PULLOUTS ALL NEXT WEEK IN THE MAIL
Meet the Irish woman who gave up her marriage - and any hopes she might have had of becoming a mother - in her quest for the final frontier
‘I’m prepared to sacrifice security’
IT isn’t every day you meet a fortysomething woman — or anyone, for that matter — who intends to travel to Mars. But Dr Niamh Shaw, 48, is utterly determined to set foot on the red planet — ‘and if that’s the way I die, that’s the way I die’.
The doctor of science from UCD has turned her back on the conventional life she once had — marriage, mortgage, academic career, possibility of motherhood — to fulfill her childhood dream.
‘On paper I was a success,’ she says, of her life as a younger woman. ‘I was married, I was doing my PhD at the time, I was going into a career in academia. My mum was so proud of me. For most people’s definition of success, I was ticking all the boxes. I had a house, everything.
‘But it’s very important to know yourself what success is. Sometimes it’s a very difficult question to ask yourself. Usually in the middle of the night you wake up and have that feeling — you know what it is that you want but you’re not brave enough to say it. It never goes away,’ she believes.
‘I just couldn’t ignore it. I had to be really honest with myself and go, this isn’t enough. This isn’t me. It wouldn’t be right for me to stay married to this person because I’m not fully committed to this life or this world or anything.
‘Doing the PhD helped me with that a lot because when you spend 16 hours a day on your own in a room you’ve nowhere to hide. So all this stuff bubbles to the surface,’ she says. ‘I kind of just wanted more. I’ve always wanted more.
‘I guess the great thing about space and science fiction is that it makes you dream bigger. I’ve always been a dreamer and it made me not want to give up on my dreams. I want more than this and I’m prepared to sacrifice security and all the trappings of a married life — family and everything — for it.’ Niamh, from Dundalk, Co. Louth, doesn’t believe it was possible to combine the two.
‘I don’t think so, no. I think if you have a mortgage and you have kids and everything... This is just what happened to me, it wasn’t a plan that I didn’t have kids.
‘But in a way I’ve sort of found myself in a position where I’m able to commit to this because I don’t have children and because I don’t have a mortgage and I don’t have the other commitments that other people do. Because I think if you have those commitments they have to come first. Without those it makes things a lot simpler. You can get up and go at a moment’s notice.’
Ever since she first saw Star Wars, aged eight, in a cinema in Carlow with her brothers, Niamh has longed to explore space. She still has the diaries in which she jotted things like, ‘My dream job: to be an astronaut’. Of course, many children want the same thing — or to be a premiership footballer or prima ballerina. But most of us outgrow these fantasies. Not Niamh, though it took her a while to acknowledge that undimmed desire.
‘I think it was a fear of failure, almost. This thought of, oh God, if I actually pursue this and nothing happens, what does that mean about my dreams?’
In 2011 she made the first small steps towards that giant leap into space, simply by following people on Twitter who are involved in the industry. She attended a ‘Tweet-up’ — a meet-up of Tweeters — at the International Space University in Strasbourg where she ‘met a load of people who were just like me’.
She left academia in 2013 to ‘pursue the creative arts’, often by humorously communicating science to a broader audience through theatre. For example, she made videos addressing all of her abandoned personas — wife, student, working woman in London, tourist in Australia, astronaut — to explain how a branch of maths called particle physics can be applied to life.
‘When we went to make the astronaut Niamh, it was the only life I had invested nothing in. That was a slap in the face,’ she explains. ‘And 2014 was the beginning of me saying to the world, I have this crazy dream. I’m a woman in my 40s, I know I’m not the right age, I don’t have any qualifications related to being an astronaut, but you know what? I’m just going to see what happens. And that’s what I did.
‘A very important part of that step was, I think, changing my relationship with failure. When you’re a really good student — I loved school, I loved studying — failure is a bad word. Success is 95%, failure is an E or something. You kind of see the world that way. What it does is, it actually limits you from trying something out of your comfort zone.’
Living a more creative life meant she had to allow herself to fail. ‘Because if you’re a writer you won’t even put a pen on a page, if you’re a theatre maker you won’t even get up and try anything, if you’re a dancer you won’t even stretch if you’re afraid of failure.’
She began ‘reaching out to people’ and being introduced to others who shared her curiosity and interests.
‘The next thing I was at the European Space Agency’s technology and research centre ESTEC in Noordwijk meeting Irish people who, like me, had dreams of being an astronaut when they were small. But they knew someone in the European Space Agency or went to NASA or wrote a letter to an astronaut. They reached out to somebody — that was the difference between me and them.’
She began writing about her efforts, getting Arts Council and Culture Ireland funding to take her play To Space to the 2014 Edinburgh and Adelaide fringe festivals.
