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When Catherine Coleman, know as Cady, goes to work, waving goodbye to her son Jamey, 10, she doesn’t drive or take a train – she blasts off in a spaceship. Many more women now work in space, but Cady’s next Nasa mission is a big one. In December, she leaves
When Catherine Coleman, know as Cady, goes to work, waving goodbye to her son Jamey, 10, she doesn’t drive or take a train – she blasts off in a spaceship. Many more women now work in space, but Cady’s next Nasa mission is a big one. In December, she leaves Earth on a Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station, where she will live and work for six months. This will be the 5 longest mission undertaken by a Nasa astronaut who is the mother of a young child. The Cady Coleman who greets me at the door of her 200-year-old farmhouse deep in the woods of New England is smaller than I had expected. This is a woman who walked into an American Air Force centrifuge programme as a volunteer and walked out with a world record for endurance. She once spent six weeks camping in Antarctica, learning that “my mother was correct 10 when she told me to dress in layers.” She has also lived 18m underwater in a giant tank, as part of Nasa’s extreme environment training, an experience she took in her stride as the daughter of a navy diver. And she has clocked up 500 hours in space on two previous short-duration shuttle missions, in 1995 and 1999. Cady is 49, 5ft 4in1, slim and narrow-waisted. She confesses to having had trouble getting 15 space suits small enough. There is excitement in her voice when she talks about the possibility of a space walk during the coming mission – but the reality is that committing to a mission at all has required soul-searching. She needed the full support of her husband, Josh Simpson, and she needed Jamey to understand, too. “Wed talked a lot about whether I would even sign up to go – but it is part of who I am – and it’s part of who Jamey’s mother is and Josh’s wife is. If I’m not doing those 20 things, I’m not sure I’m being as much of a mum as I could be. It is part of me.” How does an astronaut with a child come to terms with the risks inherent in space travel? Cady answers by putting those risks into a broader context. Soldiers are deployed all the time to places “not nearly as nice to be as the International Space Station,” she says. However, she and her husband do