Profile: Gregory Olsen

Photo courtesy of MSNBC

Everyone has had a childhood dream of becoming something amazing. Some children want to become veterinarians, while others play with fire trucks and daydream about putting out flames and saving lives. Yet for many growing boys, the greatest dream of all has been the desire to go into space. While only a few chosen elite can claim such a boisterous accomplishment, one jersey native achieved such an amazing goal only a few years ago.

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Gregory Olsen was born in 1945. Shortly after being born, Olsen’s family made the trip from New York and decided to settle down in New Jersey. He attended Ridgefield Park High School where he soon became known as a troubled student. He received low grades in high school and was even convicted as a juvenile delinquent after being caught stealing hubcaps. Soon after this he turned his life around, dramatically increased his grade point average, and even went off to college. After graduating from Fairleigh Dickinson University, he went off to the University of Virginia where he received a PhD in Materials Science.

After college, Olsen went through a wide variety of career ventures. From 1972 to 1983, he worked as a research scientist at RCA Labs and developed new crystal growth methods for optoelectronic devices. In 1984, he founded a fiber-optic detector manufacturer titled EPITAXX and later also founded an infrared camera manufacturer. The two companies were bought and sold multiple times, raising hundreds of millions of dollars each time.

The successful entrepreneur didn’t fully achieve his dreams, however, until but a few years ago. After over five months and 900 hours of training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow, Olsen was prepared to take off for the International Space Station. On October 1, 2005, Gregory Olsen left the Earth on a Russian rocket and became the third private citizen to orbit the Earth.

For ten days he was a guest at the International Space Station where he orbited the Earth over 150 times. Although some branded him as a “space tourist,” Olsen deplored the term. Prior to taking off from the launch pad, he was quoted as saying:

”The term ‘tourist’ doesn’t do justice to all the work I’ve put in, or the work that the people at the Gagarin centre put in preparing us.”

Featured above: Greg Olsen has a drink of water on the ISS

When he returned to Earth on October 11, Olsen returned to his job as founder and manager of GHO Ventures. At GHO Ventures, Olsen runs a series of programs and initiatives called Angel Investments. These programs range from an education program called Achieve 3000 to a company called Princeton Power Systems which produces electrical power conditioners.

Since that time, he has gone from school to school, discussing the details of his space trip as well as the space race and the possibilities for the future of space travel. He recently gave an in-depth interview with Kim Nagy of the Wild River Review where he talked about the particulars of his experiences in space. On March 27, Olsen visited Rowan University where he gave a lecture on these topics to students in the Rowan Hall auditorium.

In his Rowan Hall lecture, Olsen spoke to teachers and aspiring students alike about not only the intense training he underwent in order to go into space, but also the need to be determined.

"The lesson I learned when I was 60 was the same I learned when I was 16: don't give up," said Olsen. "Don't give up; that's really the secret to life. There's a lot of reasons why you can't do something and only one reason why you can and that is not giving up."

Featured above: Jim Clash (of Forbes) interviews Greg Olsen (2005)