For less than the second time, , Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space plane, was transformed right into a science laboratory. Galactic 05 successfully accomplished its mission on Nov. 2, but for Kellie Gerardi, Galactic 05 crewmember and Virgin Galactic Astronaut 021, the training and preparation for the flight goes back almost a decade. She sat down with NSF to detail what it takes to conduct industrial suborbital research.
Gerardi said her training began two years before the flight, but unofficially began a decade ago. She volunteered as a coat checker on the Explorers Club in Recent York City while in college. The organization is an esteemed society that goals to advertise and recognize pioneers in scientific exploration and field study. Honorees include the Apollo 11 crew, Elon Musk, Sir Edmund Hillary, and more.
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Kellie Gerardi in her flight suit prior to the mission. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
While volunteering, she met Richard Garriott de Cayeux, a video game designer who, along with being the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, purchased a seat aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket and visited the International Space Station in 2008. Gerardi thanks Garriott de Cayeux for first introducing her to the concept of business spaceflight.
“I graduated the identical 12 months that the space shuttle program retired, and I used to be oblivious to the existence at the moment of this kind of nascent industrial industry and it blew my mind,” Gerardi said. “I just remember considering ‘I would like to be an element of that’ and so the goal was never even originally how do I get myself to fly? It was how do I help create the Star Trek future where we’re democratizing access to space, we’re expanding Earth’s economic sphere?”
That encounter led her to satisfy the Suborbital Researchers Group, which included Dr. Alan Stern, who would fly alongside her on Galactic 05.
Gerardi worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) before joining Masten Space Systems. During that point, she was capable of work just a few test stands away from Virgin Galactic’s work zone within the Mojave Desert.
She got her first taste of astronaut life and hands-on research while participating in an analog mission on the Mars Desert Research Station while joining the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) in 2017.
“I used to be imagined to be there in 2016, but I used to be pregnant and couldn’t fly,” Gerardi said. “So, literally right after I gave birth, and once I say literally, I mean I used to be still wearing Spanx under my flight suit to maintain all of my organs in place, I used to be like right there. That was really exciting because we tested an actual prototype of their EVA suit throughout the Mars Desert Research Station rotation.”
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Kellie Gerardi donning her EVA suit as a part of Mars Desert Research Station Crew 149. (Credit: Kellie Gerardi)
During this time, she began working for Palantir. All of those experiences would lead Gerardi to her first flight to the sting of space.
IIAS shared which experiments they planned to fly with Virgin Galactic greater than two years before the actual flight took place, Gerardi said. When she discovered she could be flying those experiments, she had a unique response than most might expect.
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Gerardi aboard a microgravity training flight. (Credit: Kellie Gerardi)
“I do know that I’m imagined to say I never could have dreamed of this, but that wouldn’t be true because I dreamed of that intimately, excruciating detail,” Gerardi said. “After I knew that I used to be having the chance to fly, after all it’s like an amazing gratitude for the trust that IIAS is placing in me, the arrogance they’re placing in me, the pressure that’s being placed on my shoulders to be the, , best ambassador that I may very well be, not just for IIAS but in addition for suborbital science generally, for the industrial space industry, for ladies in STEM, for identical to, , pick your kind of roulette slot, and I felt a way of pressure to live as much as those expectations.”
Gerardi says she and Dr. Stern each agreed certainly one of their most useful experiences in preparing for the actual flight was parabolic microgravity flights, where an airplane pitches up, giving passengers nearly 2G of force pushing against them, before pitching over and downward in the form of a parabola, allowing just below 30 seconds of near zero-G conditions.
Gerardi and Stern partnered with the National Research Council of Canada, which allowed for microgravity training aboard a Dassault Falcon 20 aircraft.
“It’s a really dynamic environment in space, especially like immediately post-boost, and also you’ve got the principal engine cutoff (MECO), and then you definitely’ve got the coast to apogee, but when the response control system (RCS) is firing in that vehicle, it’s like something that was two inches away is now two feet away, and the vehicle inverts,” Gerardi said. “In order that a part of flight, it’s like you may academically prepare for it, and what’s going to occur, they usually prepare you so well. But if you’re experiencing it, it’s like, thank God we had that muscle memory to depend on of parabolic flight, because if you’re doing something with high-quality motor, like I’m opening a payload stowage solution, I’m unstowing, I’m securing, I’m doing things, and that I don’t think I’d have been capable of do had I not had that extensive experience in microgravity.”
