Katherine Bennell-Pegg will head to Germany next month to become the first woman to be trained as an astronaut under the Australian flag.
Key points:
- Katherine Bennell-Pegg has wanted to become an astronaut since she was a child
- She will train with the European Space Agency
- She hopes to encourage more girls and women to be involved in the sector
Ms Bennell-Pegg, the Australian Space Agency’s director of space technology, will receive her training through the European Space Agency.
The training will provide the Adelaide resident with a basic training certification, which is required to be selected for a space mission.
Ms Bennell-Pegg said she had worked with some fantastic women over her career, but working with women in the space industry was rare.
“Less than 27 per cent of the Australian STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce are women,” she said.
“Women are very much the minority globally.
“Without diversity in our STEM workforce in all its forms, we can’t have the creativity we need to solve the problems of the future.
“I’m really excited to use this opportunity to hopefully elevate the conversation around women in STEM.”
Forging her own place in space
Ms Bennell-Pegg said she had had a passion for space since childhood.
“I grew up on the northern beaches of Sydney, where the sky is incredibly clear with stars at night,” she said.
“I realised stars aren’t just pinpricks of light, but could actually be whole planets, or even be entire galaxies.
“As you do when you’re a child, you have a stubborn urge for adventure, and I was drawn to that adventure.”
However, due to a lack of female representation in the field, she had to forge her own path.
“There were no real role models for … Australian [female] astronauts at that point,” she said.
“When I was a kid, there was no space agency, let alone a path to being part of a space sector in Australia.
“I did aerobatic flying when my friends were learning to drive, I read every physics book I could find.
“During my career sessions in high school, I was asked to write down three jobs you want, and I wrote ‘astronaut’ and refused to put anything else.
“I signed up to engineering at university without knowing what engineering was. I did it because it had space in the title and I loved space.”
Blazing a trail
She hoped her new position would break new ground women hoping to work in the industry.
“This isn’t just for me, it’s for what it can do for the rest of Australia, and what it can do to inspire young people and particularly young women,” she said.
“While I’m named as the first to represent Australia, I hope I won’t be the last.
“I would love to do a spacewalk installing some scientific equipment, or maybe even one day the Moon, who knows?”
However, she said the under-reaction from her six- and four-year-old daughters when they found out about their mother’s new job showed this was already in motion.
“‘Great, what’s for dessert?’ was my oldest one’s response, and my youngest one said, ‘But you go to space every day anyway for work,'” she said.
“I think it’s anticlimactic but beautiful that they don’t question that that’s unusual, [and] that for them, anything is possible.”
Ms Bennell-Pegg said having an Australian astronaut being trained under our flag in and of itself showed the nation was progressing in leaps and bounds.
“The significance of Australia taking its first foray into human space flight is huge,” she said.
“It shows that we’ve reached a certain maturity in our space sector on the world stage and can unlock so many relationships and opportunities for collaboration for Australia in the space sector and technology more broadly.”
Long way until spacewalk
Ms Bennell-Pegg’s training will run until May 2024, but as for when she will be headed to space, she says that remains uncertain.
“Right now there is no flight opportunity foreseen, which is not unusual when an astronaut candidate undergoes basic training,” she said.
“At the end of that training, you are qualified to be tapped on the shoulder for an international space station mission and that will be up to Australia to decide.
“Usually when you are selected for a mission, it will be a couple of years of free-flight training again before you actually go up there.”
