- Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper
- Astronaut
Johnson Space Center
Growing up in Minnesota, Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, meant that I was always around water. Weekends in the summer meant going to one of the many lakes that were in and around the city of Saint Paul, where I was born and raised. My four brothers and I loved to go swimming and the neatest thing was to see an occasional small fish underwater. In lakes, you usually won’t see much else.
The first time that I saw the ocean was at the end of summer in 1980, when I went off to college in Massachusetts. The first thing that I remember was that the water was really salty (all of the lakes in Minnesota were fresh water)! But I quickly got used to the salt and soon realized that it was easier to float and the waves were bigger. While in college, I studied Mechanical Engineering, because I really liked math and I was very interested in learning how things worked. I also was interested in the US Navy. I received an ROTC scholarship to help pay for my college tuition, so I knew that I would be going into the Navy after I graduated. I finished my Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was commissioned as an Ensign in the US Navy in 1985.
Initially, I was interested in flying for the Navy, but because I failed the eye test, I could not become a pilot, so I started looking at becoming a Navy Diver. So, after graduation from MIT, I was off to the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida to learn to become a deep sea diver (hoo-yah!). It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. After Dive School, I was fortunate enough to be stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I really enjoyed my time at work with the Navy doing Underwater Ship Repair and Salvage work. It was quite impressive the one time when I got to dive underneath an air craft carrier. Most of my free time was spent diving around the island of Oahu.
While I in the Navy, I learned about NASA and the building of the Space Station. I read how NASA was planning many space walks to build the Space Station. The training for the space walks is done underwater in a huge training tank. I thought to myself, that this looked more like diving than flying. If pilots can be astronauts, why can’t a diver. So, I applied to the Astronaut Program and finally in 1996, I was accepted as an Astronaut. I made my first flight into space on the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Our mission, STS-115, was to the International Space Station, where we delivered an external module that has two solar panels. During the flight, I did two space walks. And yes, it did feel very much like diving!
Now, I will be part of another NASA mission, NEEMO 12. We will be spending 12 days in the Aquarius habitat, simulating what it would be like to live in a habitat on the moon or Mars. We will be evaluating techniques that will be required for exploring the lunar surface and doing experiments to learn about how the human body functions in a small and stressful environment. We will also be looking at various telemedicine techniques. It should be an exciting mission to learn about exploration: whether it is the ocean floor or the surface of the Moon!
