Siblings' bond not bound by Earth

Kevin Ford wears a Ball State shirt while on the International Space Station. His sister, Nancy Richardson, works at Ball State as an administration coordinator for educational leadership. PHOTO PROVIDED BY SCOTT TRAPPE

Editor's note: This is the second in a three-part series of space-related articles in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the moon landing. To see the first article, click here. To read the third article, click here.

Sitting in a tipped over chair, a young boy presses the on switch of a vacuum cleaner.

“Houston, we have liftoff.”

“I thought it was so cute — you never think he’d actually do it,” Nancy Richardson, Ball State’s administrative coordinator for educational leadership, said decades later about her younger brother, Kevin Ford. “When he was on the Soyuz [a Russian space craft], I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

Nancy and Kevin, two of Clayton and Barbara Ford’s six children, sat with their family in their rural Indiana home, huddled around the TV to see the first steps on the moon July 20, 1969.

The eldest brother, David — an Indiana University and Ball State alumnus who became an Indiana state senator — deciphered what was being said on TV for the family.

Kevin, who spent his youth playing pretend, eventually became an astronaut and space shuttle pilot for NASA decades later.

LEFT Siblings Kevin Ford and Nancy Richardson pose for a photo in Ford’s home a week after his return to Earth on the Soyuz in March 2013. RIGHT Richardson and Ford pose for a photo at a presentation in November 2013 in Montpelier, Ind. PHOTOS PROVIDED BY NANCY RICHARDSON

DIVERGING PATHS

As Nancy and Kevin grew up, they ended up pursuing different interests, drawing inspiration for their lives from their family.

Nancy, who went back to school after raising five children, received her degree in English education at Ball State, while Kevin pursued a career in aviation.

“I was really drawn to aviation from a pretty young age and that was because my older brothers were both interested in it,” Kevin said.

However, a book he took from David’s room changed his life forever.

To this day, Kevin can still remember the opening paragraph of “Carrying the Fire” by Michael Collins, a story about the Apollo 11 moon landing.

“It was the first book I read to the end and turned right back to the first page,” he said. “There are [not] too many books I have read twice in my whole life.”

It wasn’t the fact Collins was part of Apollo 11 that attracted Kevin, but rather his career as a fighter pilot and a test pilot.

When David took Kevin on his first flight when he was 13, it solidified Kevin’s desire to fly. Less than four years later, Kevin earned his pilot’s license.

He graduated from Blackford High School in Hartford City, Ind., earned an engineering degree at Notre Dame, enlisted in the Air Force and eventually became a test pilot, which led to applying for the astronaut program.

He was turned down three times before he was accepted.

“I was 40 years old already by the time I became an astronaut,” Kevin said. “It’s not one of those things that you can race towards after college.”

In 2000, he got accepted for candidacy.

“I lucked out,” he said.

ROCKET MAN

In 2002, Nancy went to Florida to visit Kevin at his new job as an official astronaut.

She had the chance to meet John Young, the ninth person to walk on the moon, and Rick Husband.

Kevin Ford, right, poses for a photo with his brother, former State

Sen. David Ford. David died in 2008 from pancreatic cancer at the

age of 59. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NANCY RICHARDSON

Husband would later command the Space Shuttle Columbia when the shuttle’s heat resistant tiles failed and the shuttle disintegrated, killing the crew in 2003.

“That was really personal ... [because] Kevin had spent a lot of time with all them,” Nancy said. “He had to do the flyovers and take the families to the funerals. It was just really difficult for us.”

It wasn’t until 2009 that Kevin was finally able to pilot a space shuttle and go into space for the first time.

The liftoff gathered all of his friends and family but for one — “Kevin’s biggest fan,” David.

A year earlier, David died from pancreatic cancer.

Nancy said David, the man who inspired Kevin and was the first person to place him in a cockpit, shared many similarities with Kevin.

“They were so much alike,” she said. “On the phone, I couldn’t tell them apart and their writing was almost identical.”

In his first wakeup call in space, Kevin honored his brother and his state by playing the IU fight song.

UP ABOVE

Kevin has been up in orbit one more time since the 2009 mission, his family always nearby for his launches and returns.

“They really like to know the details,” Kevin said. “If I mention something like, ‘Hey we are going to have a really high beta angle with the space station,’ my sister, Nancy, can tell you what that means. I think it kind of rubs off on them.”

His most recent mission was from late October 2012 until March 2013 on the International Space Station, flying up in a Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan, where he got to talk with a man who indirectly set him on a course 200 miles above the Earth.

That man himself had traveled 238,855 miles from Earth in 1969.

“I did make a request to have a phone call with Mike Collins because he wrote that book,” he said. “So I was able to get his phone number and call him in his home, and we just chatted.”

Kevin said getting to be miles over his planet made him ask himself daily, “How did I get here?”

“You can see the city lights, the lightning and the clouds down below and the sea of stars above you,” he said. “You can see it change so fast, just the way the sky is moving around you. It really makes the Earth look small. It looks and feels like a quarter-mile track.”

In this NASA video, Commander Kevin Ford and flight engineers Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn of the International Space Station's Expedition 34 crew wish the world a happy new year for 2013.

NO DISTANCE TOO GREAT

Sitting in her office, Nancy thumbed a pendant around her neck and pointed to a framed Ball State T-shirt with four patches pinned to the bottom of it.

“That’s the Ball State shirt Kevin took with him into space,” she said.

Kevin said before a mission, he had visited Nancy and their father, who died recently in June, at the university for lunch when he mentioned that he needed a Ball State T-shirt.

He had a specific type in mind, a 100-percent cotton red T-shirt with a Cardinal head on it.

“We were having a hard time finding it, and so we finally ask the guy at the store and explain it to him and he goes, ‘Well how picky are you, man?’” Kevin said.

When the Fords were checking out, Kevin told the employee why he had been so specific about the shirt.

“I said, ‘Maybe, you’ll see it in the magazines someday,’” he said. “I’m not sure he believed it.”

Upon his return after the space trip, he gave the shirt to his sister. Nancy then pinned all the patches from his missions to it. The last one is seen dangling, about to fall.

“He designed the last patch,” she said. “I say I help him, but I was just there with him. Since he was commander, he got to design it.”

Kevin took the design to a jeweler to craft a pendant based off it, Nancy said. After it went up with him on his mission miles above the Earth, he returned to hand it to her.

“He’ll always be my little brother,” Nancy said, thumbing the pendant.

Ford's missions

STS-128

This was Kevin Ford’s first mission into space. Ford piloted Space Shuttle Discovery on its 37th mission into space and the 30th mission dedicated to the assembly of the International Space Station. Discovery carried logistics and science payloads needed to maintain and expand the station.

Destination: International Space Station

Launch: Aug. 28, 2009

Landing: Sept. 11, 2009

Mission duration: 13 days, 20 hours and 54 minutes

Expeditions 33 and 34 for Ford

Ford returned for a second trip into space with these expeditions. He traveled up to the station in a Russian Soyuz from Kazakhstan. He spent six months up in space on Expeditions 33 and 34, conducting scientific research and making repairs to the station. For Expedition 33, he was a flight engineer and became commander for Expedition 34. Ford then handed off command to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield for Expedition 35.

Destination: International Space Station

Launch: Oct. 23, 2012

Docking: Oct. 25, 2012

Landing: March 15, 2013

Mission: Conduct research and maintenance on the ISS

In this NASA video, Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford hands command to the first Canadian space commander, Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency in March 2013.

Siblings' bond not bound by Earth