Galaxy Girls Read online

  Jeanne Lee Crews

  AEROSPACE ENGINEER

  USA

  BORN 1940 →

  PROTECTING SPACESHIPS FROM THE DANGERS OF SPACE JUNK

  Jeanne Lee Crews has always been interested in how things work and she loves solving puzzles. When she saw Sputnik orbiting the Earth in 1957, she knew she had to be a part of this exciting new venture and joined NASA as one of their first female engineers.

  One day, a scientist named Burt Cour-Palais asked her to build a hypervelocity launcher, a special “gun,” to see how different materials could handle being hit by objects at very high speeds. Jeanne built the launcher and was fascinated when she saw what happened to the materials when they were hit. She and Burt worked together for the next twenty years to try and solve the problem of how to deal with debris in space.

  Things in space move very fast. The International Space Station orbits the Earth once every ninety minutes, traveling at 17,500 mph, about ten times faster than a bullet from a gun. If even a very small object were to collide with it, the damage could be huge.

  Since the launch of Sputnik, over seven thousand five hundred satellites have been put into space. More than four thousand are still in orbit, though only about one thousand two hundred still work. Space is vast, and the probability of any of them meeting accidentally is low; but there are millions of other objects in space too. In the early days, people didn’t worry about pieces of debris—used rocket bits and satellite springs—being left, but these small man-made objects can orbit the Earth for hundreds or thousands of years and now litter space.

  Jeanne and Burt designed a new debris shield, called a Stuffed Whipple Shield. This is used on the ISS to protect spacecraft from anything measuring 1 centimeter or smaller. Engineers track everything in space bigger than about 4 inches, so the ISS or satellites can move out of their way. But between 1 centimeter and 4 inches? As Jeanne said, “You just have to hope and pray, and I don’t much like that!” If the ISS were hit by one of these particles, it would make a hole. The air inside would likely take many hours to leak out, so the crew would have time to fix the damage or get in their spacecraft and come home, but it is something to be avoided.

  As space gets busier and more crowded, the risks from debris will be ever greater. Jeanne’s proposed giant 6.2-mile balloon to “absorb” lots of small pieces was never made, but twenty years later, the need for such devices is getting more urgent. Her early recognition of the issue has made scientists work even harder to find a solution.

  “I never did know what the words ‘You can’t do it’ meant in my whole life.”

  Kalpana Chawla & Laurel Clark

  AEROSPACE ENGINEER

  ASTRONAUT

  INDIA

  USA

  1962 → 2003

  DOCTOR

  ASTRONAUT

  USA

  1961 → 2003

  THE COLUMBIA ACCIDENT

  Kalpana Chawla grew up in India. She used to watch the planes at a local flying club, and hoped one day to become an aerospace engineer. She followed her dreams to the United States, where she got a job at NASA researching the behavior of airflow on aircraft. Laurel Clark was a Navy doctor. She had been trained for all sorts of challenging environments, carrying out medical evacuations from submarines, and working with aircraft as a flight surgeon.

  Laurel and Kalpana were both selected by NASA as astronauts and were members of the crew of STS-107 on board the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was Laurel’s first flight to space and Kalpana’s second.

  Columbia lifted off on January 16, 2003. Just eighty-two seconds after launch a piece of foam insulation separated from the external fuel tank and hit the wing. Teams on the ground spotted this, but similar events had happened before, so the program managers believed the damage was minor and would not cause Columbia any problems, and reassured the crew that all was in order.

  Kalpana, Laurel and their five crewmates, Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, William McCool, Ilan Ramon and David Brown, had a really busy mission. They spent sixteen days in orbit, working in shifts to carry out experiments twenty-four hours a day. Among them, Laurel observed roses bloom and silkworms hatch. Kalpana helped fix an experiment looking at how water mist might stop a fire in microgravity.

  On February 1, Columbia fired its main engines and headed home after a successful mission. As the Shuttle reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, hot gases rushed into a hole in the wing where the foam had hit on launch. Mission control started seeing some strange readings in their data, and then lost communication with the Shuttle. A few minutes later they heard reports of multiple streaks of light over Texas, where Columbia should have been flying through the atmosphere. Columbia had been torn apart by the hot gases rushing into the wing, ultimately causing a catastrophic loss of control and the disintegration of the vehicle, killing all the crew.

  Once more NASA and the space community had to confront the dangers of spaceflight. All of the Shuttles were grounded while the accident was investigated. NASA decided to retire the Space Shuttle once it had finished building the International Space Station and then focus on developing safer spacecraft. Laurel, Kalpana and the crew’s mission ended in tragedy, but it was not in vain. Their experiments led to advancements in many areas of science, including helping to improve cancer drugs, and their research will live on, keeping their memory alive.

