An ex-NASA astronaut has shared her story about how she persevered in achieving her dream of traveling to space, even though it took almost two decades to materialize. She also predicts that in just five years, affluent space tourists might experience trips similar to those offered by Blue Orbit. 

Joan Higginbotham, 60, residing in Charlotte, North Carolina, made history as the third African American woman to embark on a space mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in December 2006. 

In 2003, she was deeply affected by the tragic incident where seven of her NASA colleagues lost their lives when Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry.

Conversely, the tragedy, she tells the Daily Mail, only made her more determined to achieve her ambition of boarding a space flight.

Recalling that chilling February day, she says: ‘It was devastating. I can remember the day like it happened yesterday. Three of my classmates were on board, which made it more tragic because I was extremely close with them. I knew their family, I knew their kids.’ 

Joan, who’s now an Astronaut Ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, remained unwavering in her commitment to getting to space though, saying: ‘I did not reconsider, that was never a thought in my head.’

She continues: ‘My thought was, let’s figure out why this happened, let’s correct the problem, and let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again. 

‘That was my philosophy. I’m a firm believer that when it’s your time to depart the world, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a space shuttle or if you’re crossing the street.’

When she did make it to space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006, she orbited for 12 days, 20 hours, and 45 minutes, and the electrical engineer says she quickly became accustomed to the routine of life in space.

Joan explains: ‘Every single minute of the day is on a timeline, so you could go to the laptop and see where you are in the day and say, “Oh, I have 30 minutes left for my meal, and at nine o’clock I need to start this particular task.”

‘When you woke up, you had about half an hour for morning hygiene and breakfast, and then your day started.’

Hygiene didn’t involve a shower but a more humble method. ‘You had a wash rag that you’d wet and just wipe yourself down with. Obviously you could brush your teeth. I’d spit the toothpaste into the wash rag and then put it into the wet trash.’

Meal times were surprisingly fancy though, with astronauts, alongside dieticians, attending tasting classes to put together a meal plan, often with their favourite dishes which, for Joan, consisted of Mexican-style eggs and beef enchiladas.

‘My commander loved shrimp cocktail, he had a shrimp cocktail at every meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner,’ Joan says.

Also on board that mission was Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams, one of the two astronauts who earlier this year spent nine unplanned months in space after getting stuck on the International Space Station.  

Aside from eating, washing, and getting eight hours of rest a day, the astronauts were ‘working nonstop’.

However, there was one moment that felt more like a film than reality: glimpsing the Northern Lights from space. 

‘I had never seen them before, and they were just really brilliant green neon lights just kind of dancing through the darkness of the night sky.’

Joan was with a crew of seven as a ‘mission specialist’, working to assemble and upgrade the International Space Station.

‘Our mission was to take up another piece of the space station hardware because we were still building it at the time,’ she said, continuing, ‘We took up about 6000 pounds of equipment and supplies that were needed.’

‘When I launched in space, I felt like I could do anything with one eye closed and one arm tied behind my back.’

Her confidence largely results from her intense level of training, which spanned a decade and involved a competitive application process.

NASA rejected her initial application because she didn’t have a technical master’s degree, but a business-related one. They offered to pay for the next course, and in April 1996, she reapplied.

She made it into the 120 invited to interview, a gruelling process that took place in Houston, in addition to thorough physical, psychological, and FBI background checks.

‘We were there for an entire week for the interview process,’ Joan recalled. ‘I came in on a Sunday and left on a Friday.’

She likened the first series of tests to a generic college application process. ‘It was a fill-in-the-blank test. It was multiple-choice tests, and I was thinking, ‘What is this telling you?’ But it told them something.

‘Then there was just a battery of physical tests so there was nothing they didn’t check out on us.’

She explained that the physical and psychological tests worked as a ‘weeding out process’. ‘Everyone who comes to interview has been weeded down from 6000 people, so all these people are highly qualified.

‘So how do you go from 120 people to 15? They have to find some way to get people out. So it’s either from a medical standpoint or from a psychological standpoint. And then after that, I don’t know how the magic happens, how they weed it to 15.’

After doing the interview and waiting six months while NASA assessed the test results, Joan received the news that she had made the final cut.

‘So, once I was selected, it was roughly a year and a half of training that we did, and we learned how to fly T38 supersonic jets. Before we did that, we had to do land and water survival.

