Thirty-four years before Victor Glover took a trip around the moon, he made another important journey: Crossing the graduation stage as a member of the Ontario High School Class of 1994.
On Friday, two months after circling the moon as the second in command and pilot of NASA’s Artemis II mission, he touched down at Ontario High once more, speaking to hundreds of community members.
Glover, in a loose and casual tone, remembered transferring to the school halfway through his freshman year and praised educators who guided him.
“If I was the president, well, if I was the governor, I would triple all of your salaries. The most noble thing you can do,” Glover said.
He recalled his education journey and math.
“That resume and that journey was not a straight line. It was mistakes and failures and challenges along the line,” he said.
“Math spoke to me. Numbers have always spoken to me,” Glover told the audience.
Glover was introduced by Robin Akeda, his Advanced Placement biology teacher
Akeda recalled receiving what she thought was a spam call with a Houston area code:
“‘Hello, Ms. Akeda, this is Victor Glover on the International Space Station,’” the voice on the other end said.
“Victor and his crewmates brought all of us into the Orion capsule,” she recalled. “Our spaceship is as fragile as theirs and we are deeply indebted to each other.”
Glover remembered pole-vaulting in high school.
“The first time I left the ground in flight was about a quarter of a mile that way,” he said. “I could have been in orbit, that 12 feet. That changed my life.”
Glover, 50, grew up in Pomona but attended Ontario High, where he was a varsity football player and a champion wrestler.
He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on a wrestling scholarsip and met his wife in college.
Glover recalled the Marines, Navy and Army all tried to recruit him to play football or wrestling for them after high school. He turned them down, based on a scene in the 1991 movie Boyz n the Hood in which a father tells his son Black people shouldn’t join the military.
But in college, his relationship changed based on knowing an actual service member there and joined the Navy.
“Young people who want to serve their country is super-inspiring to me,” Glover said.
“Combat sucks. But it’s unfortunately necessary. But we need to be better and avoid it if we can,” he said.
For Glover, one of the first four people to visit the moon in almost 54 years, the dream of going to space started early — along with dreams of being a stuntman, a police officer like his father or president.
When he joined the astronaut program in 2013, Glover’s goal was to crew the International Space Station. he ended up doing that twice, totaling more than six months in space, and performed four spacewalks.
Glover, a Navy Commander who flew missions off an aircraft carrier during the Iraq war, doesn’t shy away from danger. Seventeen NASA astronauts have died during training or while on missions. But as a married father of four, he has a lot to return home to.
The Artemis II crew only orbited the moon, including becoming the first humans to observe the far side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth. Humans actually stepping out onto the surface of the moon is planned for a future Artemis mission. Glover hopes to be one of the lucky few to set foot there.
Glover was also the first Black man to go to the moon. He both recognizes its importance but has expressed the hope that it would one day no longer be notable.
More about astronaut Victor Glover
- Astronaut candidate from Pomona hopes to someday man space station
- Pomona resident chosen as astronaut for historic NASA missions on spacecraft by SpaceX and Boeing
- Pomona-born astronaut answers students’ questions from orbiting space station
- NASA Capt. Victor Glover returns to Ontario High to share his journey
- From Pomona to the moon: NASA astronaut Victor Glover pilots Artemis II
- Victor Glover’s aunts share stories about Artemis II astronaut’s Pomona boyhood