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Annie Handmer

What got you interested in the space industry? Did you always have this interest in STEM, or is that something that evolved over time?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

For me, becoming an astronaut is truly the culmination of a childhood dream come true. When I was young, I grew up at Curl Curl, not too far from here on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, and I used to love looking up at the beautiful clear sky.

In Australia, we're blessed with a wonderful view of the heavens above us. And when my mum, who had also studied physics, was able to explain to me that some of those stars that were twinkling weren't stars, but they were planets, and they were planets that no human eyes had ever, you know, seen up close before, I wanted, you know, to be the one that got to explore them too.

I was very young, early junior school, and that sense of curiosity and drive is common in so many Australian kids, I think because we live amongst nature, even in our cities, compared to many other developed countries around the world.

And, as I grew up, that, you know, that desire for adventure, that feeling to look under every rock, wanting to climb every tree, that sense of all you get when you look out at a horizon, that grew into wanting to be an astronaut because if you add adventure and exploration and curiosity, that just pops out at you. This is the best way you could, you know, live your life.

And when I got to high school, in Year 8. Are many kids here in Year 8? Not here. Maybe online. When I was in Year 8, I was asked by my school in our first careers counselling session, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and we had to put down three options. And I only put down one, astronaut, because that was the only thing that I wanted to be.

And instead of, you know, laughing at me or patronising me, my school and my parents instead said, ‘Well go and figure out what that might take.’ And what I learned was that, you know, to be an astronaut, you can be a scientist, you can be an engineer, you can be a pilot, you can be a doctor, so you should pursue whichever of those that interest you, and you should enjoy, you know, sports and expeditions, and all of that sounded fantastic.

So, I really got interested in science and discovery then. So, my interest evolved from adventure to wanting to be part of concrete steps forward. And that's why I applied to study science and engineering at university even though I didn't entirely know what engineering was. It's because it had the word space in the title. And so I'm an example of someone, there are many out there, who were drawn to a STEM career that they love because they love space.

[End of transcript]

Annie Handmer

My question for you is about the training that you went through. It sounds to me to be really mentally and physically challenging as well. So, can you talk us through some of those challenges, what's it actually like, and how did you overcome those?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

Yeah, so the training was very intense and very challenging, but also really fulfilling and I think worthwhile.

[Video of centrifuge spinning]

So, to speak to what you saw there, that was a centrifuge where we were spun up to 6g, so you become six times your own weight, to go through what it feels like from a g-force perspective when you go through a launch and a re-entry. So, that's just one example of how we are trained to become used to the extreme environment that you experience when you go to space to go up there and do good work and do good science that you can't do on Earth.

The training itself though is quite incredible. So, when you are selected to become an astronaut, which, for me, was at the end of a year and a half long intensive selection process, it was an adventure in itself. You can't call yourself an astronaut right away. You can call yourself an astronaut candidate, or ASCAN. And first you have to do what's called basic astronaut training, which, for me, it was 13 months. You do it with a class. My class was called the Hoppers - it's the patch on my right shoulder. And when you pass that training, hopefully pass that training, then you can call yourself an astronaut.

It's then that you can be ready for mission assignment to the International Space Station, or even beyond to the moon. And the curriculum for that training was determined by all of the different countries involved in the International Space Station. So, that's basically all of the human spaceflight nations today, except for China. So, the U.S., Canada, Japan, 22 European member states, and Russia. And that curriculum is common wherever basic astronaut training is delivered.

And it's about getting all of those different STEM professionals, whether we are doctors or engineers or scientists or pilots, up to the same common baseline of knowledge. And astronauts today are no longer just test pilots and pilot and alpha personality profiles. We have to go up to space and get along together in a bunch of caravans, in effect bolted together, and do good science and get along. So, we have to be all-rounders.

[Video footage of astronaut candidates undertaking various types of training]

So, the training covers science, because we are scientists in the sky. We're the hands, the eyes, the ears of the scientists from our country on Earth that have worked for decades, in some cases, to develop their important and unique research. And we learn all kinds of science, you can imagine, because every kind of science can be applied to space.

We learn about medicine because we not only have to be able to do first aid up there, things like CPR by doing a handstand on the patient, but we also have to be able to take medical samples of ourselves and our crew mates to look at how when our bodies degrade from bones and muscles, what can we learn that can help us with issues like osteoporosis and others on Earth? We learn the operational aspects, like the centrifuge, to learn how to work in space. We do scuba diving underwater, we learn to fly the robotic arm.

