Aug 20, 2006 5:07 pm US/Central
Astronaut First Minnesota Woman In Space
St. Paul (AP) ―
A group of St. Paul students will be in Florida next to watch as a native daughter makes history as the first Minnesota woman to go into space.
Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, an alumnus of St. Paul's Cretin-Derham Hall, was supposed to be part of the crew on a May 2003 flight that was scrapped after the Columbia space shuttle disaster earlier that year.
Next Sunday, if all goes according to plan, the 43-year-old St. Paul native will blast off with five other crew members aboard the shuttle Atlantis to resume construction of the International Space Station. That work has been suspended since the Columbia accident, which killed seven astronauts.
Stefanyshyn-Piper visited Farnsworth Elementary in St. Paul in the spring of 2005, and students there recall her disappointment that the 2003 mission was canceled. Next week, several of those same students will be on hand to watch her lift into space.
In all, 43 students from Farnsworth, an aerospace-themed magnet school, will be on hand, along with two Cretin-Derham students. In addition to watching the launch, they will monitor her progress during the planned 11-day journey.
It's a jam-paced mission. The crew will perform three complicated spacewalks to install a 17.5-ton addition to the space station -- one of the heaviest payloads ever flown into space.
"This has been described as one of the most difficult tasks ever attempted by humans, and I'm here to tell you that it seems like it's going to be that hard," said Mike Suffredini, NASA station program manager. "This has never been done before, the creation of a spacecraft in space."
Stefanyshyn-Piper, 43, and mission specialist Joe Tanner are slated to conduct the first spacewalk, followed a day later by a walk by two other astronauts. Two days after that, Stefanyshyn-Piper and Tanner will take the final spacewalk.
That will put Stefanshyn-Piper in an elite club. Only six other U.S. women, and a single Russian woman, have ever journeyed outside a spacecraft. It's a rarity mainly because the required spacesuit calls for a body type few women possess, said , who is 5-feet-10.
"Height is a big part of it," she said. "If you fit in a suit, then the easier it is to work, and that's sometimes a make-or-break on who gets assigned."
Stefanyshyn-Piper graduated in 1980 from what was then the all-girls Derham High School. Her mother, Adelheid Stefanyshyn, still lives in the house where Stefanyshyn-Piper and her brothers were raised in the city's West Seventh neighborhood.
In a recent interview posted on NASA's Web site, Stefanyshyn-Piper said she understands the risk of what she's doing -- but considers it worth it.
"For us as humans to advance, to become a better race, is going to require us to go out exploring," she said. "Once we stop exploring and you stop trying to look for something new or go someplace new, then you're just going to start almost disintegrating because you're just going to not be thinking. Once we stop thinking and stop wanting to go further, then that's going to be the start of the end."
(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
