Meet Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, 2 ‘badass’ astronauts, engineers, and dads who are poised to make history for SpaceX, NASA and the world
by Dave Mosher, Business Insider US
- SpaceX is about to launch two people to space – its first-ever human mission since Elon Musk founded the rocket company 18 years ago.
- SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spaceship will be piloted by NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley during the test flight, called Demo-2.
- Both men are military test pilots, engineers, members of the same NASA astronaut class, and flew on two space shuttle missions. They each also married astronauts and have a son.
- Fellow astronauts describe Behnken and Hurley as deceptively intelligent and say they’d fly with either or both of them in a moment.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The ways in which NASA’s astronaut office picks a crew from the members of its esteemed corps is something of a mystery.
But with the space agency’s 2018 selection of Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to fly SpaceX’s now-imminent rocket launch of its new Crew Dragon spaceship, the process seems obvious in hindsight.
Each man graduated from the same crop of astronaut candidates in 2000. Each is an engineer and flew military aircraft. Each has flown to space twice aboard a space shuttle. Each married a fellow astronaut who’s journeyed to space and fathered a son with her. Each spent years working with SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, to perfect the commercial spaceship they will now attempt to ride to orbit.
And both share the aspiration of every test pilot-turned-astronaut: the freak opportunity to fly a brand-new bird.
“If you gave us one thing that we could have put on our list of dream jobs that we would have gotten to have someday,” Behnken told reporters on May 20, “it would have been to be aboard a new spacecraft and conduct a test mission.”
A high-stakes resurrection, nine years in the making
Weather and other factors permitting, the duo will drive out to Launch Complex 39A shortly after 1 p.m. ET, get sealed inside the Crew Dragon around 2:30 p.m. ET, lift off at precisely 4:33 p.m. ET, and slip into low-Earth orbit within nine minutes.
Then, about 19 hours after that, the crew aims to pull up to and dock with a football field-size orbiting laboratory called the International Space Station (ISS). The plan is to stay for roughly the next 110 days before departing, careening back to Earth, and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
The stakes of the astronauts’ mission, called Demo-2, could hardly be higher.
SpaceX, though it has launched 85-and-counting orbital-class Falcon 9 rockets, has never flown a single human being. NASA, meanwhile, flew its last space shuttle in July 2011. Since then, it’s had no means to reach orbit except by paying Russia for seats aboard its Soyuz spacecraft – and that reliance is a problem for the US, which has sunk about $100 billion into the ISS.
What led to this moment is a roughly $8 billion, 10-year public-private effort called the Commercial Crew Program. NASA awarded SpaceX about $3.14 billion of that to develop, build, and fly Crew Dragon.
The joining of forces was designed to help both entities overcome the obstacles to their own success. NASA got to groom the rocket company into a reliable commercial spaceflight provider that can sell the agency tickets to orbit for its astronauts. SpaceX, for its part, is now poised to finish the program with a human-rated spacecraft that will permit it to break open a new era of commercial spaceflight for the entire world.
“Unfortunately we’re in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Our country has been through a lot. But this is a unique moment where all of America can take a moment and look at our country do something stunning again, and that is launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” Jim Bridenstine, NASA’s administrator, said during a Tuesday press briefing. “We’re going to go to the International Space Station. And what we do there, of course, is we’re transforming how we do spaceflight in general.”
Essential to that transformation, both years in the past and at the outset, will be the two people proving the gambit has worked.
SpaceX: They’re ‘badass’ pilots, astronauts, and dads
Hurley, 53, grew up in New York near the Pennsylvania border, graduated at the top of his class in high school, and chased a civil engineering degree from Tulane University. By joining the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, he eventually would up as a test pilot in the Marine Corps with the call sign “Chunky” – and later a member of NASA’s year-2000 astronaut class.
Behnken, a 49-year-old Missouri native, followed a similar path. He pursued a mechanical engineering degree from Washington University in St. Louis, later picking up a master’s degree and PhD in the topic from Caltech. Amid that academic work he’d joined the US Air Force’s ROTC program, which led him to become a test pilot and also a member of the same class of NASA astronaut candidates.
The men befriended each other in NASA’s program and each flew two space shuttle missions. Hurley’s last mission, aboard space shuttle Atlantis in July 2011, was also the final flight of NASA’s program.
Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who joined SpaceX in 2011 to help develop its spaceships, and is now an astronautics professor at the University of Southern California, says he knows both the men well from working with them. He even overlapped with Behnken by sharing the same PhD advisor and trekking in nature with his future fellow astronaut.
“Doug likes to play a dumb pilot, but he’s actually a really smart guy,” Reisman told Business Insider. “And Bob’s nickname is ‘Dr. Bob.'”
Reisman added that Behnken “is very even-keeled” and quiet, and “tries not to let his mouth get out in front of him.”
