In her leisure hours, Caldwell likes to sing in venues both large and small with Max Q, the all-astronaut band.
When she graduated from Fullerton in 1993, she presented Olmstead with a small color photograph of the two of them together. It was in a clear plastic holder affixed with a small model of a plastic space shuttle and an American flag. On the flag, she wrote, “This will be worth money some day.”
Olmstead had the photo sitting on his desk six years later, when Caldwell returned to campus as an astronaut and distinguished alumni speaker for the university’s 40th anniversary convocation.
While she was at Fullerton, another chemistry professor, Scott Hewitt, became Caldwell’s research mentor. “Because of Tracy’s mechanical, electrical and intellectual skills, I asked her to join my research group and encouraged her to apply for our Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program, funded by the National Science Foundation,” Hewitt recalls. Caldwell began research in the program that Hewitt established in 1992, helping design and build a laser ionization/mass spectrometer.
“When Tracy began here,” Hewitt recalls, “she was not sure whether she had the ability to do undergraduate research. When she gave her first presentation to my research group, she was very nervous and was visibly shaking. By the time she left CSUF, she was poised and confident, and had enhanced her research and communications skills.”
The last day Caldwell spent in Hewitt’s lab, she stayed late and the sky darkened. Hewitt directed her to a particular spot in the room, an area she had seen many times before, furnished with tall, slender equipment racks and set with blinking lights and gauges. Then Hewitt turned out the overhead lights.
“What do you think?” he asked. Nothing registered with Caldwell, who had never seen the room in darkness before. As the colored lights blinked on and off, he prompted gently, “Doesn’t it look like the cockpit of the space shuttle?”
It did, and years later, that memory still triggers her emotions. “That was just like him, always rooting for me,” noticing something that other professors would not think twice about. “He was just as excited about my future as I was.”