‘Then it was kind of like grad school, so we had to learn how to operate the shuttle. We had to learn how to operate the space station. It was a series of classes.

‘Then we would go on a simulator and put into practice what we had learned about systems, and then they would throw failures in, and you’d have to work through the failures.’

‘We had one of the largest classes ever because we were about to start building the International Space Station, and we had a lot of international partners.’

‘There were people from Canada, France, Germany, Italy Spain, Sweden, Japan, and the United States.’

‘There are 44 of you, and that seems like a lot of people, but you’re thrown into a scenarios where you’re doing some really incredible stuff and stuff that a lot of people don’t get to do, and just because of that environment, you began to bond with one another, and we would help one another get through these different tests.

When Joan finally reached space after a ten-year wait in December 2006, in the STS-116 mission aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, she joined a crew of seven as a ‘mission specialist’ and helped to assemble and upgrade the International Space Station.

She credited the mission with altering her perspective on life. ‘It gave me a greater appreciation for my fellow humans, and we need to be kinder to each other because we’re all in this together.

‘The other thing that changed for me was the way I look at Planet Earth, because there’s only one planet Earth. It’s the only place we have to live, and so I’m more mindful.’

In addition to altering her mindset, the mission also had a physical impact on her when she got back to Earth.

‘Gravity is really heavy, and we don’t know it, because this is all we know. So, when I came back and I got off the shuttle, and I’m walking to the crew van, I felt like I weighed about 500 pounds.’

‘I was slapping my feet against the ground because I just didn’t have a sense of weight.’

While Joan was there for just shy of two weeks, the astronauts who spend months in space can suffer more severe effects.

‘The long-duration folks, they’ve seen a couple of things happen, so they’ve seen the pressure in their eyes get a little abnormal, a little high, and may not turn back to the baseline level from before they flew.

‘They are seeing people that do really long, extended duration missions, sometimes their bone mass doesn’t come back, so they’re a little weaker than they were. Those long-term effects they’re still being studied.’

Those lengthy flights are worlds away from one of the more recent missions that captivated the attention of millions around the globe: The Blue Origin flight, which counted Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry as passengers.

The mission, which also took journalist Gayle King, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, lasted just 11-minutes, and though the flight met widespread criticism for being a showy affair, Joan ultimately supported it.

‘I think anyone that has the opportunity and wants the opportunity to go to space, should go to space.’

Joan, who was there when the Roar singer blasted off into space with five other women, said, ‘It was very different from what I’m used to when astronauts are launching. They go into quarantine, and you can’t see them.

The recent affair was something much flashier. ‘They came out after getting all glammed up, and we’re touching them and talking to them.

‘It’s like this is so weird. And there was a little procession as they went to the pad and we stood on either side, and people had cowbells, then we sat down, they launched it, and like ten minutes later they’re back. It was just very different from what I’m used to.’

Joan believes that commercialised space travel is on the way and may well be possible for the general population in the next five to ten years.

‘I think at some point it should become more economically feasible, but for people right now, you still have a pretty hefty discretionary fund if you want to go.’

In November 2007, Joan Higginbotham retired from NASA to pursue a career in the private sector, and works to encourage and inspire younger people, particularly women and women of colour, into the world of NASA.

‘I’ve been in a pretty male-dominated career all my life. It was challenging initially because I guess a lot of people weren’t used to dealing with a woman of colour, and I think I probably had to work a little harder to prove myself, but once I did that, things came around.

‘I always say my one major mistake I made when I was a young engineer was not speaking up and owning my voice because I was trying so hard to blend in with everybody else.’

That learning curve serves as one of Joan’s most significant messages to young people today. ‘I say always use your voice and own it because I find when you don’t speak up, people will make up narratives about you.

‘It may not be the one that you want, so use your voice to show that you belong at the table and build your confidence that way.’

‘I always tell young women, and anybody, to find your village. Find people who are going to support you, find mentors, and be that person for somebody else, because there’s always somebody coming behind you.

‘The third thing I would tell them is to say yes to opportunities even if you think you don’t have everything it takes for whatever opportunity is coming, say yes and grow into the opportunity.’

Joan’s final message is one in support of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, located near Orlando, Florida, which she believes has the power to inspire, educate, and entertain people of all ages on space matters.

And among the many exhibits, attractions and experiences, visitors have the chance to speak with a veteran astronaut, like Joan, every day.