Ed Lu

Early life and education

Ed Lu grew up in Webster, New York, after being born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from R. L. Thomas High School in 1980, where he wrestled. Lu went on to Cornell University, earning a B.S. in electrical engineering and joining Pi Kappa Phi. He then completed an M.S. and Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University in 1989, supported by a National Science Foundation fellowship. His postdoctoral research in solar physics took him to the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, and the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 1994, he was chosen for the NASA Astronaut Corps.

NASA career

Lu flew on Space Shuttle missions STS-84 in 1997 and STS-106 in 2000, performing a six-hour spacewalk during the latter to construct the International Space Station. In 2003, he served as flight engineer on Soyuz TMA-2 and spent six months on ISS Expedition 7 with cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. During that mission, he answered questions from students in a Japanese NASDA educational event, playing 'Happy Birthday' on an electronic piano for a student.

He also demonstrated the difficulty of playing piano in space during a live CBS News and NASA TV interview. On October 15, 2003, Lu communicated with China's first crewed mission astronaut, Yang Liwei, congratulating him in Putonghua and saying 'Welcome to space. Have a safe journey.' While on STS-106, Lu noted during a space phone call that there is no moon illusion in space.

While still at NASA, he co-founded the B612 Foundation with Rusty Schweickart, Clark Chapman, and Piet Hut to detect and deflect asteroids that could strike Earth. The foundation later aimed to design and build a privately financed asteroid-finding space telescope, Sentinel, to be launched in 2017–2018.

Magic trick in space

While on the ISS, Lu collaborated with magician James Randi to perform a card trick. Randi instructed Lu to select a card from the middle of a new shuffled deck without looking, turn it around, and reinsert it facing the opposite direction, then place the deck back in its box and later fan the cards to the camera. Randi performed the same procedure on Earth at JREF headquarters before witnesses from the Miami Herald. Both selected the seven of diamonds. The remaining cards were jettisoned for weight, but Lu smuggled the card home. The two autographed cards are framed at JREF offices in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Post-NASA career

On August 10, 2007, Lu announced his retirement from NASA to work at Google. He left Google in June 2010 and worked out of the Sunfire Offices. In September 2011, he joined Liquid Robotics as Chief of Innovative Applications, promoting new ocean science applications, and in 2012 became Chief Technology Officer of Hover Inc. On June 28, 2012, Lu, with Rusty Schweickart and G. Scott Hubbard, announced plans for the first privately funded deep space mission, Sentinel, an infrared space telescope to detect threatening asteroids. On October 25, 2016, B612 and Lu endorsed NASA's NEOcam proposed mission and ended the Sentinel project. As of 2022, Lu is working on a project to find 'killer asteroids' by analyzing terabytes of archived data, with B612 having found over 100 potentially threatening asteroids, supported in part by Google's applied artificial intelligence project.