- William M. Hendryx –

Family Circle

5/21/02

"It’s a very sensual experience," says Marsha Ivins with a wry smile. Pam Melroy adds, "It’s like being in a magic world where none of the rules apply. You want to spread your arms and fly." Janet Kavandi says, "It’s fascinating to observe the way things move."

These women are all talking about zero gravity. Weightlessness. The experience is space flight, and what its like for a woman to sit atop more than three and a half million pounds of rocket fuel and then be hurled in-to the vast unknown for days at a time.

These women are U.S. astronauts, and among them, they’ve traveled more than 41 million miles through space.

"You can just be," continues Ivins, 50, about the experience of weightlessness. "It’s like swimming without having to come up for air." A veteran of five space flights, with a degree in aerospace engineering, Ivins has been an astronaut since 1984. She’s petite, with sharp features, penetrating hazel eyes, a purposeful spring in her step, and thick, sandy hair. She’s single, she’s sassy, she loves to bake for her friends, she’s something of a maverick, always speaking her mind, and she’s quick to take charge.

"From the age of 10, I wanted to be off the ground," she says, having watched Alan Shepard become the first American in space in 1961. Five years later she took her first flying lesson in suburban Philadelphia, near where she grew up. Less than a year later she soloed, and a year after that she was licensed as a private pilot. Ivins is a mission specialist, a position that involves coordinating shuttle operations, performing space walks, and being responsible for payloads and specific experiment operations.

During her last trip in February 2001, Ivins and her crew delivered and installed a new laboratory module to the ever-expanding international space station, while it orbited 220 miles above Earth at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. "You never get used to the view," she says. "No language can describe the vast sea of stars."

Looking in the other direction, toward Earth, Kavandi, also a mission specialist, paints another picture. "It's like looking from God's eye view," she says. "You don't see those borders or the issues that cause wars. There's a lot of Earth to live on, yet we fight over small pockets."

Tall and trim, with dark hair below her shoulders, Kavandi, 42, seems almost shy, with the demeanor and beauty of a small-town homecoming queen who also happens to be valedictorian of her class. She is the older of two children and was reared near Springfield, Missouri. She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and has been to space three times, always with photos of her son and daughter (whose privacy she guards), ages 11 and 8, and husband John, an airline pilot she met in college. Melroy is the quintessential girl next door—diminutive, soft features, sandy hair, plenty of energy and eyes the color of the sky. She grew up in Rochester, New York, as the middle child between two brothers. She loves to cook and she loves the theater. She's also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, a skilled test pilot and a veteran of the Gulf War, with more than 200 hours of combat and combat support fly time. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and holds a masters degree in earth and planetary sciences from MIT.

Melroy has been to space once, as a shuttle pilot in October 2000, and is scheduled to go again in August. "And I can't wait," she says with childlike enthusiasm. "It's awesome!" Melroy met her husband, Chris Wallace, during flight training at Reese AFB, Texas, and they served together during the Gulf War. They hope to start a family before much longer. "It's getting late," admits Melroy, 40. "For some, having children is their consuming dream. For me, this [space exploration] is my consuming dream. I always wanted children, but I had to do this first."

Like Ivins, Melroy was a child when first struck with the urge to go into space. She was eight years old and in the third grade as she sat glued to the television, watching the first moon landing in 1969. "I wanted to become an astronaut from that moment on," she says, and it never occurred to her that she was a little ahead of her time. Another nine years would pass before NASA named the first female astronaut, and it would be five more years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983.

"My parents gave me an unshakable sense that I could do anything," says Melroy. "Of course, they were pretty flabbergasted when I chose this." But they also gave her balance by teaching—through example—the importance of involving yourself in the lives of others. "The success of the human race depends on our success as a community, not on our technical brilliance. We can all be incredibly smart and still blow each other up."

For Kavandi, the urge to flee gravity came at an even earlier age, around four or five, while growing up in Missouri. She recalls sitting on the back porch at night with her father and watching the lights of satellites sail over-head. "My dad and I would talk about what it must be like to be up there and look back at Earth," says Kavandi.

