A University of San Diego graduate experienced the raw, wild sensation of space travel late Sunday, bolting into orbit inside a NASA SpaceX Dragon capsule that will deliver him and three crewmates to the aging and noisy International Space Station early Tuesday.
Matthew Dominick is commander of Crew-8, which includes fellow NASA astronauts Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, along with cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. They took off from pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, the site of many Apollo and space shuttle launches.
This is the first of what could become several missions for Dominick, a 42-year-old former Navy fighter pilot who has been named one of NASA’s Artemis astronauts. The space agency plans to land some of these explorers on the moon later this decade. The Artemis team also includes astronaut Jessica Muir, a UC San Diego graduate.
Dominick will spend about six months doing research, maintenance and possibly spacewalks aboard the space station, where Muir and two other UCSD graduates, Kate Rubins and Megan McArthur, also were crew members in recent years.
The Colorado-born Dominick has dreamed of space travel for decades.
“Watching the shuttle launch for me, as a kid, was an enabler,” Dominick told an audience at USD in 2022. “How do I become part of that? How do I join that team to do that?
“I didn’t know exactly where I was going to go at any one time, but I always knew I wanted to go further, or faster, or higher.”
Dominick, who was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2005. He then went to Pensacola, Florida, to train to become a naval aviator. During his career, he made 400 aircraft carrier landings, many during deployments to the North Arabian Sea, where he flew close air support missions during the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
In 2017, he joined NASA’s astronaut corps and steadily rose through the ranks, earning a spot on a mission and receiving the coveted role of commander.
He will live a spartan existence aboard the 356-foot space station until late summer, circling Earth once every 90 minutes at an average altitude of 248 miles.
Like his crewmates, Dominick will sleep tethered to a wall, eat many of his meals out of a pouch and urinate into a funnel and hose. The view from the cupola, though, is said to be fantastic.
If skies are clear, the space station will be visible from San Diego County starting at 4:55 a.m. Wednesday. The outpost will come into view 10 degrees above the eastern horizon.
The public can follow Dominick on X (formerly Twitter) @dominickmatthew.
