Nicole Aunapu Mann.PHOTO: NASA / Bill Ingalls
“Darling, we’re moving to Houston!” Nicole told her husband Travis in a short phone call seven years ago. Travis realized it was time to put the champagne on ice. And sure enough, when Nicole got home from work that evening – she was working at the Pax River naval air station in Maryland at the time – the champagne was waiting for her.
Houston, Texas is home to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center that with its over 3,000 employees makes up a virtual city in a city. They have their own power station, police, communications and even a clinic. Its wide streets lined with parks often see herds of deer made up of several dozen animals.
Of NASA’s ten space centers across the United States, it is the one in Houston that trains astronauts, runs space missions and studies moon rocks and dust. Nicole’s phone call to her husband meant that she had just been selected to the recent astronaut training group. There were 6,100 initial candidates, while eight were selected in the end, including Nicole.
Nicole has completed her astronaut training by now and is preparing for her first spaceflight. She is part of a three-member team set to fly the new Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA paid Boeing €4.2 billion for the development of the Starliner. Nicole and her team will be the first to fly it. If everything goes to plan, Starliner will become a kind of space taxi for both NASA astronauts and space tourists.
“It will be my first spaceflight, and I’m very excited,” Nicole says in an interview to Postimees. Nicole is joined on the mission by commander Chris Ferguson and mission specialist Mike Fincke. Ferguson is responsible for the Starliner reaching its destination and getting back to Earth safely. The team will stay at the station for six months where Fincke will be in charge. Nicole is the Starliner’s pilot. Both men are experienced astronauts.
“Naturally, being the rookie in the team comes with pressure, but I believe it will be healthy. It’s the “train and don’t screw up” kind of pressure,” Nicole says, laughing. There are a million things one can screw up on a mission such as this one. “But our training is excellent, and I’m confident. I know that we’ll be ready by the time we launch.”
Nicole is one quarter Estonian. Her grandfather Helmuth Aunapu emigrated as a young man in the 1920s and finally moved to USA. He joined the Army and took part in World War II as a military engineer, earning the rank of lieutenant colonel. The war claimed the house of Helmuth’s relatives in Estonia. The family escaped to Sweden before Helmuth’s mother and sister also moved to the States. His brother joined the Red Army to save his family from Siberia.
https://news.postimees.ee/6879...
