Gregory Jarvis eagerly anticipated his voyage to space.
“I’ve been charged up since last March, and so this is kind of a culmination of a dream come true,” he said at a pre-flight panel.
Jarvis’s responsibilities aboard Challenger entailed amassing new information about liquid fueled-rockets and their design, specifically by studying liquids in weightless environments.
He sometimes had trouble believing he would actually be going up in the shuttle.
“He always thought of astronauts as being perfect people, nothing wrong with them psychologically or physically,” his wife, Marcia Jarvis, said in a Netflix interview. “And he says, ‘Who would have ever thought that a balding 40-year-old engineer would ever get a chance to be in this situation?’ So he was just ecstatic.”
In his role as a satellite engineer, he had applied for the NASA payload specialist position and was selected from among 600 candidates at Hughes Aircraft Company.
He began training, but it took longer than expected to get into the air. Twice, he was assigned to missions and then replaced by legislators who would fly in his seat. So when NASA put Jarvis on the Challenger STS-51L crew, he was beyond ready.
Still, the whole process took some getting used to.
“The first time you put on a blue flight suit you kind of walk around, ‘Maybe I’ll let them walk in front of me and they won’t see me’ but after a while, you think, you do they things that they do, you work around the orbiter, and you say, ‘I know what I’m doing here, I belong,” he said in a TV interview during his time at NASA.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1944, Jarvis graduated high school in Mohawk, New York, before studying electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo. He then moved to Boston to obtain a Master’s in the same subject area at Northeastern University. During this time, he met his wife, and they married in Boston before he joined the Air Force and was stationed in California.
The day they arrived in California in 1969 was the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
“I remember sitting in the car when that came on the radio,” Marcia Jarvis said in a Netflix interview. “Greg just went bananas when he heard that we’re actually walking on the moon and he was just intrigued.”
While in California, he pursued a Master’s in management science at West Coast University Los Angeles. After leaving the Air Force, Jarvis received job offers from every company to which he applied, his wife said. He selected Hughes.
“Greg was very passionate about engineering, but his specialty was communication satellites that were going to be launched from the shuttle, and when the program presented itself at Hughes that they could fly a payload specialist, he was so ecstatic about that,” said Marcia Jarvis. “They narrowed it down to the final 10 and so he called me at work, and he just says, ‘I got number one.’”
Beyond his passion for science, he loved to play squash and racquetball, in addition to riding his bike. Jarvis had an adventure streak and enjoyed going cross-country skiing, backpacking and whitewater rafting. He also played the classical guitar, especially when he needed to relax.
“Greg had a real spark in his eye, something I don’t see in everybody’s,” Marcia Jarvis recalled in a Netflix interview.
In 1985, he returned to the University of Buffalo to deliver a commencement address.
“You can reach for the stars by always giving your best in performance and attitude,” he told the graduating class.
When Jarvis finally boarded Challenger for his mission in January 1986, he took with him a flag from his alma mater. The flag survived the explosion and was later recovered from the wreckage. The University of Buffalo went on to name an engineering building after him, and there is now a memorial sculpture in his honor.
Similarly, his high school later renamed itself in his memory. There is also a hydropower dam on Hinckley Lake in New York bearing Jarvis’s name.
