The Joy and Opportunity of Living in Space

Q: What does it feel like to be launched into space?

It’s noisy. There’s so much shaking. But what you really feel is pressure. With the weight of the solid rocket fuel plus all the hydrogen and oxygen, you move slowly off the pad. Relatively slowly, I mean—you’re going a hundred miles an hour when you clear the tower, but then you keep going faster and faster.

You’re strapped tight in your seat. The suit techs will actually put a foot on your shoulder to get leverage for hauling on the straps. You’re glad of it when everything is vibrating. The numbers on the screens are really big because you wouldn’t be able to read them otherwise. The headsets are turned up loud so you can hear communications. Out the window, you see the clouds getting smaller and the blue sky turning to black.

There’s this huge bang as the solid rocket boosters separate. Then it’s smooth—no more shaking—but you’re still accelerating. G-force builds until it feels like there’s a gorilla sitting on you. You just try to keep breathing even though you kind of wonder, “If I let this breath out, will I be able to get another one in?”

Finally, there’s a moment when everything’s different. Even strapped in you can tell there’s no gravity. Looking out, you see that you are in a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. It’s just unbelievable.

Being able to fly everywhere is awesome. You just give yourself a little push and fly like Superman or sideways or upside down or twirling. Flying means you can’t forget that being in space is a whole new way of life and that we’re still discovering what we can do up there.

Q: Flying everywhere sounds extraordinary. And so foreign. Yet, you’ve described space as feeling like home. What did you mean?

Before my first mission I thought going to space meant I’d be somewhere else. But when I got there, I just felt like home was bigger than we thought.

From the cupola of the International Space Station (ISS), I’d watch Earth, trying to spot places that I love and discover new places. Every time, I’d see different light, a different continent, a different season.

Seeing the whole planet and realizing that we all live there, I came to feel connected to everything that happened there, because it’s our home and belongs to all of us. I’m not sure who first described our planet as Spaceship Earth, but it seemed natural to think that way while looking at it from orbit.

I believe we belong up there, too. There’s a joy to living in space. I’m somebody who goes to bed late; it kind of gives me my time alone. So after we turn the lights down, I’d just fly slowly through the station. Astronauts do so much in small capsules, both with training and getting to orbit, that when we arrive, the space station feels huge. It’s the length of 10 train cars. At that time of night there wasn’t anything I was supposed to be doing. That was my time to just love being there.

With each of my three missions, I had such a strong sense that what we were doing mattered. Recently somebody said to me, “I really don’t see any use in going to space and I don’t support it.” From my perspective, there’s so much we have to do here on Earth, but so much of what we learn up there is applicable to life down here, too. I think space missions are imperative for both.

Q: Would you give an example?

There are so many examples. Here’s just one small one: If you look closely at water in a glass, where the liquid touches the edge, it seems to be climbing up. Surface tension creates that meniscus. While I was on the space station, we did an experiment for a wonderful scientist who asked us to fill different-shaped containers with liquid. It was a simple experiment aimed at refining our understanding of how fluids behave by seeing what’s different when gravity isn’t in the picture.

We did the experiment. Then a few weeks later, we were asked to do it again. We wondered if we had somehow screwed it up. Through a video link the scientist watched us fill a vessel—you can’t pour a liquid in space, so it’s not entirely straightforward. Then he had us shake the vessel. Then shake it harder. Then he said, “Great. Thanks.” And that was it.

Later, I learned that the first results were so astonishing, so different than what was expected, that all these different scientists from around the world flew in to watch the experiment with their own eyes. Rather than waiting for a paper to be published, he wanted everyone in the field to see and be convinced and start the process of, “If this is possible, then this is possible, and this is possible.”

That new knowledge is applicable in space. Being able to turn water into oxygen for breathing is key to extended space trips—things like establishing a base on the moon, which is next on NASA’s list, or going to Mars. Understanding how liquids and bubbles behave without gravity is foundational for that.

And on Earth, surface tension plays into COVID tests and every other health test where a little drop of liquid moves through a test strip. It’s relevant to understanding rates of erosion or how to clean up soil contaminated with oil. With all of those, there’s a fudge factor—an approximation—built into the results, in part because our understanding of how fluids act is imperfect. If we can move our knowledge forward by doing such a simple experiment in space, wow.

Q: The fact that shaking liquid in a container expands our understanding makes clear how new all of this is. To highlight that in a different way, I want to check some dates with you. When you were born, no human had gone to space.

That’s correct, though I was only a few months old when Yuri Gagarin went to space in 1961.

Q: When you did your first Space Shuttle mission in 1995, the International Space Station didn’t exist.

Right. In fact, that mission was focused on doing experiments in many disciplines to figure out what was required to do science in space. That helped others design the ISS so that astronauts could do scientific work effectively.

Q: Construction of the ISS began in 1998. It was inhabited starting in 2000. It continued to be expanded and was just being completed when you lived on the space station for about six months in 2011. Today, the ISS is on the edge of being retired. The history of people going into space, thus far, fits within your lifetime. You’ve been part of it.