IIAS facilities in Florida also allowed for flights aboard an Extra 300 for high-G training.
There was one additional piece of coaching that happened before getting hands-on experience at Spaceport America in Recent Mexico; training to make use of a maximum absorbency garment (MAG).
“This was just not on my vision board once I dreamed of going to space as a little bit girl,” Gerardi said.
She said they were instilled with the importance of hydration.
“You’re within the desert and it’s so hot, and if there may be a delay, you don’t need to by chance restrict your hydration,” Gerardi noted. “Hydration really makes a difference with G tolerance. In the event you’re dehydrated, you may lose as much as half a G of tolerance in your ability to face up to high G-forces. So it’s really essential. So I understood why MAGs are so essential and helpful.”
She also noted it may very well be helpful for any individual who might need a nervous bladder to have the ability to totally benefit from the flight. Besides field testing it, she noted something special about hers.
“It was space-themed,” Gerardi noted while chuckling. “It was like little kids like drawing [a] space-themed diaper. So yeah, it was really funny.”
Ships mated? ✅
Research teams onsite? ✅
Astronauts in training? ✅
Have to be a spaceflight week 😎🚀 #Galactic05 is tracking for this Thursday, November 2. pic.twitter.com/D7pIGSIReg
— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) October 30, 2023
One week before the flight, the crew arrived for official pre-flight training in Recent Mexico. Gerardi notes the training for herself and Dr. Stern was different from the third passenger, Ketty Maisonrouge, who was participating as a paying customer versus a researcher.
“That was simply because there’s different operational and safety concerns if you’re free-floating things or like stowing things,” Gerardi noted.
Training included practice inside a simulator in addition to contained in the actual ship, .
“They’ve a full mock-up of the vehicle that they close off they usually run with audio, pilot audio, and visual out the windows,” Gerardi remembered. “You see like on screens such as you dropping away from [the mothership] . And so those were really high-fidelity simulations that were built to spec. And so we ran through those, Alan and I ran through those with our payload team quite a lot of times.”
She noted that throughout the entire process, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was watching. That included someone from the FAA present via Zoom during key tests including bailout and oxygen training.
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Gerardi undergoing hypoxia training in 2021. (Credit: Kellie Gerardi)
When it got here to the training aboard the actual space plane, Gerardi compared it to memorizing choreography. She said the final thing she wanted was to be the primary participant allowed to free-float an experiment and mess it up, removing the power for future flyers to perform something similar.
“I mean even the night before I used to be in my hotel room with a blindfold on doing a one-handed version of the discharge [of the payload] over and once again,” Gerardi said. “I had a backup mock-up and just practicing in order that even when all other senses were impaired, I used to be going to have the ability to get that thing safely stowed.”
Gerardi’s three experiments included the previously mentioned free-floating experiment referred to as “Configuration of a Confined Fluid in a Low-Gravity Environment,” with the goal of higher predicting and controlling the form of fluids in microgravity to assist prevent an incident like in 2013 when ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned during a spacewalk consequently of a clogged filter. The hope is to also use the information to develop syringe designs for administering medicine in space.
She wore Astroskin, a biomonitoring device that can be currently used aboard the ISS. This device tracks body functions corresponding to heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin temperature, with Gerardi’s mission marking the primary time it was used to gather data throughout the launch, re-entry, and landing phases of flight.
.@KellieGerardi is wearing an Astroskin biomonitoring device developed with the support of the Canadian Space Agency (@CSA). Fun Fact: The Astroskin is currently in use by astronauts aboard the @ISS! #Galactic05 marks the primary time this technology will likely be used during launch,… pic.twitter.com/yXNlpSBwo2
— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) November 2, 2023
Gerardi also wore a continuous blood glucose monitor. This was attached just a few days before her flight and he or she was wearing it when this interview was conducted lower than every week after her flight. The monitor was used to assemble data that will help to deal with concerns that insulin resistance might develop more quickly during spaceflight.
