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Iowa Whitson rivets audience, ...

Reprinted courtesy of the Grinnell Herald-Register, May 4, 2009.

Iowa-born astronaut Peggy Whitson was named a Hero of Valor in the Iowa Transportation Museum’s first class of transportation heroes in a ceremony May 1 in the high school auditorium (see separate story in this issue for a report of the ceremony). A record-holding astronaut and survivor of a rocky re-entry flight, Whitson told the audience of about 400 guests of her second space flight when she commanded the international space station, expanded under her direction. Sprinkling her talk with statistics, Whitson told a tale of can-do practicality laced with her unique blend of charm and gentle humor that had her audience spellbound.

Whitson a trim and stylish 49 began her connection with her listeners by noting she had played field hockey against Grinnell College and run on the college track while a student at Iowa Wesleyan in Mount Pleasant. Talking with slides in the background, she related that she grew up when people still dressed up for Easter, showing a picture of her and her siblings in fine Easter style. She grew up on a farm in southwest Iowa where she said there were more pigs and cattle than people living in the nearest town of 32. She raised cattle in 4H and watched the moon landing at nine with wonder, graduating from high school the year women were first admitted to astronaut training. She determined then she would one day work in space.

Whitson clearly remembers the importance of role models in her life. Once class of high school students attend the ceremony, sitting together, and Whitson naturally gravitated toward them, often speaking directly to the students as he related her story.

As soon as Whitson earned her PhD in biochemistry at Rice University in Houston, home of NASA, she secured employment there and applied for ten years for astronaut status before being accepted. Six years of training and waiting followed before her first space mission in 2002 to the space station.

Four types of vehicles arrive at the station, Whitson told her audience: the American shuttle and the Russian Soyuz which are manned and flown by on-board pilots; Russian progress vehicles which are unmanned but can be flown by pilots on the space station and ferry supplies; and the European automatic transfer vehicles or ATV which is unmanned by space station pilots. Both the shuttle and Soyuz capsules bring and return astronauts to earth, and Whitson happened to ride to her second mission in both directions in a Soyuz.

Showing a slide of camels to the amusement of the audience, Whitson explained that the Russian Baikonur space center is in the vast Russian dessert and that Russian procedures move their space vehicle to the launch position on railroad tracks in two hours while the American shuttle takes six hours to along a system referred to as a “crawler.” She noted that Russian tradition is to place flowers on the grave of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, before a launch. The Soyuz reaches orbit in eight- and-a-half minutes just as Gagarin’s original spacecraft did, but catching up to and docking with the space station takes two days.

Whitson and her fellow astronauts trained for two to four years for their six-month mission in 2007 and 2008, including intensive training in handling emergencies of all kinds in space. The expedition she commanded was Expedition 16, and its crew overlapped with that of Expedition 15, crowding the tight quarters. She was piloted into space by a Russian and at various times commanded Americans and a Frenchman. Noting the Russian was a very serious man, she delighted in showing a picture of a Christmas celebration with him wearing a Santa Hat.

While Whitson commanded the space station, the shuttle and the European unmanned vehicle brought three additions for the space station, each the size of a school bus, and Whitson herself conducted five space walks to help install and secure the new modules. They included a European and a Japanese contribution to the station. With the station traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, it circles the glove every 90 minutes, allowing a space walker to view 15 sunrises in a single circuit.

While the shuttle was docked to deliver a module, one of the solar arrays providing power to the station malfunctioned, failing to deploy fully as needed and trapping the shuttle. Whitson’s farm-grown ingenuity kicked in, and she designed a device which could, when installed, pull the array into place and hold it. A fellow American space-walked out to the critical point on the array and installed the device, moving much farther from the station than had ever been done and succeeding. With that special Whitson twinkle, the astronaut told her listeners that her dad used to say he could fix anything with pliers and Number 2 wire which was her inspiration and essentially all the astronauts did to deploy the array and free the shuttle.

Little snippets of working in space were tucked around Whitson’s story of station expansion like how hard it is to move 400 pounds in space—the object is weightless but bulky—and how hard to exercise on a treadmill when every step in weightlessness pushes your off the machine, making a harness a necessity to achieve the exercise for humans to keep muscle mass and bond density.

Return to earth was a little more exciting than planned for Whitson and her two astronaut collages in a Soyuz she described as containing three space-suited individuals in a volume identical to the front seat of VW bug with one of them piloting. One of five bolts designed to blow and jettison an unneeded portion of the Soyuz during reentry failed to function, throwing the craft off course and producing a descent that applied eight times the normal force of gravity to the three astronauts. The Soyuz sets down rather than landing like the shuttle, and it erratic ride caused the craft to hit harder than normal and bounce, leaving what Whitson called a divot, a huge dent in the earth away from which the craft bounced as it finally slowed. Whitson joked that the mission controllers lost track of the craft, landing in the Russian desert, 380 miles off course, but the impact set a huge grass fire to show their location. The Soyuz when it came to rest, she said, was “a little charred” which was Whitson-esque understatement for the battering the craft and its occupants took.

Whitson has logged over 377 days in space, spread over two shuttle and space station missions in 2002 (Expedition 5) and 2007-08 (Expedition 16). While serving as the first female commander of the space station, she and another woman achieved yet another first for women when Whitson was joined by Pam Melroy who commanded the shuttle during the same mission, placing tow female commanders in space at the same time.

Whitson holds the current record among U.S. astronauts for days spent in space and is ranked 20th among all astronauts for time away from the earth. In total six “space walks” outside the shuttle and space station, Whitson has accumulated nearly 40 hours of time literally in space, more than any other female.