NASA Photo/Houston Chronicle, Smiley N. Pool
“As you re-enter the atmosphere, you start feeling this force,” explains NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus. “Like [gravity] is trying to squash you flat against the surface of the planet.” We work against it constantly just by lifting our arms or taking a step.
The same could be said of Magnus, who went from reading Nancy Drew books in Belleville, Ill., and dreaming of space to flying the final U.S. space-shuttle mission in July 2011. And she did it all so effortlessly, like she didn’t even know the odds she was fighting.
In middle school, Magnus knew she wanted to be an astronaut. But when “you’re a seventh-grade girl in Belleville, it’s just something other people do,” she says. “You don’t even want to talk about it because you think people will make fun of you.” But after studying physics and electrical engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and getting a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology (with a brief stint at McDonnell Douglas), Magnus felt ready to join the space program.
Her first mission was in 2002 on the space shuttle Atlantis, which she also took on the shuttle program’s 135th and final mission.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Magnus says of being selected for the final mission. At the time, she was working at NASA Headquarters in D.C. She’d spent four and a half months on the International Space Station in 2008 and thought she would only be tapped for long-duration stints; the final shuttle mission was just 12 days. But she happily agreed.
“Our primary task was to learn what we needed to learn to carry out the mission successfully,” she explains. “It was only after we landed that it hit us, like, ‘Wow, that was it. That was the last mission for the space-shuttle program.’ It’s sad, but then you have to think about all the great things the shuttle program accomplished and be proud of that and not diminish that either.”
After the final shuttle mission, the space program is going through something of a tumultuous transition. But Magnus seems to be taking the changes in stride—maybe because her job involves changing what’s never been done before into historical milestones. “NASA has a history of the government starting and stopping our programs at inconvenient times,” she says.
And maybe that’s why she wants to tell other people that the odds they’re fighting are better than they think. “It’s very easy when you’re a young person with a dream to look at it and think, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s impossible. I can never do that.’ Go for it and see what happens.” After all, we defy gravity every day.
