Coleman sits in the rear seat of a supersonic T-38 jet for pilot training as a newly minted NASA astronaut candidate in 1992. “When a chemist gets to fly a T-38, she will always be smiling,” she says. NASA
On the day of Sally Ride’s talk, I hurried into 10-250, the large lecture hall beneath the Great Dome that is the emblem of MIT. Sandy Yulke, the chair of the Association of MIT Alumnae, was already introducing Sally. Sally. Just a first name. As if she were one of us. I slid into an empty seat just a few rows back as Sandy talked about how proud she was to welcome the soon-to-be first American woman in space. And Sally was standing there, right where our professors stood every day. A woman. And an astronaut.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the image I’d had of astronauts—or any kind of explorer, for that matter—could not have been further from the figure before me that day. And I’m not just talking about images I saw in the media—I had one much closer to home. My dad—James Joseph Coleman, known as JJ—was a career naval officer who ultimately led the Experimental Diving Unit. A legend among Navy divers, he had also been a project officer for the Sealab program that built the first underwater habitats, allowing men—and it was all men at the time—to live and work in the deep seas for extended periods. The spirit of exploration, the desire to understand fascinating and challenging environments, seemed normal to me. But because none of the explorers I saw looked like me, it didn’t occur to me that I could be one. My dad worked in a male-dominated world where I’m sure very few of his colleagues imagined that people like me might belong too.
By the time I got to MIT, in 1979, only six women had been selected as NASA astronauts. But seeing Sally Ride on the stage that day turned a possibility into a reality—a reality that could include me. Instead of being larger than life, she was surprisingly real and relatable: a young, bright-eyed woman, with wavy brown hair kind of like mine, wearing a blue flight suit and black boots. She seemed a little shy, looking down at her hands as she was introduced and applauded.
Sally was obviously passionate about her scientific work—she was an accomplished astrophysicist—but she also had this amazing job where she flew jets, practiced spacewalking, and was part of a crew with a mission. Both scientist and adventurer, she was accomplishing something that no American woman ever had—and, in the process, opening the door for the rest of us. As I listened to her speak that day, an utterly unexpected idea popped into my head: Maybe I—Cady Coleman—could have that job.
If you can see it, you can be it. Representation doesn’t fix everything, but it changes, on a visceral level, the menu of options that you feel you can reach for. No matter how many people tell us we can be whatever we want to be—and my mother told me that from the moment I was old enough to understand—some of us need more than words. Representation matters. A lot. We are enormously influenced by the signals that we get from our surroundings. What do people expect of us? What models do we have? What limitations do we internalize without knowing it? In her quiet, matter-of-fact way, Sally Ride shattered assumptions I didn’t know I’d taken on. Like so many people at MIT, I was an explorer at heart. What if I could explore in space as well as in the lab?
Becoming an astronaut
No one just becomes an astronaut. Every astronaut is something else first. At MIT, I had fallen in love with organic chemistry and was determined to become a research chemist, hoping to use science to improve people’s lives. Because I attended MIT on an ROTC scholarship, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Air Force upon graduation, but I was given permission to get my doctorate in polymer science and engineering from UMass Amherst before serving. I was then stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where I worked on new materials for airplanes and consulted on NASA’s Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment. I also set endurance and tolerance records as a volunteer test subject in the centrifuge at the aeromedical laboratory, testing new equipment.
But the ideas that Sally Ride had sparked were never far from my mind, and when NASA put out a call for new astronauts in 1991, I applied—along with 2,053 others. I was among the 500 who got our references checked, and then one of about 90 invited to Houston for an intense weeklong interview and physical. In 1992, after months of suspense, I got the fateful phone call asking, “Would you still like to come and work with us at NASA?” Thrilled beyond words, I felt a kind of validation I’d never experienced before and have never forgotten.
Four months later, I reported for duty at the Johnson Space Center. Knowing that years of rigorous training lay ahead before I might launch into space on a mission, I couldn’t wait to dive in.