Are your kids interested in space? Enroll them in the Farnsworth Aerospace Elementary Magnet School.
For more information visit the website at http://farnsworth.spps.org or by calling the placement office at 651-632-3760.
by Lisa Radunz Strohkirch
In September, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper became the first woman from Minnesota to go into space with the crew aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. During the 12 days in space, Stefanyshyn-Piper clocked over 12 hours on two space walks as part of the mission to restart assembly of the International Space Station.
"When you come out for the first time and you're looking down at the earth below, you think 'Wow, that's really far,'" Stefanyshyn-Piper said. "It's a pretty sight, but you definitely hold on."
On the crew of seven, Stefanyshyn-Piper delivered and prepared a massive external truss and two sets of solar arrays, which will provide one quarter of the power for the Station.
Stefanyshyn-Piper grew up in Minnesota and graduated from the all-girls Derham Hall High School. She earned her master of science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 on a Navy ROTC scholarship. In the Navy, she trained as a diver and worked on underwater ship repair and salvage projects, including the development of a salvage plan for a Peruvian Navy sub and de-stranding the EXXON HOUSTON tanker in Hawaii.
"I was looking at NASA and saw a spacewalker and I thought 'That doesn't look much like flying,'" she said. "The training they do is underwater. I definitely thought, 'OK, that's diving.'"
Despite the original launch being delayed three years because of the Columbia accident, Stefanyshyn-Piper remains confident in the safety of her work. "We understand that we'll never be able to make it 100 percent risk free," she said, "but it's getting it to the point where you can mitigate the problems or at least deal with them so you don't have a safety or crew issue."
During the delay, Stefanyshyn-Piper worked on an engineering team to solve a problem with the spacesuits, which cycled condensation back into the cooling system. The team worked for a year and a half to create a filtration system using the materials already on the Space Station.
"There's nothing that says a girl can't be an astronaut," Stefanyshyn-Piper told CNN before her spacewalk, "Because we have proven you can do it. And if more of them see women in these types of roles and that they follow their footsteps, I think that's great."
At 43, Stefanyshyn-Piper isn't finished with her career in space. "My immediate future is going to be doing some ground work," she said. "I'll be working in the program office, so this will give me the opportunity to deal with some of the issues with the spacewalks. I think hopefully prospects are good that I will get another flight but I won't know that for at least another couple of months."
