CMU Trustee Who Flew To Space Wants To Make Space Travel Accessible For Everyone
By: KDKA-TV News Staff
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- A Carnegie Mellon University alum and trustee has a new mission in life after flying into space earlier this week.
49-year-old Glen de Vries, the Vice Chair of Life Sciences and Healthcare for a tech company in New York was among those on Blue Origin's New Shepard.
De Vries flew into space on Wednesday with three other crew members, including Star Trek's William Shatner.
De Vries says it was an experience unlike any other, and now he wants to get others interested in the space industry so they can travel through the atmosphere, too.
"I thought that would be important to me before we went up, and having done it makes me feel twice as much conviction. Maybe a thousand times more conviction. That is something we need to make accessible in an equitable way, to as many people on the planet as possible," de Vries said.
De Vries stresses another way of doing that is by making things cheaper so more people can experience what he did.
