To boldly go: The astronaut who has both walked in space and reached the deepest ocean trench

Having blasted off on three space shuttle missions and plunged to the Earth’s deepest ocean trench, Kathy Sullivan has a unique perspective on the planet she’s devoted her life to studying.

The pioneering astronaut heads to Scotland for next month’s Edinburgh Science Festival on her continuing mission to help us better understand our changing planet.

The first American woman to walk in space, she was also the first female to reach the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, so has plenty of stories to tell.

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“I like the fact I didn’t have to choose either or – I got to do both,” she said. “The common element is the wonder of great engineering that lets us create a spaceship or a submersible that let us go to those places and better understand them.

“Inside, it’s mind-boggling how absolutely normal it is. It’s like a magic school bus. To take it all in while eating your tuna sandwich is an amusing dissonance.

“If the view is your thing, you definitely want to go to space because it’s expansive and spectacular. Underwater, you can only see as far as the power of your lights, but the endless marvels of all the lifeforms are dazzling in their own way.

“The ocean is so much more immense than most can fathom, and we’ve pinpricked the tiny surface layer. We’re only aware of what lives there if we happen to have bumped into it.

“We’ve got better topographic maps on Mars than we do of our own ocean floor.”

Passion for the planet

Kathy’s passion for the planet led her to studying geology and oceanography. By fortune of timing, the door opened to women at Nasa when she was finishing her degree.

In 1978, she became part of the first astronaut class to include women, and her debut space shuttle flight came in October 1984. On that mission she spent three-and-a-half hours outside the airlocks on a space walk.

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“It’s a wonderful feeling,” she recalled. “You’d watched with great envy the cool stuff people in line in front of you got to do. There are all sorts of technical hurdles to actually getting the green light. You’re on tenterhooks.

“Nobody can forget their first launch and seeing Earth from orbit. These tourist rides now are getting nice glimpses, but this is an altogether different thing. At the time Nasa was cautious and almost reluctant about doing space walks. It adds an extra degree of danger to something already dangerous. The list of really ugly things that could go wrong is pretty daunting.

“When it finally did happen, it was mainly a big relaxation. I just went into muscle memory, went out and did the work.”

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Kathy recalls timing work just right to watch the Himalayas go by below, and the joy of the 90 minutes before and after sleep that astronauts had as free time.

She said: “It was nice to just float up by the window and take in where you were.”

Challenger disaster

However, while preparing for her second shuttle mission and deploying the Hubble Space Telescope, disaster struck.

In January 1986, the world watched as Challenger broke apart after launch due to a fault in one of the rocket boosters, killing all seven crew members.

“It was devastating,” Kathy said. “The unending raft of funerals and memorials was gut-wrenching to go through.

“It became clear there’d been people within Nasa who knew the boosters weren’t behaving properly and were essentially hiding it. That added to the anguish.

“This is always going to be risky, but you’re banking on the competency and good faith of every person.”

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Kathy’s first mission had been on board Challenger – fitting as it shares a name with the 19th Century expedition that pioneered oceanography. She had lost four classmates in the disaster, but it didn’t dissuade her.

She said: “The essence of this job is you’re riding a bomb for a living. Challenger showed that, unless everybody does every bit of their job in full faith and competently, it’ll behave like a bomb instead of the rocket you want it to be.

“We all had a very good grasp on the risks. We believed the value to science, technology, our country and mankind was worth it. If we were going to pack it in after one bad television incident, I was going to be really mad.”

Space: the ultimate vantage point

Space missions are vital, Kathy says, in understanding how all our planet’s systems work through things like monitoring climate patterns.

“The vantage point of space has been utterly transformative,” she said. “It helps you track and map the richly interconnected systems that make up our planet. Trooping down around here on the dirt on our two little feet, we really can’t begin to perceive it.

“By my third flight, that’s what inspired me to come back to Earth and find a role in which I could do more than just share my pretty pictures. I could actually put all that information into the human domain and connect it to decisions we face as citizens.”

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She’s sceptical of space tourism – and people calling themselves astronauts for taking a short trip to a spot far below she reached.

With a lot of space exploration now the domain of the private sector and billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos rather than nation states, the sharing of data and discoveries is something she hopes can continue.

“The common good model has been a really powerful open innovation platform,” she said.

“If the person that measures it gets to monopolise and decide who to sell it to, I think that costs us in the long run.

“There’s definitely a trend in that direction so we’re going to have to figure out how to how to navigate it.”

‘Stranded’ astronauts

Kathy sympathises with Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the two Nasa astronauts whose return to Earth from the International Space Station has been delayed by almost nine months, but reckons they’re not too fazed by it all.

“They’re very experienced senior astronauts and it’s very likely they were looking at this as their finale flight lasting just a few days,” she said. “They’re not stranded, they’re not sad. Suni, in particular, is in her happy place.

“The biggest negative consequence is Butch will probably miss his daughter’s prom.

“The family impacts are regrettable, but that’s part of every astronaut’s career. The mission’s got to come first and we do what we can around that.”

If Kathy could go back to space tomorrow she’d jump at the chance.

“Nasa took John Glenn back when he was 77 and got data on how an old man’s body responds to space,” she said.

“I’m closing in on that age and I think they need to have an old broad – I’m first in line!”

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Kathy’s talks Walk Like An Astronaut and Above and Below are at the Edinburgh Science Festival on April 5. Visit edinburghscience.co.uk