Greg Olsen is no ordinary multimillionaire. He’s confident and self-assured without being egotistical or self-absorbed. He’s rightly proud of his achievements, even as he credits others for their decisive influence on his life. And he’s continually looking for the next challenge, without suggesting in the slightest way that he has anything to prove.

It’s this balanced appraisal of his own strengths and weaknesses — and, as he would suggest, the opportunities that good fortune has placed in his path — that explains how a Brooklyn boy turned success in optoelectronics into an outer space adventure and ended up spending eight days aboard the International Space Station.

Making his own luck
Olsen’s own trajectory is stellar. After an undistinguished adolescence, Olsen earned dual bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and physics from Fairleigh Dickinson University, as well as a master’s degree in physics. He then moved to

Charlottesville, where he earned his doctorate in materials science from the University of Virginia in 1971.

Olsen ascribes his success to luck. He was lucky at Fairleigh Dickinson to fall in with a group of students who took academics seriously. He was lucky to attend a small trade show where he encountered Avery Catlin, that particularly persuasive professor of engineering (and later executive vice president of the University) who convinced him to apply to U.Va. to study for a doctorate. And he was especially fortunate to have fallen under the guidance of materials science professor William A. Jesser, who was just starting his career at U.Va. “I was Bill’s first graduate student and I learned a lot from him, both professionally and personally,” Olsen remarks. “Bill’s a very capable guy who doesn’t throw it in your face. I’ve tried to emulate him.”

Engineering and business
While at U.Va., Olsen took what he describes as a “fabulous course” in point defects from Doris Wilsdorf that focused his interest in crystal defects. At U.Va. he studied metallic crystals. From 1972 to 1983, he worked with semiconductor crystals at RCA Laboratories, now known as the Sarnoff Corporation. Olsen conducted fundamental studies of crystal defects and developed numerous innovations in optoelectronics, including the commercialization of indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) photodetectors and lasers.

In 1984, Olsen struck off on his own, starting his first company, EPITAXX Inc., which manufactured fiber optic detectors and emitters. After selling EPITAXX for $12 million, he co-founded Sensors Unlimited Inc. in 1991. Sensors Unlimited is the preeminent developer of indium gallium arsenide technology and manufacturer of optoelectronic devices for fiber optic communications systems, photonic and near-infrared imaging

devices. Its cutting-edge camera technology is employed in a variety of critical military, national security, telecommunications and industrial applications such as covert surveillance, machine vision, night vision, health and safety protocols, and historical art inspection. Olsen sold Sensors Unlimited for $700 million in 2000, bought it back in 2002 for $6 million and sold it again in 2005 for $60 million.

Clearly another component of Olsen’s success — his protestations to the contrary — is that he is a smart fellow and a shrewd businessperson.

A new chapter
Olsen was sitting in a Starbuck’s in Princeton, N.J., reading The New York Times, when he came across an article about Space Adventures, a company founded by Engineering School grad Eric Anderson (see Endnote, p. 20). Space Adventures was sending adventurers who could pay the high price tag to the International Space Station (ISS). “I was thinking about the next chapter in my life,” Olsen recalls. “And I thought this might be it. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s during the Space Race, it was hard not to get excited by the idea of going to the space station.”

Olsen contacted Anderson and decided to sign on. As Olsen points out, having the interest and the time is as important as having the resources, though being able to afford the $20 million fee is a prerequisite. “You have to feel strongly about wanting to go into space,” Olsen says. “You have to be willing to put your life on hold for a good year and a half.”

Olsen completed more than 900 hours of intensive training and physical conditioning

at Star City in Russia in preparation for his mission, but even so he almost didn’t get to go. He developed a minor medical condition that caused the Russians to disqualify him. “It was a terrible disappointment to me,” he says. “I had my heart set on going. At the same time, I knew that it wasn’t a real tragedy, and that helped me keep my perspective.” Olsen was persistent. He kept monitoring his health and was reinstated several months later when the medical condition that had disqualified him — a spot on his lung — disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.

When Olsen finally entered the Soyuz TMA-7 spacecraft on October 1 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, he was so grateful to be back in the program and to be on the verge of this great adventure that he felt nothing but joy as the 20 million horsepower rocket engines propelled him into orbit. “The Russians do space so well,” he says, “that I didn’t feel worried.”

While aboard the ISS, he participated in a research program prepared by the European Space Agency that studied the human body’s response to the microgravity environment. The experiments were designed to study the possible cause of nausea and lower back pain; and the evolution of human bacterial flora. But while aloft, he had plenty of time for contemplation — and to reflect again on his good fortune. “Every day when I woke up, I looked out the window and appreciated just how lucky I was to be there.”

Although Olsen makes a point of saying “It’s not what you do, but who you are,” his own experience shows that with a little bit of luck and some persistence, “who you are” can determine “what you do.”