Kathy Sullivan

A scientist whose expeditions in space and at sea have taken her where few others have gone before

lite to measure how much energy the sun is adding to the Earth every day, thus gathering years of invaluable data critical for making projections about climate change. In 1990, she was part of the space-shuttle crew that launched the Hubble telescope, which for 30 years has allowed astronomers to peer deeper and deeper into space, finding new galaxies and planets, and to better understand the very origins of the universe.

“I think what it boils down to is I was always just really interested in how things worked,” she says. She didn’t start off pursuing a job or a title so much as a lifestyle. Growing up in Southern California, she devoured stories about Jacques Cousteau and the Apollo astronauts in Life and Look magazines. “‘How could my life be like that?’ That was kind of the driving force, which I simplified into: I need to find some kind of work where people buy me airplane tickets,” she says. But her ambitions were strictly terrestrial at first. She had a talent for languages and was fluent in

French and German by the time she was done with high school. She was considering a career in the foreign service until she realized as an undergrad that the sciences were a better avenue to the “active, inquisitive life” she wanted to lead.

And while it certainly wasn’t the norm for a girl growing up in the 1950s and 1960s to feel like the sky was the limit, in her family, it was. Her father, an aerospace engineer, taught her how to fly a plane as a teenager. “The ethos in our family was very much ‘Nobody gets to edit what you’re interested in,’ ” she says. “People around you may voice opinions, but they don’t get to choose it for you. That’s the peanut gallery. Ignore them.”

It was a good ethos to have in her pocket walking into NASA in 1978. In the early days, when she took her seat at meetings, Sullivan remembers, “Every now and then I would realize there was a bit of an odd glance being shot around the room that might have been ‘What the hell is that woman doing at the table?’ ” But as soon as she was introduced as one of the astronauts, “that pretty well settled it.” It was the most prestigious title you could have at NASA, and she was accorded the respect it was due. “I mean, I think there were undoubtedly some of the older folks, in particular the older men, that maybe doubted” whether women were up to it, she says.

But any doubts that Kathy Sullivan had the right stuff have long been put to rest. One of her father’s favorite family stories, she says, was when he went to mission control and stood in the viewing room to see her spacewalk. He could see the flight surgeon’s console, which was monitoring her heartbeat. When she stepped out of the hatch it spiked to 78 for a moment before settling back down to 60 as she worked for three and a half hours in equanimity despite the expanse of the universe being at her back. “I was just ready to go,” she says. “I felt completely calm.”

After NASA, she used her multidisciplinary talents in a number of administrative roles — most notably as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama. Perhaps less exhilarating than her expeditionary work, it still satisfied her itch to figure out how things work. “It’s just a different kind of jigsaw puzzle,” she says. “I take great satisfaction in being able to develop and curry the talents that can take on great challenges and make an organization hum and do great things.”

There is, of course, a lot left to explore out there, but Sullivan doesn’t have a bucket list of places she is still dying to see. “You’d say, ‘Girl, you’ve been in outer space. You can’t possibly have a list like that,’ ” she says. The sightseeing from the space shuttle would be pretty hard to beat. “I remember looking down at the Earth,” she says. “Below me, it’s early evening [but] we’re still bathed in sunlight, several hundred miles above. It dawned on me, and really sort of stunned me, that there could be some little girl down there pointing up at the sky and saying, ‘Look, Mommy, it’s a satellite,’ and she’s pointing at me.”