I think it's reasonable: you can own your nerd credibility when you're an astronaut.
Kathleen Rubins
I think it's going to be amazing to see how the world of microbiology, molecular and cellular biology, and human physiology is massively changed by microgravity.
You need nerves of steel if climbing aboard a rocket is your career path.
I thought I was prepared for space, and it still absolutely defied every expectation and dream. It is an incredible thing to put yourself on a rocket and launch off the planet. It is an amazing thing to see the planet from space. This blue sphere is almost indescribably beautiful.
For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.
I was the one with a subscription to 'Sky and Telescope' magazine as a kid while my friends were reading 'Tiger Beat.'
If you find something that you're excited about and you're interested in, my advice to young women and young men would be do what you're really interested in and what drives and motivates you.
As an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of California, San Diego, I worked on infectious diseases at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
I think young folks have a good sense of what they want to do.
They say that in space, nobody can hear you scream. The first time I stepped out of the airlock, I was ready to scream - not because I was scared but because I was so excited to see the Earth below me.
Sequencing DNA on the ISS will enable NASA to see what happens to genetic material in space in real time, rather than looking at a snapshot of DNA before launch and another snapshot of DNA after launch and filling in the blanks.
I kind of watch anything on the Syfy channel.
We're pretty interested in microbial communities on-board space stations. It's a closed-loop system. Our water is recycled; our air is recycled.
My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.
When I was in grad school, I wanted to be in academia forever.
When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.
I decided to do graduate studies in virology at Stanford University in California because it had a hospital, which made working on clinical applications easier.
Joining NASA was very exciting, but it was the hardest decision I have had to make in my life.
There's actually an incredible amount of parallels between working in central Congo in a remote, isolated village and doing research aboard the space station.
NASA trains you to assess emergency situations and react in a way to keep yourself and everyone else safe.
Most germs aren't bad. You're in a microbial environment all the time.
We have to engineer devices that are going to work in space stations. Those same things are going to work in the most remote regions on Earth.
I thought that NASA didn't take biologists and so nothing would come of it. But I knew I would regret it if I did not apply.
Folks should find what really inspires them; they should always pursue what they want to do.
Young people can accomplish a lot.
From as young as I can remember, I wanted to be - in order - an astronaut, a geologist, and a biologist.
I've always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.
I'm involved with health care/medical supply delivery to Africa and started a non-profit organization to bring supplies to Congo.
Spaceflight is a tricky business. It is definitely difficult, and I think we forget that sometime.
You absolutely know you're in space when you're doing a spacewalk. That was pretty interesting because you can feel vacuum. It actually changes your vocal cords because the pressure inside the suit drops quite a bit, so your voice feels different.
When you go to vacuum in the airlock and you take the hose off the front of your space suit, there's a little bit of water in there, and you can see that sublimate and ice crystals form and fly away. My thought at that moment was, 'Oh, we are not kidding at vacuum here; we are really in space.'
When we're doing the space walks, we're working very very hard. Every single minute is choreographed. But there's a few minutes here and there where ground is maybe talking about something, and you have to put your tools down and wait. Just getting a chance to look through your visor and see the planet go by was incredible.
When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.
When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.
There's a world of insights to be gained into human health and disease by understanding how gravity and space radiation influence biology.
I don't think you ever really decide that you want to be an astronaut. I put in an application and hoped for the best.
The planet is beautiful.
It changes your perspective to be able to look out the window and see the planet. One of the thoughts that I had when I first got up here was, 'We really do live on a planet, and we are in a solar system, and we are flying through space right now.' I mean, this is something that you know, obviously, but to see the planet - it's amazing.
