34 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN | FROM THE NEST Growing up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, Alex Weldon ’14 Ph.D. dreamt of becoming an astronaut. In awe, he watched video footage of astronauts working in Skylab, the first U.S. space station launched in the 1970s, and later, footage of the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. In high school, he got a job at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where astronauts were projected onto IMAX movie screens playfully tossing M&M candies at each other inside their cabin as they lived and floated weightlessly in space. Now, as director of engines, materials & processes engineering at the aerospace company Blue Origin, Weldon hopes to help make space travel accessible to everyone. “I enjoy the way I’m impacting the space industry now, and I think there’s a lot more opportunities for private astronauts,” Weldon said. “When I went to undergrad, the only option in the U.S. was through NASA.” After earning a chemical engineering degree from Princeton in 2008 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Lehigh, Weldon eventually landed at the private space travel company, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, envisions millions of people living and working in Alex Weldon ’14 Ph.D. is director of engines, materials & processes engineering at Blue Origin. ENGINEERING | ALUMNI ʼ14 Next Generation of Space Travel Lehigh grad with dreams of being an astronaut helps develop rockets and engines for private space travel industry. COURTESY OF BLUE ORIGIN
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