‘At the end of 2014 I still hadn’t got to space. But any astronaut that gets selected, that’s a five-year plan. I went, oh my God, what do I do now? And I got scared again. But I realised, you keep going until you achieve it or a day arrives when you don’t want to do it any more. And so that’s what I’ve been doing since.’
She enrolled in the International Space University’s nine-week Space Studies Programme in Ohio in 2015, which copper-fastened her resolve.
‘You meet people from NASA and the European Space Agency and people working in the space industry and writers and filmmakers who are obsessed with space. Suddenly it feels like your dream isn’t so unusual — form a line! That really encouraged me to keep going.
‘The Space Studies Programme is being held in Cork this year and I’m lecturing at it, so I’ve come full circle in the space of just two years,’ she adds. Along with Cork Institute of Technology, the event will be hosted by Blackrock Castle Observatory, where Niamh is artist-in-residence.
Last September she attended the Astronautical Conference in Mexico where she gave a talk about her work. The keynote was given by 45year-old billionaire inventor and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
‘He got up and he shared his grand design for Mars and he had figured it out so well and so clearly: “This is the rocket and these are the engines we’ve designed and this is the spaceship that’s going to take a hundred people. And the first few [missions] are going to be expensive and the price is going to go down and I’m looking for funding.” He opened a path and I thought, wow, he’s actually made it tangible.’ How much would it cost? ‘Well Elon reckons that he can bring it down to €200,000 to get to Mars after the first few expeditions. I don’t have to be the first Irish person, I don’t have to be the first of anything. I just want to do this so I can experience it and communicate it back. Whatever length of time that takes is fine. I don’t need to be in a race of any description.’
In January, Niamh and a team of four scientists and engineers spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a place in the Utah desert which simulates a mission to Mars. Obviously, it only gives a flavour of what that experience might be like — and even that is not for the faint-hearted.
‘I was really worrying about the fact that you couldn’t shower, the fact that we were in such close quarters. The bedroom was a metre wide by about two metres long. It was nothing, a shelf. The living quarters you shared with four other people were eight metres square. I like my own space, so I was wondering, how am I going to do this? But I surprised myself.’
The team had to suit up before leaving their ‘spaceship’ and the kit
was ‘incredibly uncomfortable. It was so cumbersome, chafing your shoulders. Then you put the helmet on and it’s quite claustrophobic the first few times’.
The idea of this simulation is to put would-be astronauts ‘in the uncomfortable circumstances which you would be in in space. They’re not the same, but it’s that thing of having to put yourself completely out of your comfort zone’.
Niamh was older than her teammates and has a surprising phobia, given the scope of her ambition.
‘I’m afraid of heights and they’re all in their 20s. Never once did they make me feel my age or talk about my fear of heights.’
The team made a point of sitting together for meals.
‘It’s freeze dried food. It’s powder. Everything’s powdered. Like, the eggs are powdered, so you just add water. We had freeze dried cabbage, freeze dried peas, freeze dried carrots. When you added water to it, it was fine, it just didn’t have much flavour. Thankfully, I have a very bad palate so it was lost on me. I couldn’t care less about the food. I was grand with it.’ The confined accommodation and air conditioning were more problematic.
‘I never slept. I think I got max two or three hours sleep a night. I’d wake up with a blinding headache every morning, grossly dehydrated and aware of a shortage of water.’
But that hasn’t put her off at all — in fact, she has ‘no fear about the one-way mission to Mars’.
By anyone’s standards this attitude is reckless, with such a mission fraught with all kinds of dangers.
‘Yeah, but you can’t sit in and be afraid of dying. I can’t anyway. When you work with people from the space agencies they’re not into kamikaze missions, they’re not into death sentences for their astronauts.
‘The astronauts are the culmination of years of intensive research by hundreds and thousands of people. The actual expedition is the final part of about 40 or 50 years of work, so they will have thought of every possible, probable solution to anything that could go wrong, so that the numbers are in your favour.
‘I don’t think you can do better than that. Every time you go outside, get in your car, walk down the street, who knows what could happen?’ she argues, though needless to say her family are very concerned. ‘Well, with the Mars thing, for a while with Mum, we just didn’t talk about it,’ she admits, though Niamh still has her heart set on getting there.
‘If I was lucky enough to get a ticket, of course I’d go — I’d go in a heartbeat. And if that’s the way I die, that’s the way I die. I’d rather do that than sit at home afraid I’m going to die.
‘I’d rather go out there, and obviously prepare as best I can and do everything to make sure that I will survive. But I want to be a part of it. And the people who are in the industry are my kind of people. They get excited about new ideas and they want to innovate. They get it.’
All the same, Niamh admits the path she’s chosen is a lonely one. ‘Yes, it’s lonely, but not to the point that I don’t want to do it,’ she says ‘You meet like-minded people along the way.’
And Niamh doesn’t think space travel for all is far off. She says: ‘In 20 years there’ll be a lot of people like me who will be achieving it.’
‘You can’t be afraid of dying’