Astronaut Drew Feustel grew up in Detroit loving cars. Living in “the Motor City”, cars were always a part of his life. His first car was a 1967 Mustang that he bought from a neighbor at age 14. That Mustang was the first car that he learned to take apart and completely rebuild. Feustel recalls, “Most mustangs in Detroit didn’t have a long life because of the rust, so that car needed to be rebuilt.” This love of rebuilding cars led him to work at an autobody shop for three years, while he attended community college in Detroit. “I’ve done several cars on my own, I’ve painted five or six cars, learned metal fabrication, engine building, body, paint—pretty much everything,” said Feustel.
Over the years, Feustel has accumulated quite the classic car list: 1967 Mustang Convertible, 1967 Mustang coupe, 1968 Torino GT hardtop, 1966 Mercury Comet Cyclone GT, 1966 Austin Healy Sprite, 1968 Volkswagen Wesfalia Van, 1968 Volkswagen Type III Fastback, 1972 BMW 2002 Tii, 1987 BMW L6, 1990 BMW M3, 1973 BMW Bavaria, 1972 BMW 3.0 CS, and 1985 BMW 535i Euro. The most monstrous car was the Wimbledon White Mercury Comet Cyclone GT. “It was a sleeper,” says Feustel “with a 4.11 locker rear end and traction bars, and 428 engine with aluminum heads, custom headers, 3-inch exhaust, and it had huge rear tires on steel wheels. My wife was never fond of that car because whenever I started it up, it shook the windows in the house.”
Feustel’s road to NASA started at Oakland Community College in Michigan. After receiving an Associate’s Degree in Science, specializing in Geology, he attended Purdue University, for both Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Geophysics. After marrying his Canadian wife Indira, he then left Michigan for Canada, studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he received a PhD in Seismology. He then went to work for Exxon in Houston doing oil and gas exploration. He joined NASA in 2000. After 2 Space Shuttle missions in 2009 and 2014, He became Commander of the International Space Station (ISS) from June to October of last year. He is still an active duty Astronaut.
Feustel’s history with racing started when he was a kid racing motocross, he states: “I was always a racing fan, [I] followed IndyCar, Formula One, and MotoGP, and I still follow it to this day. I keep up on the series, the teams, and the drivers, and because I was a fan I spent time in space taking photos of the entire 2018 season—all of the race tracks, and all of those photos are posted on my Instagram (@Astro_feustel) and twitter (@astro_feustel) …Those [photos] were posted during my six months in space. On the race weekends, I would post the picture of the track, and then watch the race. That was kind of what I did as a hobby while I was up there.”
There was a lot of ground control logistics that went into planning the shooting opportunities. “I worked with some of our ground support teams in mission control, and I tried to provide coordinates for them so they could provide timing opportunities for me to see if I could pick up the tracks. The photos were taken in my spare time—nights or weekends, or middle of the night or whenever, basically when I knew I was going to be flying over a track I would plan ahead for the day so that I had some free time to use the 5 minutes that I had to catch a track as I passed overhead, and then get back on with my work—I managed to capture all of them. It wasn’t a trivial thing. I had to think about how I was going to get them, how I was going to pass over, whether it was going to be clear,” said Feustel.
The tracks were “pretty tricky to find”, recalls Feustel: “I used a Nikon D5 with an 800mm lens with a doubler on it, 1600mm, manually focusing the lens and using manual settings. When I looked out in the lens you could probably fit 30 tracks into the area, I couldn’t see them with the naked eye, usually, but if I pointed the camera in the right place, I could see them through the viewfinder. There were a lot of times where I couldn’t see them, and entirely missed a track because I pointed the camera in the wrong spot.”
“We’re flying at 250 miles up, so from that vantage point, I would have to determine if I was looking left, right or straight down, and I could really only take tracks if they were 15 degrees from vertical from my position, so it if was outside of 15 degrees offset from our track I didn’t even bother because it was too far away. The real challenge is timing, weather, and actually finding these things,” remarks Feustel.
The ISS is also traveling at high speeds—very high speeds, “We’re travelling at 17,500 miles per hour, which equates on the ground to 5 miles per second, so you’re going pretty fast, so you don’t have a lot of time. Generally speaking, the time I had was about less than a minute maximum. It would be there, and I would start firing away and then it would be gone,” says Feustel.
For car guys who’s project car builds are interrupted for other obligations (like blasting off to space!) love to plan out how they will continue the project when they are able to, and Feustel was no different. Although he was off planet, he still thought about his car build. He decided to order a car part—from the International Space Station! Feustel proudly recalls that “I did order a part from space … I did make a point to order a starter (motor) from space for one of my BMWs. I ordered it online, from an iPad, from a Wi-Fi linkup. My wife called me two days later and asked, ‘Did you order something?’ and I said: ‘Yep! I ordered a part from space.’”
Feustel returned from the station on October 5th, 2018. One of his first trips after he left NASA quarantine was to be the Grand Marshal in November 3rd at Sports Car Vintage Racing Association’s National Championship at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. He is passionate about teaching the love of cars to his children, and the next generation and passing along the skills for car restoration and preservation by working with the Restoration, Preservation, and Mentorship (RPM) Foundation as an ambassador. It’s a non-profit organization started by McKeel Hagerty of Hagerty Insurance that is now a part of America Automotive Trust. Feustel spends a lot of time at RPM events mentoring young people with fellow RPM ambassador and racing legend Lyn St. James.
Check out the pictures that Feustel took from space of the IndyCar, Formula 1, and MotoGP tracks. You will probably find your favorite track and see it from a perspective that you’ve never seen before.
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