When the primary people walked on the moon 54 years ago today (July 20), female astronauts weren’t yet allowed within the U.S. human spaceflight program.
That did not deter future NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who at age nine watched Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot the moon in 1969, on a television set from her home in Iowa.
“I assumed, ‘Cool job’ … [but] I never really told anybody about it, since it seemed so unreal to me,” Whitson, 63, said on CBS News’ “Person to Person with Norah O’Donnell.” The interview will stream today at 9:30 pm EDT (6:30 p.m. PDT), and CBS will air a preview on the CBS Evening News at 6:30 p.m. EDT.
In an excerpt from that interview provided exclusively to Space.com, Whitson recalled one other major milestone in space history: 1978, when the first-class of astronauts that included women and Black individuals was finally brought into NASA. She was graduating highschool that yr.
“I’m like, ‘Possibly this is feasible for me to turn out to be an astronaut.’ Luckily, I had no idea how hard it might be, but I set my mind to it,” Whitson said. After getting her Ph.D., she began applying for each NASA class, racking up 4 rejections in eight years.
Those rejections are hard to assume now, provided that Whitson has since commanded three space missions (for NASA and Houston’s Axiom Space) and is probably the most traveled people of any gender, with a complete of 675 days in space — greater than every other American. She told CBS she was fortunate to maintain going and attributed her childhood on a farm to creating the resilience she needed to return to NASA repeatedly.
Related: International Women’s Day: Female astronauts keep making strides off Earth
In her early life, Whitson witnessed a sea change at NASA by way of female participation. The primary women within the space program worked in background roles — for instance, the Black “Hidden Figures” mathematicians and engineers only latterly hailed for his or her roles in calculating the trajectories of early human spacecraft.
The agency recruited its early astronaut corps from the military, which itself had restrictions by gender and race within the Sixties and Seventies in the course of the early days of the space age. A Sixties effort to usher in civilian women, generally known as the Mercury 13, ultimately failed after among the tests required U.S. military facilities that were restricted to men. (A long time later, happily, Mercury 13 participant Wally Funk made it to space at age 82, aboard Blue Origin’s Recent Shepard suborbital vehicle.)
NASA regularly opened up its corps to scientists after which women astronauts, starting with the pioneering “Thirty-Five Recent Guys” class in 1978. Despite that joking moniker (which partly referred to the near-decade it had been since any astronauts were hired), NASA took its diversity recruitment so seriously that it brought Nichelle Nichols of “Star Trek” fame on board to draw women and Black astronaut candidates.
Among the many women brought on board in that class was Sally Ride, whose estate posthumously disclosed in 2012 that Ride was also the primary known LGBTQ+ individual in space. Ride was the primary American woman to fly in June 1983 and ending up going to space twice. “It was very meaningful to me,” Whitson told CBS of Ride’s pioneering mission, adding that she has been glad of the eye dropped at fortieth anniversary celebrations this yr.
To make sure, women astronauts proceed to lag their male peers by way of milestones, at the same time as NASA and other agencies work hard to beat the bias of the early space program days. For instance: the primary spacewalk by a female NASA astronaut was by Kathryn Sullivan in 1984, 20 years after the primary man performed an extravehicular activity. (The Soviet Union exceeded that mark by a couple of months, and notably it flew the first-ever female astronaut in 1963. But this text focuses on Whitson and NASA.)
Spacesuits for the space shuttle unfortunately were tailored to larger and more stereotypically male sizes; cost and complication has meant similarly male-focused suits proceed to fly on International Space Station missions. This example signifies that few women can don the extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuit overall. The one all-female spacewalk so far took place in 2019, 54 years after the primary male one. (NASA’s recent generation of spacewalking suits for its Artemis moon program shall be more gender-diverse; so far, other genders besides female and male haven’t flown with the agency so far as we all know.)
As Whitson was being rejected over and all over again, the primary female pilot of an area shuttle (Eileen Collins) got her mission in 1995 — 14 years after the shuttle first reached orbit. Whitson’s persistence paid off, nevertheless. She was chosen as a NASA astronaut candidate the subsequent yr, after racking up considerable related experience.
Whitson’s work at NASA before being an astronaut included research roles and (eventually) being appointed to deputy division chief of the medical sciences division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center; working within the U.S.-U.S.S.R. joint working group in space medicine and biology; and being named project scientist of the shuttle-Mir space station program that saw several U.S. spacecraft visit the Russian outpost, amongst other milestones.
Whitson stayed busy on the bottom side for nearly a decade after her selection, holding key roles reminiscent of deputy chief of the astronaut office (which assigns folks to flights), lead for the crew test support team in Russia, and chief of the station operations branch. Whitson also chaired the astronaut selection board in 2009 and served as a member of the 2004 astronaut selection board.
She then flew three roughly six-month missions to the International Space Station (ISS): with Expedition 5 from June to December 2002; as commander of Expedition 16 that flew from October 2007 to April 2008; and as commander of Expedition 51 (and crew member of Expedition 50) that flew from November 2016 to September 2017.
Whitson emphasized that each one of those years of getting related experience on the bottom was key to securing her milestone because the first-ever female commander of an ISS expedition. (The primary female commander of any NASA mission, an area shuttle mission, was none aside from Collins in 2005.)
“I used to be qualified and had some experience working with these teams,” Whitson said, referring to the bottom teams supporting Expedition 16. Then, in 2009, Whitson was chosen as the primary female and non-military chief of the NASA astronaut office, which also drew upon her lifetime of experience. She held the post for 3 years.
“I attempt to tell young people it is so essential to make the most of the opportunities you are given along your path, because getting there is not at all times a straight line,” she said.
Whitson retired from NASA in 2018 because the American with probably the most total time in space — and the lady who had done probably the most spacewalks (10). After leaving the agency, she went to space yet again through one other route. Whitson commanded Axiom Space’s Ax-2 mission to the ISS earlier this yr, serving as the primary female commander of a personal space station mission.
Axiom Space is a component of a brand new generation of firms aiming to bring business science and crewmembers to space. Like NASA, it uses SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, but focuses on short-term stays immersed in research. All such missions should be commanded by a retired NASA astronaut, per agency regulations; the 10-day Ax-2 mission concluded in May 2023.
When CBS asked Whitson what she desires to do next, she said she’d like to go to the moon, similar to the Apollo astronauts did. (It is not an idle dream, provided that the Artemis program goals to NASA and international astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2025, with Artemis 3.)
“I’d have a good time doing that one,” Whitson said of a moon mission. “But there’s just lots of opportunities. I believe, as space is changing a lot, there are numerous ways to contribute and be a component of that. I believe it’s a part of the explanation I wish to keep going back. Besides the addiction of this attitude, I actually like being a component of something larger than me. Space truly is that, and the objectives in space are that. So I’m very enthusiastic about continuing.”