One among the important thing differences Gerardi noted within the training for Galactic 05 in comparison with other vehicles was the power to make changes to payload storage and functions on the plane as late because the day before flight. Those plans are typically finalized months prematurely on longer-duration spaceflights.
“Alan modified certainly one of the stowage solutions for his payload together with his carabiner and his tether the day before flight,” Gerardi remembered. “It was such a greater solution, too, that if we had been of, I don’t know, restricted to dogmatically enforced timelines only for the sake of locking it in, but without the power to have any kind of pragmatic considering, we’d have had a suboptimal solution that would have resulted in us interfering with one another’s choreography.”
Gerardi notes certainly one of her biggest struggles was to have the ability to activate a GoPro camera and confirm that it was recording quarter-hour prior to release.
What research is @KellieGerardi conducting during #Galactic05? Let’s discuss!
First: Kellie’s fluids experiment will free float within the spaceship cabin to look at how a confined fluid behaves in low gravity. Data gathered from the #Galactic05 spaceflight may help inform a spread… pic.twitter.com/4Rp6NTnmYY
— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) November 2, 2023
“The payload was right next to me on my right side, and only with my middle finger could I like barely graze the highest, but I wouldn’t have the ability to envision that the sunshine was on and might you imagine if I did all of this and the GoPro light wasn’t on,” Gerardi anxiously remembered?
“What I ended up having the ability to do was loosen certainly one of my left shoulder straps, maintain positive control of it, but maneuver my body to achieve down and check and see the sunshine reflecting off of my finger from the GoPro after which re-strap up and tell them cabin was secure, and the incontrovertible fact that I used to be capable of make those modifications, it was great to have the ability to work with the [Virgin Galactic] team.”
Then all of it got here all the way down to flight day. Gerardi said her suit was frolicked for her much like how her wedding dress was when she got married. Then it was time to board .
“I mean that was possibly one of the crucial profound parts of the flight seeing all my family and friends, amazing, as we were taxiing away, however the final thing I saw was the entire Virgin Galactic flight line engineers in a line waving us off and sending us off,” Gerardi recalled. “I do know what it’s prefer to send hardware to space and to feel that, but sending colleagues and humans and those that you only sealed off and put in there. I mean, it was just, I had chills sort of from that visual and it was so meaningful.”
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The Galactic 05 crew walking out on launch day. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
The mothership with underneath, took off at 9:00 AM local time from Spaceport America, starting a climb to a release altitude near 50,000 feet. Gerardi remembered the clear blue skies that day, including her family having the ability to see the whole lot of her flight from the bottom. Nonetheless it was something within the air that jumped out at her.
“I got to see this gradient of blue going from the lightest to the darkest navy after which it got really dark real quick,” Gerardi said with a child-like smile across her face. “For just a few moments circling at that release altitude, I just thought it was essentially the most beautiful thing on the earth. After which just a few minutes later I believed something else was essentially the most beautiful thing on the earth. Nevertheless it was, like, staggering. That mental picture stands out to me on most immediate recall.”
Then got here the moment of release, which Dr. Stern called ‘surreal.’
“You’re dropped and you only watch go, whoosh, after which impulsively, you’re flat in your back, and it’s like riding a rocket to the celebs,” Gerardi vividly remembered. “I mean, you’re just going backwards, and you’re feeling that you just’re riding a rocket. Like, it is correct behind you…I’ve done a ton of high-G flights. I’ve done centrifuge training, I’ve done all of it, but just being in your back and riding a rocket to the celebs was like, I just, it was like sci-fi. And it was so cool.”
Galactic 05 drop and ignition. One other suborbital spaceflight within the books! Congratulations @AlanStern, @kelliegerardi, @VirginGalactic, and @Spaceport_NM! @NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/8LUNTABDyo
— Jack Beyer (@thejackbeyer) November 2, 2023
Gerardi said she had a smile plastered on her face your complete time and is looking forward to seeing the raw flight footage to recall her expressions.
“I checked out the temporary clips I shared of everyone else’s faces which might be taking it very seriously, and possibly even doing respiratory techniques, and I’m just cheesing,” Gerardi joked.
