On New
Year's Day in Pasadena, Calif., among the hundreds of thousands of roses
covering nearly 50 flower-formed floats in the Tournament of Roses Parade and amid
the more than 12,000 roses covering the Bayer Advanced "Wizard of
Oz"-themed float, will be the only rose among them all that truly flew
"somewhere over the rainbow."
The two-toned pink rose, appropriately of the variety that was named after the
parade ("Tournament of Roses"), circled the Earth more than 200 times
in February 2008, aboard space shuttle Atlantis. How the rose came to be there,
and how it is now to be a part of the parade, came as a result of the author of
"Roses For Dummies" working together with an astronaut, who also
happened to be his younger brother.
"I have had a long interest in roses and have written a number of books on
roses," explained Lance Walheim in an interview
with collectSPACE.com. "Everybody was always kidding me, why
don't you send up a rose with Rex? The challenges of doing that, well, my
staged answer was, 'Rex can't even grow a rose in his own backyard, how is he
going to grow one in space?'"
The idea however appealed to Lance, and to Rex, who at the time was preparing
to embark on his second mission.
"I thought that would be a great idea," shared the younger Walheim.
"Since I am from California, and the Rose Parade is here in California,
and he is a rose expert, it seemed like a neat idea to combine his career with
my career."
As both brothers recalled, the problem was how to do it.
"I'm also the Bayer Advanced garden expert and we have a float in the Rose
Parade every year and I thought, we could send him with a dried rose and then
put it on the Bayer Advanced float. And that would be kind of fun as a
promotion for the parade and also for NASA," explained Lance. "The
first thing we had to do was decide how we'd dry a rose."
It turns out there were a number of ways to prepare the rose, from baking it in
a kiln to putting it in a silica gel and then microwaving it. Freeze drying,
which is a method NASA uses to preserve
the astronauts' food, was not an option, however.
"Given the time constraints we had, I think trying to figure out a way of
freeze drying it would have taken a lot of experimentation," shared Rex.
"We also did not want to bother NASA with it."
Ultimately, the simplest method offered the best option. After picking several
dozen of the "Tournament of Roses" roses from behind Wrigley Mansion,
the headquarters of the parade, and shipping several to a kiln, Lance arrived
at the answer.
"It turned out that just hanging them upside down gave us the best
results," he said of the air drying process.
The next challenge for the brothers was how to package the rose for its
spaceflight. NASA provides its astronauts with a few dedicated areas to carry
personal items. They can choose to
pack items in the Official Flight Kit (OFK), which remains stowed for
the length of the mission, or take items in their Personal Preference Kits
(PPKs) and special Flight Data Files (FDFs) for access during flight.
For Rex and Lance, the choice was between protecting the flower from accidental
damage and having the chance to photograph the rose while in space. Their
solution was to fly two roses.
One of the dried flowers would be wrapped by NASA and stowed inside the
shuttle's crew cabin, where Rex nor any of his STS-122 crewmates could get to
it. The other was to fly with the FDF together with a bible and a pennant for
University of California, Berkeley, Rex's and Lance's alma mater.
As the latter rose would be available to Rex during the 13-day mission to the
International Space Station (ISS), he needed a way to protect it.
"Again, we're doing this all on the fly and we are thinking, 'How are we
going to package this thing so it doesn't get shaken to pieces on ascent?'. We
never came up with a really good idea, but what we did was we put it in a
little plastic box and then handed it off to the folks at the Cape to be packed
on the shuttle. We never really braced it, so we were not really sure what was
going to happen to it," described Rex.
Originally, Atlantis - with Rex and the rose aboard - was scheduled to launch
in early December 2007, which then would allow Lance enough time post-flight to
get the rose into the 2008 Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1. Bayer
Advanced put out a press release announcing the 'space rose' was to be on their
float. The shuttle however, experienced problems with its fuel level sensors,
leading to NASA delaying the mission.
Two months later, at 2:45 p.m. EST on February 7, 2008, the space
shuttle lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The bumpy
ride to orbit took about eight minutes.
"When we got on orbit, I kind of sheepishly looked in the locker to see
how [the rose] did and it was perfect!" Rex recalled. "It was
obviously shaken pretty good on ascent but I guess it was a bit tougher than it
looks. I wasn't sure when I looked in there if I was going to find rose dust or
I was going to find a rose."
Continue
reading at collectSPACE.com to learn how the 'space rose'
went from the floating in orbit to a float in the New Year's Parade and watch
for the rose in the 120th Tournament of Roses Parade on the Bayer Advanced
"Garden of Oz" float on January 1, 2009.
Copyright 2008 collectSPACE.com. All rights
reserved.
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