By Anne Steele, News Staff

Northeastern junior Justin Dowd is ready to take the university’s global learning theme even further — to outer space.

Dowd, a physics major, won the Metro newspaper chain’s Race for Space competition for his chalk-drawn animation “Einstein’s discovery about time,” and an excursion aboard the private spacecraft Lynx, which will travel 120 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.

As the initial hype dwindles, Dowd said reality is starting to set in and he is left with the question of how, exactly, a college student prepares for outer space.

Prior to the launch, which is tentatively scheduled for 2014, Dowd said, he will undergo training programs in the United States and the Netherlands. The training will include a ride in an Aero L-39 Albatros jet, a two-seater military trainer aircraft.

“They’re going to use that to get me prepped for the G-forces because if you don’t have the right techniques to breathe properly and to tense the right muscles, then all the blood can rush out of your head and you’ll pass out,” Dowd said.

He will also fly in a reduced gravity aircraft, dubbed the “Vomit Comet,” a hollowed out and padded jet (similar to a 747)  which will nose dive toward the ocean after climbing up to cruising speed around 30,000 feet.

“When it’s doing a nose dive, the plane and everything in it is falling at the same rate so everything floats,” Dowd said. “It’s what they use to prep astronauts for zero gravity.”

Dowd will also train in the Netherlands with instructors from Space Expedition Curaçao (SXC), the commercial space launch facilities provider that co-sponsored the contest. He will train in a simulator, which is an exact replica of the one inside the rocketplane he will fly to space in.

Besides jaunts in futuristic aircraft, Dowd will need to complete extensive safety training and a tutorial of the spaceship. One of the reasons the jury selected Dowd (who completed the Tough Mudder last weekend) was his peak physical condition.

“Part of the reason why they picked me is so I wouldn’t be completely unprepared when the time comes,” Dowd said. “I’m going to have to be in good shape to actually be able to enjoy the trip.”

But Dowd said this training is at least six months to a year out, as XCOR Aerospace is still building the Lynx in Mojave, Calif. In fact, Dowd will be taking one of the spacecraft’s first trips.

The two-and-a-half-hour journey includes a four-minute Mach 3 blast straight into space, which is approximately three times the speed of sound, or a mile every three to four seconds.

“It is pretty intense I think,” Dowd said. “I can’t wait for that.”

Once he dons his space suit, Dowd will then experience five to 10 minutes of weightlessness while the ship slowly rotates, alternating views of the stars and the Earth, before dropping back into the atmosphere where the rocket becomes similar to a glider, Dowd says, circling for an hour and a half down to the runway on the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

Although Dowd recognizes the dangers of his voyage, he said he is more focused on the work ahead of him.

“Just being a physics major, we’re kind of gluttons for punishment,” he said. “We work almost to the point of being ridiculous, and [as you can see] from the video, I enjoy teaching people. It’s what I love to do so it’s pretty awesome that I’m getting to do that on a massive scale.”

And until the voyage, he will get to do just that.

Dowd has signed on with Metro newspapers to do six months of animating, making
chalkmation shorts on science topics including space and biology. The three-to five-minute videos will be featured on the English-speaking Metro news website and will be accompanied by a column about space every two weeks. The first video, slated to come out May 21, is about “aluminum foil and how there is like a billion year journey for it to get into your kitchen,” Dowd said. The second will be about whales.

As Dowd settles into the anomalous life of a college student slated for space travel, he said he has started to reflect on its implications.

“Now that all the media is dying down, it’s kind of slowly sinking in,” he said. “I’m excited to never be the same after I go into space because I’m told, and I’ve read books and all the astronauts say that you’re not really quite the same after you come back and I’m looking forward to that.”