Gerardi noted there have been special callouts on this flight that were specific to the research being conducted, along with astronaut instructor Colin Bennett calling out time increments every 20 seconds. She said that your complete first portion of the flight following unstrapping from her seat is blacked out as a result of her deal with completing her experiments.
“I used to be aware that we were in space, but I used to be so paranoid about getting the science and doing right by my team, and doing right by so many individuals who had placed their faith in me that I used to be aware, but not present in that portion,” Gerardi said. “I used to be so solely focused on getting this payload safely unstowed, getting the information.”
The truth is, on her planned timeline, 20 seconds were allocated for acclimating to microgravity. Nonetheless, Gerardi immediately jumped into the science.
“I just began a free float, and in that first block, I already doubled, nearly tripled, the utmost period of time we had ever gotten in parabolic flight of a free float,” Gerardi excitedly said.
While the outcomes of the experiment haven’t yet been released, Gerardi said all data will likely be available to the general public freed from charge once it’s published.
One thing she did note was that her experiment performed very otherwise than she’d expected.
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Kellie Gerardi conducting her fluids experiment mid-flight. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
“I had never seen the experiment behave the way in which it did in space, even after seeing it a whole lot of times on earth and in freefall, near freefall,” Gerardi recalled. “I had never seen it behave prefer it did. And so I used to be just so excited. All the pieces worked so perfectly. After which I stowed it and I used to be like mentally cheering myself on because I got it stowed.”
“So I looked like knowledgeable. And I’m knowledgeable, nevertheless it was essential to me that I looked like one too, since it was like, I used to be so conscious that everybody was watching, and this was the primary time that Virgin had allowed someone to do what I used to be doing, and it was very essential to me that I did right by that chance in order that the subsequent person has a good easier time convincing the team of what they need to do in space, free-floating-wise.”
Following the completion of her experiment, Gerardi remembered the cabin being extremely quiet, saying you would hear a pin drop with no motors or RCS thrusters firing during that portion of the flight.
Completing that task finally allowed her to look out the window on the Earth.
“I turned out my window and I actually saw space and Earth for the primary time and I, it took my breath away, prefer it really took my breath away,” Kellie noted along with her eyes beginning to water. “I watched myself on video, just like the respiratory and the awe, I used to be just in a stupor and it makes me sort of emotional to take into consideration, but I also probably interrupted everyone’s apogee experience because twice Alan told me that, and I don’t really remember this, but I just was like, ‘oh my god, oh my god’, and it’s like everyone else had already had a number of time to look out the window and I used to be just so focused and so this was my first time really, really experiencing it and it was essentially the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
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Gerardi’s first view of the Earth while in flight. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
As she remembered looking the window, away from her seat 2L, Gerardi waxed philosophically, with the tears still in her eyes and a big smile on her face.
“We’ve all seen, since childhood, so many pictures of the Earth and so many photos from much further away than I used to be, nevertheless it was the primary time that I had experienced Earth as a planet,” Gerardi said happily. “I don’t quite know the best way to describe it, but I feel I had a really academic understanding of Earth as a planet and being this cognitive dissonance of being each an element of it as a house but in addition away from it enough to experience it as a planet amongst other planets was an incredibly powerful and disorienting sensation and I just…that thin brilliant brilliant blue band of atmosphere it’s just like the just fragility of it and nothing that I hadn’t seen before from images, but unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. And so it was just that and it was magical and overwhelming.”
Gerardi noted with this interview being done so near the completion of her flight that she had yet to really process what it meant. While describing the planet, Gerardi had large, brilliant eyes and a smile that kept growing with each added description, as she processed the memory in real-time.
She noted that there have been two call-outs prior to re-entry, certainly one of which was to get near to your seat, followed by the ultimate call to strap in. Gerardi says she waited until the very last likelihood to reattach her five-point harness.
Following landing, Gerardi ran to hug her daughter, Delta V, named after the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that is required to perform a maneuver. The moment was shared on her Instagram account, which currently has over 346,000 followers, and on TikTok where she has an audience of greater than 728,000 followers. She wants the trolls and naysayers to grasp the importance of the reunion portion of flight.