She'll never forget the awe she felt at her first glimpse of Earth from space. But the news isn't all good. Kavandi worries about the planet, insisting that she can see a distinct difference just in the three-year period between her first mission in 1998 and her third in 2001. "The forested areas of Earth are rapidly decreasing," she says.

Though her parents were killed in a private airplane crash when she was eight, Kavandi credits her father and those evenings on the porch for much of her success.

Like her father, Kavandi encourages her children to think about what they might do that would contribute to the world, not detract from it—whether through space exploration, advances in medicine or helping others one-on-one. "It's never too early to start planting those seeds," she says.

Most shuttle missions require about three weeks away from home, so Kavandi starts preparing the kids months in advance. "All in all, I think the separation is harder on me than on them," she says. From a career standpoint, Kavandi feels she's achieved her ultimate goal. "But my family is still the most important thing in the world to me," she says. She works hard at being a "real mom," preparing meals, helping with homework and allowing the kids to talk about anything. "I want them to know they are more important to me than my job," she says.

Ivins also felt the influence of her parents. Her father was a surgeon and a perfectionist, she recalls. But a demanding father wasn't the most influential thing in Ivins's life. "I wasn't a very social child," she says. "I was a good student but a slow bloomer." While growing up, she often helped friends get ready for dates, then went home to watch Star

Trek. "I watched science fiction become science fact," she says. "That was the greatest influence in my life."

So how did these women become astronauts? It wasn't easy. Each of them applied, then each one reapplied. The odds of being accepted into astronaut training are much better than winning the lottery, but hardly promising. To date, more than 38,200 have submitted applications; 310 have been selected. Of those, only 43 are women, but

"NASA is highly gender-neutral," says Kavandi. "It's such a diverse culture—from gender to race to religion—every-one seems blind to those issues."

But what about risk? All three say they've never felt real fear. Kavandi cried during her first launch, not because she was afraid, but because she was awed by the fact that she was actually doing what she'd dreamed of as a child, sitting on that porch with her father. She was going into space.

Melroy says those first few seconds of liftoff are"... more like being in a train wreck than any- thing I can possibly imagine." But she wouldn't trade the experience. She recalls the launch of October 11,2000: "We took off about 10 minutes after sunset. We went straight back up into the light, so I got to watch the same sunset all over again. Amazing. The colors were incredible."

Just over eight minutes later the main engines shut down and the shuttle was in orbit, surrounded by a black sky, circling a big blue planet. "You see these enormous cloud systems," says Melroy, "and deserts and mountains, and these thundering rivers, clearly gushing for miles into the oceans. It takes your breath away."

Ivins closes her eyes, reliving a similar experience.

"Your own existence becomes insignificant," she says. "It's ego-shattering." Every 45 minutes the Earth is bathed in sunlight, and then it goes dark for another 45 minutes.

During the day the astronauts see land and oceans and clouds, but no signs of people. In darkness, oddly enough, it's just the opposite, as the only thing clearly visible is light—light created by mankind. "You see these enormous cities, lights everywhere, and they're like diamonds sprinkled on velvet," says Melroy.

Once, while flying over such a spot in China, Melroy imagined a woman on the ground, looking toward the heavens at night and waving. "I could see the city where she was because it was lighted by technology," says Melroy, "and she could see me because I was aboard the pinnacle of what human technology has achieved." The sense of connection was overwhelming. "So I waved back."

That connection—that tie between humanity, the Earth and the universe—is the essence of spirituality for Melroy.

"Going to space is absolutely essential to the health of the human race," she says. She's talking about the requirement for cutting-edge research—to build the international space station, to conduct experiments aboard it. "This continuing search for knowledge is essential to the improvement of the human condition," she says.

Kavandi puts it in more practical terms. "The space effort has contributed more to humankind than most will ever realize," she says. She points out the myriad advances attributable to the space program, from medicine, computer sciences, to cancer cell and plant growth research.

Ivins agrees with her colleagues, but she thinks the reason we go to space is more fundamental. "Because we can," she says simply. "It's encoded in our genetic makeup, to go explore. Man saw an ocean, he built a boat. He saw a bird, he built an airplane. He saw a star, he built a space-ship. We want to know what's over the next hill. If we didn't, we wouldn't be sitting here."