Just call it a strange coincidence: When Highland Park native John Mace Grunsfeld blasted into space March 2 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, he wasn’t the first Grunsfeld to reach for the stars.
Sixty-five years earlier, his grandfather, architect Ernest Grunsfeld, had designed Chicago’s Adler Planetarium on Lake Shore Drive, which at the time was mankind’s only way of making that same reach.
On May 19, the grandson will appear as a guest of honor in the star-gazing chapel built by the grandfather. It will be part of the Adler’s 65th anniversary celebration.
And taking it all in will be a man with pride overflowing, John’s father and Ernest’s son: architect Tony Grunsfeld of Highland Park.
“It will be terrific,” Tony said. “It’s wonderful.”
Yet Tony Grunsfeld said his son’s interest in space was not launched by the creation of Ernest, who died in 1972. “It’s just a coincidence,” he said. “I don’t think that had any influence.”
John Grunsfeld, 36, an astrophysicist, took off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., a place he had been hoping to reach since age 8.
Back then, as a 3rd grader at Ravinia Grammar School, he developed the hunger that would lead him on the 15-day, 15-hour mission that was to become the longest so far in NASA’s shuttle series.
Grunsfeld’s role on that flight was as a mission specialist using extremely sophisticated telescopes that had been launched once before on an earlier shuttle mission.
Obviously there was some education in between, but this desire to reach into space was born out of a fascination with the televised space missions of the ’60s and ’70s, a curiosity fed by science fiction books and, of course, “Star Trek.”
“The ’60s were a remarkable time because several things were happening at once,” John Grunsfeld said. “Men were leaving planet Earth, kids were breaking into the television age, and I was able to see Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.”
In addition to having a head for science, Grunsfeld harbors a love for something that seems to be common in the astronaut corps, from Alan Shepard on: speed.
Before his 17,000-mile-an-hour ascent, however, he had to settle for speedy descents on snow skis or rides in fast cars or trips in his airplane, a twin-engine Comanche. Suffice it to say, Grunsfeld likes to test limits.
“John was always interested in finding ways to make his bike, skis and car go faster,” recalled David Sickle of Chicago, who met Grunsfeld while the two attended Highland Park High School. “He wasn’t interested in taking unnecessary risks; he just wanted to know, `How do you do it?’ He’s probably set his (speed) record now.”
“One of the first things I remember about John was him talking about being an astronaut,” said Tom Loeff, who now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., but has been a close friend to Grunsfeld since 5th grade. “He was motivated to learn about and understand the world around him. I would have been surprised if he hadn’t achieved his goal.”
Grunsfeld’s sister Marcia Henner of Highland Park feels the same way. “John was always very serious and worked harder than anyone else,” she said. “Whatever he does, he does to the fullest.”
“John is the ultimate explorer,” said his wife of six years, Carol Schiff Grunsfeld, also a Highland Park native. A NASA shuttle program analyst, she and Grunsfeld now live in Houston. “There are things we haven’t discovered, the very beginning of how and why we are here (on Earth),” she said. “He is driven to answering these questions.”
As evidence of what their marriage would become, they spent their honeymoon climbing the icy mountains of Bolivia. That alone would be enough to strike fear in many people.
And while fear may be what the rest of his family has felt about his explorations, especially before the launch, the simple desire to know is what has driven John.
“Sally (John’s mother) and I are very proud of John,” Tony said. “But space travel is a dangerous profession and a frightening process. It’s not like getting into your Chevy and going to work. I don’t think he was the least bit frightened, though.”
If he was, in the spirit of the earliest astronauts, he didn’t show it.
“I’d like to take three or four more space shuttle missions,” Grunsfeld said, noting that astronauts fly approximately every other year. “After that, I’d like to spend three or four months on the space station, then return to the university environment to teach.”
A laboratory module for the international space station Grunsfeld referred to is scheduled to be launched in 1997 and manned for the first time the following year, according to Kari Fleugel, public affairs specialist for NASA in Houston.
That will be the next great step in space technology. And as the quest for space has become more technological, the public profile of the astronauts has sunk to the point that this could be called the Age of the Anonymous Astronaut.
Lake County’s other astronaut, Jim Lovell, who lives part time in Lake Forest, put it this way: “This is the age of the mature space program. We send six or seven astronauts into space at a time, but their experiments are plowing new ground.”
In fact, Lovell, a veteran of the Gemini and Saturn programs who almost gave his life for the cause, said he respects the modern breed of astronaut because of the extensive education involved. In the early days of the space program, he said, the emphasis was on simply getting into space or to the moon through bravery and flying expertise. Nowadays the emphasis is on the science performed once the astronauts get into space. “I admire these guys,” he added.
Grunsfeld agreed that today’s astronauts are less likely than their earlier NASA counterparts to be treated like celebrities. But this hasn’t discouraged the most experienced pilots in the world and the top scientists and engineers from academia from applying for the job, he said.
Furthermore, being a little more anonymous seems to fit Grunsfeld’s earthly goals better too.
“I consider the lack of celebrity status a feature,” he said. “One of our responsibilities is to go out and tell the public what we do. After all, that’s where taxpayers’ dollars go. The advantage of not being too famous is that we can go to schools and community centers, talk to hundreds of kids and not have everyone worry about hosting a celebrity but rather someone they’d like to know.”
Certainly what Lovell said about education is true in Grunsfeld’s case. Like his father and grandfather before him, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1980.
Prior to earning a master’s and doctorate in physics from the same university in 1984 and 1988, respectively, he spent a year as a visiting scientist at the University of Tokyo/Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. He also was a NASA graduate student fellow at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1987, the W.D. Grainger Postdoctoral Fellow in Experimental Physics at the University of Chicago from 1988 to 1989 and a Senior Research Fellow on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from 1989 until 1992.
Hoping to get into the astronaut corps, Grunsfeld applied to NASA in 1991 along with 3,000 other candidates. One of only 20 to make the final cut, he was hired in 1992 and qualified for the Endeavour mission after a year of training.
Those are impressive credentials to say the least. But when Grunsfeld talked by shortwave radio to students at his alma mater, Highland Park High School, during his shuttle mission, known as Astro 2, it was as much as a local boy makes good as it was as a scientist.
At 7:29 p.m. on March 8, during one of Grunsfeld’s 12-hour shifts, Highland Park High School students C.J. Culicchia, 17, and Todd Kooperman and Jonathan Niehoff, both 15, and all three members of the school’s Communications Club, had the opportunity to speak to Grunsfeld for eight minutes via ham radio.
Grunsfeld told the students that man’s impact on the environment was visible from space, explaining that he could see the deforestation of the Amazon jungle. And on the more mundane side, he told them he couldn’t wait to get back to Earth for a good, hot shower, because bathing in space seems to be one of those feats mankind has not yet perfected.
Beyond that, showing that there is still plenty of the little kid left in him, he said that during spare moments he did what any curious child would do: kept his nose pressed to the window.
At the urging of the Grunsfelds’ longtime family friend Hank Arenberg of Highland Park, Post-Newsweek Cable Co., headquartered in the suburb, televised Endeavour’s entire mission.
Perhaps that will be enough to get another 8-year-old out there reaching for the stars.
Grunsfeld’s advice to that girl or boy: “Regardless of what dreams you have, work very hard, play very hard and have fun.”
And to Ernest, wherever you are, you can rest knowing this: Your boys are having fun.
