A Journey to the Final Frontier

On Saturday afternoon, the Missus and I shall make our annual (last year notwithstanding) pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan and we shall do what we have done since the Memorial opened, which is place flags at about a dozen and one-half names.   Included among the names are the ten University of Colorado Buffaloes who were murdered that day. 

Chad Keller (AeroEngr '93) is one of the ten Buffs whose memory we honor.  

Chandler Raymond Keller (AeroEngr '93)

Photo Credit:  Adam Kenny 

I did not know Chad Keller.  Given that I graduated from CU in 1989 and he did likewise in 1993, I suspect that I graduated from CU three or four mto onths before he arrived on campus as a freshman.  By all accounts, he was an extraordinary man, loved with equal aplomb by his parents, his wife Lisa who was widowed far too young, and his friends. His dream from the time he was a little boy was to become an astronaut but, as his dad Dick tells it, "his eyes were kind of bad".  

Upon graduating from CU, Chad Keller began a career at Boeing.  He worked as a propulsion specialist for the United States Department of Defense and National Reconnaissance Office launching communication satellites.  In early September 2001 he had flown from California, where he lived, to Washington, D.C. to give a series of briefings at the Pentagon.  Having wrapped up the business that had brought him cross-country, on Tuesday, September 11, he boarded a flight bound for California and home.  Tragically, the flight he boarded was American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked and then flowing into the Pentagon as a weapon, killing all the innocents aboard - including Chad Keller.  He was just twenty-nine years old. 

Nineteen years after his death, Chad Keller's lifelong dream of going into space came true.  Astronaut Chris Cassidy, a former Navy Seal who became a NASA astronaut in 2004 and who had never met Chad Keller, made his final journey into space in 2020.  Before he went up, he reached out to Chad Keller's parents and asked if he could "take Chad into space" with him.  He took several mementos up with him - and he also took some of Chad Keller's ashes.  

Chandler R. "Chad" Keller 

A remarkable gesture.  An extraordinary story. 

-AK