Ron Garan was born in Yonkers on October 30, 1961. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1979. His father still lived in the city years later, when NASA was writing up his biography.
What happened in between is one of the best stories this city has, and almost nobody here tells it.
From Roosevelt High To An F-16
Garan took his commission in the Air Force in 1984 and earned his wings the next year. He flew F-16s out of Hahn Air Base in what was then West Germany. Then Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, where he went through the Air Force Fighter Weapons School.
From August 1990 to March 1991 he deployed to Southwest Asia for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He flew combat missions in the F-16 and came home with a Distinguished Flying Cross for Combat Valor. By the time he left the Air Force he had logged more than 5,000 hours in over 30 different aircraft.
A Ship Named For Yuri Gagarin
NASA selected him as a pilot in July 2000.
His first flight was STS-124 aboard the shuttle Discovery, from May 31 to June 14, 2008. That mission delivered the 37-foot Japanese Kibo laboratory to the International Space Station. Garan logged 20 hours and 32 minutes outside on three spacewalks.
His second flight is the one with the detail people remember. On April 4, 2011, he launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in a Soyuz the Russians had named Gagarin. It went up off the same pad Yuri Gagarin had used nearly fifty years before.
He spent 164 days in space on that trip, as part of Expedition 27 and 28. He also took part in the last spacewalk ever staged from a space shuttle.
The Numbers
Across the two flights, more than 178 days in space. 2,842 orbits of the Earth. 27 hours and 3 minutes outside, on four spacewalks.
Add the two missions together and it comes to more than 71 million miles.
He is also an aquanaut. In April 2006 he spent 18 days living underwater in Aquarius, the world's only undersea research laboratory, working out how astronauts might one day explore the surface of the Moon.
He Came Home
On March 23, 2024, the Hudson River Museum welcomed him back to Yonkers for two talks. One was called Expedition Space. The other was called The Orbital Perspective. Mayor Mike Spano was among the elected officials there.
The Orbital Perspective is what Garan has spent the years since NASA talking about. It is what 71 million miles does to the way a person sees the place they came from. In his own words, each and every one of us is riding through the Universe together on this spaceship we call Earth.
He figured that out about 250 miles above a city that graduated him in 1979.
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