Hilmers ’72 inducted into US Astronaut Hall of Fame
Thirty-two years ago David Hilmers ’72 stepped off his fourth and final NASA mission and retired his space gear.
He traded it in for a medical career and global health missions to combat Ebola, COVID-19, and HIV.
The retired astronaut took a break from his most recent work helping to eradicate hepatitis in the Pacific Islands for his grand return to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center more than three decades after his last mission. During the June 1 induction ceremony, Hilmers joined 107 other astronauts in the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
“It was a surprise to be selected,” Hilmers said. “I think it was reminiscent of when I was selected as an astronaut in 1980. I really didn’t feel like it was something that was going to happen, so I had that same sense of surprise. But it is very nice to have people remember what I did and feel I deserve this honor.”
The Cornell College graduate says he never had a lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. After graduation from Mount Vernon’s Hilltop campus, he enlisted in the Marines and completed Naval flight officer training. During his active service years, he received two graduate degrees in electrical engineering. While stationed overseas in Japan, he was reading his morning messages when he saw an advertisement for people to apply to become astronauts.
“In my case, it was much more of an ‘Oh that sounds like it might be fun to apply,’ type of thing,” Hilmers said. “I applied through the Marines. NASA reduced the list to 100 people who were asked to come for interviews. I was somewhat surprised I had made it through those hoops and then I came to Houston from Japan for an interview, I looked at the people who were also being interviewed and thought well, there’s no way I’m going to get selected.”
But he was.
Hilmers’ 12-year NASA career
Hilmers held a 12-year career with NASA, flying four missions, two of which he can’t share details about since they’re classified. He served in a variety of roles including shuttle software testing, space suit development, and capsule communicator for six shuttle flights.
Among his missions, he flew on the space shuttle Atlantis, which was in the background of events during the induction ceremony on June 1, and was selected to be a mission specialist on the return to flight crew after the Challenger tragedy. That mission successfully launched a communications satellite.
“It was a mix of emotions,” Hilmers said. “There’s a little bit of anxiety after the Challenger accident. Thinking, well, could it happen again? Overriding that by far was feeling honored to be part of the crew and to be chosen to be on that first mission after the Challenger accident and being able to bring America back into space.”
His 1990 mission involved being on a shuttle that went to the highest inclination, 62.0 degrees, of any U.S. crewed spaceflight to date. After his third shuttle mission, he decided to pursue his life-long ambition to become a physician. The week of his scheduled medical school entrance exams, in April 1992, astronaut Sonny Carter died. He was asked to replace Carter on the International Microgravity Lab mission, scheduled to launch in nine months. He accepted that fourth mission and began to train on the 60+ experiments that were manifested aboard the shuttle. Just four weeks before launch, he was accepted into Baylor College of Medicine.
He says he has a lot of memories of looking at Earth from space and seeing all the places you’ve only read about or seen on a map.
“That view of Earth is just fantastic,” Hilmers said. “That’s by far the thing that you came away with are those images of what the earth looked like. Half the time we were in daylight and half the time we were in darkness. You are going around the earth once every roughly 90 minutes.”
Cornell College
Hilmers studied math and economics at Cornell. He also played football and participated in track and field and wrestling.
“I think the thing I remember most about Cornell, and the thing that really helped me on my career trajectory, was the fact that I was able to try so many different things at Cornell.”
He remembers enrolling in a variety of classes outside of his majors and specifically remembers taking a film course.
“I think that feeling of just being free to try new things and explore came out of Cornell, and that’s really something that stayed with me for the rest of my life.”
Hilmers also says he thinks fondly of the small town atmosphere, small school atmosphere, and knowing most of the people on campus. He says his Cornell education taught him a very logical way of looking at things, which was helpful in space.
“I made a lot of friends while I was at Cornell and had a lot of great experiences. It was life-forming, I would say. Certainly, the education was very sound and allowed me to later go into electrical engineering and go to graduate school before I went to NASA and then later on became a doctor.”
Flying into the future
Despite being retired from NASA, Hilmers is still heavily involved in the Space Program. For about 20 years, he was contracted with NASA as part of a National Space Biomedical Research Institute that investigated medical advancements to help astronauts perform better and understand the risks they face in space.
Then, four years ago he was offered a position as the Exploration Medicine Technical Lead for the Clinical Science Team, which is a group examining the medical requirements to get astronauts to Mars and back to the moon.
“We’ll have a limited amount of weight and volume we can put medical equipment in, so what drugs, what medical equipment, what skills are needed, and who should go? Do we need a physician to go on the trip? We’re answering all those types of questions. It’s very complex. It sounds very simple, but it’s actually a pretty complicated question that requires modeling. That’s what I’ve been working on for the last three to four years now with NASA.”
Hilmers is currently a professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at Baylor and serves as the chief medical officer for an Australian-based nongovernmental organization, Hepatitis B Free (HBF), which was founded by his wife, Dr. Alice Lee. Since 2013, HBF has worked with governments and local partners to establish hepatitis treatment programs in low-income countries. His true passion has always been volunteer medical work and disaster relief in low-resource countries and he has served in nearly 60 countries. Notably, he has worked in areas of conflict (Iraq and Ukraine); as an early responder after typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis; in refugee camps across the globe; and in epidemics such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Hilmers and Lee, a gastroenterologist, live in Sydney, Australia. He returns periodically to Houston for teaching and clinical work at Baylor. His oldest son, Matthew, works as a manager in Houston, and his younger son, Daniel, is a pastor in Warsaw, Poland.
Photos courtesy of Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
