Purdue, Virgin Galactic plan all-Boiler space flight in ‘27

Purdue grad student, prof and three alums – plus a research project – will be the crew of Purdue 1.

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PURDUE, VIRGIN GALACTIC PLAN ALL-BOILER SPACE FLIGHT IN ‘27

Purdue, long ago establishing itself as the Cradle of Astronauts, announced plans Tuesday to send a five-member, all-Boilermaker crew of researchers and alumni into suborbital space aboard a Virgin Galactic flight, in what officials with the commercial space company say is expected to open the door to more universities and companies looking to regularly put experiments into zero-gravity situations.

Purdue 1, as the mission is dubbed, will include passengers Steven Collicott, a Purdue aerospace engineering professor, and graduate student Abby Mizzi, who will use the flight for research into how liquids react in zero gravity.

Abby Mizzi, a Purdue grad student, will be part of Purdue 1, a suborbital space flight carrying an all-Purdue crew in 2027. (Photo: Dave Bangert)

Three Purdue graduates – Jason Williamson, a senior vice president for design for Texas-based Dunaway, and two yet to be named – will round out the five seats.

“We are going to take Purdue to space,” Purdue President Mung Chiang said Tuesday morning during an event to announce the plans at Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering. “Why should a university be confined by the surly bond of gravity here on Earth?”

Those involved were already talking about hopes for missions Purdue 2, 3 and 4, as Mike Moses – Virgin Galactic’s president of Spaceline, a Purdue graduate and husband of Beth Moses, one of 30 alums in Purdue’s Cradle of Astronauts – talked about “a new generation of space professionals.”

“Purdue 1 marks the beginning of a new era where university-led space research will become the norm and academic institutions become regular customers in space,” Moses said. “We're not just advancing science, we're empowering the next generation of innovators and expanding frontiers. This mission is proof that space is now an accessible frontier.”

Purdue’s pitch to Virgin Galactic to secure seats for suborbital flights that typically run $600,000 apiece evolved out of Collicott being selected in 2021 to NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. That included NASA funding to accompany an experiment into zero gravity on a future Virgin Galactic flight.

“I’m old news,” Collicott joked Tuesday.

Collicott had sent other experiments aboard space missions, both through NASA and commercial flights, during a career at Purdue that dates to 1991. And he’s led a course on zero-gravity design-build-test research that puts his students in aircraft that fly parabolic patterns designed to simulate short periods of weightlessness. They call it the “Vomit Comet.”

While he waited in queue for the NASA-sponsored opportunity, Collicott said it “certainly set my mind to thinking about what else could happen.”