Looking Up

NASA crashed two probes into the moon this morning in an attempt to find water. The University of Puget Sound (Wash.) must be eagerly awaiting the results, considering their admissions office began a recruiting campaign in that region over the summer.
The university had a toe hold in the area through an incoming freshman’s father—American astronaut John Phillips.

(Photo Courtesy of Nasa. John Phillips at the window of the Space Shuttle Discovery with his University of Puget Sound cap. He is in the Japanese “Kibo” laboratory. Outside the window are the rest of us. [the earth!])

Phillips admitted his daughter Alli last fall and volunteered to take the college’s baseball cap with him on the Space Shuttle Discovery’s April 2009 flight to the International Space Station.  Phillips says the photo session ran slightly amock.

“The cap’s a ‘one size fits most,’ which doesn’t work well on my oversized orb, even with a skinhead
haircut,” he wrote in an email. “I have symptoms of space ‘pumpkinhead’ in both photos; for the first few days in orbit, you feel like you’re standing on your head, with a red and puffy face.”

Apparently the college’s colors of maroon and white travelled at up to 17,500 miles per hour, or ten times the speed of a rifle bullet. It spent 13 days in outer space, circling the earth 202 times.

Phillips, a NASA science officer and flight engineer, met Puget Sound Vice President for Enrollment George Mills in Houston when his Lillis Scholar daughter Alli Phillips ‘12 was interviewing to study molecular and cellular biology at Puget Sound.

Mills says, “This was my first opportunity to work with an astronaut parent. John’s suggestion that he take Puget Sound memorabilia into space was an exciting one since it would extend the reach of Puget Sound.”

The college is getting some earthly good out of this by posting the space photo on its Facebook page and in alumni magazine Arches. So far though, no new enrollment queries have come in from the virgin territory.