- Hi, Jack.
We're in here having dinner,
and mommy was gonna show you again what I'm having tonight.
Tonight, I am having some tomatoes and artichokes.
Mm.
Hi there Jack.
The sun is just coming up here at the Space Station.
Pretty cool, huh buddy?
George was watching with me too.
We like to watch the sunrise.
I miss you sweetheart, and I love you.
I love you sweetheart, I miss you.
I love you guys.
Watch this, momma can fly like a superhero.
Whee!
I'm Karen Nyberg and I was an astronaut for 20 years.
I flew my first space flight in 2008 on Spatial Discovery,
and it was only a two week mission,
and that was before I was married with a child.
And then I flew my second time in 2013,
and lived on the International Space Station
for almost six months.
My son was six months old
when I was assigned to the mission,
and then I trained for two and a half years,
so he was three years when I flew.
It's almost ready.
You're gonna eat dinner with your headphones in?
- [Jack] Maybe.
- Go get dinner.
So pretty much from the time we started dating,
we've been going nonstop.
Doug flew in 2009, and then we had Jack in 2010,
and then he flew in 2011.
- We got married in there too.
Yeah, that's right.
That's a--
- You can't imagine how difficult
for a mother to leave, you know,
a child that's three years old.
You know, with Jack he's such a good kid.
At about the six week period after she had launched,
he looked at me and he said, "when's mommy coming home?"
And I'm like, "alright buddy".
This one's gonna be a little longer.
- And I made sure that he met my crewmate,
so he knew, you know, who I was living with.
We'd go outside and show him the Space Station,
go over and say that's where mommy's going to live.
- Karen sent a video down every night.
The one I think he really loved,
we have this huge storage bags on Space Station.
- Peekaboo.
- They zipped her in this giant storage bag,
and then she popped out of it.
I think he really related to that.
- Hello Jack.
Can you believe mommy fits in that bag?
I love you sweetheart, I miss you.
Yeah, so I landed in Kazakhstan
and came back on a NASA airplane
to Ellington Field in Houston.
And they let the families onboard the airplane first,
before we got off,
and my husband came down the aisle and my son,
and when he first looked at me
I could tell that he was trying to process
because he had been only seeing me
over a video for six months.
And so there was kind of this, is that really mommy?
And then of course the big hugs and the reunion.
The hardest part, which I did prepare myself for,
was when I came back,
that he would not want to come to me immediately.
The first night he didn't want me to put him to bed,
and it was really hard,
but I had mentally prepared for that, so that was helpful.
- Having astronaut parents is kind of surreal.
It's cool, but I don't really think about it too often.
- If you could go to any planet in the solar system,
which one would you choose?
- Probably like Neptune.
- Why Neptune?
- Well, I mean I kinda wanna go to all of them.
- [Karen] So do you think there's life
anywhere other than on earth?
- [Jack] Yeah.
- [Karen] When I first decided
that I wanted to be an astronaut,
I was eight or nine years old.
And at that same time in 1978,
NASA had selected the first class with female astronauts,
and Anna Fisher was one of those.
It never seemed like I can't do that because I'm a girl,
and I think seeing those first women do it
was so inspirational and motivating.
- My name is Dr. Anna Fisher.
I'm a mission specialist astronaut.
I was selected in the first group of women
for the space shuttle program in January of 1978.
In becoming an astronaut,
I was never at all trying to break barriers,
that wasn't what I was thinking about.
I was just thinking about this dream that I'd had
since I was 12 years old, and that's what I wanted to do.
I think women always felt a little more pressured.
People were just watching you more carefully
or just more curious.
Well just in general,
when I look at how the internet works now,
and look back at first
when the first six of us were selected,
I can only imagine what kind of comments
there would have been,
and I'm so glad we didn't have to deal with that.
And then of course, when I flew as the first mom,
I mean I got lots of questions from the press,
both favorable and unfavorable.
You know, saying how could you leave your daughter,
and that sort of stuff.
And I just cannot imagine what it would have been like,
not only deal with your own feelings
about what you were doing,
but other peoples' judgment about what you were doing.
It would've just made it so much more difficult.
I made the decision to not tell them I was pregnant
until I absolutely had to.
I wanted to minimize the time
that anyone thought of me as different,
and so I had to do a lot of things.
Like we had an emergency egress drill
where we had to demonstrate
we could pull a big 200 pound man out of a shuttle.
I did all those things while I was pregnant,
without telling anyone,
so that the responsibility
was solely my decision, not NASA's.
So by that time there was only about another four months
before Kristin was born.
My boss called me in and asked,
and said he was thinking of assigning me to a flight,
and how did I feel about it.
You know, I was eight months pregnant
when he called me in,
and I said it's what I've always wanted, I can do it,
so yes, I would love to do that.
And so I had Kristin on Friday
July 29th, 1983, on a Friday.
Monday, I was in at the Monday morning
eight o'clock meeting that we had.
Not because I was trying to be
some kind of Superwoman or anything,
but I just wanted particularly all my male colleagues
to know that just because I had a baby,
that I was very committed,
and I was going to honor my commitment to my flight.
- So my entire life I've had
two passions that I've followed.
And one of them of course was space,
because that's what I ended up going with my career.
But I also was into art and creating things.
Now what I'm trying to do
is take kind of the experiences I've had,
and what I've done in space,
and transition that into art pieces.
We're coming out with a line
using photos I took from space as inspiration,
turning those into a quilting fabric.
I'm working with a company called Svaha
that makes STEM inspired clothing,
mostly for women and girls.
We do often put little girls and little boys in a box
of what they should be interested in.
I did a design for them,
which I'm pretty excited about
because I decided to go with dinosaurs in space.
What I like about this design is space,
which is really open to everybody,
and it should be open to everybody
because we're all the same
small little part of this universe.
You know, there really is no reason
why dinosaurs should be for boys.
And so just putting the two together,
I think hopefully will inspire the little girls
that like both of those, you know,
that I can like this too, and it's okay.
Knowing I would have some downtime on Space Station
since I'm living there,
I brought a little bit of fabric with me,
and I wanted to spend some time sewing.
One day I had a Sunday where I had no work to do.
I had been collecting this fabric
that lines the Russian food containers,
so I decided to make a dinosaur
for my son who loved dinosaurs.
And so I spent that day.
I drew a pattern, and I cut it out,
and I sewed it together
with the little bit of thread I had
and some needles that I had brought.
And then I cut up an old tee shirt that I was done wearing
that was going to be thrown away
and stuffed it with it that, and he still has it today.
- This is a toy dinosaur
that my mom made on the Space Station.
It is the first toy made in space.
It was made for me, and I keep it up.
It's really cool.
- The best part of motherhood I think,
is it's just simple times like this.
When I was in space,
the stuff that I really craved
was just having breakfast with the family,
reading to Jack, and I really miss those things,
and that part of it.
I think it's been pretty amazing to watch a child develop
and just you know, every phase of his life,
and just the new things he learned,
and the new things he knew.
It's just been really amazing
to see all the phases of their lives as they get older.