And what many don't realise is that beyond also winter and ocean survival expeditions and things like that, we learn humanities. We learn about space and culture, we learn about space strategies. We have to learn Russian, because part of the space station is Russian. And for me, that was the hardest part. Foreign languages are not my forte, and I really had to put in a lot of extra effort right from the beginning to get through that part of the course. And I came out fine on the other side. And it was a big relief, but it really demonstrated to me how important our effort is versus talent, even on astronaut training.

So yeah, it's been very challenging from that perspective. I'd say that in addition to the Russian, the other most challenging part was learning to pace myself. We had 323 instructors in 13 months, and every one of them is a world expert in their field and fantastic at the ability to teach us and to learn, to stop asking questions and, you know, put the pen down for the day, or for that lesson, to have energy for the next was really important.

Annie Handmer

Can I just circle back to that bit where you said you did a handstand on someone to give them CPR? It's not on my list of questions, but I've got to ask, is that, like, what's that about? How do you do that? Why do you do that?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

So, we learn to get around and live in microgravity as best we can on Earth in two ways. The first is scuba diving. So, in water you have buoyancy, so you have some effects of weightlessness, but inside the suit, you know, you're heavy. So, if you're upside down, all your weight's on your shoulders. And water's heavy, so your movements are slowed down.

[Video of astronaut candidates on a Zero-G plane]

So, we have to complement that by going in Zero-G planes, or 'Vomit Comets' they're also called, but there was no vomit in my plane's case that I saw, thankfully. And in there you really learn that it's hard to be controlled in microgravity.

With the touch of your pinkie, you can fly to the other side of the environment. So, in these planes, they are like a normal airline and with all the seats removed at the front. Lots and lots of padding. And for 22 seconds at a time, you experience what it's like to be in microgravity. And the first urge you get is to swim. That it's really bizarre, you want to kick and you've been told in your brief, ‘do not kick, because someone's face might be near your foot,’ and you have to consciously control it.

And one of the things we learned on that was how to do CPR. If you do CPR in the normal way in space, you just push yourself off the person and fly up to the roof. There's no counter force. So, you do a handstand on their chest and put your feet on the roof and do squats is how you do it. We also learned how to use tools up there. Like, if you use a drill and you don't hold on yourself, you will spin as well as the drill. And it's not very productive and looks really silly to everyone watching from home.

[End of transcript]

Annie Handmer

I wanted to talk to you about how did you train for mindset and how have you prepared yourself for those moments that really matter, that matter most in space, but specifically your attitude, your mental fortitude, and the ability to make the most of that experience when it comes for you.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

Yeah, so John Young, a NASA astronaut, said something back in the 80's like, ‘If you're sitting on top of a rocket that's about to be lit and you're not feeling a bit nervous, you don't understand the situation.’ So, every astronaut, of course, feels a little bit nervous in the lead up to launch. We're all human. But we train really well to know what to expect. And we're also selected well for having the right human behaviour and performance as well.

As part of astronaut selection, psychology and the right personality profile formed a huge part of it. So, I was told during our psychology lessons on the training afterwards that they look for people that can be flexible, meaning no extremes of personality type, people that, you know, don't jump to conflict or to taking blame when it's not theirs to take, and also that can make the best of any situation, whether that be an uncertain situation, a good situation, or a bad situation, and get the job done. And that's something that was furthered in our training and continues to be developed as far as possible through an astronaut's career.

On the training, we did what's called human behaviour and performance training, HBP. There's actually an International Space Station HBP model. You can find it on Google. It's very interesting reading for anyone that wants to learn to work well in a team or a complex environment. And the principles they taught us there were really interesting.

One of them that was really important for me was self-care. You know, often in a job that we care about, people burn the candle at both ends, we work too hard. But that's not how you work well. You know, in an uncertain situation, particularly a stressful situation, you need to make sure that you're rested enough to work, not worked enough to think you deserve rest. And as part of that, that's something that's been learned over time in space.

So, one example one of the other astronauts gave me was that in his crew on the space station, one of the astronauts didn't, you know, put his pen down at the end of the workday. He kept working for a couple more hours, and that meant that everyone else felt like, ‘Well, ooh, maybe we should be working too.’ And in the end, it created a lot of resentment and that person eventually had to take some time off in space and it wasn't good for crew cohesion and it didn't bring the best outcome.

