Crew-13

Lea Cheshire (0:00)

Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 438, crew 13

I'm Lea Cheshire, and I'll be one of your hosts today. Later, I'll be joined by hosts, Nolifar Ramji and Joseph Zakrzewski. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, also let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.

Four spacefarers are preparing to launch to the International Space Station as NASA's SpaceX crew 13 mission, continuing the over 25 years of continuous human presence, living and working aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Tetriotnikov have completed their training and are ready for liftoff aboard SpaceX's Dragon, named Grace, atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once they arrive at the space station, they'll integrate with the rest of the Expedition 75 crew members for an approximately six-month mission. We talked to all four crew members about their journey to becoming an astronaut, their expectations for the mission, and why the work they'll do aboard the space station is so important.

Nolifar Ramji (1:02)

Let's go.

Joshua Kutryk (1:19)

Houston, We Have a Podcast.

Lea Cheshire (1:24)

NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins was selected as an astronaut candidate in 2017 and is the commander of NASA's SpaceX Crew 13 mission. Watkins grew up in Lafayette, Colorado, and earned an undergraduate degree in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University, as well as a doctorate in Geology from the University of California, Los Angeles. As a geologist, she studied the Martian surface and was a member of the Curiosity Rover Science Team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. This is her second flight to the space station, having previously flown aboard NASA's SpaceX Crew 4 mission, spending a total of 170 days in space across space station expeditions 67 and 68 in 2022 She will be the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft twice. Here's my conversation with Jessica Watkins.

Jessica, welcome back to Houston We Have a Podcast.

Jessica Watkins (2:15)

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Lea Cheshire (2:16)

I'm super excited to see you going back to space. This time as the commander for Crew 13, heading to the International Space Station in about six months. That's right. That's right.

Jessica Watkins (2:24)

Yes, thank you.

Lea Cheshire (2:25)

Before we get into what's coming up, let's talk about you and your backstory a little bit. So where did you grow up and what inspired you to be an astronaut?

Jessica Watkins (2:36)

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, right at the foothills of the Flatirons, which I think I took with me later in life, which maybe we can get to.

But really what inspired me to be first be an astronaut, I was actually born in Maryland. And while I was there, I attended an after school enrichment program, and it was at the Judy Resnick Elementary School. And so I remember asking my parents who she was and what she did. And that was kind of the first time that I had heard about this idea of going to space and that you could do it as a career. And so that was kind of the first time that I kind of set my sights on that.

Lea Cheshire (3:16)

That is so cool. Number one, I'm very jealous that you grew up in Boulder. But getting to, I don't know, when something like that is named, you never think about the true impact that it really might inspire someone who goes to school there. So that is so sweet. I love that.

So it seems like really from that moment, you knew that you wanted to pursue human space life. Was there ever anything else that you were semi-interested in? Or were you just blinders on to everything else, dead set on this path?

Jessica Watkins (3:45)

Yeah, no, I mean, I think from that moment, it became a kind of far off dream that was always in the back of my head, but not anything that honestly, I really ever thought would actually happen. And so along the way, I had lots of other ideas about what would I do with my life.

And so really for me, what ended up happening was I fell in love with geology and the ability to research and explore the surfaces of other planets in particular, in addition to our own, but especially the idea of being able to explore Mars was really exciting for me. And so I really fell in love with the idea of being able to use our orbiters and rovers and collect data on the surface of Mars in particular, and be able to understand more about the history of Mars, but also learn more about the geologic history of Earth in the process as well. And so that is really what I thought that I would be doing for the rest of my life until I got the phone call to come here.