Cape Town - We always ask the question, what is out there? Nasa’s astronaut Nicole Stott is here to explain that.
Stott is not only an astronaut, but also an artist, an author, an aquanaut, and a mother.
In line with her Space Tour 2023, Stott has been visiting schools across the country and this week she was left mesmerised by the beauty of Cape Town.
Having done two missions to space, the first time in 2009 for three months and her second mission which lasted two weeks, Stott has always admired South Africa from thousands of miles above ground level.
She is now experiencing it on the ground for the first time.
She has spent 104 days in space.
Speaking to pupils at Parklands College Prep School on Wednesday evening, Stott said places on this planet stand out from space and South Africa is one of those which distinctly stands out.
Children in the crowd, many of whom kept to the space theme and dressed like astronauts, sat wide-eyed as Stott explained her time in space.
Stott explained that she was part of Nasa’s 18th class of astronauts to graduate. They were 17 graduates.
But this achievement did not come easy for Stott.
She came from a family that exposed her to different things – her mother was a creative and her father built and flew small aircraft.
This sparked her curiosity.
“I went off and studied aeronautical engineering and I learnt how to fly aeroplanes.
“And I thought to myself, if you want to know how aeroplanes fly, why would you not want to know how rocket ships fly? ”
She then got a job at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a Nasa engineer.
During her tenure, she worked on the Space Shuttle Programme and up close and personal with spacecraft.
She worked for 10 years on the Space Shuttle Programme and it was here were she saw astronauts and got a better understanding of what they do.
“I always thought that was something for special people. Like why would they even pick me? Even later while I was working as an engineer at Nasa I was thinking… ‘What have I done?’”
Stott realised that astronauts spent 80% of their time doing engineering, and reaching out to her mentors, she was encouraged to fill out an application to become an astronaut.
She was interviewed but was not selected. However, she was offered a job at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she trained astronauts.
Two years later she reapplied and was selected in the year 2000.
In her graduating class, not everyone reached the selection process the same way, as they studied various fields such as oceanography, medicine and geophysics.
“On top of that, which I think is important, we had artists, musicians, really wonderful chefs, professional waterskiers, race car drivers, house builders. All of these things when mixed together make a really wonderful crew to fly to space,” Stott said.
However, they do have a few years before they set out on a mission to space to the International Space Station.
“It’s a lot like going back to school. We learn all about the systems, how space ships we’re going to fly on are going to work, all the science we’re going to do in space and other languages,” Stott said.
She described their training of working on the robotic arm to playing Xbox or PlayStation.
But, the most important thing was learning how to work as a team, learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
“The best place to do this was in the water. An aquanaut. Your body is saturated with nitrogen so you have been down under long enough.
“You can’t just swim to the surface and in that habitat (the size of a school bus), we have to learn how to work as a crew 60 feet under water,” she explained.
Stott described her first flight as amazing.
The expectations and reality vastly differed.
“You’re shaking like jello from inside. You are travelling super fast, hoping you’re travelling in the right direction. For about the first minute and a half, you can just monitor and the human reaction to all that energy is seven million pounds of exploding rocket stuff underneath you.
“It is so cool, from being peaceful quiet on the launch pad to those entrance lighting and in eight and a half minutes you are orbiting the planet and travelling at 28 000km per hour,” Stott said.
She said describing her time in space cannot be put into words.
“Everything is still in space, but we’re everything but still. We’re travelling at about 28 000km per hour around the planet, which means we orbit the Earth every 90 minutes 16 times a day,” she said.
At the International Space Station, which has been flying around for over 20 years, with crew members on one crew representing 15 different countries, five international space agencies all work peacefully trying to improve life on earth.
“The best way of living off the grid – a space station,” Stott joked.
Her routine every morning was floating to the computer, checking carbon dioxide in her atmosphere, amount of clean drinking water and the health and well-being of all crew mates.
Stott and her crew also conducted research in space.
“Every day on board the space station there are over 200 active research investigations going on that pretty much cross every area of science you can imagine,” she explained.
During free time, astronauts take pictures and just absorb looking at Earth from space.
She took many photographs of Florida, her home, as well as South Africa and other places.
“From space, South Africa has these really beautiful creams, pinks, browns, tans just gorgeous colours and patterns and the shape is very distinct. So every time we fly over South Africa we know we are flying over South Africa. We did not have to check the computer to see where we were,” Stott said.
She even took up mice in the space station and took them back home upon return.
“I spent six and a half hours out on a spacewalk helping build and repair the space station.
“I also got to not only crawl around but ride on the robotic arm. I never felt like I was moving. I got to fly the robotic arm.
“We exercised two hours a day to counteract that bone and muscle loss that happens really aggressively up there. I actually came back in better shape because really, who has two hours a day to exercise, right?” she joked.
Stott also explained that as a woman there was never a good hair day.
While crew members were extremely busy, they also had fun and joked around, enjoying their gravity-free space. They even celebrated Halloween.
“I took up a watercolour kit with me and painted while I was in space. As you can imagine, floating balls of water while you paint.
“Since the very first time, people have been bringing their humanity to space with them, like coloured pencils or writing poetry or playing music. My friend quilted. Another friend weaved baskets while in space,” Stott said.
Her words of encouragement were: “We are all earthlings. The only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere that blankets and protects us all. And I truly believe if that we decide to accept our roles as crew mates and not passengers here on spaceship Earth, we have the power to create a future for all life on Earth. That is as beautiful as it looks from space”.
Organiser Steve Sherman, from Living Maths, said the Space Tour 2023 will continue in Cape Town until Thursday evening at Protea Heights Academy.
Living Maths is an organisation that runs classes at about 20 to 30 schools across Cape Town, where maths is made exciting for pre-Grade R to Grade 7. The organisation also does online classes which are run weekly and attended by children from around the world.
robin.francke@inl.co.za
IOL