Michael Bloomfield has been to the final frontier, and will be going back next January.

A 1993 graduate of Old Dominion's master's in engineering management program, Bloomfield has participated in two space shuttle missions - one in 1997 to rendezvous with the Mir Space Station to drop off astronaut David Wolf and pick up Mike Foale, and a second in December 2000 to shuttle fellow astronauts who installed power-boosting solar arrays on the new International Space Station.

Bloomfield, 42, joined NASA in 1995 after a long career in the Air Force, where he flew F-15s. Becoming an astronaut was not something that had been in his original plans, however. The Air Force was developing a new plane, the F-22, and the prospect of flying a new craft intrigued him. To do so, however, he would have to have a master's degree (enter Old Dominion University) and go to test pilot school. But the new project took longer than expected.

"The F-22 was slipping further and further into the future so I applied to NASA," he explained.

Of the 3,000 people who applied to go through NASA's training program at that time, fewer than 30 were chosen.

Until then Bloomfield's exposure to the space program consisted of what the general public saw on television - Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, coverage of the Apollo program, the Challenger explosion - and, he recalls, some drawings of Skylab that he received after writing a letter to NASA when he was in grade school back in Michigan.

Flying planes had not even been a childhood dream. Becoming a pilot happened only after he enrolled at the Air Force Academy, which he chose because it was the one school that would allow him to play major college football.

Bloomfield is thrilled, however, with the turns his life has taken, and he remains in awe of his new profession.

"It's very difficult to describe to people what it's like to go into space," he said. "You want to describe it to your wife and your kids and your friends, but unless you've actually seen it, there's no way to really describe it."

Among his most vivid recollections of the first trip were the colors - "the blues are very blue; the whites are really white; the blacks are so dark," he remembers. Bloomfield also was struck by the sheets of fire that surround the spacecraft when it re-enters Earth's atmosphere; the tremendous speed (the space shuttle travels at a rate of five miles per second in orbit, taking, for example, only 10 minutes to cover the distance between California and New York); and the way zero gravity makes your head feel, somewhat like hanging upside down from the monkey bars on a playground, he said.

"All these things make it a unique experience."

On his second mission, Bloomfield piloted the Endeavour for 10 days, docking it with the International Space Station. "I remember looking out the window at this huge, huge station," he said. "It's a tribute to all the engineers around the world that we are able to build this."

As pilot for the mission, Bloomfield was also responsible for taking a "beauty shot" of the space station. To do so, he had to undock the shuttle and perform a fly-around, pause at just the right position and then pitch the shuttle's nose to the correct angle. The maneuver permitted a high-resolution, large-format camera mounted in the shuttle's cargo bay to take pictures of the orbiting outpost.

Bloomfield said part of the challenge in getting the pictures was that he had to make decisions about eight minutes ahead of time.

He is scheduled to return to space in January on another flight to bring materials from Earth to help with the ongoing assembly of the 100,000-pound station, which, when completed, will be the size of a football field.

This partnership between the Americans and Russians has led to an appreciation of each other's culture, Bloomfield said. He cites the "robustness" of the Russian cosmonauts and the simple way in which they create complex systems as two of their most impressive traits.

Between now and the time the station is finished in 2006, about one flight a month - alternating between the two nations - will have been made to the outpost, which will then become home to a seven-member crew representing both countries.