Nov 9, 2008 3:27 pm US/Central
Minnesota Astronaut Heads For Space This Week
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ―
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Space Shuttle Endeavour successfully lands at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center March 26, 2008 in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (File)
Matt Stroshane/Getty Images
A Minnesota astronaut is up for her second flight into space when the space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to lift off on a mission to the international space station Friday night.
St. Paul native Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is the first woman assigned as the lead spacewalker on a shuttle flight.
She will perform three spacewalks to clean and lubricate a jammed solar-wing rotating joint. On her only other mission, in 2006, she took two spacewalks.
The 45-year-old Stefanyshyn-Piper wanted to fly for the Navy in the mid-1980s, but failed the eye exam. She joined the Navy anyway and went into diving and underwater salvage. The Navy captain says she would have been "perfectly happy" with that career, but put in an astronaut application and was selected in 1996.
Her engineer husband, Glenn Piper, works for NASA and, is in charge of all the equipment used in her underwater training for the mission. They live in Houston and have a 19-year-old son who is a college sophomore.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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