In the News

NASA astronaut Stephanie D. Wilson and her crewmates completed this week 18 months of training ahead of the planned August launch to the International Space Station.

For Wilson, the pathway to orbit really began in Pittsfield. As a student at what was then Crosby Junior High School, she interviewed a Williams College astronomer for her career day project.

“I was really fascinated by his work,” Wilson told U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, Friday.

Neal, whose 1st Congressional District includes Wilson’s Pittsfield hometown, asked her about her Berkshire roots in a conference call, Neal in his Springfield office, Wilson at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston and reporters listening in.

“I could not have picked a better place to grow up than Pittsfield, Massachusetts,” said Wilson, born in Boston in 1966 and a 1984 Taconic High School graduate. “It was a wonderful sense of community.”

She went on to Harvard and earned her doctorate at The University of Texas. It’s been speculated that Wilson could be the first woman on the moon.

She is NASA’s most senior, most flown-in-space African American female astronaut. She is a veteran of three spaceflights in 2006, 2007 and 2010, having logged 42 days in space.

Neal recalled Alan Shepard’s flight to become the first American to travel to space.

“It was a much more simple undertaking than what you are about to do. But it galvanized America,” Neal said before referring to the moon landing in 1969.

Wilson’s Crew-9 mission, targeted to launch in mid-August, will carry NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague, Wilson and cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos to the orbiting laboratory known as the International Space Station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the crew aboard a Dragon spacecraft from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the company’s ninth crew rotation mission for NASA.

Three more astronauts will follow in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and the crew expects cargo craft.

During Wilson’s mission, she and her crewmates will study neutron stars, cell changes and gene expression during long space flights in microgravity and research predicting wildfires from space.

“It is a wonderful orbiting laboratory that we have the honor of working with our colleagues, or international colleagues,” she said in the news conference.

She told Neal her work will be “To better our lives on earth. And to tell those stories to all who are on earth,” as well as work furthering the NASA lunar and possible Mars missions.

Her early missions helped build the International Space Station. This week, NASA and Space X detailed plans to bring down the ISS, probably in 2031 when it’ll be 32 years old.

It’ll be bittersweet, Wilson said at the news conference.

To Neal, she said she’s looking forward to visiting components she helped build.

“But in ending programs, it also means we are able to extend our work in other programs,” Wilson said.