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CORVALLIS - A small-town boy from rural Oregon is about to get a very big view of Earth.

Donald Pettit, who grew up outside Silverton, Ore., and graduated from Oregon State University in chemical engineering in 1973, will head a long way from his home state when he blasts off on the space shuttle Endeavor from the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, Nov. 11.

And he won't be coming back to Earth anytime soon. Pettit, who NASA selected in 1995, will spend four months working at the International Space Station, Alpha, before returning to Earth next March.

Initially a backup member of the expedition-6 crew, Pettit was tapped for the trip when crew member Don Thomas was medically disqualified. Pettit will serve as the flight engineer and science officer for the three-man crew.

"We're very proud of Don," said Goran Jovanovic, a professor of chemical engineering at OSU, and one of Pettit's mentors. "This is a remarkable accomplishment for him, and it's wonderful for students here at OSU to witness his success as an engineer in space."

Before joining NASA, Pettit worked as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Projects included reduced gravity fluid flow and materials processing experiments on board the NASA KC-135 airplane, atmospheric spectroscopy measurements on noctolucent clouds seeded from sounding rocket payloads, and volcano fumarole gas sampling on active volcanoes.

Pettit was also a member of the Synthesis Group, which worked on assembling the technology to return to the moon and explore Mars (1990), and the Space Station Freedom Redesign Team (1993).

For more information about the shuttle launch, go to: http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/schedule/schedule.htm