ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Several Lehigh Valley natives have played important roles in Artemis II.<\/p>\n
Stephen Blaschak is an Allentown native and a graduate of Dieruff High School.<\/p>\n
He moved to the sunshine state back in the 70’s and now, he’s a senior quality assurance inspector with NASA.<\/p>\n
Blaschak played a big role in getting the capsule and the rocket ready to launch for Artemis II.<\/p>\n
“I was in the capsule the night before launch, we were hooking up the environmental control systems for the hookups into the spacesuits,” says Blaschak.<\/p>\n
Blaschak is a master electrician by trade.<\/p>\n
“It got to a point where you know what I wanted more so when I was 40, I put myself back in college,” says Blaschak.<\/p>\n
The Lehigh Valley native got an aerospace technology degree and has been with NASA for more than two decades.<\/p>\n
“I really like my job, so that’s why I’m still working at the age of 72,” says Blaschak.<\/p>\n
Blaschak has sent astronauts up in rockets before.<\/p>\n
“I did shuttle and we put people into space, but they were going into low earth orbit,” he explains.<\/p>\n
He says seeing the Artemis II crew go up and make it to the far side of the moon has been a career highlight.<\/p>\n
“But this here we put them out around the moon and back and that’s pretty cool stuff,” says Blaschak.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II crew will return home Friday night. Then Blaschak says he and the team at NASA will get the capsule back and get to work in a job he’s grateful he gets to do.<\/p>\n
“And we get to take it apart bolt by bolt nut by nut and see exactly how it acted how it reacted what happened to it what didn’t happen to it, and that will be lessons learned for Artemis III,” says Blaschak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Several Lehigh Valley natives have played important roles in Artemis II. Stephen Blaschak is an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,70186,73539,157,33111,30949,73540,16565,73538,73537],"class_list":{"0":"post-162813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-artemis-ii","12":"tag-capsule","13":"tag-lehigh-valley","14":"tag-moon","15":"tag-nasa","16":"tag-quality-assurance","17":"tag-rocket","18":"tag-space-mission","19":"tag-stephen-blaschak"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}