As an example, Reisman shared a story about being in a SpaceX meeting with Behnken in which some employees began to talk to him “like a dumb pilot” him about vehicle control theory – which the astronaut studied for his doctorate.
“I’m sitting there laughing my my ass off because I know that he knows more about this stuff than they do,” Reisman said.
Behnken and Hurley’s experience, tenor, and attention to detail led NASA to pick the duo and two other astronauts in 2015 as part of a “Commercial Crew Cadre.” The goal: work with SpaceX and Boeing on new commercial spaceships. It also fast-tracked them for coveted spots on Crew Dragon.
During a press briefing on May 1, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, described both men as “badass” dads, pilots, and astronauts.
When later asked what makes each other a badass – and while avoiding saying the expletive – Behnken said Hurley “is ready for anything all the time” and “always prepared.”
“When you’re going to fly into space on a test mission, you couldn’t ask for a better person or a better type of individual to be there with you,” Behnken said. “I’m just thankful that, doing something like this, I’m doing it with with Doug Hurley.”
Hurley, for his part, praised Behnken’s wit.
“There is no stone unturned, there’s no way that he doesn’t have every potential eventuality already thought about five times ahead of almost anybody else,” Hurley said. “There’s no question I can ask him that he doesn’t already have probably the best answer for.”
Both say their first real jobs were working for their dads – and it wasn’t fun work, but it built them up.
“That’s probably the hardest boss that you ever worked for is your father,” Behnken said in a NASA video.
Leroy Chiao, who flew to space four times as a NASA astronaut before retiring, says the reputations of Behnken and Hurley precede them.
“I would certainly fly with them, either one of them or both of them, in a moment,” Chiao told Business Insider.
‘When you’re watching, you’re just a spectator’
Behnken and Hurley found a lot more in NASA’s 2000 astronaut class than space shuttle flights and work helping developing the first private spaceships: They also met their wives.
Megan McArthur, who helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009, married Behnken. The two later had a son, Theo, who’s about 6 years old. Fellow astronaut Karen Nyberg, meanwhile, married Hurley and had a son Jack, who’s now about 11 years old.
Both women and their sons have traveled to Florida to watch Behnken and Hurley rocket to orbit.
In an interview with The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport, McArthur expounded on the difficulty of seeing the father of their child launch to space in a turning of the tables.
“One of the hardest things to do is watch the person that you love launch into space,” McArthur told the Post. “It’s much harder than actually doing it yourself when you’re in the rocket. You have the training. You’re prepared for the mission. When you’re watching, you’re just a spectator. And no matter what happens, there’s nothing you can do to contribute to the situation.”
Still, having a spouse who understands the inherent risks of launching to space has helped the couples parent their sons through what to expect.
Behnken says the delays in the Commercial Crew Program – the first launch of a SpaceX or Boeing spacecraft was supposed to happen in late 2017 – have actually worked to their advantage in the parenting department.
“We’ve had a lot of the conversations over the years rather than having to have them all in the last couple of weeks,” he told Business Insider. “It’s kind of become more routine, if you will, in terms of expectation that I would eventually be flying on a SpaceX vehicle off to the Florida coast.”
‘That’s how we like it to be’
In the early morning hours of March 2, 2019, Musk and some NASA officials held a cursory press conference after launching Demo-1: a full launch, docking, and reentry of a Crew Dragon spaceship with a mannequin named Ripley and plush Earth toy inside. Behnken and Hurley joined the SpaceX CEO and chief designer on the dais to answer questions.
Though Musk was beaming, he quickly copped to being “emotionally exhausted” from the flight, and explained all the work to come, including docking and – most worrisome to him – reentry and landing. (The mission was a total success, though the capsule was accidentally destroyed months later during a ground test.)
Toward the end of the briefing, Business Insider asked Musk how, given his stress levels, he might handle the coming flight of Demo-2 – and the two astronauts sitting to his left.
“I suspect it will be extremely stressful,” Musk responded, looking over to Behnken and Hurley. But Musk added the Demo-1 test flight will go “a long way towards feeling good about the flight with Bob and Doug” on Demo-2.
He also noted that Behnken and Hurley monitored the launch data from the control room, including the successful separation of the Crew Dragon ship from its rocket and insertion into low-Earth orbit.
“I went over and asked them what what they thought,” Musk said. “How do you feel about flying on it? Seems like you’re feeling good about flying on it?”
“You guys told us what was gonna happen, and that’s what happened. That’s how we like it to be,” Behnken interjected.
On Wednesday, or whenever the mission manages to lift off in Florida’s fickle weather, the astronauts will wish for similarly by-the-book behavior of their launch vehicle. But this time, with their own bodies, hopes, and dreams riding to space aboard a Dragon.