Larry Connor, Baja winner and sports car veteran, pilots first private spaceflight

Felix Baumgartner did a BASE jump from the stratosphere down to Earth in 2012, followed by making his racing début two years later in sports cars. Larry Connor can say he did the reverse as he goes up into space after accumulating a history of racing successes, especially in the off-road world.

The 72-year-old Connor is a member of Axiom Space‘s Mission 1, the first private space mission to the International Space Station that launched on Friday and is supported by SpaceX. As part of the mission, Connor and crewmen Michael López-Alegría, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe will spend eight days on the ISS before returning to Earth. Connor serves as the crew’s pilot, meaning he oversees the controls of the Crew Dragon Endeavour.

Private missions and space tourism are topics of major and controversial discourse in the spaceflight community, especially as their passengers are typically wealthy individuals who pay exceptionally high prices to participate; Axiom Mission 1’s passengers paid $55 million each, with all but López-Alegría having no prior experience in space. Connor made much of his fortune founding various businesses such as the Connor Group real estate firm, of which he took sole ownership in 2003 and grew to $3.3 billion in value by 2021.

Save for mission-specific training, the highest Connor had flown prior to Mission 1 was as an aerobatic pilot. On the ground, Connor is more than familiar with getting airbourne when driving a Trophy Truck in desert competition.

The owner of Team C Racing, he dominated the SCORE International World Desert Championship in 2015. Joined by co-drivers Sean Backus and Jason Ruane, Team C won all five races—the San Felipe 250, Baja Sur 400, Baja 500, Imperial Valley 250, and Baja 1000—in the Trophy Truck Spec class to become only the third entry to sweep an entire season in the sanctioning body’s history. Coupled with winning the class in the 2014 Baja 1000 and 2016 Baja 500 (the latter in a limited schedule), Connor scored seven consecutive SCORE victories. His most recent start is the inaugural Baja 400 in 2019, where he shared a Trophy Truck with Ricky Johnson and finished eleventh overall (ninth in class).

He helped develop Mason Motorsports‘ AWD Trophy Trucks, and one of Team C’s Mason TTs placed third overall in last weekend’s San Felipe 250 with Mike Walser and Jax Redline.

Credit: Jake Galstad/LAT Images

Connor’s racing career began in 1982 in open-wheel and sports car series like Formula Ford and the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). In 2000, he won the SCCA Central Division National Formula Atlantic championship followed by the SCCA National Championship Runoffs’ Formula Atlantic events in 2000 and 2001.

In a far-from-uncommon activity for entrepreneurs who enjoy motorsport (an expensive sport to get into), he eventually moved into major American sports car divisions and competed in the Rolex Sports Car Series and American Le Mans Series. He ran the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in 2002 and 2005, though his teams failed to finish either race, as well as the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2004 where his entry crashed out. 2005 also saw him enter two races in what is now Indy Lights, failing to start at Indianapolis and finishing eighth at Watkins Glen.

While much of his driving career since the 2010s has been in off-road, he returned to sports cars in 2020 when he participated in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge‘s Roar Before the 24 at Daytona. He shared a Honda Civic TCR for LA Honda World Racing with Mike LaMarra and Matthew Pombo.

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