When people start asking the ubiquitous question ‘what have you been up to?’ at the Newton High School class of 1970’s 40th reunion on May 1, Richard Laronde jokes that he thinks he may have the best answer.
Laronde, a globetrotting event planner, has been training to be an astronaut – in a modern sense of the word, that is.
The Walpole resident, who grew up in Newton and lived there until he was married in 1976, holds ticket number 93 aboard Virgin Galactic – one of the world’s first commercial spaceflights.
“It’s the childhood dream, ” Larond e said about space travel. “I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s and astronauts were my heroes.”
Laronde began a string of adventures about six years ago when he set his sights on cross-country skiing to the North Pole as a way to motivate himself to lose weight and combat life threatening diabetes.
Upon reaching the North Pole, Laronde naturally immediately proclaimed that he had to make a trip to the South Pole.
Laronde skied to the South Pole in January 2007.
At that point, the skies were the limit for Laronde – err, maybe they weren’t.
Traveling to the ends of the earth not being enough, the Dover Drive resident thought he’d give outer space a try.
Laronde booked a seat on Virgin Galactic as soon as he got home from his South Pole trek.
“I wanted to go to space,” Laronde said, simply enough.
When the 58-year-old was just a kid and NASA was being formed, everybody thought they’d be going into space eventually, Laronde said, but the future didn’t pan out quite the way science fiction writers in the ‘50s envisioned.
Laronde said a friend told him he started talking realistically about traveling to space in the early ‘80s, but, when tycoon Richard Branson announced plans to build a commercial spacecraft in 2004, that dream suddenly seemed more doable.
“The first time you hear about it, it’s like, ‘I’m there,’” Laronde said. “This is the big one.”
Last January, Laronde was centrifuged in space center in Philadelphia were he completed his initial training for the flight.
While there, Laronde and others experienced a flight simulator that replicated reentry into the earth’s atmosphere at 6 G-force – about twice the power of slamming the brakes of a Formula 1 racecar while traveling at 100 mph.
“It was quite the ride,” said Laronde, who experienced tunnel vision during the smooth speed and a headache and nausea afterward. “It’s like the best ride you’ve been on times 10.”
