We met on an awful night at the Kennedy Space Centre late last week, as the US tried to launch its most powerful rocket ever to bring humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The warm Florida rain lashed down. Above the launch site lightning split the sky.
The Irish-American retired Nasa astronaut Cady Coleman was at Cape Canaveral as an analyst for American broadcaster ABC, as a fuel leak forced launch controllers to call off their second attempt to send a crew capsule containing test dummies into lunar orbit.
But she believes humans will return to the moon and travel on to Mars. “Going back to the moon is not just repeating everything in terms of Apollo — the original moon programme from the 1960s.
“The (new) Artemis programme, this is serious exploration, going somewhere we have not gone in 50 years. And that is the place to learn how to go to Mars.
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“The number of unexpected things that happened on the space station — the toilet broke more than once a month, the system that recycles the air — not because people did not design it well but because we are still learning how all this stuff works and how the physics is affected and how humans are affected.
“When people say, why are we not on Mars yet? We have a lot to learn.”
Coleman is one-quarter Irish on both her mother’s and father’s side, but laughs: “it adds up to much more than half”.
An Post acknowledged her Irish ancestry by putting her image on a stamp in 2019, along with her fellow Irish-American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eileen Collins, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.
Coleman points to another woman astronaut as a key inspiration for her to go into space. While in college she heard the first US woman astronaut Sally Ride give a lecture.
Coleman’s father was a US navy diver who worked on an undersea laboratory programme.
“When I grew up it was really normal to live in places kind of uncomfortable, probably dangerous and definitely weird. That was normal in my household.
“At the time the only explorers I was exposed to were men. It never occurred to me that I could do that job until I was in college and Sally Ride came before her mission to speak at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and I remember being in the auditorium and thinking, ‘Wow, we have these things in common, could I do the things that she has done?’”
Coleman is a polymer chemist and after college joined the US Air Force. She volunteered for centrifuge training, which tests the reactions and tolerance of pilots and astronauts to high acceleration, and also learned how to fly.
She plays the flute and was in a band while training for the space programme in Houston, Texas, which also included the Canadian astronaut and author Chris Hadfield.
A video of Coleman performing a 2011 St Patrick’s Day greeting in the International Space Station, playing instruments loaned to her by Matt Molloy and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and flown up to orbit on the US space shuttle, was viewed nearly 100,000 times.
Prior to that, she had been introduced to Moloney’s son Pádraig, who was working at the time with Nasa.
The family he was staying with had a bar where everyone would play or sing, and when the Chieftains came to the area Pádraig “made it so we could all go”.
“In the finale they always have local bands play. We got to play in that finale.”
She says taking instruments belonging to the Chieftains into space happened by chance.
There was a delay in retiring the space shuttles, which meant she could bring more items with her to the space station.
“They (however) had to have the stuff right away. I reached out to Matt Molloy and Paddy.
“I told them I would need to have it in two weeks.”
“I told them I was to take it on a business trip, (but) did not mention that it was going to be 93 million miles and it would take six months.”
Coleman says she called Paddy Moloney from the space station.
“We played a tune called Fanny Power and I also played a piece called The Butterfly for Matt.”
As she leaves, Coleman recalls her sadness at Moloney’s death last year.
“He absolutely was a force of nature. And I loved being part of his storm.”
