Michael Lopez-Alegria
Michael Lopez-Alegria isn't exactly a household name in the United States, but the veteran NASA astronaut is a high-flying celebrity in Spain.
Michael Lopez-Alegria
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Just try strolling around Madrid with the first Spanish-born astronaut to fly in space and you might as well be running with the bulls.
"I mean, literally, after my first flight, I couldn't walk down the street in Spain. It was like I was a movie star," Lopez-Alegria said in a recent interview with SPACE.com.
Cross back over the Atlantic Ocean, though, and Lopez-Alegria quickly blends in with the rest of NASA's no-name astronaut corps.
"You get back here, and you go: `Doesn't anybody want my autograph?'" the affable astronaut said with a smile. "And that is actually fine. All that attention is hard to live with."
Known affectionately as "Mike-L.A.," Lopez-Alegria became the Yuri Gagarin of Spain back in October 1995, when he served as a mission specialist and flight engineer during a marathon microgravity research mission aboard shuttle Columbia.
The Madrid native actually grew up in Mission Viejo, California, but that didn't stop the media in Spain from turning him into an instant celebrity.
"I was pretty broadsided by that," Lopez-Alegria said. "I was born in Spain, and I have a lot of family there. I have roots there. My father lives there. I really didn't expect much, but as it turns out, I was the first guy born in Spain to fly in space and they made a big deal out of it."
The Spanish media spotlight since has shifted to Pedro Duque, a European Space Agency astronaut who flew aboard Discovery with former Mercury astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn in late 1998.
And that's just fine with Lopez-Alegria.
Duque "is more legitimately a Spanish astronaut. He not only was born in there but he was educated there," said Lopez-Alegria. "So the joke in Spain is that he was the second `first Spanish astronaut.'"
The media hubbub, meanwhile, is starting to gather steam again as small clusters of Spanish media types descend on Kennedy Space Center for Lopez-Alegria's second flight.
The veteran astronaut thought the buzz would die down after Duque's flight, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
"There aren't many Spanish astronauts, so when a guy goes up in space they want to be a part of it, and I think that's great," Lopez-Alegria said. "If that will encourage people to study math and science or engineering, then there is definitely enough room in Spain for two of us."
Lopez-Alegria, 42, is a U.S. Navy commander that is married and has one son. He and crew mate Jeff Wisoff will perform the second and last of the four spacewalks planned for the mission.
A former military test pilot, Lopez-Alegria has tallied more than 4,000 hours flight time in more than 30 different aircraft. Total time in space to date: 15 days, 21 hours, 52 minutes and 21 seconds.
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