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NANTICOKE — As the first woman to command the International Space Station, the American who spent the most amount of time in space (665 days) and the oldest American woman in space on her last mission at age 56, U.S. Astronaut Peggy Whitson may be, in many ways, larger than life.
Yet when Greater Nanticoke Area High School students got a rare chance to not only touch but wear one of Whitson’s space suits, even the most petite among them felt cramped.
“It was really tight,” Mahrukh Mahrukh said with a soft voice and bright smile after squeezing into the Russian-made outfit obtained by science and physics teacher Tony Fleury.
Truth is, the Greater Nanticoke Area senior may have been the smallest in that particular class — and Fleury eagerly showed of the suit every period to his students — but she was still taller than Whitson who — according to starsunfolded.com — is about 5 foot, 4 inches.
Even Senior Madalyn Gomelko, who gushed about trying on the same suit in an earlier class Monday and who clearly was even more petite that Mahrukh, said putting on the suit was “pretty cool” but “the feet felt really weird.”
Weird how?
“Compressed.”
Fleury said he was lucky enough to get the suit on loan while attending the National Science Teacher Association national conference in Atlanta last week. He told the students he was honored to be involved in a booth where the suit was propped up on display.
Fleury said American space suits never reach the public outside of a museum where they are behind display cases, but that the Russian suits sometimes are offered to the astronaut after a mission, for a price. He didn’t know how much this one cost, but said he had heard of other astronauts paying $20,000 for a suit.
Whitson, he said, had decided the suit should be made accessible to students in the hopes it would inspire some — particularly women — to consider a career in aerospace, or even in space itself.
He praised Whitson as “the real deal,” and “an astronaut’s astronaut,” a woman born on an Iowa farm who rose to prominence in the rarefied atmosphere of astronauts, in part because those in charge realized she always got the job that needed doing done.
In a brief video Fleury played, Whitson noted she was nine when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and sparked interest in her future career, but it wasn’t until Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983 that the dream seemed possible. Whitson applied to join NASA three years later, but said it took 10 years before she was in.
The suit itself was one piece with the helmet already attached. Only the gloves came off. Mahrukh entered from a large opening in the front of the suit, feet first, then arms, then the headpiece slipped with some difficulty over her taller frame.
While American space suits are pretty sophisticated and complex, Fleury noted the Russian Sokol suit, first introduced in 1973, has an almost overly simplistic inner liner that looks like an oversized balloon, or maybe a bread bag. Once inside, the opening of the liner is tied shut, bunched up and shoved into the thicker outer suit, which in turn is zipped and strapped up.
Fleury passed around the removable gloves, which only a few students dared try on. Noah Krubitzer, 17, laughed at the small fingers, then asked “Who’s the tallest astronaut?”
Fleury didn’t know off hand, but according to quora.com, American Jim Weatherbee is the tallest person to have flown in space, at 6 foot, 4 inches.
And no, the lanky Krubitzer said, he is not considering a career of space wayfaring.
“I want to be a journalist, actually,” he insisted with a grin. Well, then he could just write about other people trying on space suits.
And while Mahrukh offered little but smiles in response to donning the suit, as the class wound down Gomelko offered her own enthusiastic reaction from putting it on earlier.
“It was really life-changing!” the 18-year-old effused. “To get to try on a space suit!”
Life-changing, but so far not career changing. She still plans to go into nursing.