I’m really proud to be one of the individuals involved. Of course, everything I did in my career at NASA involved teams. And it’s new enough that we can really see how everything we’ve accomplished is the result of all these interlinked teams—from the teams of astronauts to mission control teams in different countries to behind-the-scenes teams doing work to solve problems or design or make parts. Each team has contributed to moving our capabilities forward.

Later, after my missions, I served as a NASA liaison to the SpaceX team. First, they were delivering supplies to the space station. Then their ships became the way we transport astronauts. There’s this iteration as our space capabilities develop.

And it’s just beginning. Life up there is still a science experiment. I can’t wait until we are bringing kids into space. What are they going to figure out? My husband, Josh Simpson, is a legendary glass artist. What would his work, or other kinds of art, look like if it were created without gravity?

Q: Who gets to go to space is an issue you explore in your book. NASA has selected 360 astronaut candidates in its history; 61 have been women.

When I started at NASA, it was towards the end of NASA’s early silent, stoic Mercury 7 model—“We don’t tell stories or talk to the press unless somebody makes us, and even then we don’t like it.” Now, we have a more inclusive understanding of who can be an astronaut and how they can be. And the importance of sharing our journeys. But we still have a long way to go.

I didn’t fit the mold. I’m a woman who talks a lot and defaults to spontaneity, improvisation, and having lots of ideas rather than following a checklist. I came in with a perspective that often wasn’t seen or appreciated among astronauts.

I was probably naive about how competitive the process was. I’m someone who just shows up as herself. I had confidence in my abilities and willingness to work hard. I attended very good schools. I studied chemistry at MIT and got my PhD at the University of Massachusetts, which has the best polymer science and engineering program in the world. Even so, there were people who thought I’d been selected into the astronaut program because I was cute and good at telling stories.

Getting past the assumption that there is a mold of who goes to space isn’t easy, and it’s still a work in progress. Luckily for me, there were also lots of people who made an effort to make sure that the skills I brought to the mission were seen.

Q: You’ve made a strong case that, whoever they are, astronauts need to be very clear about their strengths and weaknesses as individuals. It’s important for performance. It’s important for safety.

Absolutely. I had my own assumptions to get over. Initially, I didn’t understand one whole category of astronauts. The pilot astronauts made sense. So did the mission specialists who do the science—I was one of them. But there’s another category of mission specialists, flight engineers. They often had backgrounds as military operators. I thought, how come we have them? They’re not going to fly the vehicle, and they’re not doing the stuff we’re going there to do.

It didn’t take long to realize that getting a mission off the ground and then executing it successfully requires people who are operationally experienced. And that helped me understand the places where I’m weaker. I’m great at suggesting options for getting two more data points from an experiment. I’m great at seeing solutions. At times, that’s invaluable. There are also times when it’s crucial to say, “The plan is set. We’re not making any changes, because if we do, we could really screw everything up.”

I was part of a team that used a robotic arm on the space station to catch a Japanese supply ship. My partner was Paolo Nespoli, an Italian astronaut and very effective operator. We were the perfect team up on the space station. We understood each other. He knew when it was time to stop considering possibilities. He would say, “Let’s do this thing. Let’s start.” And I knew I could trust him.

But we also had to convince the trainers that we were a good team because we were so different. Paolo is loud and demonstrative. That’s not the trainers’ idea of what a robotic operator should be like. But I understood what volume meant from Paolo. It worked for us.

Q: What are you hoping for the future of people in space?

I’m hoping that it continues to catalyze amazing things here on earth. I believe that the more things we discover and the more we learn, the more hope we have of living the kind of lives we want to live.

A quick example, in 2021, the Inspiration4 flight was the first all-civilian crew for an orbital spaceflight. Sian Proctor was the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft. She’s a geosciences professor, artist, and author. Who knows what ripples her trip to space will make.

Q: That was a private spaceflight operated by SpaceX. What’s your take on the growing role of commercial companies in space?

Adding these commercial people into the mix is great because, again, I think more is better. More ways to go to space will mean more people get to go to space.

Governments are good with early development of technologies when we don’t necessarily understand what the application is going to be. But government cannot afford to fail. Failures mean a loss of political support and momentum.

Commercial companies can make more technological progress, not because they’re superior, but because when it comes to testing space hardware, they can push the technology until it fails and often this is a good way to learn from it so that we are ready to put people on those spacecraft sooner. They leapfrog ahead and bring NASA and others with them.

Together, all of these different efforts have things moving forward quickly. It makes this a very exciting time.

Q: When will that translate into an outpost on the moon or a Mars mission?

People from Earth will be on the Moon and Mars faster than we think. How we go about it will say something about us as humans. So, we need to be thinking about what we want to do and what we don’t want to do.

I used to say that I felt like a colonist when I was one of the six humans living in orbit. Now I’d rethink that word. We’re grappling with how to account for history. What actually happened? Who is telling the stories? Who has been left out? How could things have been more equitable? These issues are difficult.

As we prepare to go out into space in new ways, I see some challenging conversations in our future. But if we do that hard work together, I think it’s an opportunity to create a better future for everyone, wherever we call home.