Galaxy Girls Read online

  She was fascinated by how she felt in space, though her training had led her to expect this. What surprised her the most was how her body felt when she returned to Earth. She said that despite knowing about gravity on Earth, she was not aware of it until she came back from space and could feel the heaviness of her body and noticed how everything was drawn to the ground. She learned not to take for granted the little things that we barely notice in our lives and which have always been there.

  Chiaki returned to space in 1998 on board STS-95, making her the first Japanese person to go to space twice. She was training for a third mission when the Columbia accident happened, and decided it was time to step down as an astronaut and look at other research.

  Since then, Chiaki has combined her two passions of medicine and space, managing JAXA’s Biomedical Research Office and leading many experiments that have continued to fly to space. Her out-of-this-world medical research continues to help those on Earth, like her brother, who are suffering.

  “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

  Claudie Haigneré

  DOCTOR

  ASTRONAUT

  POLITICIAN

  FRANCE

  BORN 1957 →

  GETTING BACK TO EARTH IN AN EMERGENCY

  Claudie Haigneré enjoyed school when she was a child, working hard and learning as much as she could. She was also very athletic and loved running. Claudie had hoped to study sports at university but she had done so well in school, finishing it early, that she was too young to be accepted on the course she had set her sights on. She decided to study medicine at a different institution instead, which had no issues with her young age. She was a very well-respected researcher when she saw that France’s National Center for Space Studies (Centre national d’études spatiales, CNES) were looking for scientists to fly in space.

  Claudie was selected and she developed many experiments for CNES, particularly focusing on how the human body adapts to life in space. When she took some of her experiments to the Mir space station in 1996, along with those of other scientists, she was the first Frenchwoman in space. She made a second voyage in 2001, this time visiting the International Space Station (ISS) to carry out more experiments.

  In between the two missions she gained a qualification that no other woman has ever received: Claudie qualified as a Soyuz Return Commander, meaning she could fly the Soyuz spacecraft home in an emergency.

  The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is a three-person capsule that has been transporting cosmonauts and astronauts to and from space since 1967 and it is considered to be a very reliable workhorse. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, it has been the only way for people to get to and from the ISS. The Soyuz that the crew arrive in stays docked to the ISS throughout their mission, so they always have a way to get home if there is an emergency. Every morning they check over their spacecraft, make sure everything is OK and print out a set of times which tell them at what points during the day they could leave and head back to Earth if they needed to. It is their vital safety net.

  Fortunately, during Claudie’s missions, and indeed so far throughout the history of space stations, no one has had to come home in an emergency, but the reliable spacecraft is always there, just in case.

  Claudie returned to Earth inspired by her visits to space. She went on to have careers in politics, business, science and research. She has even been given the top order of merit in France, the “Legion of Honour.”

  “Dare in your life. Don’t wait to be perfect. Why not you?"

  Patricia Cowings

  PSYCHOLOGIST

  AEROSPACE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGIST

  USA

  BORN 1948 →

  INVESTIGATING SPACE SICKNESS

  Patricia Cowings has spent her career trying to help astronauts feel healthy and ready to achieve great things in space.

  Her parents encouraged her as a child to do something she was passionate about and she decided to study psychology. When she was at university, the engineering department had a course about how to design the equipment astronauts would use on the Space Shuttle. Patricia didn’t have the right qualifications, but she wanted to take the course. Seeing that it was full of men, she told the professor in charge, “You have to let me in! You need a woman in the class.” It turned out that this would shape Patricia’s whole life.

  During the course, she visited NASA and learned about how spaceflight affected astronauts’ bodies. She became interested in how the mind and body interact and how the mind could help solve medical issues, particularly space sickness. Patricia has spent her career developing a technique called Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise, teaching astronauts and other people how to control some of their physiological responses, such as heart rate and blood pressure, helping them to overcome motion sickness.

  We live with the gravitational pull of the Earth acting on us all day. Our bodies are used to working against it, but when a human goes into space and starts floating, all the fluid inside the body begins to even out. The balance system in our ears relies on fluid, and as we float and the fluid inside our ears floats, the brain is unsure how to deal with the changed signals. The result is to feel sick, a bit like seasickness. Fortunately, the body is very adaptable and after a few days the brain figures out what is happening and learns to ignore the signals and you stop feeling sick. The same thing happens in reverse when you come back to Earth, but it can sometimes take even longer for the brain to figure out the signals again.

  Patricia’s work has been essential in trying to understand why some people get more spacesick than others and in finding ways of helping astronauts adapt to the changes their bodies face when they go to and from space. It has also helped lots of people on Earth with balance problems and could be crucial if humans go to Mars where there will be no one to assist them. Patricia’s vital research is helping humans push the boundaries of our bodies and our knowledge of the mind further than ever before.

