Getaway Special (GAS)

The Getaway Special (GAS) Team at Utah State University (USU) was founded in 1976 when NASA introduced a space research opportunity with the Getaway Special program. USU was one of the first groups to get a payload experiment reservation with this program thanks to a donation from R. Gilbert Moore, a former professor. It wasn’t until 1982 that the first payload of USU, and the world, was sent into space on the STS-4 NASA shuttle. Over the years, USU’s GAS Team has worked in collaboration with other schools to send many different experiments into space that explore a variety of subjects ranging from capillary waves to soldering to the effects of microgravity on popcorn. Since its inception, this student-driven team has established and upheld Utah State University's reputation as the university that has flown more experiments into space than any other university in the world.