It took 14 applications to get into the astronaut program, and that was only one of his careers. Dan Barry loves a challenge.
By Stephanie Bergeron
You can call him an M.D., a scientist, or a shoemaker. He’s an engineer, an entrepreneur, a father, and a husband. He received five degrees between 1975 and 1982. He has worked as a physician in rehabilitative medicine and has patented five products including a prosthetic arm, a running shoe, and his most recent invention: robots that assist people with disabilities. He’s even been a contestant on the CBS television show, Survivor.
But for Dan Barry ’75 EE, who has circled the earth 481 times, his most hard-won title is astronaut. “It was what I wanted to do my whole life — fly in space,” he says.
Barry, 52, spent most of his childhood in Alexandria, La. After taking an engineering aptitude test in high school, he received a postcard from Cornell.
The offer of a McMullen scholarship and the reputation of the Ivy-League school were enough to lure Barry north. “I didn’t know very much about Cornell,” he says. “I’d never seen it until the first day I showed up as a freshman. For a kid from a small town in the Deep South, it’s a big transition, but I really liked it,” he says. “I don’t know that there was anything I didn’t like about Cornell.”
His undergraduate work in electrical engineering included a bioengineering project on learning in invertebrates and a Mars rover project in autonomous obstacle detection. Barry was also a member of Theta Chi, a fraternity on Stewart Avenue (currently inactive at Cornell).
As a senior, Barry wrote to Edward Gibson, a Theta Chi brother and Skylab astronaut, for advice on how to get into the space program. Gibson wrote back with what Barry called the best advice he has ever heard. He told Barry to follow his heart.
“Gibson said to do what you really like to do and then you’ll be good at it,” Barry says. As for preparation for the space program, Barry recalls that Gibson said, “Whatever you want to do, as long as it has a science bent to it, is going to be relevant to space flight.”
So with Gibson’s advice in mind, Barry enrolled in graduate school in electrical engineering at Princeton University. In 1977, he began work with assistant professor Sol Gruner, who is now a professor of physics at Cornell.
At the time, Gruner was working on the structure of the photo protein inside the rod cells of eyes. But in order to study eyes, Gruner needed samples. He and Barry headed to a slaughterhouse where they worked in the “disassembly line” clipping eyeballs from cow carcasses.
“It turns out that after a while he got quite good at it,” says Gruner. Barry’s research with Gruner formed the basis of his Ph.D. thesis.
“Dan was a wonderful student to work with for many reasons,” says Gruner. “He really is very bright and he was willing to try all kinds of things”
While a student at Princeton, Barry first applied to and was rejected from NASA’s astronaut program. Determined to fulfill his dream, he applied again and again over the years—while he continued his work as a grad student at Princeton, as a medical student at the University of Miami, as an intern and resident at the University of Michigan, and even as an assistant professor at Michigan. Fourteen times in all.
“If you have ever received the ‘thin’ envelope, I can relate to how you felt. I was the king of ‘thin’ envelopes,” he said in a commencement address to Beloit College, where he received an honorary degree in 2003.
But persistence paid off and he was accepted into NASA’s fourteenth class of astronaut candidates for the space shuttle program in 1992, the same year he was granted tenure at Michigan. Since then, Barry has flown on three space shuttle missions as a mission specialist. For his first flight on Endeavour in 1996, he retrieved the Space Flyer Unit launched from Japan 10 months earlier and deployed and retrieved a Spartan satellite. On a 1999 shuttle Discovery flight, Barry transferred supplies to the International Space Station. In 2001, on another Discovery flight, Barry’s mission delivered the Expedition-3 crew to the station. In all, he’s logged over 734 hours in space and performed four spacewalks. Barry is listed as one of the top ten people in the world for career spacewalk length after completing 24 hours and 49 minutes of spacewalking. In April 2005, Barry retired from NASA to start his own company, Denbar Robotics.
Following his first flight, Barry’s adopted hometown of South Hadley, Mass., held “Dan Barry Day,”as a celebration of his work in space. The event included a community parade, slide presentations, and autograph sessions. Hundreds of residents and local college students attended the event.
These days Barry has another claim to fame: he was chosen as a contestant on Survivor: Panama. While living on a deserted beach with little more than a machete, he went several days without food and competed in physically and mentally demanding challenges. But for Barry, Survivor was just another crazy adventure.
“You go fly in space and you have all this support, thousands of people making sure you have what you need to be successful,” he says. “I thought that it might be fun to go try something without any support where in fact the people around you are your adversaries.”