  PUSHING HUMAN MINDS AND BODIES TO THE LIMIT

  “Doesn’t matter where you are from or what you look like . . . I’ve spent my life studying human potential—and stretching my own.”

  Irene Long

  DOCTOR

  USA

  BORN 1951 →

  NASA’S CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER

  Irene Long’s father loved space travel and his enthusiasm inspired his daughter, who would watch him soar through the skies as he learned to fly airplanes. Irene also loved medicine and dreamed of combining her two passions and setting up a clinic on the Moon one day.

  While at medical school, she read about an aerospace medicine course. It was somewhere in her home state of Ohio, but she didn’t know where. Irene, ever resolute, wrote to numerous addresses, inquiring about the course and how to apply. A few days later she received a phone call. “Apparently you want to go into space medicine,” said a voice. “Someone just dumped fifty letters on my desk, and they’re all from you!"

  The letters worked, as Irene became only the second civilian to study at the aerospace medicine program at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. At the end of the course her unwavering ambition shone through again when she told her supervisor, “If I’m not hired, I’m moving in with you and your wife.” The next day she received a job offer, and has worked with NASA ever since. Irene worked hard and ended up becoming the Chief Medical Officer, responsible for the well-being of everyone at NASA, astronauts and ground crews alike.

  The health of an astronaut is hugely important, just as it is for any other person in their job. But being in space brings an added difficulty—if an astronaut becomes ill while in space it isn’t as simple as popping down to the doctor’s office. Every astronaut in space has a doctor assigned to look after them, and they have regular conferences from space to make sure all is well. Astronauts are also trained to perform some medical procedures too, from tooth extraction to sewing up wounds, but for any major issues they have to come home.

  Coming home from the International Space Station
can be done in a few hours, but the quickest route to Earth means an astronaut might end up in the middle of nowhere fending off bears. The stresses and strains of reentry after months in space can be tiring even for a healthy astronaut, never mind a sick one, so Irene and her team of doctors worked hard to keep astronauts as healthy as possible.

  Irene retired from her post just a few years ago. Throughout her long career, Irene was committed to the well-being of everyone at NASA, keeping them all happy, healthy and achieving more than we ever could have dreamed.

  “To know where you’re going, you must know where you’ve been . . . To succeed and prosper in the present, you must know where you’re headed.”

  Living and Working in Space

  2000 → Now

  On October 31, 2000, Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev launched into space, and two days later arrived at the International Space Station, then just three modules joined together. This was the start of a permanent, unbroken human presence in space that continues to this day. In 2003, China became the third country to put astronauts into space using their own rockets and spacecraft. Humans from all over the world have learned to live and work together in space, performing hundreds of scientific experiments every year.

  Peggy Whitson

  Julie Robinson

  Suni Williams

  Jeanne Lee Crews

  Kalpana Chawla & Laurel Clark

  Nicole Buckley

  Berti Brigitte Meisinger

  Samantha Cristoforetti

  Noriko Shiraishi

  Anousheh Ansari

  Ginger Kerrick

  Elena Serova

  Peggy Whitson

  BIOCHEMIST

  ASTRONAUT

  USA

  BORN 1960 →

  FIRST FEMALE SPACE STATION COMMANDER

  Peggy Whitson is a quietly confident introvert and one of the greatest astronauts in history. Throughout her life people told her it wasn’t sensible to follow her dreams of flying to space—she ended up proving them very wrong.

  Peggy grew up on a farm deep in the American countryside. When she was nine she was inspired by Neil Armstrong and the men who walked on the Moon. But it wasn’t until she saw the first female astronauts that she thought she might give it a go too, so she sold chickens that she reared on the farm, at a local market, to save up the money to pay for flying lessons.

  When she was at university, Peggy shared her dream of flying to space with a famous scientist and he told her that he thought astronauts weren’t important and that it wasn’t a good profession. But she never lost sight of her ambitions, and after years of study and working on experiments that flew on the Space Shuttle, her commitment and enthusiasm shone through and she was selected as an astronaut in 1996.

  Peggy has flown in space three times, each time for approximately six months aboard the International Space Station. The ISS is an amazing feat of engineering, the biggest object ever constructed in space. It has about the same amount of living area for the astronauts as a five-bedroom house, and is roughly the size of a football field. It took twelve years to construct, with each component part brought to the station by rocket or Space Shuttle. These were built all over the world, designed by different engineers, and joined together for the first time in space by a robotic arm. The different “rooms” are called modules, and a huge “spine” runs across it to hold the eight giant solar panels that power the station.

  During her second stay on the ISS, Peggy was in charge, the first woman to be selected for the role of ISS Commander. It was a very busy mission, with three new modules arriving and two solar array panels being moved to a new home. There was a big problem when one of the solar panels got torn during the move, but with Peggy’s superb leadership skills and teamwork, the panel was repaired and the station assembly continued.

