Reaching for the StarsAn Interview with Greg Olsen – Scientist, Entrepreneur, and Space Traveler

By Kim Nagy and Joy Stocke

Scientist and entrepreneur Greg Olsen isn’t your average billionaire.

Convicted of juvenile delinquency for stealing hubcaps, Olsen failed trigonometry in high school. But, in 1957, he also watched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, orbit the Earth and the experience left its mark.

Many years later, Olsen, a research scientist with 12 patents and the CEO of GHO Ventures, was sitting in Starbucks when he read an article about a company called “Space Adventures,” which offered space flight “and the space frontier” to private citizens. Olsen was particularly intrigued that the company offered clients opportunities to take part in important research in remote sensing and astronomy projects. He started to imagine participating in a mission himself.

In 2005, Olsen became the world’s third “space tourist,” paying approximately 20 million dollars for a 10-day mission on the International Space Station (ISS), during which he orbited the earth 150 times and covered almost 4 million miles of weightless space travel.

A frequent lecturer on his experience in space and the career opportunities science offers (particularly to minorities and women), he keeps his message simple:

“Don’t give up.”

How did you become interested in science?

My dad was an electrician, and from my earliest days I remember following him around with his toolbox, playing with his tools, tinkering with his things. When I grew up, you never ever called the repairman…you always fixed things yourself, so it just kind of grew naturally from there.

Did you take science classes in high school?

I was a real screw up in high school. I had a 78 average when I finished. I failed trigonometry in my senior year. So there was nothing in my high school career that would predict big success.

However, the Russians launched Sputnik when I was in the seventh grade so that was a real boost for science.

You’ve had training in physics and material science, but you’re also an entrepreneur and a patented inventor. How do the worlds of research science (which is your original background) and entrepreneurship mesh?

They meshed for me personally because two of my start-up companies are from the fields I trained in. For instance, my first company EPITAXX (a supplier of optical detectors and receivers for fiber optic telecommunications and cable television networks) relied on my knowledge of physics and material science.

I feel very lucky that I’ve actually done professionally what I was trained to do in graduate school. Very few people still do what they were trained in college to do. Maybe they studied law, but now they are in real estate, or something totally different. So, it’s very satisfying for me.

Do you feel that business interests can serve the necessary objectivity embraced by scientists? Or do those two worlds sometimes conflict?

Business and science, as they say in the engineering world, are linearly independent, which means they don’t depend on each other at all. But I do what is called “angel investing,” where I put my money into high-risk start-ups. A lot of people in tech and science think this type of investing, because it often takes risks with new technology, is different than investing in a dry cleaner or in real estate.

The fact is all my investments are business investments. And the central point of business is that at the end of the day, week or month, you have to have more money than you started with.

You especially see this in medicine. I mean someone comes up with an amazing cure for a disease. But you still have to ask, who’s going to buy that cure? And what qualifies it as a successful venture? A lot of hardnosed stuff. And traders have known this since the dawn of commerce. At the end of the day, you still need to have more shekels than you started with.

So, you’re saying those two worlds can serve each other and, in fact, drive each other?

Science is increasingly becoming part of every facet of life, including art and commerce.

But I guess what I’m saying is that you can make a great business in real estate as much as you can in technology. It’s not that technology is special and going to guarantee you success, although it did during the Internet boom. Look at IBM and Microsoft. They weren’t first or the best; they just did the business the best.

Did you have any business training?

Zero. As I said, my dad was an electrician. My mom was a schoolteacher. And I think I had one course in economics in my undergrad years. Actually, I think an MBA can be a drawback for entrepreneurship. Business school is too systems oriented. It trains you that there is a certain methodology, and if you follow that methodology, the results will come in. I think that has more relevance in General Electric and IBM, companies that make 100 million dollars and above. Under a 100 million dollars a year and it’s more about intuition, instinct, and hard work. Not that people with MBAs don’t work hard; they do. But you can’t always depend upon methodology, and you have to be more adaptive.

