A Poudre High School alumna prepares to leave the planet
It’s a long way from Fort Collins to the International Space Station — about 250 vertical miles if the Earth-orbiting, multinational science experiment were parked directly above the northern Colorado city.
On June 6, Poudre High School alumna Serena Auñón-chancellor will head skyward and, two days later, complete a journey that has had a few notable stops since her graduation in 1993.
Auñón-chancellor is now a doctor with an undergraduate degree in engineering. She first came to NASA in 2006 as a flight surgeon providing medical care and advice to astronauts from the ground before being selected to be part of the agency’s 20th astronaut class in 2009.
She and her fellow crew members — the European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst and Sergey Prokopyev of Russia’s Roscosmos space program — left Russia on May 19 for their launch site in Kazakhstan. They will spend six months aboard the space station before returning to Earth in December, according to NASA.
“Obviously, you’re pretty excited. My crew just finished our final exams in Russia. It was a big relief to get that over with,” Auñón-chancellor said recently from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. “You almost begin to get your game face on. Our launch vehicle will be on the pad (when we arrive).”
Auñón-chancellor will do more than serve as the crew’s chief source of medical care while aboard the space station. She will take part in a variety of experiments, including studying how time in space affects human bones and bone cells, and what that could mean for treatment of osteoporosis.
“There really is no one area that we will focus on in particular because of the hundreds of experiments going on on the ISS,” she said. “Really, we’ll be looking at every aspect of the human body as much as we can, as well as engineering and material science.”
Auñón-chancellor’s space-bound luggage includes at least two mementos from Fort Collins: a banner and a T-shirt from her alma mater, Poudre High. The items were sent to her by physics students at the school
after teacher Tim Lenczycki saw her featured in an IMAX movie at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and got in touch via email. Lenczycki had Auñón-chancellor as a student in physics and advancedplacement physics in the early 1990s.
“She was very goal-oriented,” Lenczycki recalled. “She even knew back then that she wanted to be an astronaut. She was thinking about med school, but her ultimate goal was the be an astronaut.”
Colorado has produced its share of astronauts, from Boulder’s Scott Carpenter to Denver’s Jack Swigert, but local school kids don’t have to go the NASA route to make an impact in space. Lenczycki said a handful of his former students work for Lockheed Martin, the aerospace industry giant now building a satellite production facility outside Littleton.
Colorado has the secondlargest aerospace economy in the country and the highest concentration of aerospace professionals of any state, according to the Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of space-related endeavors. The foundation notes that Colorado is home base for the U.S. military’s space operations, and its local research centers and universities — including astronaut factory the University of Colorado — are among the world’s best for aerospace education.
“People are sometimes surprised to hear the influence that Colorado has on the aerospace community, but with the nation’s secondlargest aerospace economy, Colorado plays a critical role in space and has a lot to offer startups as well as established aerospace organizations,” foundation chief operating officer Shelli Brunswick wrote in an email.
In a study done last year. the Colorado Space Coalition, an arm of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., put annual output of the state’s aerospace industry at $15.4 billion. Employment in the sector increased by 4.7 percent from 2016 to 2017, hitting 55,430 workers when military personnel are included.
Lenczycki said it means a lot to his students to see someone who graduated from their school going into space, especially a woman. He hopes to set up a Skype video-chat session with Auñón-chancellor during her ISS mission.
“We do try to integrate some role models, especially female role models, in science now,” he said. “It’s not what you think. You don’t have to be a whitehaired, old guy to do science.”