As a child in Franklin Square, Mike Massimino, like millions of others, was fascinated by space travel. He stayed up late to see grainy images of the Moon landing broadcast from space. It was in his case, though, a moment that would not only interest him, but inspire the remainder of his life.
“I was 6 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon,” Massimino said of that monumental moment in 1969. “I watched that event from the living room in my home in Franklin Square.”
Unlike millions of others, though, Massimino went on to obtain numerous advanced degrees as an academic and become an astronaut. But how did he go from dreamer to doer, shedding some light on a journey to an unusual job with an office high up in the sky?
“I figured it was the most important thing happening in the world at that time,” Massimino said of the Moon landing. “We learned about explorers 500 years earlier. I thought that was cool. I realized this was the kind of thing people are going to remember 500 years from then.”
Massimino described his journey from school to space, student to astronaut, and how rather than dreaming, he reinvented his reality. He remembers talking about space while in the summer recreation program at the John Street Elementary School.
“We would go there in the morning, play softball, kickball, and checkers and watch movies,” he said. “I remember when they launched Apollo 11. They wheeled in the TV set and you watched the launch. The teachers were saying how brave these guys are and how cool. I wanted to grow up and be like one of these guys.”
Massimino at the Franklin Square Public Library took out books and read newspaper and magazine articles about space travel. He dressed up like Neil Armstrong for a parade of space costumes.
“I always had the interest,” he said. “I didn’t think I could be part of it.”
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He went to H. Frank Carey Junior – Senior High School and Columbia University, working over the summer at Beefsteak Charlie’s and as a surveyor for Nassau County and for Sperry in Great Neck. As a senior in college, something clicked when Massimino saw the movie The Right Stuff in Floral Park.
“I read the book by Tom Wolfe of the same title. It rekindled my interest,” Massimino said. “And then I became obsessed. My passion came back.”
Massimino graduated from Columbia University in 1984 with an engineering degree, worked for IBM for two years and obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before obtaining a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1992.
“To be a NASA astronaut, you need a technical background, engineering, science or medicine, or being a test pilot,” he said. “Then you’re trained to do the astronaut job.”
He hoped to get involved in space travel, if not by actually flying into space. “Becoming an astronaut seemed far-fetched,” he added. “But I thought I could get involved in some way with the space program.”
After working as an engineer at IBM, NASA and McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, along with academic appointments at Rice University and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he applied a fourth time and was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1996.
“I was teaching at Georgia Tech at that point,” he said. “I got an interview and got picked.”
NASA taught him about the Space Shuttle and the space station. He learned to fly in a T-38 airplane as a co-pilot, went to survival school, learned about astronomy and geology, as well as how to work robotic arms, did spacecraft simulation and spacewalk training. He was assigned to a flight, which would turn out to be six months after 9/11.
His father had been a New York City Fire Department inspector, and 9/11 had a huge impact on the department.
“We wanted to do what we could to pay tribute to people who were killed, the heroes of 9/11,” Massimino said of taking NYPD and FDNY patches and banners into space. “That’s why we flew the flags.”
Massimo took part in two missions to the Hubble Telescope in 2002 and 2009 and performed four spacewalks to make repairs. On the lighter side, he was the first person to tweet from space and has appeared on numerous television shows, including a recurring role on “The Big Bang Theory.”
From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!
— Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) May 12, 2009
He became a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and senior advisor for space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Massimino also wrote a best-selling autobiography, “Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe.” He, in 2018, was inducted into the Long Island Air and Space Hall of Fame. In a ceremonial designation, the street where he grew up was dubbed and co-named “Mike Massimino Street.”
Massimo returned to the street where he grew up for the renaming, remembering how he took photographs of students from his school up with him into space.
As he spoke about growing up on Long Island, becoming an astronaut — although it must have seemed an incredible reach at the time — made sense.
It was just another service job, taking risks even if the fire poured out of the bottom of a rocket rather than into a building.
“Your childhood defines you,” he added. “A lot of the people who lived around us in Franklin Square did jobs in service of others, teachers, nurses, police officers, firemen.”