I mean, when someone asks me, ‘What’s your value proposition?’ I have to honestly tell them that I don’t know what the hell a value proposition is!

And I hear this term all over.

Science is often perceived as boring by the public. How do you bridge that gap?

By making it exciting. Because the facts can be very exciting. One of my pet peeves is that people try and water down science. They want to ask children rote questions. Teach them about methodology. My three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter came back from school the other day singing five versions of a song that made her so happy that she had memorized it on her own.

You can do the same thing with the periodic chart. And the Times Tables. The Russians can quickly multiply 18 x 17 not because they are any smarter, but because they learned it in school. So teaching kids to memorize is not bad. In fact it’s good, as long as they can use it. It just doesn’t make sense to recite facts that you have no understanding of.

Why not pay attention to science? Jupiter is 100 times bigger than the earth. Why does that matter?

Do you have a different teaching model?

One of the things I want to do is to teach physics, maybe lighten up on the mathematics. You don’t have to know integral calculus to understand why a satellite stays up. Of course, that helps if you want to predict a satellite’s orbit. But, if you ask, ‘Hey, why doesn’t this thing fall down to earth?’ with a basic knowledge of physics, you can kind of reason it out.

I mean, why not teach by telling stories? One of my mentors, who passed away last spring at the age of 96, was a great storyteller. In fact, we used to call him preacher because his lectures were like sermons.

To this day, more than forty years later, I still remember his explanation of how electrons work in a circuit. The actual individual electron doesn’t travel that fast. But information itself travels at the speed at light. That’s because of the way electrons move, one repelling the next.

So my professor said, ‘You know, when Jesus Christ gave the Sermon on the Mount 2,000 years ago, if he had released only a single electron, it still wouldn’t be here.’ Which isn’t quite true. But, forty-some years later, his example is still so vivid to me. And I’ve never forgotten the concept through that individual electrons don’t move that fast.

Speaking of good stories, your company, Sensors Unlimited, made a discovery about the Renoir painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Yes, we created a camera where we use infrared light to heat oil pigments so that they can absorb, rather than reflect, light. In a painting, pigments are created and mixed to reflect visible light in a spectrum of color – blues, yellows, reds. Everything the eye sees.

But as much as pigments are designed to reflect light, they are not designed to reflect heat. With an infrared camera, you still have enough light so that the pigments reflect it, but you also have heat, which penetrates the pigments. The same thing happens with the canvas. So, we can see things beneath the surface of the painting similar to the way an X-ray works. Only there isn’t radiation damage that occurs with X-rays.

Marshall Cohen, my co-founder at Sensors, took our camera down to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. While looking at Luncheon of the Boating Party, he focused on a man who wears a black top hat and is facing sideways so that his profile is obscured. But the sensor showed that in an image beneath the painting, the man is actually facing the viewer. The curators just jumped up and down because Renoir knew all the people in that painting, and each one has a story. The man whose face is obscured was one of Renoir’s original investors and they had had a falling-out. So Renoir painted him out of the picture. That’s the most spectacular thing we’ve done with infrared technology.

You were the third private citizen to orbit the earth on the international space station in 2005. What was it like to train for the first 5 months (900 hours) in Moscow?

Oh, it was great. I really enjoyed the training. Obviously the thrill of going into space was incredible, and why I did it. But the training and the relationships I built are just as valuable to me.

How does one train to go to space?

Well, they have simulated models of the spaceship at the training station in Moscow at the Star City Complex. You go in there and you practice using the radio, using the fire extinguishers. I was not trained to operate the vehicle, though actually they did put me through just about everything. I was also trained in the emergency procedures, like how do you open a hatch. What to do. What not to do.

For six months, I was quizzed. And we’d have drills. The alarm would go off and I’d have to react accordingly. I mean it was a wonderful experience. I loved the whole thing. There was a lot of physical training, at least two hours every day.

Like what?

