realized dream of space travel
When she was 12 years old, Dr. Anna Fisher told her best friend that she dreamed of someday becoming an astronaut.
"She looked at me like I was crazy," Fisher recently told a Yale audience. "I was careful not to say that to anyone out loud again."
Nevertheless, Fisher went on to see her dream fulfilled as a member of the first class of women astronauts at NASA, where she still works today. She joined her fellow inaugural classmate Dr. Rhea Seddon (now retired), current NASA astronaut Janet Kavandi and former cosmonaut Valentina Ponomareva for a panel discussion titled "Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Women Pioneers in Space" on Nov. 12 in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium.
The discussion, sponsored by the Tetelman Fellowship of Jonathan Edwards College, was moderated by Mark Saltzmann, professor of chemical engineering, and Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, lecturer in history and author of "Heaven: The Story of Women in Space." The panel also included Cathy Lewis '80 B.A., '83 M.A., curator of Soviet Space Programs at the National Air and Space Museum, and Slava Gerovitch, a science historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who translated for Ponomareva.
Today "25% of all astronauts are women," noted Kevles, in opening the discussion. "It's no longer a question of whether women are going to be an important part of the astronaut corps."
Growing up in the Soviet Union in the pre-Sputnik days, Ponomareva "never dreamed of becoming an astronaut. It never crossed my mind that this was possible," the cosmonaut told the audience, adding that space flight at that time was regarded as theoretically possible but "useless."
Ponomareva decided on a career in aviation after her first high-altitude experience in her school's Parachute Jumping Club. "I remember how we made the trip to the airfield on the back of a truck with parachutes piled up on the back, and students sitting up on top of that pile and singing wonderful songs, and I just wanted to be part of that community," she recalled.
When Ponomareva later became one of the five women in the cosmonaut program, "it was a total fantasy for me," she said, noting that there were only two male cosmonauts at the time. While she never did get the opportunity to fly in space (her classmate Valentina Terechkova won that honor), Ponomareva has remained with the space program ever since.
Seddon, who described herself as "a product of the post-Sputnik science push," had just received her medical degree in 1978 when she learned that NASA was recruiting women for the space program. The 35 prospects in that first class speculated among themselves that NASA would choose two of them to become the first women astronauts "because one wouldn't be enough," said Seddon. Instead, NASA chose six.
"I think we learned a little bit about NASA's commitment to having women in the program at that point," she said. "In the years that followed, it's become clear that NASA is very committed to having successful women astronauts."
Kavandi's ambition to become an astronaut was sparked ,on the starlit nights when she and her father would talk about what it might be like to live in space. She eventually experienced that reality firsthand aboard the International Space Station, which she described as a "marvel" and a "miracle."
"When you're up there and you look around at the complexity and at how everything has been put together, you just have to think of all the minds and all the time that was spent and all the attention to details that had to be done to make this work," she said.
Although her stay was relatively short -- about 11 days -- Kavandi adapted easily to the weightless environment. "In a couple of days you feel very comfortable working in any orientation. You can eat or sleep upside down, brush your teeth. ... You don't stop to think whether you're upside down or rightside up, you just make yourself fit to whatever task you're doing," she explained.
Their busy schedules leave astronauts very little time to contemplate the Earth from space, Kavandi noted, but some of the environmental damage humans have wrought is apparent from that vantage point -- such as the pollution in the atmosphere and the smoke from slash-burning, which drifts for hundreds of miles out to sea.
"You really wish you could show this to the people back on Earth," she said.
Fisher remembered "being most impressed looking at the Earth and not seeing any of those political boundaries ... and wondering why people behave the way they do. It's such a beautiful planet and there's no reason for the kinds of things that go on."
In the wake of the Challenger and Columbia accidents, some critics have suggested that many of the experiments now being conducted by astronauts could instead be done by automated systems -- a concept that was viewed with some skepticism by the astronauts.
Ponomareva pointed out that automated systems can only resolve problems that they've been programmed to deal with in advance. "They cannot resolve problems that occur for the first time," she said. "They cannot attain creativity. They can only accomplish a task through a human being."
Because of the particularly restrictive nature of the laboratory environment in space, said Kavandi, "It's absurd to think you could do research in space with automated systems any more than you could do it here on Earth."
While acknowledging that public enthusiasm for space exploration has waned since the days of the first lunar landings, the astronauts firmly believe that NASA and similar programs worldwide could and should be revitalized.
"We have to set exciting goals, fund those goals and create excitement in the public for those goals," said Seddon, suggesting that one worthy objective would be to build a lunar station as the first step toward launching a mission to Mars. Unfortunately, she added, "NASA's budget has been declining for years. We can't set big goals because there's no money to get there."
Ponomareva expressed a similar sentiment. "The human mission is to explore the reaches of space," said the cosmonaut. "People should consider themselves not just creatures of Earth, but creatures of the universe, and space exploration nurtures that feeling."
-- By LuAnn Bishop
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