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Minneapolis (AP) ― Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper found one path to becoming a flyer blocked. So she found another by diving into the sea.

Now, if all goes according to plan, the St. Paul native will become Minnesota's first woman to fly in space on Sunday when the space shuttle Atlantis is due to lift off with a 17 1/2 ton addition to the international space station. She'll make two spacewalks to help install the 45-foot-long module and its huge solar panels during the 11-day mission.

It'll be the 43-year-old's first space flight, but her preparation began in childhood. Her immigrant parents stressed education. She excelled in math and science. She had a knack for foreign languages -- she now speaks five -- and always presumed she'd go to college. She went into the Navy, and when her eyesight disqualified her from becoming a pilot, she chose to be a diver.

Which, as it turns out, is great training for a spacewalker.

"She's never satisfied doing ordinary things," said her husband, Glenn Piper. "She always wants to do something special, challenging and something that is meaningful."

Stefanyshyn-Piper is remembered as being a bright, likable, hardworking student at Derham Hall, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in St. Paul that later merged with the all-boys Cretin High School, which her four brothers attended.

"She was one of those students who made the most of their education," said Mary Jo Groller, an administrator at Cretin-Derham Hall High School. Stefanyshyn-Piper stayed in touch and returned there a few years ago in her blue NASA jumpsuit to talk about being an astronaut.

As the daughter of a German mother and Ukrainian father, Adelheid and Michael Stefanyshyn, she grew up fluent in both their native languages as well as English. She studied French and Spanish in school, and relatives say her Spanish is still pretty good. She later learned Russian so she could work on the international space station.

"My parents wanted all of us to have a good education; school was very important," Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a NASA interview posted on the mission's Web site. The astronauts were not available for media interviews this week, a NASA spokeswoman said.

Being the only girl in a family with four boys probably fueled her competitive spirit, her relatives said.

"I think that if I didn't have that, that drive to always improve and try to get something better, then I wouldn't be sitting here today," she said.

She graduated from Derham Hall in 1980, at a time when she said there was a big push to get more girls to go into engineering. She then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, earning her bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering. She also met her future husband at MIT.

And while she and her husband had both had hopes of becoming Navy aviators, their careers took a turn in the opposite direction. She couldn't pass the eye exam, and he said his academic counselors steered him toward engineering. So they decided to become Navy divers. She spent years fixing ships under water and doing salvage work.

"Then when I learned about NASA and building the space station and I saw how they were doing the construction and they were training underwater, I thought that looks to me more like diving than it does flying, and so I think I can do that in space," she said.

NASA accepted her as an astronaut candidate in 1996, so she and her husband and their son, Michael, now 16, moved to Houston, where Piper now works for a NASA subcontractor. He designs mock-ups for the huge underwater tank where his wife and other astronauts train to work in zero gravity.

Stefanyshyn-Piper will have a big cheering section at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this weekend, including her husband, her mother, an aunt from Germany, three of her brothers, Groller and another staffer from Cretin-Derham Hall who will report back to their school, and a 43-member delegation from a St. Paul elementary school that specializes in aerospace studies.

One brother, Erich Stefanyshyn, who is on his second tour of duty with the Marines in Iraq, can't be there. Their father died in 1992, but was always tickled when he'd see Navy men saluting her, and he'd be very proud to see her fly into space, brother John Stefanyshyn said.

Farnsworth Aerospace Elementary, a magnet public school that Stefanyshyn-Piper visited last year, is sending 22 kids ranging from kindergartners through sixth-graders, 13 parents and eight staffers. But the most excited one in the bunch may be the principal, Troy Vincent.

"You think I'm going to let them go and not he with them?" Vincent exclaimed. "I'm absolutely going. I'm not going to miss that. I'm so energized!"

This mission was supposed to fly three years ago, but Stefanyshyn-Piper and the rest of the crew remained earthbound because of the Columbia disaster in 2003, which killed seven astronauts. Now that NASA has two recent shuttle test missions under its belt, its attention has turned back to finishing the space station.

Stefanyshyn-Piper acknowledges she has a dangerous job.

"I think anytime you strap yourself on to a rocket and, and launch yourself into space at many times the speed of sound that that's dangerous," she said. "But, I think the benefits of spaceflight outweigh that risk."

Her brothers say they're more excited than worried.

"I pray that everything will go good," Paul Stefanyshyn said. "I have a good feeling about it. ... You can't go through life being worried about everything."

"She's in the ultimate flying machine," John Stefanyshyn said.

Her mother said she can't help worrying.

"I see the danger part in it," she said. "I don't see the beauty and the joy. I'm a parent. I'd rather see her coming back than going up."

But her husband said he's "not afraid at all." Piper said he and his wife are convinced that improvements since the Columbia accident have made the shuttle safer than ever. He said he's jealous, "in a nice way," and wishes he was going, too.

"Heide and her crew have been training for this thing a long time, and they're happy to get out there and make this a reality instead of training in the pool," Piper said. "They're interested in doing their part to help move the space station to completion so we can use it."

(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)