IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE: NASA astronaut and spacewalker Rex Walheim (B.S.’84 ME) installed the Columbus Science Laboratory on the International Space Station last February. An avid Cal football fan, Walheim calls UC Berkeley “the greatest university in the world.”

Photo credit: Courtesy NASA

Rex Walheim (B.S.’84 ME) has a view that’s literally out of this world. He’s gazed at Earth from 220 miles in space.

A NASA astronaut who grew up in San Carlos, California, the 45-year-old Walheim is a veteran of two shuttle missions to the International Space Station and five spacewalks. His most recent voyage, aboard the shuttle Atlantis, carried him to the space station for 12 days in February. The mission’s lead space walker, Walheim helped deliver and install a $2 billion European science laboratory known as Columbus.

“That’s my main specialty, spacewalking,” says Walheim, who spent more than 22 hours doing just that over the course of the 5.3-million-mile expedition. As glamorous as it sounds, his latest foray included plenty of handyman-type tasks like installing handrails, replacing a spent nitrogen tank and retrieving a failed gyroscope. Wearing a bulky spacesuit, lugging massive equipment and coping with zero gravity are what makes spacewalking highly specialized work.

“It’s a heck of a workout. It really wipes you out,” Walheim says. His yearlong training included 170 hours in a pool equipped with a mockup of his sky-high job site. One difference between the pool and actual conditions is, of course, the setting. As Walheim wrapped up his final spacewalk, he spotted the California coastline approaching on the horizon.

“I really got lucky,” he says, exuding a youthful passion for his work. “It was one of those magnificent days when there was no fog or anything,” Soaking up the moment, he surveyed the familiar terrain of the Peninsula and landmarks like Golden Gate Park.

Walheim has made extensive use of his engineering expertise as a mechanical systems flight controller and operations engineer at the Johnson Space Center and now as an astronaut. “When you have a good engineering background, you make sure things make sense,” he says. In his current assignment, he evaluates spacesuits and other equipment as well as spacewalk training for astronauts.

His dreams of space travel were fed by his father, who flew B-17 bombers in World War II, and by the 1969 moon landing, which he watched on the family TV when he was six. He served in the ROTC and, as an Air Force lieutenant, was rejected from pilot training for what proved to be a misdiagnosed heart murmur. It later took two tries before he was accepted into the highly competitive astronaut program in 1996. “Persistence can be more important than the path you take,” he advised Cal graduates in a 2002 speech. He returns to campus every year or so, often for speaking appearances.

With the shuttle program scheduled to end in 2010, Walheim is uncertain whether he’ll fly on another mission. But the married father of two school-aged boys is grateful for the opportunities he’s had and eager to continue supporting the space effort. As NASA shifts its focus to developing systems capable of transporting humans to the moon and eventually Mars, he says, “I’d just like to be part of those projects.”

Abby Cohn is a Cal graduate and freelance writer who writes for the college’s web digest, Innovations, and other campus publications.