Astronaut Marsha Ivins

Marsha Ivins is an inspiration. She has shattered our macho preconceptions of what an astronaut looks like. Slightly built with shoulder-length hair, Marsha packs a mighty punch. The moment she started speaking, she commanded an awesome respect from her audience.

Those who were expecting a scientific low down on each of her 5 shuttle missions would have been disappointed. She immediately endeared herself to the audience by striking at the human angle of space flight. A barrage of entwined images of her fellow crew members in often hilarious positions of weightlessness, together with her wry and sly sense of humour, saw her audience regularly dissolve into fits of laughter.

As she easily glided from one gorgeous earth-picture to another, there was no pretentious sermon on the destruction of earth by man, just one light-hearted quip after the other. Referring to a recently flooded river delta shot from space: "if you are a smoker, this is what your lungs look like".

Marsha took great delight in captivating her audience with the hilarious detail of how to go about effectively performing one’s ablutions aboard the space shuttle. Other gems included eating dinner previously attached with velcro to the inner walls, exercising in a weightless environment, showering with globules of water, and the connection between brushing teeth and spitting in space.

Marsha underplays her achievements and one can almost be forgiven for not quite fully grasping the sheer enormity of responsibility that was placed on her shoulders to ensure that a $1.3⁺ billion module was attached securely and properly to the International Space Station.

This was one presentation where 45 minutes felt like 5 and I had definitely not yet had sufficient. Marsha handled audience questions thoroughly and compassionately. What a pleasant surprise; when it was time to be critical of NASA (her current employer!) she was. Marsha openly criticised NASA’s low productivity and delivery, to the point where she admits "something needs to be done because the space programme has gone almost nowhere since the Moon missions". Her response to an audience member’s suggestion of a future human mission to Mars was a loud "Amen to that!"

At the conclusion, Marsha presented the society with a mounted A3 collage of mission photos, beautifully presented with an STS 98 mission badge, a small South African flag that flew with her on that mission, and a personally autographed presentation plaque to our society! Precious cargo indeed. We will be making A3 laminated copies of this and anybody who attended the Marsha Ivins talk is welcome to order a copy for themselves.

Marsha wanted to be an astronaut from age 6. But only engineers and scientists got to fly into space. So she became an engineer and scientist. She flew 5 times into space. Now, go and realise YOUR dreams!

Dave Gordon