Belmont Man Tells All of NASA Award

Paul Espinosa got the VIP treatment of a lifetime May 31 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But was his favorite part watching the last-ever space shuttle Atlantis roll out to the launch pad? Perhaps a space shuttle landing?

No, it was taking his wife Nona along with him.

Espinosa, a four-year Belmont resident and NASA senior project manager at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, recently the Space Flight Awareness Honoree Award for his contributions in developing hardware and procedures for life science experiments for the space shuttle program and International Space Station.

A University of California at Berkeley graduate, Espinosa got into NASA just several years after college.

“I wanted to work for NASA all my life,” he said. 

For the past 22 years, he’s worked on various projects at Ames Research Center from the Russia program, to helicopter testing, and most recently the Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle—the new capsule-like rockets that will replace space shuttles and carry more crew members than Apollo did.

It is for these contributions that NASA’s Space Flight Awareness Program recognized Espinosa, one of the highest honors presented to employees for dedication and safety.

On his trip to Florida late last month, he and another 100 award recipients, and his civil engineer wife Nona, witnessed the last space shuttle Atlantis rollout to Launch Pad 39A for a mission to the International Space Station, set to launch next month.

He said he has always wanted to take Nona out to a launch before (he’s seen two launches), but taking her to a rollout and landing was the second best thing. 

“Being there and seeing Atlantis, and realizing that it’s the last space shuttle really meant a lot. One, because pretty much my whole career has been with the space shuttle program and second, having my wife see it because if she didn’t see it now then she would never get the chance.” 

Space shuttle Endeavor was the landing they witnessed at 2:35 a.m. on June 1, where US Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ husband was the commander of the mission.

When he’s not working on research and hardware for NASA, you can probably find Espinosa on another planet—Planet Granite that is, the rock climbing gym. It was rock climbing that moved him from Sunnyvale to Belmont.

“One day I stepped out of the gym and said, hey you can actually live here. And told my wife and one thing led to another and here we are.”

Besides thinking “Belmont is great!” Espinosa has also climbed real (big) rocks including three routes in El Capitan in Yosemite National Park as well as the face of Half Dome and even Mount Shasta.

He has two daughters at , but warned them when he took his wife instead to see the space shuttles in Florida: “You guys are younger, you have your whole lives ahead of you and then you’ll be astronauts. Then you don’t have to have Dad take you, you can go on your own!”