Hello!
Hi! I'm Katherine Bennell-Pegg. Welcome to the Australian Space Discovery Center.
Let's have a look around
Great!
Katherine just received some pretty exciting news. The Australian Space Agency and European
Space Agency are going to train her as the first Australian female astronaut candidate.
I grew up on the northern beaches of Sydney, which has a beautiful bright starry sky at night and I
used to love being out in the garden looking at the stars and when I realised that those stars
weren't just pinpricks of light but were planets or entire galaxies, whole new world waiting to
be explored, I wanted to have that adventure, I wanted to be the one exploring them. You know,
when we had our careers counselling sessions, they said, “write down three different
things you'd like to be” and I wrote down one ‘astronaut’ and refused to write anymore. So,
at high school particularly, I was exploring how do you become an astronaut? And saw you could
be someone from almost any STEM background. You could be a pilot, you could be a doctor,
you could be a mathematician, you could be a physicist, you could be an engineer. Australia
at that time, didn't even have a space agency, we didn't have, you know, a thriving satellite
development industry. So I left Australia, right after studying an engineering degree and
a physics degree, and did a double master's degree overseas and did internships at NASA and at ESA.
When I was over there, I worked on many different missions. I lived in six different countries,
I worked on Earth observation missions to measure ocean surface currents, future concepts for the
Orion vehicle that's taking people back to the moon, technologies to go up and grab big
space debris and remove them from orbit so you don't end up with space junk all over space,
which stops us being able to use it. And I also worked on technologies for astronauts,
like Augmented Reality goggles and things like that so I had a lot of fun.
By the time Katherine came back to Australia, we finally had our own space agency! And she
got a job as Director of Space Technology before applying for the European Space
Agency's Astronaut Corp. At first, she just missed out as one of 22,500 candidates!
I got to the final round, the final 25, but I didn't get over the line.
So that was disappointing. You kind of wait for a call that tells you,
will you be an astronaut? Are you just going back to your day job? And unfortunately, for me,
it was a no. But then, very recently, I found out that because of my performance
on the selection, the Australian Space Agency and European Space Agency agreed
to train me as Australia's first astronaut candidate, which is so great. I'm so excited!
She's heading off to Germany for about a year of training
which includes learning how to dock a spaceship, operate robotics and...
Will they teach me how to moonwalk? As long as it's not the dance version! I'm a bit
uncoordinated that way, but I think we do spacewalk training underwater and you
pretend you're in space by being underwater, so you can learn how to move in zero gravity.
The plan is to one day head to space for real, most likely with a stint on the ISS!
Most astronauts today go to the International Space Station, which is a huge lab in space,
sort of like a science lab that you'd have at your school, but massive and the size
of a football field. And up there, they do things like look at, you know medical tests
or look at new kinds of drugs, or new kinds of material or different ways to operate robotics.
From the eye in the sky up there, you can see all sorts of phenomena around the world. You
can look at the environment, you can look at refugee movements, you can detect bushfires
and floods and help warn people about them. I'd also love to see, the Earth from space. Earth
looks fragile and I think that's a really important perspective to gain up there.
According to the UN, only 11% of astronauts have been women and
in STEM in general, women make up less than 30%.
As a woman in the space industry, I've absolutely been in the minority for most of my career,
but this hasn't held me back at all. Certainly, there's been occasions where you get small
cuts or people try and bring you down a little bit and I think that, by just doing your best
and showing what you're capable of people very quickly see that everyone's equal and everyone
has ideas to contribute. Everyone's in there trying to achieve the same goals for space.
Why is it important that we have more girls and young women in STEM?
It's so important to get more young women into STEM subjects and jobs
because STEM is for everyone. We need all sorts of creativity and thought
in order to solve all the problems that we need to solve through space.
I actually have one more question. Do you believe in aliens?
I absolutely believe in aliens! There's so many stars in the sky. The probability
of there being life out there is so huge. But you know, whales are intelligent life,
we couldn't communicate with them if they're around another star,
so how do we actually make contact? I think, what do they look like? They probably look
like little bacteria. I'm not really sure. But I think it would be really wonderful to discover
life elsewhere in our solar system because that helps us understand how life was created on Earth.