Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is grounded, indefinitely. The St. Paul native and 1980 Derham Hall grad was scheduled to take her first trip into space on May 23, as a crew member aboard the shuttle Endeavour. But following the February 1 Columbia disaster, NASA put all its shuttle missions on hold.
Stefanyshyn-Piper was slated for STS-115, a 10-day mission to carry power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The mission specialist had been assigned two space walks to help separate pieces of the payload. “Things are bolted together so that they don’t jiggle apart or fall off or get damaged in the launch,” she explained. “The only way to remove all the launch locks is to have the astronauts go out there and actually physically remove them.”
To prepare for this zero-gravity activity, Stefanyshyn-Piper flew in the infamous “vomit comet” — a high-altitude jet that climbs to 35,000 feet before dropping into a nose dive and generating 20 seconds of weightlessness inside the aircraft. However, “For a six-hour space walk, it’s really impossible to train in 20-second chunks,” she explained. That’s why NASA also uses a neutral buoyancy lab, a 40-foot-deep pool that holds two submerged scale mockups of the space station exterior.
That facility felt pretty familiar to Stefanyshyn-Piper. A member of the U.S. Navy since 1985, she spent the mid-90s as an Underwater Ship Husbandry Operations Officer. In civilian terms, that means she repaired waterborne ships and conducted underwater salvage efforts. The experience led her to wonder if she should point her career in a new direction.
“I’d see astronauts doing space walks,” she said. “To me, that looked more like diving than flying. I figured, if I could fix ships underwater, I could build a space station in space.”
If Stefanyshyn-Piper gets to test that theory in 2003, she’ll be doing it 20 years after Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. It’s no longer unusual for a shuttle crew to include female astronauts, but women are still very much in the minority. “Before you can get more women into the astronaut office, you have to get more women into science fields like engineering and physics and chemistry,” she said. A “Women of NASA” web site is designed to encourage girls in these subjects—although one wonders if the rose and pink color scheme might generate a counterproductive “Barbie goes to space” vibe.
Stefanyshyn-Piper’s route to celestial exploration began with two mechanical engineering degrees from M.I.T. (she rowed for the crew team there too), and her Navy career. “I never did any of that because I was looking to blaze some new trail,” she said. “It was just something I was interested in, and I found I was good at it.”
Whether she’ll find out if she’s a good astronaut is still up in the air. Before the Columbia disaster, when all systems were go, Stefanyshyn-Piper considered future cosmic travel inevitable. “Right now, we’re really in the infancy of space exploration,” she said. “If you look at human nature and you look back at history, first it was, ‘What’s over the next hill? What’s down the road? What’s across the ocean?’ We’ve pretty much looked at all that. The only natural progression from here is to go out there.”
Stefanyshyn-Piper didn’t feel particularly nervous about undertaking that prospect herself—after all, the Challenger tragedy was 16 years in the past. “We’ve launched more than 100 shuttle flights,” she said. “There is the danger of strapping yourself into a rocket and going up into space, but being here at NASA, and seeing the controls that NASA has, and how meticulous they are about every detail, you know that safety is a major concern. That’s very evident in the way things work around here. That helps to alleviate some of the fears.” —Scott A. Briggs
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