Peggy Whitson is heavy.
Or more precisely, “very, very, very heavy,” as she puts it when I ask how it feels to be home. This is hardly your average “Did you have a good trip?” chat. Whitson has been traveling for 288 days—not around the world, not even to the ends of the earth, but off the planet entirely. In orbit, to be exact. And she’s not so happy to be home.
“After floating for nine and a half months in space, gravity is not your friend,” the astronaut says with a laugh. “Send me back!”
For now she’ll have to enjoy the pizza and flush toilets, two of the things she did miss in space (“Trust me, you don’t want to know the details,” she says), and rest on her laurels, which are many. Known for being exacting, hardworking, and infectiously positive, Whitson has blasted through records with abandon: most spacewalks by a female astronaut (10); at 57, the oldest woman in orbit (“Not a goal I was ever shooting for,” she jokes); first female chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office; first woman to command the International Space Station (she’s done it twice). And with her latest mission, which touched down in September, she has set a new record: 665 cumulative days in space—more than any American astronaut, male or female, young or old.
As a science geek who has interviewed trailblazing women in STEM, even I am awestruck. “How would you describe your bio?” I ask her.
She pauses. “Peggy Whitson: astronaut.” (Extreme modesty is something else she’s known for.)
There was a time when Whitson never imagined she’d be able to say those words. As a nine-year-old on a farm outside Beaconsfield, Iowa, she was spellbound by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong as they walked on the moon, but her dream of being up there with them only became a tangible goal in 1978, the year NASA accepted its first class of female astronauts. “Luckily I had no idea how hard it would be to get selected,” she says. Whitson had just graduated from high school, but she set her sights on NASA, eventually earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry and landing a position at the space agency as a research associate in 1986. She immediately applied to the astronaut program and got rejected. So she applied again—and again, every time there was a class. It took 10 years and five attempts before she finally got the nod to show up for training.
Even then, it wasn’t until 2002 that she got to lift off on the shuttle Endeavour, for a six-month stay on the International Space Station. “The first time I went into space was just so much more than you could imagine or prepare yourself for,” she says. “Zero gravity is such an alien environment—completely different from everything we’ve grown up with every single day of our lives. And it’s incomprehensible how much better it was than I anticipated it would be.” Even more mind-blowing was her first spacewalk (or EVA in NASA lingo, for “extravehicular activity”). It may look as if astronauts are floating as easily as helium balloons, but EVAs are actually the most physically demanding task they face, since they must use massive upper-body strength to “walk” by climbing hand over hand and operate tools through bulky, pressurized space suit gloves. (Whitson, by the way, has the most impressive arms I have ever seen, thanks to two hours of resistance training a day. “After one of Peggy’s workouts,” astronaut Anne McClain, 38, told me, “everybody is just lying on the floor, smoked.” It’s partly why her colleagues call her the American Space Ninja.)
The work is worth it: “Walking in space is absolutely the most exhilarating part of a mission,” says Whitson. “The view is just incredible. Being out there above the earth, I always think how delicate it looks. It gives me a fantastic appreciation of how this planet is one and we need to take care of it.”
The thrill of that view never fades. Nor does, she insists, the joy of living for months at a time on the space station with two to five other crew members (in her case, all male) on a limited prepackaged diet. To boost team spirit on her various missions, Whitson did things like host Friday-night movies (Passengers, Life, Star Trek—you get the theme) and request space burgers to be sent in her regular care package from NASA (though they still have to be dehydrated to make the trip; “it’s all about the sauce,” she explains). Her fellow astronauts are like family to her, but that doesn’t begin to capture how intensely the crew relies on one another to carry out incredibly complex and dangerous work. “On a six-month mission, it’s not if you make a mistake; it’s how you handle it,” she says. “What did you learn from it? How do you communicate it so other people won’t make the same mistake? How can you use it to make yourself or your team better?”
Most of all, Whitson loves the science she does on each mission. On this latest stay at the space station, she grew different types of stem cells in zero gravity, an experiment that could lead to cancer therapies, and studied how fuels burn in space (to one day enable trips to Mars); not the least exciting was getting to eat some of the Chinese cabbage crop she harvested with the goal of learning how to cultivate food on other planets.
Landing on earth this fall, Whitson finally got to reunite with her husband of 28 years, Clarence F. Sams, a NASA scientist, in Houston. Still, her homecoming has been bittersweet: She will probably never command another space flight. Without the earth’s protective atmosphere, astronauts are exposed to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, and Whitson has likely reached her safe limit. But if she can’t go back into orbit, she’s passionate about sending other women up. “Peggy makes you feel like you can do anything,” says McClain, who was in the 2013 astronaut class Whitson helped select. “When she first came into the [astronaut office], gender was a big part of the conversation. When I walked in, I was just expected to perform like everybody else. She took that gender conversation off the table. It’s a fantastic legacy.”
Astronaut Sunita Williams, who has also commanded an expedition, agrees. “Peggy is the leader of the space station; she’s respected by the space agencies all over the world; she’s the go-to person in an emergency,” she says. “That opens the door for people to realize women can lead, we can make critical decisions, we can take command.”
Roger that.
Gillian Jacobs stars in Netflix’s Love and directed the documentary The Queen of Code.
All photos: Courtesy of NASA
