Pass It On: USU Alum Jim Elwell Gives Space Science Students a Boost

Utah State University alumnus Jim Elwell ‘82 remembers life as a struggling student, toiling night after night in a lab and putting his heart and soul into a project that, odds on, could crash and burn in dismal failure.

“Although a lot can be learned from classes and textbooks, it takes real-world experience to become a productive engineer,” said Elwell, a member of USU’s initial Get Away Special Team from 1977 to 1981. “Working with the GAS team gave me that experience — the inevitable trial-and-error that goes into taking ideas from paper to reality.”

Elwell gathered with fellow GAS alumni at an April 8 reunion banquet, where participants reminisced about the team’s accomplishments over the past 35 years: 11 experimental payloads sent into space on NASA space shuttles, three trips made and experiments conducted on NASA ‘Vomit Comet’ microgravity flights, experiments sent to the International Space Station and thousands of K-12 students reached through Aggie-led science presentations.

The team is largely responsible for one of the university’s best known achievements: USU has sent more student-built experiments into space than any other university in the world.

At the banquet, Elwell and his wife, Diane, announced their gift of $100,000 to establish the Elwell Get Away Special Program Assistance Fund for Utah State University. The successful engineer and entrepreneur urged his peers to “pass it on.”

“Those of us who benefited from the GAS program need to help the program give similar opportunities to current and future students,” said Elwell, who, with his brother John Elwell MS’95, now a program manager with USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory, founded Salt Lake City-based QSI Corporation in 1983. Elwell sold QSI to Sweden-based Beijer Electronics AB in 2010.

“Our gift is a tribute to the integrity and life’s work of L. Rex Megill and R. Gilbert ‘Gil’ Moore, who stepped up to provide students at USU and beyond with extraordinary learning opportunities,” he said.

Megill and Moore, both former USU faculty members, founded Utah State’s chapter of the NASA-initiated self-contained payload program. Megill, who passed away in 1998, was an enthusiastic supporter of USU’s GAS program and mentor to GAS students, including Elwell. Moore, who attended the April 8 banquet, famously stood during an October 1976 professional conference presentation, as a NASA representative was announcing the new program, and offered a personal check to cover the cost of USU’s first payload reservation.

“USU students designed and built experiments that flew in the very first GAS canister in the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Columbia during its ST-4 mission from June 27 to July 4, 1982,” said Moore, director and founder of Colorado-based Project Starshine. “This June, members of that initial group of students and I will attend the final shuttle launch — the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis — as guests of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr.”

Elwell and fellow alum David Yoel MS’83 are among the former GAS students who’ll attend the launch.

“It will be bittersweet watching the shuttle program draw to a close,” said Yoel, founder and CEO of American Aerospace Advisors, a Pennsylvania-based technology firm that develops applications in space technologies, airborne remote sensing and unmanned aviation. “But it’s time to move on to new technologies and increased commercial space travel.”

Yoel, who served as the first GAS team coordinator, praised Megill and Moore for their mentorship, along with USU Department of Physics head Jan Sojka “who has shepherded USU’s program for all these years.”

“The GAS program is a remarkable hands-on experience for students,” he said. “I don’t think any university can match USU’s record. We, as alumni, need to find ways to help USU students continue to get their experiments into space.”

Banquet attendee Lara Anderson ’03, MS’04, a 2001 Goldwater Scholar and 2003 Rhodes Scholar, says the excitement and hands-on experience of crafting an experimental payload with the GAS team to fly on Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2001 played a key part of her decision to pursue a career in physics.

“I was involved in developing the microcomputer control systems for a nucleic boiling experiment — the results of which current GAS students are still exploring and incorporating into their current experiments,” says Anderson, who earned a doctorate from England’s Oxford University, is completing a postdoctoral stint at the University of Pennsylvania and starting a postdoctoral fellowship in particle physics at Harvard University. “Working with the GAS team was the first time I ever programmed a computer, built a circuit or machined a piece of metal. It was the one and only time my fingerprints have been in space.”

NASA discontinued the GAS program following the 2003 Columbia disaster. Aggies retained the name for the USU chapter and have since explored other avenues to propel their projects into space. Last year, the GAS team won a competitive slot in NASA’s 2010 Microgravity University and flew a successful heat transfer experiment on one of the agency’s ‘Vomit Comet’ microgravity jets. The team submitted a second successful proposal for the 2011 program and will return to Houston’s Johnson Space Center for another flight this June.

Banquet attendee and current GAS team member Ryan Martineau, who is among six USU undergrads slated to fly on the Vomit Comet in summer 2011, called Elwell’s gift “inspiring.”

“Meeting GAS alumni and hearing stories about their challenges motivates me to be a better researcher,” he said. “Their willingness to support current students, including Jim Elwell’s example, was a huge lesson in generosity. I hope to someday pay forward for the benefits I’m receiving from my GAS experience.”

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