So, one of the things astronauts are trained on is to pursue excellence rather than perfection. A lot of people don't know the difference, but perfection is when you can't do anything wrong, every box has to be ticked. Excellence is about that pursuit of high performance and the journey and problem-solving to get there is something that you can enjoy and not be in fear of or not, you know, a lot of people get caught up if they feel like they have to be perfect.

So, that was really interesting. And we honed that skills not just from the theory, but by putting into practice in our expeditions.

[Video footage of astronaut candidates doing winter survival]

So, we did winter survival when we were out, you know, left alone in the forest in freezing conditions and had to learn, you know, how do we behave when we're out of our comfort zone, to learn about that and then to improve it.

[Video footage of astronaut candidates doing ocean survival]

We did ocean survival as well, which I quite enjoyed because it built on surf lifesaving, and it was quite a warm day. But that also did that for many people. So, it's an important thing to consider.

It's one reason why in Australia, our Australian Antarctic Division is part of the research that goes into human behaviour and performance in space because our expeditioners down there, particularly our winter expeditioners, are in isolated, confined, challenging environments as well. So, we can learn from each other, astronauts and Antarctic expeditioners, and we do.

[End of transcript]

Annie Handmer

What can you share about the scientific research that's currently happening on the ISS that could help us build a better, brighter, more sustainable future here on Earth?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

I love those questions, Annie, because I think that it frees people and gives them, you know, the personal permission to think outside the box, which is something that we often need to remind ourselves to do. In space, you are definitely outside the box. So, Rebecca spoke to it beautifully at the beginning about the many different wonders that there are in space.

[Video shows Earth views from the International Space Station, NASA]

And what we can achieve through space. Space ultimately is, you know, an eye in the sky from which we can see phenomenon around the world. We can see bush fires, we can see floods, we can see industry, we can see traces of people moving around the world to detect issues like modern slavery through looking at brick kilns in certain areas for example.

What we can see from space, we can connect with information, and what we can connect we can inform with information like timing data, which is used in our ATMs, and map data, which is used in our phones or by the tractors that Australians use in remote agricultural areas. But it's also a place to do science.

[Video footage taken inside the International Space Station]

On the International Space Station, the breadth of science and technological research you can do blew me away every day on the astronaut training. I'd worked in space for almost 15 years and I had no idea of what can be done up there.

The International Space Station is huge. It's 109 metres across, which is almost the size of an Australian soccer field. And the internal volume that has air in it is about the same as a passenger part of an A380, or a five bedroom house.

It's got a gym, it's got two galleys where you can eat. It's got two toilets. It's got a beautiful window from which you can look out and it is filled with scientific experiment facilities.

So, basically what we do up there is unique. And it's unique because the gravity vector is removed. All life on Earth, all life as we know it evolved on Earth and it evolved under gravity, 1g of gravity specifically.

And when we go to space, we can decouple variables in the experiment. Perhaps some of you have learned about experiment variables. We can see, you know, things like how cancer metabolism works more clearly because it's affected by gravity. We can look at things like plant growth to help us understand how we can develop more sustainable crop yields. We can look at processes in the human body.

I spoke to how astronauts and medical test subjects in space, because your body's not loaded, your bones degrade at 6 to 7 times the rate of a post-menopausal woman who's not medicated if you don't have countermeasures, which means that astronauts are used a lot for research into osteoporosis.

Also immunology actually because your immune system changes. But coming back to the gravity vector on processes, you know, with crystals, crystals in space grow much, much larger and more pure. And there's two main types of crystals. One is proteins like the ones in the body.

So, we can use that to look more closely through microscopes at protein related diseases. Things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are investigated in space. And the other type of crystal is that that comes from metals. So, we can look at creating new kinds of metal alloys and understand them better in space to inform processes on Earth.

We've had one of my astronaut colleagues, he helped to make new kind of concrete mix that emits less carbon dioxide, which is one of the greatest inputs into climate change on Earth. And there's just so much, I could go on and on, but you know, from up there, I think that one thing that's really important to me is that astronauts have a huge role in talking about how precious our planet is when they come home.

A lot of astronauts have experienced what's called the overview effect. When they look back at the Earth and they see, you know, a thin blue line that is our atmosphere. They see no borders between countries. They see, you know, bushfire smoke spread around the world, pollution plumes do the same. And they communicate that through photos and through the messages when they come home. So that goes hand in hand with the research that's done up there too.

[End of transcript]