For me, I'd say being an astronaut is the culmination of a lifelong dream.
I grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, where the sky was very clear with stars, and I love looking up at the sky, and when I learned that, you know, stars weren't just pinpricks of light, but could be entire galaxies or planets, other worlds, that just expanded my, my whole scale of the universe in my child's mind.
Being selected as Australia's first astronaut candidate I would consider to be my greatest career achievement - it's an absolute thrill.
Part of the driving force is wanting to help create concrete steps forward in human knowledge and discovery. I think I was drawn to space for the adventure and the exploration, and that still really excites me, but as I've developed my career in the field, I've also learned to really enjoy it and value it for the scientific discoveries it creates.
In space you have labs where you can do really ground-breaking medical research, or develop new materials, or processes that help us with sustainable systems. You know, space is an eye in the sky from which you can see all these phenomena around the world, and help contribute to global challenges like climate change. What originally motivated me was a sense of adventure and wanting to leave a legacy, and then as I grew up, it was about that contributing back through the use of space.
Throughout my whole career, I've almost always been in the minority as a woman. It hasn't held me back at all. That being said, in space there is a diversity challenge, like there is in most STEM fields in
Australia. Only 27 per cent of the STEM workforce today are women. Less than 10 per cent of astronauts globally to date have been women. And that's a problem beyond the individual level. It's a problem at the societal level, because in order to progress and achieve new breakthroughs as a nation, as a world, we need to have diverse thought and creativity, and that comes through having more representation. The exciting thing is that the landscape for having a space career in Australia is broadening rapidly.
The other day we got our blue flight suits, and I had an Australian flag patch on mine, and it was quite emotional because, you know, even seeing that, and knowing that this opportunity could accelerate opportunities for other Australians to be involved in human spaceflight... I could retire happily.
In space, astronauts feel the overview effect, which is where they look back at the Earth and realise we are one humanity. At night, they look into the light that bends around the horizon, a thin blue line of air within which all life as we know it has existed, all of humanity has developed, where all of life's events and problems and excitements are all happening right now, and they are overwhelmed by how fragile this world really is. Life feels fleeting, yet this perspective also fills them with a sense of boundless possibility. Astronauts return to Earth compelled to protect it, to understand it, to nurture it, and we - all of us - have our part to play in this.