  “When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” KALPANA CHAWLA

  “There was a moth [in one of the silkworm cocoons] . . . just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places and life is a magical thing.” LAUREL CLARK

  Nicole Buckley

  SCIENTIST

  CANADA

  BORN 1960 →

  SPACE RESEARCH FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL MANKIND IN SPACE AND HERE ON EARTH

  Nicole Buckley has always been curious about the world around her. When she was young she thought all sorts of jobs might be fun, from actor to firefighter, spy to nurse. One day she read H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, about Martians coming to take over the Earth. They are defeated when they finally venture out of their spaceships and their immune systems cannot handle our bacteria. This inspired Nicole to learn more about biology.

  She studied microbiology and, as she was completing a research post, started looking for jobs. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) wanted to hire a scientist. Nicole liked the sound of the job but thought, “I don’t know anything about space.” When a friend said that probably not many people did, and that nobody knew if there was life on Mars, Nicole decided to apply. She was thrilled to be accepted.

  Nicole is now the Chief Scientist for all life sciences at CSA, responsible for planning the future of life sciences research, deciding what should be studied and how. She hopes that one day, as engineers invent new technologies to give the world cheaper and more reliable access to space, all scientists will look at space as just another place where research can be done.

  Nicole’s first mission as a program scientist was Space Shuttle Columbia’s STS-107, which turned out to be Columbia’s last. A hole in the heat shield let hot gases into the craft during reentry, causing the Shuttle to disintegrate, and her crew all perished. Nicole found herself asking if the science being done was worth the dangers of space travel. She believes that no one’s life should be lost in the pursuit of knowledge so she resolved to make sure that only the very best experiments in space would make it to space, in honor of the risks taken by the crew.

  Canadian experiments have made many great contributions to science, including in the field of medicine. CSA put devices inside astronauts’ spacesuits to monitor how much radiation they were exposed to. This technology is now being used to determine how much radiotherapy cancer patients should receive, and to make sure it is directed to exactly the right place, thus improving treatments and limiting side effects. The technology developed for Canadarm, the amazing robotic arm
built for the Space Shuttle and the ISS, is now used in the robotics with which surgeons operate on brain tumors. Nicole makes sure that the research Canada does in space helps humanity here on Earth.

  “The world is so much vaster than you can imagine. Keep your eyes peeled, your options open.”

  Berti Brigitte Meisinger

  ENGINEER

  MISSION DIRECTOR

  GERMANY

  BORN 1958 →

  READY FOR ANYTHING, IN CHARGE OF THE MISSION

  When Berti Meisinger was a young girl, she dreamed of working on a ship and sailing the high seas. As women weren’t allowed to be captains at that time she wanted to be a communications officer and work closely with the captain to sail the ship, so that she could be at the center of all the action.

  Near her home in the countryside outside Munich, Germany, was a big campus with lots of buildings. As she grew older, she found out that this was a space institute, and decided that working with spaceships would be much more interesting than working with sailing ships. Her determination earned her a placement at the German Aerospace Center, called the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, when she was still at school and she has continued working at the campus ever since.

  Berti started out working with the ground segment, which is all the equipment that allows mission control centers to manage satellites and receive the data collected by them. Within a few years Berti’s expertise meant she was in charge of it all—antennae, radios, computers—and her bosses sent her all over the world to train other engineers how to use the equipment.

  Next, she started learning how to fly spacecraft, so she could work on the experiments that went on some Shuttle missions. In 2000, Berti was in charge of the German part of an international experiment that flew on the Space Shuttle and produced the first ever global 3-D radar map of the Earth. She made sure the mission was planned very carefully, down to the minute. At one point, as the Shuttle was about to fly over Germany, disaster struck and the recorders stopped, but thanks to Berti’s advance planning, mission control knew that switching them off and on again would make them work. The mission continued successfully.

  Berti is very knowledgeable and a fantastic planner and go-getter. She was the perfect choice as one of Europe’s first mission directors, in charge of operating the European part of the International Space Station, the scientific laboratory called Columbus. The mission directors have to keep all the different teams who control Columbus working together, to make sure that as much as possible of the planned mission happens. Berti thinks being a mission director is like watching a thriller movie—you never quite know what will happen. You must prepare for the worst but expect the best. She always makes sure that her teams do all they can to keep Columbus flying efficiently and deliver the best every time.

  “When you like to do something, never give up. Don’t be discouraged by anyone.”

  Samantha Cristoforetti

  FIGHTER PILOT

  ENGINEER

  ASTRONAUT

  ITALY

  BORN 1977 →

  HOW LONG CAN YOU SPEND IN SPACE?

  Samantha Cristoforetti was prepared in astronaut training for all the eventualities that space travel can bring. So when a cargo craft had a problem delivering supplies and she was asked to stay in space longer, she didn’t bat an eyelid and got to work. In the process she became a record-breaker.

  Samantha always knew she wanted to go into space. She grew up in a tiny village in the Italian mountains, and remembers how seeing bright, twinkling stars in the night sky helped spark her interest in the cosmos. However, the European Space Agency (ESA) doesn’t recruit astronauts very often. She decided to follow her other goal of flying, and joined the Italian Air Force, going on to be a trailblazer as one of Italy’s first female fighter pilots. She had just completed her training when ESA spotted her talent and recruited her as an astronaut.

