When the Orion capsule splashed down after the Artemis II mission and the recovery team opened the hatch to bring the four astronauts out, one of the Navy corpsmen on the medical team was a Chelsea High School graduate, class of 2007. The City Council recognized Chief Hospital Corpsman Vlad Link on April 27.
Who he is
Link enlisted in the Navy after Chelsea High and became a hospital corpsman, the Navy’s enlisted medical specialty. The council’s citation describes more than 18 years in dive medicine and an assignment to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 1, the Navy’s West Coast bomb disposal command, whose divers and corpsmen are the ones trained to work in the water around a spacecraft. For Artemis II he was part of the medical team responsible for the crew from the moment the capsule was secured to the recovery ship, and, as the citation puts it, for “assisting them out of the capsule safely.”
Artemis II was the first crewed flight around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The four astronauts spent about ten days in space, and after ten days in a capsule the first minutes back in gravity are a medical event, which is why the Navy puts corpsmen in the water. The people who open the hatch are the first faces the crew sees.
Chelsea’s part
Chelsea High sends most of its graduates to work or to community college, and a good number to the military. Link’s path, from the Red Devils to a Navy specialty so narrow that a few dozen people in the country do it, to a place in a photograph that will be in history books, is the kind of story the city tells about itself when it can. The council’s resolution was read at the April 27 meeting and adopted without discussion, which is how the council handles its celebratory resolutions and which is not the same as nobody noticing.
If you went to Chelsea High with him, or taught him, write to [email protected].