@kelliegerardi I promised Delta I’d come right back home to Earth…. Thanks @VirginGalactic 🥹💜
“I shared this reunion video of me and my daughter and it was just so powerful. And naturally you get the trolls who’re like, you were gone for lower than two hours, why are you so dramatic?” Gerardi laughed. “To start with, blocked. Second of all, , away for under a brief time frame. Like, that wasn’t the message. That’s not why my daughter was running to me. That’s not why I used to be running to my daughter. We’ve been away from one another for a lot of weeks while I worked overseas. The message was that that is something that fewer than 100 women have ever had the chance to do in history. And the limiter has at all times been access and never aptitude.”
“It’s like, I don’t think I’m extraordinary or special in any way, and I stay up for broadening that horizon. But this was the fifth industrial flight ever for Virgin Galactic. So, one, to perform this from their side safely and to return me to my daughter on something that also has experimental stamped on that spacecraft and to observe my daughter watch me experience this thing that for her entire life, she’s at all times known from the day she was born that that was mommy’s dream. So it was all of that was layered in, in that reunion. And it had nothing to do with the time away. It had the whole lot to do with the profundity of this moment in time and what it means.”
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Kellie Gerardi along with her husband and daughter shortly after returning to Spaceport America after Galactic 05. (Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF)
Readjusting to normal life following the trip had been tricky for the primary few days post-flight. Gerardi noted that she had been crying every night before sleep, not knowing exactly why she was crying.
She also recalled two funny moments while out with family.
“Each time that I’m driving within the automotive with my husband and I turn to him and still grab his shoulder, I’m like, I left the freaking planet,” Gerardi said excitedly. “I literally keep having these moments where I even have to almost grip something and tell the person next to me, I left Earth. I went to space.”
One one that was completely happy to inform people about Gerardi’s trip was her mother, which led to the second funny moment.
“We were in [a local supermarket],” Gerardi remembered with a giant smile. “I used to be ordering sliced turkey from the deli and he or she’s like, ‘my daughter just got back from space’, that is like two days after we got back. I’m like, mom!”
Gerardi says she hopes to proceed to share her experience and the concept that at the moment, anything is feasible.
“It’s not the era of, oh, you’ve to be the old stiff astronaut, the whole lot’s going to be all that, right,” Gerardi asked. “I flew to space within the 12 months of the Barbie movie, within the 12 months of the [Taylor Swift] Eras tour, within the 12 months of the [Beyoncé] Renaissance tour, okay? It’s like, we were going to bring it. And so, that was all top of mind for me.”
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The writer together with Kellie Gerardi following the interview for this text. (Credit: Sawyer Rosenstein for NSF)
Gerardi has published a private book titled , along with a children’s book series called . While reading the latter to a gaggle of scholars at her daughter’s school, Gerardi got here to a really unusual realization.
“I have a look at Delta and I have a look at all of her classmates they usually literally are identical to, ‘Oh yeah I could go to space at some point too, but I could also do a number of other things’ and it’s like that’s so true,” Gerardi recalled. “My gender schema was very different than my daughter’s once I was growing up. I feel that’s why I wore jewelry in space.”
“It’s why I had hot pink nails,” Kellie said showing them off, still sporting the brilliant color. “It’s why I wore friendship bracelets. Not that I did that intentionally to make a degree, it’s more that I brought my full self to space and felt there was no a part of me that even thought for a second I should tone it down. It’s toning it up. Get in losers we’re going to space!”
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Onlookers view VSS Unity after it had accomplished the Galactic 05 flight. (Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF)
Besides hoping for more of her colleagues to get the prospect to perform research in space, Gerardi hopes that style of willingness to be yourself in space will encourage much more people to pursue their dreams and achieve spaceflight: suborbital or orbital.
“I feel it makes it more real and accessible and authentic to people to grasp, like that’s why it’s the human in human spaceflight,” Gerardi said. “If we were just sending robots, yeah, needless to say, we could talk only concerning the hardware, but we’re not. We’re sending human beings who’ve periods, who’ve children, who’ve lives and communities and families and emotions and all of that gets rolled into that have. And that was mine.”