Retired from NASA, Santa Rosa man continues exploring — on 2 wheels
Published: Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 1:48 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 1:48 p.m.
Four years shy of 80, retired space scientist Alfred Mascy continues to explore far-flung wonders. But he has changed gears.
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Alfred Mascy and his partner Pat DeLambert have pedaled their bikes all over the world and currently reside in Santa Rosa.
(Kent Porter / Press Democrat)The Santa Rosan worked 30 years for NASA and savored, like a kid with a rocket set, his role in missions that hurtled research spacecraft at about 100,000 miles per hour toward Jupiter, Saturn, comets and asteroids.
Retired since 1988, Mascy (MASS-see) now is happiest exploring vast regions of planet Earth and encountering its inhabitants while traveling at an average of speed of 11, maybe 12 mph.
“When I was just a little kid,” recalled the Stanford-trained astronautical/aeronautical engineer, “I had this desire to travel around the world by bicycle.”
He grew up on two wheels in Philadelphia and he collected postage stamps, still does. As a boy he examined stamps from exotic countries far away and yearned to explore them on a bike.
Mascy worked hard in a field he loved, he did well and retired young — at 53. He was divorced and his four daughters were grown when he put his bicycle on a jetliner and launched an international one-person cycling mission in England.
It lasted five years. On occasion Mascy would return to to California where he lived for decades within a few miles of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He'd take care of personal business, catch up with family and friends, and then resume the journey.
He'd sometimes board a ferry, train or plane, but mostly he pedaled. He rode through the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France, Portugal, Luxemburg, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia.
And that was only the first of Mascy's international rides. A faithful journaler, he has recorded bike-borne memories from 73 countries.
There have been tense moments and mishaps, naturally.
Mascy shouldn't have been riding on a border road between the former Czechoslovakia and the former East Germany, but he couldn't understand the road signs. The armed Czech guards who confronted him were stern-faced until they saw from his passport that he was American.
“They put their guns away and patted me on the back, and I kept going,” Mascy said.
He also was on a ship in the port city of Split in the former Yugoslavia when the captain announced over loudspeakers that the boat had to depart at once because civil strife had broken out in the city. “You could hear the gunfire,” the cyclist said.
But after all his international travels, he suffered his one injury, a shattered left arm, when a passing RV hit him in Yosemite.
Mascy has beheld landscapes and natural wonders most Americans will never see, but what he's loved most from his cycle journeys is the people. Ride a bike, he said, and people everywhere greet you, engage you in as much conversation as common language allows and invite you to join them in a refreshment or meal.
“I get so much enjoyment from meeting people and talking to them about their culture and customs,” he said. “That's one of the beautiful things about touring — sharing your life with other people and having them share their life with you.”
He has sat on dirt floors in Africa and accepted a meal from people who owned nearly nothing. He discovered that Irish keen to take visitors to the pub “can spot an American from 20 paces.”
The encounters he has made on his slow-speed, backroad travels have convinced him ever more deeply that “there is so much good in the world. People are good.”
His partner for the past 2½ years in cycling, ballroom dancing and life is retired Hewlett-Packard/Agilent human-relations executive Pat DeLambert, 71. They pedal locally about 100 miles per week while they prepare for their next overseas ride.
They cycled in New Zealand and Germany last year and this year are planning to tour more of Germany and also Austria and Italy. Next year, they're considering the Czech Republic and Hungary.
Mascy spoke of space exploration when he said, “We're just scratching the surface. There are so many mysteries out there.”
But it's clear the former NASA scientist holds the same view of the earthly discoveries that can be made from the seat of a bike.
Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.
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