'Just the beginning': Nicole Mann is the first Indigenous woman astronaut in space

Unreserved52:07Star people

Nicole Mann and NASA made history this past October when Mann became the first Indigenous woman in space. A member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Nicole rocketed into orbit 20 years after Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington became the first Indigenous person in space. She spent 157 days on the International Space Station as the mission commander and conducted research and experiments to prepare for explorations to the moon and Mars. Wilfred Buck is a star Knowledge Keeper from Opaskwayak Cree Nation and he’s on a mission to restore Indigenous knowledge of the universe. This Canada Day, the author of Tipiskawi Kisik: Night Sky Star stories, shares the Cree knowledge of Keewatin over the Winnipeg skyline. But if you think fireworks are the main event? Think again. Wilfred is using new tech to tell ancient stories - drones. Jennifer Howse is an Education Specialist at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory at the University of Calgary, nestled in the Foothills of the Rockies. Jennifer, who is Métis from Alberta, reveals the night skies to young people - as a way to reveal their connection to the stars. Using a giant telescope, she shows them bright stars and distant planets that some have never seen before. Connecting youth to the constellations helps her teach them about the impacts of light pollution.

Nicole Mann, a U.S. Marine colonel and test pilot, became the first Indigenous woman in space, when she rocketed into orbit last October with SpaceX.

She is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and spent 157 days aboard the International Space Station as commander of SpaceX Crew-5.

She conducted two space walks and also connected with schools around the United States while in orbit to speak with students about the wonders of space. 

Rosanna Deerchild, host of Unreserved, spoke with Mann about her mission to the International Space Station, what life was like on board and what she hopes for the future of our planet. 

So take us to your floating laboratory. You spent five months there. What was that like?

It was just incredible living and working on board the International Space Station. Not only are we doing some incredible science on board and maintenance upgrades to the space station, but it is so much fun just floating around in space.

If you've ever had a dream when you were a kid that you were flying or floating, It feels just like that. It really does.

I can't even imagine. Can you walk us through a couple of the kinds of experiments you did? 

Absolutely. A couple of my favourites are the BioFabrication Facility or BFF. And this is where we are literally 3D printing human cells in space. It sounds like a Star Trek type situation, right? But this is the reality now.

It's because we're in microgravity, this laboratory. We can print the cells and they will grow and their structure will be more accurate than they would if you were printing them on Earth. Because of the gradient of gravity, you don't have any of this in space. And so right now they're printing 3D human cells and they've printed a human meniscus for the knee. 

The concept is, in the future perhaps we can print a patch for your heart. So if you had a heart attack, you know that muscle will not heal completely and so you could patch the heart or we could at some point maybe print 3D organs and fly those back to earth where they could be transplanted. So there's that side of it. 

And we got to grow plants on board too. We grow dwarf tomatoes. It was incredible to smell the soil and to smell the plants because the smell on the station is a very sterile environment. It smells very metallic, like a hospital with some cleaning solutions that we use. So It was really amazing to smell plant life and see these beautiful little red tomatoes.

How does doing those kinds of experiments in space help us to prepare for future exploration?

We're trying to develop ways that we can sustain humans deeper into space, so perhaps when we have a sustained presence on the lunar surface or this journey to Mars, we could grow tomatoes. We also grew yogurt and fermented and grew yeast to try to develop ways we could be self-sufficient in our food and nutrients.

So if we can grow some of our food on these long missions that will provide nutrients for our body, but there's also the psychological aspect of growing plants and kind of still being connected with your home planet while you're on a deep space exploration.

Did you have time for fun things? For example, I heard you did some space selfies. 

I did take some space selfies on the second space walk. On the first one it was just so new. I was so focused on just getting everything done, I didn't really take a moment to just reflect and just pause. So I was really intentional about that [second space walk]. I wanted to take photos and I wanted to pause for 30 seconds and just look around.

I'm literally climbing outside the space station holding on with one hand floating over the planet. And I wanted to just live in that moment and just reflect on the incredible things that we've done, just all the training and the thousands of people on planet Earth that were supporting us in this mission. 

How did it feel knowing you're the first Native American woman in space?

When I became a marine, I didn't want to be a female marine. I just wanted to be a marine. I didn't want to be a Native American engineer or astronaut. I just wanted to be an engineer and an astronaut.

But as you actually take time to widen your perspective and think about the importance of us celebrating the firsts, it's important that we reach out to the communities that maybe have never been exposed to space flight before. 

I realized on board how important that is. I had some chances to talk to some kids on reservations, some kids that didn't realize we have an International Space Station and astronauts are living on board and one of them happens to be a Native American.

Maybe that will inspire a young child to think maybe that's something they can do. I see that as a really important responsibility.

You brought a dreamcatcher with you to the International Space Station that your mom had given you when you were young. Why was it so important for you to bring along? 

That was really important for me because it was a piece of home and a piece of my childhood.

When I was young, I had a lot of nightmares and bad dreams and I remember my mom giving me a dreamcatcher. She explained that the dreams will come in and the bad dreams will be caught into the web, but that the good dreams will come down to the feathers and go into your brain.

That was a type of visualization that really helped me when I was a child, and I still think it helps me to this day. It floated in my crew quarters and in my little room, a constant reminder of my family back on planet Earth and all the people, all the love and all the support.

What sort of things did you think about when you were looking at earth from the ISS? 

As you look from the blackness of space down to the planet Earth, you could start to pick up these colours and they're so dramatic and they're changing so quickly. You can see this thin line that goes around our planet and that's our atmosphere.

It's incredible to think how that's the only thing that is keeping all humans on planet Earth alive and safe from the vacuum of space. And so you see this incredible planet and all its beauty and its majesty, but then you also have this incredible feeling of fragility.

It's so important that we realize this and take care of our planet, it's the only one we have. Seeing Earth from space gives you this amazing perspective and appreciation for what we have. 

That first glimpse of the planet from space was so powerful. As you look down, you don't see any borders or boundaries, you don't see divisions of countries or states, you see humankind all coming together.