Space passenger rides out highs and lows

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

MOSCOW - In his travels from Brooklyn to the threshold of outer space, Greg Olsen has been through incredible highs and lows: from an admittedly less-than-stellar academic record to scientific success, from hard times in business to multimillion-dollar deals.

But Olsen's biggest highs and lows have come since he decided to plunk down $20 million for a visit to the international space station: Just weeks after he started training, Russian doctors kicked him off the crew because they didn’t like the looks of his medical tests.

“It was a huge blow,” the 60-year-old inventor-businessman told MSNBC.com in an exclusive face-to-face interview this month in Moscow, “and that’s what builds your character.”

It took almost a year to persuade the doctors to let him back in training, and now he’s on the verge of the highest high of all: this weekend's launch to the space station.

Why is Olsen going through all that aggravation and spending all that money? When a Russian reporter recently asked him that question, Olsen answered simply, in Russian: “Ya lyublyu kosmos.”

The reporter persisted: Why does he love the cosmos? Olsen then nodded toward his professional crewmates, NASA astronaut Bill McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev. “The same reason they love it — to be weightless, to see the Earth from space,” he said, in English this time. “It’s a great experience, and I really look forward to it.”

But even though he's looking forward, he's also bracing himself for further character-building exercises ahead.

“I’m not an astronaut or a cosmonaut. But on the other hand, space is not for wimps,” he told MSNBC.com. “It’s certainly not just writing a check, going off into space. It’s a challenging process. It challenges you physically, emotionally, intellectually, and it’s a wonderful experience. Launching is going to be the culmination of it.”

A charmed life?
From the outside, Olsen might seem to have led a charmed life, in a succession of high-tech businesses, in his cosmic avocation and even in physical appearance: His rugged looks have been compared to Clint Eastwood’s so many times that he says he’s waiting for the day “when people tell Clint Eastwood that he looks like Greg Olsen.”

Sure, he had his troubles growing up: Born in Brooklyn to an electrician father and a schoolteacher mother, Olsen got into scrapes during his teen years in New Jersey, and was once arrested for the stereotypical 1950s-era offense of stealing hubcaps. But he turned all that around in college, becoming “a good B student” and earning degrees in physics and materials science from Fairleigh Dickinson and the University of Virginia.

Today, Olsen says his interest in math and science was fueled in part by the enthusiasm of the early space race, from Sputnik in 1957 to Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in 1969. “I never imagined back then that I would be following his footsteps in some small way, but it planted the seeds,” he said.

Olsen honed his scientific talents at RCA, where he developed new technologies in fiber optics – specifically, light detectors and emitters that use indium gallium arsenide crystals.

The devices that he invented can be used to focus signals for fiber-optic transmissions, or to see things in infrared wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye. For example, one of Olsen’s infrared imagers was used during this summer’s Discovery mission to inspect the shuttle’s protective skin for damage.

In 1984, Olsen left RCA and founded his own company to capitalize on the technology. The company, called Epitaxx, was sold to the Japanese for $12 million in 1990 — just before Japan’s financial bubble burst.

Olsen plowed his profits into yet another startup, Sensors Unlimited, which specialized in infrared imagers. In 2000, the company was sold for $700 million. Then the bottom fell out of the high-tech market, and Olsen and his management team bought the company back in 2002 for just $6 million.

Olsen now serves as Sensors Unlimited’s chairman of the board, but says he’s not played much of a role in the company’s management since the buyback.

Just this month, Goodrich Corp., an aerospace and defense contractor, announced that it was buying Sensors Unlimited yet again, this time for $60 million in cash.

Olsen sounded almost apologetic about his knack for selling high and buying low.

“All the good things in my life have been preceded by some sort of struggle,” he told MSNBC.com. “People say, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, you go start a company and you sell it for a lot of money.’ But I’m not sure people are aware of how much hard work is involved, and how many setbacks you have to endure. You know, just like the space trip.”

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