National Space Day, marked on the first Friday of May each year, is a time to celebrate the opportunities and achievements that have unfolded during the brief but eventful history of human space exploration.

It’s an odyssey in which many members of Phi Kappa Phi have played a part. Some 30 members of Phi Kappa Phi have traveled into space, and the Society’s ranks include many space scientists such as astronomers, physicists, and engineers.

Among Phi Kappa Phi members who have been to space is Wendy Lawrence, whose career included service as an astronaut aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 2005.  

She’s shown above in a dress rehearsal for that mission – her big, heavy suit a reminder that space travel asks a lot of those who undertake it.

One of the challenges, as astronaut John Herrington mentioned in a spring 2021 issue of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine, is the profound solitude of space walks. “I’m at the end of my tether, at the edge of the space station,” Herrington said in recalling a spacewalk he undertook two days before Thanksgiving in 2002. “I can’t see my spacewalking partner; he’s off doing something else. I’m it.”

“Moments of shocking solitude often strike astronauts on spacewalks, prompting acute awareness, curiosity, exhilaration, and sometimes trepidation,” journalist Maggie Jackson noted in that Forum article. “It’s a time when the astonishing new perspectives gained by being in space are revealed most intensely.”  

Readers can check out that article from our archives here.

Though space can be a lonely experience for astronauts, their journeys often inspire moments of deep solidarity back on Earth. Phi Kappa Phi’s spring 2024 issue revisits such an event from 1968, when NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft captured the first picture of Earth rising above the moon. After a stressful year that included the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, the world seemed especially hungry for something hopeful. Those Christmas Eve pictures of Earth, which underscored humanity’s underlying connection in a broken time, are still celebrated today.

You can read our retrospective of the Apollo 8 mission in our latest Forum here.

Happy Space Day, folks. In space and everywhere else, Phi Kappa Phi will continue to advance new frontiers of discovery.