Swati Varshney has spent a long time strapped into parachutes. Now, she’s helping to bring a girl skydiver higher than ever before.
Varshney, who has 1,200 profession jumps together with a Ph.D. and ancestry in India, is certainly one of three “explorers” on the Hera Rising project. The initiative by non-profit Rising United plans to send a girl high into Earth’s atmosphere for the primary time.
The opposite two finalists for the stratospheric opportunity are Eliana Rodriquez (who has ancestry in Colombia) and Diana Valerín Jiménez (ancestry in Costa Rica). The selectee might be determined after 18 months of coaching; the opposite two explorers will remain on the team for ground support and academic outreach.
Hera Rising goals to interrupt barriers in gender and representation and is producing ample educational materials in Spanish and English. Additionally they could have considerable technical expertise on the team. For instance, the equipment will largely be provided by Paragon Space Development Corp., which has helped in previous record-breaking skydiving. It is usually a part of a team led by Axiom Space that can outfit spacesuits on NASA’s Artemis program for astronauts aiming to land on the moon within the 2020s.
Space.com spoke with Varshney about her profession to date, what she expects to learn and what this historic opportunity means to her.
Related: Hera Rising will attempt the first stratospheric skydive by a girl in 2025 (exclusive)
Space.com: Tell us about your skydiving journey.
Varshney: My academic progression and my profession trajectory has been really intertwined with skydiving because it went along. So I began skydiving. I just did a tandem skydive as a thing to do to examine off your bucket list, right? And I went and did it and I had an absolute blast. I had a lot fun doing it. I felt really comfortable in freefall. I loved it, but I wanted to return and pursue this as something cool to do as a hobby. I had been accepted into my master’s degree program at Cambridge and heading in the right direction to get to do my Ph.D. at MIT.
I actually just wanted something that was totally different, and as a release to — this can be a really cliché option to say it — cut away right from what I used to be doing in my day-to-day life. I began doing my license, my training, learning more concerning the sport, learning that there have been so many alternative avenues for progression and things to do. And I learned rather a lot about how technical body-flying within the sky really is.
It grew to be something that was rather a lot more just like my scientific training than I ever thought it will have been in the primary place. It was just one other avenue for me to pursue this goal of lifelong learning. There’s more disciplines to try, there’s more events to go to, there’s competitions. It became this never-ending journey of one other pursuit of information that went alongside my academic profession.
Space.com: How did you become involved with Hera Rising?
Varshney: The project founders reached out to some folks in skydiving to determine who some good candidates for this project could be. That they had some criteria. They wanted it to be a girl, preferably with a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) background, and an underrepresented minority. It was series of interviews and conversations with that team and determining how this was all going to work, after which learning about me by way of, what are my interests? Am I doing this for the proper reasons?
Over the course of this I also met my teammates, the 2 other explorers which have been chosen for this project. I met Diana and Eliana, after we went all the way down to Houston to try on spacesuits. And that was a extremely incredible experience. I used to be wondering (if it was going to feel like) all three of us are competing to be that one one who’s going to leap from space. But no, it was more like we’re a team of three women who’re going to make this occur.
It was great. I’ve seen in my academic profession, where there is a difference between when it comes working as a team and camaraderie in a lab, and getting a project done — versus a hyper-competitive environment where it’s one person’s glory to have their name as the primary creator on the paper.
Space.com: What’s your team’s journey to the flight?
Varshney: There’s different components of it from the spacesuit design. There’s the training that the explorers, myself included, could have to go to to arrange for the event. After which there’s a complete bunch of research that is going into the platform design, what’s actually going to hold us as much as space, and a number of the experiments which can be happening, and naturally the academic side.
It may start with some some suit sizing and fitting. There’s some different concerns that the (pressure) suit designers have to keep in mind to suit any certainly one of the explorers. We’re all women. We’re smaller than the typical (male) astronaut. That is something we learned after we went to attempt to the suits. The suits were all just a little bit too big for us. Their joints were form of within the unsuitable place to suit our bodies. We have now limited ranges of motion; just even raising our arms and looking out on the shoulder joint, or the scale of the gloves to make use of our fingers to work a number of the adjustments and the dials on the suit.
With regards to training for the jump, I feel there’s rather a lot that is going to enter it. We’ll have to do high-altitude training, by way of groundwork and altitude chambers, and learning easy methods to control your body and use your body in in high-altitude environments. Then there’s also jump training. I feel it can involve a series of high-altitude jumps, going higher and better and better.
Space.com: What do you hope you’re going to get out of the experience?
Varshney: I do not know if I actually have an ideal answer for you yet. But the way in which I thought of this project is it’s an ideal combination of a few of my most key interests. It’s science and engineering, my profession. It’s skydiving as a hobby, after which also my passion for representation and inclusion in each of those spheres, actually.
I’ve done a number of work on highlighting diversity and underrepresented minorities within the outdoor sports community, in addition to trying to interact women and underrepresented minorities to pursue STEM careers. To have all three of those interests in a single spot and one project — and to have a single thing to work on as an alternative of my brain split in three different directions — it’s really incredible.