Joshua Bush, '00, Has Nowhere to go but Up as a Pioneer in the Space Travel Industry

     
         Joshua Bush floats in weightlessness during his zero-gravity flight over Las Vegas.


Name: Joshua Bush
Hometown: Wallingford, Philadelphia                         
Majors: Leadership Studies and Political Science
Personal: Married Jennifer Bush in May of 2007
Job: Vice President of Park Avenue Travel

Joshua Bush, '00, is ready for an out-of-this-world experience. Literally.

Bush recently completed space travel agent training at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He is now one of 45 "space agents" accredited by Virgin Galactic who is authorized to sell tickets to space.

But Bush, the vice president for Philadelphia-based Park Avenue Travel, isn't one for letting someone else have all the fun and adventure. He plans to go sometime in the not-too-distant future.

"We learned all about the effects space flight has on the body, the medical implications and about the intricacies of booking and selling space flight," said Bush. "In subsequent trainings in Las Vegas and Philadelphia I did more physical, hands-on training."

Seats on the first flights are priced at $200,000. So far over 350 tickets have been sold and the first flight is expected to take off sometime in 2010.

Bush has experienced everything space tourists will experience except for the flight itself.

"I partook in parabolic flights resulting in weightlessness," said Bush. "Then this past January I underwent G-force training in a human centrifuge at over 6GS. As a result I have experienced all the physiological effects that you experience during space flight."

For some, this may sound a bit unnerving. But Bush is quick to reassure that it isn't - especially the flight to experience weightlessness.

"It's actually really calm. It's kind of a Zen-like experience," he said. "You lay on the floor and the plane starts to put itself into the dive, the floor kind of drops out from under you and you start to float."

On the actual trip to space, passengers will experience weightlessness, a G-force surge and get to see an iconic image of space in person: the curvature of the earth against the black canvas of space. The rocket motor will also shut down and allow passengers to experience the silence of space.
 
   Above: Bush with Sir Richard Branson,     The opportunity to travel to space was one Bush might not
   the founder of Virgin Galactic.                   have had if he hadn't taken a chance and decided to work
   Below: Bush during training simulation.    for Park Avenue Travel, the family business.

After graduation he got a job with Capital One as a retention manager but decided that life in the corporate world wasn't for him. After a stint working in commercial and investment real estate until 2006, Bush decided that he was ready for a change.

Traveling out of the country and taking risks had been a regular part of life growing up, and Bush realized he missed those opportunities. Before college, he had visited Europe, Central America, the South Pacific and New Zealand. He had gone diving with sharks on the edge of the continental shelf.

"After graduation and being on my own for 10 years, I realized that the trips I got to take as a kid had dried up," he said. "That coupled with my parents taking better trips to more places like Africa and Peru made me realize how much I missed traveling."

His decision to leave a safe job in corporate America, he says, was worth the risk.

And soon, going "above and beyond the call of duty" will take on a whole new meaning for this daring Jepsonite.

      "The travel industry is governed by relationships. Leadership is about relationships.    
       Requests, interactions, delegation, it all comes down to our relationships. Jepson was
       the first place where I was able to quantify these ideas and understand them in other 
       contexts."
                                                                                                --Joshua Bush