Fantasy Flight: Chiaki Mukai, Japan’s First Female Astronaut
Raised by a working mother in Gunma Prefecture, a place known for dry winds and tough women, Chiaki Mukai decided she wanted to become a doctor while she was still in elementary school. At 32, she was a cardiovascular(心血管的)surgeon and chief resident at the Keio Hospital in Tokyo. Then she saw the newspaper ad that changed her life.
The beginning of a dream
The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) was looking for astronauts. What really shocked Chiaki, as she prefers to be known, was that there were no gender restrictions.
She suffered for three days. Weightlessness has much to offer scientific research, she thought. If I don’t try, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.
"I had no idea what to expect," Chiaki said, giving one of her trademark smiles. "But I started two training programs the day I sent in my application. First, I started learning English. Then I began working out with weights."
Her English study program was entirely self-constructed. She made English labels for everything in the house. "I wanted it to seem like I was living in an English-speaking country," she explained. She answered the phone in English. She read English-language books. In August 1985, NASDA chose three payload specialists for the 1992 Spacelab-J launch — Mamoru Mohri, Ta Doi, and Chiaki Mukai. Chiaki’s journey to the stars had begun.
The journey to space
"You can never give up," Chiaki says. "The life of Marie Curie taught me that. I read time and again how she struggled with her home, her children, and her scientific dream. And she achieved her goals — even though it cost her life.’
"My mother is the same kind of woman. She didn’t want to depend on someone else for her livelihood, so she opened a haberdashery(男子服饰用品店)in our hometown. She still runs it."
Chiaki’s mother didn’t blink an eye when her daughter told her of being chosen as an astronaut. "You never know what life’s going to deal you," she said to Chiaki. "So you must do what you really want to."
Once she started her training for space, Chief’s roster(名单)of heroes grew longer. "Yuri Gagarin was the pioneer," she said. "I have immense respect for him. And Nell Armstrong — it was really great, what he did. That must have been a ’fantastic voyage’. But then all the people I worked with at NASA and NASDA are heroes in their own way. So how do I choose
Chiaki gestured at the bustle(喧嚣)of Tokyo outside the window. "From here, we can’t see very much. But from 300 miles up, you realize how small the earth is. But you know what I first learned in Orlando, Florida — at Disneyworld." Which brings Chiaki to another of her heroes: Walt Disney. Like Chiaki, he was a dreamer. And he shared his dreams of fantastic worlds with others. She is fascinated by the way his movies, gentle and natural, teach us about humanity.
"Disney, and science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, realized the Earth is just a small planet without having to go into space. Their accomplishment is much greater in a way than ours. We saw with our eyes. They saw with their minds’ eyes."
The first Japanese astronaut to fly an American space shuttle was Mamoru Mohri, who went as payload specialist on the Spacelab-J, a flight funded largely by Japan. Chiaki and Ta Doi backed him up.
After Mohri’s flight touched down, Chiaki journeyed back to Japan to begin work in the microgravity lab at Tsukuba. But word soon came that she had been chosen as payload specialist for the International Microgravity Laboratory-2 (IML-2), so she returned to take up the training where she’d paused.
"Mohri was chosen to fly the Japanese-funded space shuttle, so there was never any doubt that he’d go. But the IML-2 was an international flight. NASA didn’t have to choose me. And there were half-a- dozen well-qualified alternatives who could have gone in my place. The pressure is tremendous. ’
Chiaki says she had a hard time understanding jokes told in southern accents. "Flying is fine. Acronyms(首字母缩拼词) are easy to learn, so you don’t even have to speak in sentences. But jokes. Whew! Or tales about family. Any time the subject strayed from work, I was in trouble. ’
In preparation for her flight, Chiaki took more than a thousand of the training flights that give passengers twenty seconds of weightlessness. "Twenty seconds is nothing like the real thing," Chiaki says ruefully. "No matter how many times you do it."
The dream came true
On 8 July 1994, a quarter of a century after Neff Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the suce of the moon, the IML-2 mission blasted off. Soon the shuttle Columbia was in orbit, and Chiaki’s work began. Before the shuttle touched down two weeks later, she had appeared on children’s television, played midwife(接生婆)to a brood of newts(蝾螈), used her own body to record the effects of weightlessness on human beings 82 experiments in all.
"Way out there, looking down at the curvature of the earth, I couldn’t help thinking what a small world this is. Compared to all of outer space, Earth is like one tiny plankton (浮游生物) swimming in a vast ocean. Yet look at the power of mankind. Look where we are, 300 miles above the suce. We’re so very fragile, yet so very strong.
"Back on earth, I made an astounding discovery. When you let go of things, they drop! I was constantly reminded of Earth’s tremendous pull. For nearly three days after touchdown, every step reminded me of gravity. Every move I made was a tussle with weight. Yet after three days, my body adjusted. Isn’t that marvelous" While scientists continue to research the many implications of weightlessness, Chiaki envisions great medical benefits from microgravitational situations. Rehabilitation (康复)would make tremendous strides, she maintains. "People with handicaps in full gravity might not have them in zero gravity conditions. They could practice movements at zero, 0.25 G, 0.5G, and so on until they were competent at normal gravity. "
To understand the functions of the eye, we remove all light, Chiaki explains. To understand the functions of the ear, we remove all sound, and work from there. So she says that removing the weight of gravity will bring mankind new understanding of how the human body works.
The impossible dream
Cervantes is another Chiaki hero.., or perhaps we should say Don Quixote. "I love Man of La Mancha. I cry every time I see it." She hums: "To dream the impossible dream .... "
"I like the way they translated that song into Japanese," she says. "Instead of ’ impossible dream’, it comes out unreachable dream and means that as soon as you have fulfilled one dream, another even more vivid dream forms."
She stands in her grey-green double-breasted suit and thrusts out a hand. Her grasp is firm, like her vision. With a smile, she strides away. Back to her laboratory in Tsukuba. Where she’ll work regular 12- hour days..., reaching for the stars.
After returning from her flight, Chiaki Mukai had difficulty in adjusting to the gravity on the earth.