Weights. Swimming. Running. I used to run two miles in the morning. And then lift weights. We’d also go into the sauna. It was about 210 degrees Fahrenheit – dry heat – so you can’t stay in there for much more than 10 minutes. A lot of the cosmonauts were there. I think I won them over because they saw that I was working hard. You know I was there every day doing everything they told me to do.

Were you scared at all?

I thought about fear each time we trained for the zero gravity flights, which is a misnomer. You actually go up in a plane and free fall. I thought maybe I’d get motion sickness when I was in space. And I didn’t. But, you never know until you’re there.

I was, however, scared of the doctors more than anything because they do have a medical disqualification.

I was training in the year 2004 when I had a lung x-ray and they saw a little black spot. And just like that I was disqualified.

What was the black spot?

We don’t know. But it went away and the doctor here signed me off, and said you’re healthy and ready to go. But the Russians resisted for nine months. So, yeah, I was scared of anyone with a white coat and stethoscope.

What did it feel like to be in space?

Wonderful. I mean, just imagine if you could float in the middle of the sky.

Did it really feel like we might imagine it in our dreams…peaceful, calm?

Yes, that is pretty much how it was for me. I mean again, I didn’t get any of the motion sickness. About 40 percent of all people who go into space experience different forms of motion sickness, sometimes just a headache, sometimes vomiting, but it’s like seasickness. They cannot predict who will get it.

How do you eat with no gravity?

Well it’s the peristalsis, muscular action. Human beings can eat upside down. It’s not easy, but you can do it.

What does the earth look like?

Earth is a big luminous, blue sphere. Now remember, we were only 220 miles above the earth. But we orbited the earth every 90 minutes so we were going faster than a bullet: 17,000 miles an hour; five miles every second.

The whole time you’re up there…why are you traveling so fast?

Because, really, you’re falling. Being only 200 miles above the earth, gravity exerts its effect. So, you’re falling just as if you jumped out a window. But while you’re falling you’re also going forward at 17,000 miles per hour. Which is why you need that rocket velocity, because all the time you’re falling, you’re also reaching an edge. That’s what defines being in orbit. That rocket has to have enough velocity so that by the time you fall far you don’t crash into earth?

So you’re not using fuel once you’re in space.

No, you’re in inertia of orbit. (See Wild River Review’s interview with mathematician, Ed Belbruno) A spaceship orbits the earth like the moon and planets. There is a small bit of friction and you have to boost the orbit occasionally.

How did the moon look?

A bit brighter because you don’t have the earth’s atmosphere absorbing the light from it.

You speak frequently to encourage women and minorities in the sciences.

First of all, I want to get more American kids to go into science and math. But, I also want to reach out to women and minorities in order to say, “This is the easy way up.”

Science was the quick way up for me. I mean, my dad was working class and I wind up with a Ph.D. I can tell you this: Any women with a bachelor’s degree in any science can name her price because the workplace is still very polarized, I believe only 10 percent of scientists are women.

It’s not like in Russia where the ratio is more like 50 percent, which was a surprise to me. I mean I would go to engineering meetings in Russia and it was boy/girl. But, women in Russia are still expected to take care of domestic chores after a full day of work so that balance isn’t quite right either.

If the workplace is still so polarized, are there enough role models for girls thinking about entering science in the United States?

Anusha Ansari, the women who went to space last year like I did, is a wonderful role model for girls. She was born in Iran and came over here at age 11, and she has a very similar background to mine. She got a degree in electrical engineering, started a telecom company, and sold it.

But my presentation is this. I always start out by telling my own story…how I failed trigonometry in high school and how I was a screw up. Because kids walk into a class and think, oh here’s this big rich white guy who probably went to Princeton. You know, there are a lot of assumptions that aren’t true. The message I try and give is this: Whether it’s kids, adults, no matter who you are, it doesn’t matter. Don’t give up is the secret.

Is that your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs as well?

Yes, in a nutshell. Survive your mistakes. Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Just deal with them. I mean I made more mistakes with my second company than with my first, but I dealt with them more effectively the second time around, and more quickly. I say it over and over again because I believe it: Don’t give up.