chosen. “It’s quite an honor, but it would have been impossible to receive it without the teamwork I was lucky to be a part of,” he says. “So I really appreciate my team members and mentors who have helped me take on the challenges of human spaceflight.”
In his new role, Wakata is supporting Takuya Onishi, who is currently on the ISS, and helping to prepare fellow JAXA astronaut Norishige Kanai for a future expedition. But thoughts of once again experiencing 16 sunrises a day are never far from Wakata’s mind.
“Personally, I would like to fly in the new spacecraft that are being developed in the United States,” he says with a broad smile. “Hopefully, I would like to get back into zero gravity at some time in the future.”
You can take the man out of space…
Koichi Wakata will receive the Distinguished Achievement Award on September 14 at the Club.
Words: Nick Jones
Image: Yuuki Ide
