Houston native back from ISS with a new skill: cutting hair
Native Texan Loral O’hara was pleasantly surprised by her haircut after returning from the International Space Station.
The NASA astronaut spent 204 days in space, during which she conducted dozens of science and technology experiments, helped maintain the orbiting platform and completed her first spacewalk.
But living in space requires other skills, too. For O’hara, one of those was cutting hair for herself and her crewmates — made all the more difficult in weightlessness.
“I got a lot better at it, I think, on orbit,” she said during a news conference this week from NASA’S Johnson Space Center. “With maybe one or two misses, but it was overall pretty good. And surprisingly, mine was OK when I got back because I cut mine three times I think while I was up there.”
O’hara returned to Earth on April 6, landing in Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule. She later flew home to Ellington Field where she was greeted by her family, including a new baby nephew she met for the first time.
Her family lives nearby as O’hara is the second Houston native to become a NASA astronaut. She was born in Houston and raised in Sugar Land, attending Quail Valley Elementary School in Missouri City and then First Colony Middle School and Clements High School in Sugar Land.
To celebrate O’hara’s return to Earth — and Houston — her family rented a house on the beach.
“Getting to spend time with them next to Galveston Bay, where I spend a lot of time here, was really special,” she said.
O’hara’s first spaceflight included 3,264 orbits of Earth, and she welcomed eight visiting spacecraft carrying both cargo and crew. Her spacewalk with NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli lasted six hours and 42 minutes.
Some of her favorite research projects were in the life sciences category, where she helped conduct tests that analyzed human health in space. Some of those experiments also could have applications on Earth for immune system function and aging, O’hara said.
“We were taking care of cell cultures, feeding these cells basically with medium-sized syringes,” said O’hara, whose PRENASA experience focused on engineering. “I felt very much like a scientist in the laboratory.”
And in her free time, O’hara enjoyed taking pictures of the Earth.