After more than half a century, at the end of next year, mugwort 2 It will bring humans closer to the Moon again. Among the four crew members, she will be the first astronaut to complete that mission: Christina Hamaca Kochphysics and electrical engineering born in Michigan 44 years ago.
The first manned test of the Orion space capsule and the SLS rocket is aimed at travel to the moon, orbit it and return to Earth in ten days. The testing of all the equipment will be a decisive step for Artemis 3, which at the end of 2025 should carry out on the lunar surface, also for the first time in history, a woman and a non-white person. The project seeks to establish inhabited colonies, a step prior to the conquest of Mars.
She is Christina Koch, the first woman to orbit the Moon
Koch will occupy the position of specialist, focusing on everything working as it should on the ship. She has experience to spare: she is the woman who has spent the longest time in space (328 days on the International Station) and she has taken six spacewalks, with a total duration of 42 hours and 15 minutes.
Raised in a time when astronauts were exclusively white males, Koch was lucky. When she told in the garden that she wanted to go into space, her teachers supported her. “Nobody told me that it was something unattainable -remembered in one interview scam The country-. Whether it was because of that support or because of my own stubbornness, I threw myself fully into fulfilling my dream.”
The list of inspiring would grow: Sally’s Ridethe first American female astronaut (in 1983) and mae jemisonthe first black astronaut to travel to space (1992), but also civil rights activists and especially her own grandmother, who “basically ran an entire farm by herself and went to university against the will of her own father.”
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After graduating, Koch contributed to the development of scientific instruments on various space missions, he suffered an entire year at the Amundsen-Scott Antarctic base (the southernmost place on the planet) and did field work in more remote places, from Greenland to American Samoa.
A decade ago, she became one of eight members of the 21st class of astronauts in the POTalso historical for having selected the same number of men as women. In line with that milestone, Artemis 2 will be the most diverse mission in lunar history Of the entity. There will not only be one woman (35% of the staff of the agency is female) but also an African-American, the pilot Victor Glover (less than 12% are black).
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Ready to come full circle, she herself is becoming an inspiration in her own right. “Do what scares you,” she alienates her. “Very often, the things that catch our eye, but we think are out of reach, are exactly what we should.”
JL
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