  Samantha was launched into space in November 2014, along with crewmates Anton Shkaplerov and Terry Virts. Each group of people working on the International Space Station is called an Expedition and is given a mission number, and Samantha’s crew was called Expedition 42. The number forty-two is famously declared to be the answer to “the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything” in Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which also says that a towel is the most useful thing for an interstellar hitchhiker. Samantha and her crew paid homage to the book throughout their mission, and celebrated Towel Day on May 25.

  Their five-month mission on the ISS went according to plan, with the crew helping to run hundreds of science experiments and even installing a coffee machine. They were just days away from heading home, and were making final preparations for a return to Earth when there was a problem. A cargo ship which was bringing supplies hadn’t made it into space as planned. Mission control did not want to launch the next crew until they understood what the problem was so Samantha and her crewmates were asked to stay longer. This meant that she spent 199 days and 16 hours in space, the longest flight by any European astronaut.

  It takes about a year for a human being to recover from being in space for six months. On her return, Samantha said her legs felt as heavy as tree trunks. Her long stay in space meant that not only could important experiments continue while she was there, but she could also help scientists understand how being in space affects the human body.

  “When you discover new things every minute your mind is absorbing so many experiences, it feels like time expands.”

  Noriko Shiraishi

  ENGINEER

  JAPAN

  BORN 1976 →

  LAUNCHING SUPPLIES TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

  Noriko has been guided through her life by following her dreams and taking on the biggest challenges. As a child she looked up to the sky and wanted to be able to fly, so she went to university in Tokyo and studied aircraft. While there, she learned about how difficult it was to get a rocket to fly, and thought what a brilliant challenge it would be to work on.

  Noriko was determined to follow her rocket dreams so she joined the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Here she saw a launch conductor at work and aspired to being that “because it was a tough job, but worthwhile.” Seven and a half years of intensive training later, she became the first female launch conductor.

  Noriko was in charge of the team responsible for launching the H-IIB rockets. These launch the Japanese cargo vehicles called HTV, carrying vital supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. She and her team managed every launch from a bunker just 1,640 feet away from the launchpad, but 40 feet underground so they are safe if the rocket explodes.

  The ISS supports six crew members, who usually stay for six months each. Everything they need when there—food, clothes, toilet paper, experiments to work on, personal items—must be flown into the ISS in cargo ships, such as HTV. Some water is delivered, but most is recycled on board the station—treated astronauts’ urine, as well as condensate from the air-conditioning units, is turned back into drinking water. When the HTV has delivered its cargo, the crew fill it with their rubbish, dirty clothes, broken equipment and even all the bags of dried human waste. This spacecraft has no heat shield, so it burns up with all its contents on reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere.

  As a launch conductor, Noriko gets to push the button which launches the rocket; she also has to push the emergency stop button if something goes wrong. This is a nerve-racking responsibility and Noriko has to be able to make quick decisions, with complete trust in her team of about 150 people. After the launch she evaluates all the data, looking for any problems and making sure the next flight is even better.

  Noriko hopes one day to build a Japanese rocket that can carry people. She’s currently working on Japan’s next rocket, the H-III, which will be bigger and better, a fantastic home for her drive for excellence. Noriko will keep following her dreams and perhaps one day she’ll be launching humans into space.

  �
��Focus on what you are interested in and I believe you will be able to pursue your dreams.”

  Anousheh Ansari

  ENGINEER

  SPACE TOURIST

  IRAN

  USA

  BORN 1966 →

  FIRING UP YOUNG WOMEN TO FOLLOW THEIR DREAMS

  Anousheh Ansari grew up devouring science fiction novels and Star Trek. When she said she wanted to be an astronaut, no one took her seriously. Her home country, Iran, had no space program or agency, and everyone assumed she would grow out of the dream. Instead, her vision kick-started a space revolution.

  When she was sixteen, her family moved to America to escape the unstable political situation in Iran. She went to university, studied electronics and computer engineering, and met her husband. They set up a company that created a hugely successful product allowing voice communications over the Internet, and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Anousheh had never forgotten her dream to go to space, or her belief that one day Starfleet Academy would exist for real, so she decided to use some of her fortune to fund a prize that might change the way people think about space travel.

  The Ansari X Prize offered $10 million to the first nongovernmental organization to fly the same crewed spacecraft 62 miles into space and back, twice within two weeks. Twenty-six different groups entered the competition, some backed by big companies, others much smaller groups working in their spare time. The prize was won in October 2004 when SpaceShipOne made two flights just five days apart, reaching altitudes of 64 and 69.6 miles. The winning spacecraft was then bought by Virgin Galactic, who wanted to develop the technology and offer private citizens the opportunity to head into space. As soon as tickets went on sale, Anousheh bought hers, her dream of going into space now a future possibility.