Frank Henschel of Lambertville went on a American Museum of Natural History Discovery Tour and watched millionaire Gregory Olsen lift off for the international space station.
By: Linda Seida
LAMBERTVILLE As millionaire scientist Gregory Olsen came home Monday from his $20 million trip to the international space station, Frank Henschel of Lambertville recalled his trip to Kazakhstan to watch the New Jersey space tourist and two crew members blast off into space.
Mr. Henschel recently traveled with 14 others to explore the U.S. and Russian space programs on an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History’s Discovery Tours. The itinerary included the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York; then on to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., before departing for Moscow and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where the Russian Soyuz craft launched Oct. 1.
The tour also was supposed to stop at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, but that leg of the journey was aborted because of Hurricane Rita.
"It’s been a real whirlwind of a trip, almost too fast," Mr. Henschel said Monday.
The tour began Sept. 17.
"We were given completely VIP treatment all the way around, everywhere we went," he said. "We were as close as close could be to the launch."
Mr. Henschel, who describes himself as a "super senior citizen" who is in his "upper 80s," was a pilot with the Naval Air Transport Service in World War II. He flew missions across the North Atlantic and logged about 3,700 hours of flight time.
He and his wife, Helen, also flew on the Concorde supersonic jet, a transatlantic flight that he recalled took just three hours and 15 minutes.
In later years he toured the geographic North Pole and South Pole as well as the Northwest Passage.
He said he might have enjoyed being in Mr. Olsen’s shoes at one time.
"I might have when I was younger, but not now," he said. "There’s a lot of training before you can go, a lot of hard training."
After watching the launch, Mr. Henschel traveled with the tour group to Moscow to view the Russians’ Mission Control. It was a "monster control room" where he stood "about 10 feet from all the control people at their monitors," he said.
The trip’s highlights included spending a day with former NASA astronauts Wally Schirra and Story Musgrave. Mr. Henschel and the others in the tour group did not get to meet Mr. Olsen, who was quarantined before the space flight with two fellow Soyuz travelers, astronaut William McArthur and cosmonaut Valery Tokarev. Some in the tour group had the opportunity to experience simulated zero-gravity flight conditions.
Mr. Olsen spent $20 million to become the third non-astronaut in space. Mr. Henschel would not say how much he spent to go on the tour and watch the liftoff.
"Yes, it was fairly expensive," he said, adding the experience was worth the cost.
A Discovery Tours brochure listed the cost of the tour at about $29,000.
Mr. Henschel brought home several souvenirs for his wife, but there wasn’t much time for shopping, he said. He also returned with one souvenir he could have done without: an upper respiratory infection.
With the aid of a translator, he was treated by a physician.
"There was no language problem. We always had interpreters," he said.