The Georgia State Spotlight Programs Board kicked off their distinguished speaker series with an out-of-this-world guest: former astronaut Dr. Peggy Whitson.
Whitson holds the NASA record for the most days spent in space at 665 and is also the first female astronaut to be a commander on the International Space Station (ISS) twice.
Before Whitson addressed the crowd in Georgia State’s House Salon, The Signal had the chance to sit down with her and get a closer look at her experience as an astronaut.
When she first launched, it was unlike anything she had felt before, she said.
“I think on my first mission I launched on the shuttle and we get into the vehicle about two and half hours before the launch,” she said.
Whitson’s experience with her first launch was filled with anticipation and excitement.
“It’s steaming and creaking and you can hear things you haven’t ever heard before around. We got to the 254-foot level to get to the vehicle and lay on our backs … waiting for the launch. It’s exciting. You know for me, I wanted to be an astronaut forever, and so it was really exciting to think, ‘Well, I hope we can get off the ground today,’” she said.
Whitson said they had to scrub, or cancel, their first launch due to unfavorable conditions. On the next one, when the countdown reached six seconds and the solid fuel rockets turned on, there was no going back.
She also recounted the scariest moment that she had ever had during her astronaut career.
“I think for me the scariest moment was actually when we tore a solar array and I was the commander on board the international space station at that time and trying to be part of the team that was figuring out how we were going to fix this,” Whitson said. “It was on the end of this football field-sized truss, you know the array 115 feet long partially deployed with the tear two thirds of the way.”
Whitson said it was like their own Apollo 13; they had to improvise and repair the solar array using what they had available on the station.
“If we had failed, if we had not been able to fix it, we would have had to jettison (detach and dispose of) the array,” she said.
After being in space for so long, Whitson said her perspective of humanity has changed.
“I definitely think you have a different perspective going into space. One is [the] perspective on Earth, it being so special. We’re in space trying to build an ecosystem like we have here on Earth naturally … When you go up there it gives you a perspective on how hard it is to [replicate] that and how special it is, our planet is, and we should take care of it. I think there is definitely a perspective of taking care of the planet there,” she said.
While on the station, the team of astronauts participated in a variety of research endeavors.
“We do all kinds of different research on the ISS. We use the lack of gravity as a tool to try better understand different things that are going on. I’m a biochemist but each astronaut does research in all different kinds of fields. So we look at physical things like combustion experiments. We look at engineering technology development and testing because not everything works as well in zero gravity. We do biological research because we want to understand how the human body is responding to being in space so we’re the test subjects for a lot of those investigations,” she said.
She concluded the interview with some advice for young people who are aspiring to do something great.
“Dreams don’t get handed to you on a silver platter so you gotta go work for those. But one piece of advice I want to give to all young people is that the thing I think that made me achieve more than I ever even dreamed of was the fact that I pushed myself. I challenged myself to live a little bit beyond what I was comfortable with. I didn’t just take the easy way. I didn’t just do the things I knew I could do. I challenged myself to do more,” Whitson said.
But if she could go back again, would she?
“Oh, in a heartbeat.”