Barry, the second oldest of the season’s castaways, appealed to audiences as a father figure. “I was sort of the kindly old man character,” he says. “That’s not exactly who I was out there, but I’m certainly happy with the portrayal of someone who has integrity and is willing to stick to his word.”
Barry says that even before the show, he understood that certain parts of his personality would be emphasized.
“These shows are sort of ‘reality’ in little letters and ‘TV’ in big letters,” he says. “In order to get an audience that wants to watch the show week to week they have to build characters.”
He was voted out of the game on day sixteen after losing a challenge involving a puzzle that he and his teammate could not complete before the other team.
Barry returned home from Panama to continue work on his current project. His company, Denbar Robotics, is designing robots to help people with disabilities.
Barry, who was a physician in rehabilitative medicine, became interested in assistive technologies in med school at the University of Miami. In one class, a woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis spoke about a button-hook device that could help her get dressed and get in and out of her car.
“Ten dollars worth of stuff made the difference between this woman’s ability to live independently versus having to live in an assisted living situation,” he says. “I thought that it was really neat that you could take small pieces of technology and have a really big influence on people’s independence.”
During his residency in Michigan, Barry researched the sounds that muscles make when they move. His curiosity led to the patent of a prosthetic arm that uses small microphones to trigger movement. He developed the first model using inexpensive microphones from a local electronics store. He later tested it on his patients at the University of Michigan.
“He had no hesitation to get in there and try experiments,” says Gruner of Barry’s many unique ideas. “He’s bright, he’s fearless; he loves to try new things.”
Gruner was able to try out one of these new things when he found a gift from Barry — a pair of running shoes — in his mailbox. Barry found that one way to enable people to run faster is to use an anisotropic material in the sole of the shoe, so that energy can be stored in the heel and transferred to the arch of the foot when a runner pushes off of the ground.
His first design was a graphite-like material that was too stiff for comfortable walking, but excellent for runners. Shoe companies didn’t accept the idea, saying that when people try on shoes in a store, they test them by walking, not running. No one would buy a shoe that was uncomfortable to walk in. Barry didn’t give up. He developed a new model using a fluid-based design for cushioning and a less stiff graphite component. The cushioning result was the Brooks Hydroflow.
“They were great shoes. I used them for years,” says Gruner.
But despite inventing shoes and arms, floating weightlessly in a spaceship above the Earth, and eating snails in the jungles of Panama, Barry’s greatest moments are simple ones: “It’s when my kids were born, no question about it,” he says.
Barry’s children, Jennifer, 20, and Andrew, 18, spent a lot of time away from their father while he was training at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and they were living in Massachusetts with his wife, Sue, a professor of biology at Mount Holyoke College. Still, Barry flew home most weekends for 12 years and, weeknights, he read books to his children over the phone.
“I think we stayed connected as a family really well despite the fact that we worked 1,500 miles apart,” he says.
The family also made it a habit not to work on weekends. Instead, they had family Warcraft games and challenged neighboring families to ultimate Frisbee games in the snow. At children’s birthday celebrations, Jennifer says that her father was always the life of the party.
“He would play all the games with us and you could tell he wasn’t just humoring us — he actually still enjoyed hide-and-go-seek and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it,” she says.
Jennifer says that she appreciated the time her dad took for nightly reading and weekend fun.
“That has always been very special to me, that he would take that time out of his day, his job, his life, to sit at the phone with a book and read to his children,” she says.
She also credits her father for her love of math and physics. Jennifer first became interested in math on a long car ride one summer. A rowdy game with her brother had escalated into shouts. When her father addressed the problem, however, he didn’t ask for quiet. Instead, he posed a problem: “x plus y equals 7 and x minus y equals 1. Do you know what x and y are?”
Jennifer, who was nine at the time, thought quietly before responding. “When my father pronounced me correct, I instantly demanded another problem.” she says. “This went on during every long car ride—and some short ones—for years until the problems I wanted became too difficult for my father to think up and solve while driving.”
Jennifer’s interest in problem solving led her father to teach her algebra and calculus at a very young age. She is now a physics major and a math minor at Swarthmore College.
“Whenever anybody asks me why I decided on math or physics, my mind flashes back to a car ride long ago,” she says. “My father loves to learn and he has worked hard to pass this love on to my brother and me. I don’t know of any lesson more important.”
And for Barry, a life of learning has certainly paid off.
“I’m very lucky,” he says. “I have no regrets.” 
