Stardust from p 16 than a want. It was a drive. And it was almost a reality. During his tenure at NASA, Chapman was slated for Skylab B’s mission to space, but it was officially canceled in May 1973. Skylab B, a part of the Apollo program, was a proposed second American space station that was planned to be launched by NASA, but was nixed due to lack of funding. Chapman “was very, very, extremely alarmed” when the mission was called off, Tseng recalled. He predicted Skylab B would go down in history as a stepping stone in humanity’s migration to other planets. “It signaled a change in NASA’s position from being a leading space exploration agency to something much more reduced,” Tseng said. In a 1970 letter to the scientific community, scrawled on a yellowing sheet of paper with United States Government letterhead, Chapman begged to salvage the only chance he ever had to realize his childhood dream of reaching the stars. Family members provided the letter, which preserves Chapman’s dejection and desperation, to New Times. “We have very few friends left, in the scientific community, in Congress, or amongst the general public,” Chapman wrote. But he held out hope: “It is surely clear by now that the Titanic manned space program is not as unsinkable as it may have seemed … I, for one, have a dumb faith that man is in space to stay.” His protestations were futile. But he was never one to give up, those close to him remember. Chapman even suggested to his colleagues, in jest, that they should create a fake alien artifact and give it to Neil Armstrong to “find” on the moon, to spark renewed interest in the missions there. When all else failed, Chapman resigned from his NASA post in 1972. He steered his post-NASA career to support the Strategic Defense Initiative, commercialize the Solar Power Satellite, and help startups in the emergent private sector commercial space industry. His mission involved joining forces with a private research firm to develop laser propulsion and solar-panel satellites with Peter Glaser, who invented them. “His love for space was limitless,” Tseng said. She recounted meeting her late 18 husband in 1979 at a professional dinner and asking him about the twin paradox, a theory that people traveling at the speed of light age slower than people staying on Earth. The phenomenon was addressed Celestis Philip Chapman’s astronaut helmet is among the Apollo 14 mission mementos to accompany his remains in a deep- space casket. accurately in the 2014 film Interstellar, which included contributions from Nobel laureate Kip Thorne. “I said, ‘Tell me about time travel and space,’” Tseng remembered saying to Chapman. “He thought it was wonderful. The rest is history.” Chapman was an outdoorsman with a penchant for hiking and exploring. He wintered in Antarctica for the experience of living in a forbidding place, in prepara- tion for his expected trip to space that never came to be. He and other Apollo astronauts visited geologic sites in Arizona, sparking Chapman’s love for the state, in the 1960s. Ryan Anderson, a planetary scientist and developer at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center, said that the Grand Canyon and other sites in the Flagstaff area were even better classrooms for astronauts headed to the moon. Arizona contains a number of exposed canyons and existing craters, like Sunset Crater just north of Flagstaff, where NASA field-tested rovers, spacesuits, and other equipment. Chapman loved taking risks, and he loved blazing new trails. “Everyone agreed this would be the most remarkable way to commemorate Phil,” Tseng said. “It’s much better than any regular funeral.” Longtime colleagues would sum up Chapman’s life and posthumous interplan- etary ambitions in one quote from French essayist Stéphane Audeguy: “What we call ‘death’ is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.” JULY 21ST–JULY 27TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