  As well as being vital to the building and running of the ISS over the years, Peggy has completed a record ten spacewalks and in 2017 she broke the record for the longest cumulative time spent in space by any American astronaut, woman or man. Peggy is honored by the records, but she is more proud of being part of the brilliant team of people that work to explore and learn about space.

  “In terms of goals for NASA before I die, we need to be living on Mars. And I might not live that long, so they better get on with it!”

  Julie Robinson

  SCIENTIST

  USA

  BORN 1967 →

  MANAGING THE SCIENCE THAT HAPPENS IN SPACE

  Julie Robinson thought she would spend her career working in universities, doing research and teaching students. She never expected to end up working in human spaceflight.

  Julie is NASA’s Chief Scientist for the International Space Station, representing the interests of thousands of scientists from over ninety-five countries worldwide who have experiments there, and working with partners in the other ISS space agencies. She studied chemistry and biology, and used her knowledge to understand what was happening in images of the Earth taken by satellites. This led her to work at NASA, looking at pictures taken by astronauts. Today, she makes sure that scientists can understand what is happening on Earth, by enabling them to do experiments off the Earth.

  The ISS is a truly unique laboratory. Over four hundred experiments are performed there every year, in numerous different scientific areas. Because the station—and everything inside it—is in permanent free fall, neither the astronauts nor the experiments can feel the effects of gravity. By studying how things behave in space, scientists can find out more about how materials react, how things work and what happens to the bodies of humans and other living things, thereby making discoveries that could not be found out any other way. Scientists then apply all this knowledge learned in space to things on Earth.

  The astronauts carry out some of the experiments, but most are operated remotely by teams of scientists and engineers on the ground in mission control centers all around the world. Schoolchildren are also able to suggest experiments to the ISS. One group, for example, suggested the astronauts try putting water next to something charged with static electricity, like a balloon that has been rubbed. On Earth, water will be attracted to the object and many people expected the same thing to happen. Everyone was surprised when the crew tried it, putting some drops of water near a statically charged rope, and the water ended up orbiting the rope.

  Julie thinks this is a really exciting time for science in space. The ISS will stay in orbit until at least 2024 and possibly even later, so there is plenty of time for more research to be done. Scientists are making discoveries that challenge things we thought we understood, and we don’t know what breakthroughs lie around the corner. Without the space station, and Julie making sure all the scientists are able to do their experiments, we would have a much poorer knowledge of things that will improve the lives of everyone here on Earth.

  “It’s up to us, the scientists, to continue to challenge ourselves to share this work with the public in new and dynamic ways.”

  Suni Williams

  TEST PILOT

  ASTRONAUT

  USA

  BORN 1965 →

  FIRST PERSON TO RUN A MARATHON IN SPACE

  Suni Williams was really disappointed when she didn’t get into her first choices for university. When her brother suggested that she go to the Naval Academy instead she wasn’t sure—she was an Indian girl with long hair and didn’t know what to expect. But having decided to give it a go, she discovered that there were plenty of opportunities ahead of her.

  She loved flying helicopters, and became a test pilot. Through her training she found out what astronauts did, and realized it was something she could do as she had the right skills. She was thrilled to be selected as an astronaut in 1998.

  During Suni’s first mission, a six-and-a-half-month stay on the International Space Station in 2006–07, she became the first person ever to run a marathon in space. She wanted to encourage children to make fitness an everyday part of their lives, so wh
en the Boston Marathon was being run on Earth, she ran the equivalent 26.2 miles on the space station’s treadmill. She had trained for the race just as everyone else did, by exercising regularly.

  Even if she hadn’t been running the marathon Suni would have had to do lots of training. When people are in space, free-falling around the Earth and floating, they don’t use their muscles as much or fortify their bones, and so these start to waste away as the body adapts to the new environment. If astronauts were to stay in space forever, this wouldn’t be a problem, but they need to be strong enough to get out of their spacecraft when they land on Earth. Usually there are recovery teams on hand to help, but if they had to come back in an emergency, this might not be the case.

  To minimize the deterioration of bones and muscles, astronauts exercise for two hours every day: one hour of cardio activity and one hour of “weights.” The ISS has a treadmill and a cycling machine, and a multiuse gym that uses resistance devices rather than normal weights. In the weightlessness of space, astronauts strap themselves to the treadmill using a harness that goes over their shoulders and is attached to the base by elastic bungee cords.

  Suni has flown in space twice so far, breaking records and commanding the ISS. She’s now busy helping to develop and learn to fly America’s new spacecraft that will take crews to the ISS in the future.

  “The types of people we look for when we select astronaut candidates [are] those who can challenge and push themselves, but who know when to stop before hurting themselves.”