Biography|Michael Suffredini — The Austin Labs Where Orbital Mechanics Turned Him Toward Space

People who later meet Michael Suffredini as the man who ran the International Space Station tend to start the file in Houston.

The earlier file opens on the Forty Acres in Austin.

He took a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.

The Cockrell School still lists that degree on its Academy of Distinguished Alumni page.

The department he sat in occupied the W. R. Woolrich Laboratories at 24th Street and Speedway for fifty years.

That building went up in 1958, a year after Sputnik.

The university demolished it around 2019 to clear ground for the Energy Engineering Building.

What remains for a visitor is the campus itself.

The Main Building and its tower still stand at 110 Inner Campus Drive, the landmark that framed every engineering class of his era.

He arrived wanting high-performance aircraft.

Victor Szebehely's orbital-dynamics teaching pulled the work toward space instead.

Szebehely had come to Austin from the Goddard Space Flight Center and spent the rest of his career on the three-body problem.

Suffredini has told later interviewers that the shift happened in that classroom.

After graduation he went to McDonnell Douglas, then a NASA contractor on Johnson Space Center work, before joining the agency as a civil servant in January 1989.

The public record does not pin a birthplace.

The first place that can be walked is this campus.

Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (Main Building, University of Texas at Austin)