Spokane astronaut Anne McClain set for Wednesday launch to International Space Station

Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson is in Orlando, Florida, to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s Space X launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Follow along in print and online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.

 

In a week’s time, one of Spokane’s own has a date with the International Space Station.

U.S. Army Col. Anne McClain, the Lilac City’s local astronaut, will lead a team of four on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission expected to take off next Wednesday at 4:48 p.m. Pacific Time. NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Takuya Onishi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will join McClain as crew members.

The launch from the Kennedy Space Center will be live-streamed through the space agency’s streaming platform, NASA+.

The mission will be McClain’s second trip to the space station, and the first crew change of 2025, allowing NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to return to Earth after an eight-month stay. The pair were supposed to return about a week after their arrival aboard the Boeing Starliner last June, but concerns about the craft’s safety during re-entry led to an extended stay.

It’s a realization of a stated goal for McClain, who previously served as a flight engineer and the U.S. orbital segment lead on the station for Expeditions 58 and 59. The 1997 Gonzaga Prep graduate was vocal about wanting to return after spending 204 days on board the International Space Station in 2018 and 2019, where she contributed to hundreds of experiments, and led two spacewalks totaling more than 13 hours.

“You get this amazing perspective when you’re up there about how reliant we are on one other and how everyone you meet you have more in common with than you do differences,” McClain said at the time.

McClain had her eyes on the stars from an early age, instilled in part by her science teacher mother, Charlotte Lamp. On her first day of preschool, Lamp said McClain declared she was off to learn to be an astronaut, as she told The Spokesman-Review when McClain was honored as a 2019 Woman of the Year.

“Anything that launched, anything that went to the moon and back … all of that, we always watched it when she was little,” Lamp said.

While acknowledging a fair bit of nervousness about the impending launch, Lamp said in a Monday interview she’s excited, and that the thought, care and hard work behind the incredible feat of transporting her daughter to space help put her at ease.

“Just picture this: your child climbs on top of a 16 story tube of gas, and then they light it. How would you feel?” Lamp said. “You have total trust in the system, because they are so well built.”

The International Space Station, staffed with human crews since 2000, remains a feat of science, engineering and international diplomacy. Planning first began under the Reagan administration, with the US, Canada, Japan, Russia and Europe agreeing to combine their efforts to make the floating laboratory a reality. More than 270 astronauts have visited to help conduct more than 4,000 experiments that have helped advance health, safety and technology not just for space travel, but back on Earth as well, said Norman Lewis, a molecular plant sciences researcher and regents professor at Washington State University.

Efforts to prevent bone and muscle loss in astronauts has led to new strategies to help those on Earth diagnosed with conditions like osteoporosis. Studies aboard the space station have led to deeper understandings of Alzheimer’s and cancer, and technology first developed for use on the vessel is now assisting clinics with diagnoses, making automotive factories more efficient and keeping produce fresh in grocery stores across the country.

“There are zillions of people, I want to say zillions, whatever that number is, that are walking around today, and if it weren’t for scientific and medical advances, they wouldn’t be here,” Lewis said. “That’s something that I’m not sure many people really fully understand, whether it’s a bypass operation, whether it’s a cancer treatment or whatever else it may be.”

Some of the research over the years have roots in Eastern Washington; Lewis will be leading a study exploring crop growth for eventual long-term space travel that will arrive aboard the station in August, a continuation of past research he conducted in tandem with the station crew in 2018. He said the novelty of conducting research with assistance from astronauts hurtling nearly 18,000 mph above the Earth still hasn’t worn off.

“That’s what science is, you see something you don’t understand, and then you try to figure out what it is that it is that you need to understand in order to get to the next level of understanding,” Lewis said.

While he’s not as familiar with McClain’s story as he’d like to be, Lewis has long followed space exploration. He remembers watching the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who completed the first crewed spaceflight in 1961 amidst the Cold War. He said it’s remarkable to see how international agencies came together just a few decades later for a project like the ISS. Now, crew members from across the globe routinely work hand-in-hand, and are able to travel in the same spacecraft, which was previously unimaginable.

Lewis wished McClain luck on her journey, as well as her efforts once aboard the station.

“In this area of science, you’re not guaranteed to come back,” Lewis said. “When you shoot off in a rocket, you might not even get someplace. These people are true pioneers.”

McClain spent a year in the ROTC program at Gonzaga University before attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. A Marshall Scholar, McClain holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Bath and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Bristol, both in the United Kingdom.

While overseas, McClain capitalized on the chance to play more rugby, a sport she picked up as an 18-year-old walking around the Gonzaga campus, she recalled on NASA’s “Houston We Have A Podcast.”

“I saw a group of people playing a very interesting-looking sport, and I kind of approached and asked what it was about,” McClain said. “And the next thing I knew, I was starting a rugby match the next day.”

McClain went on to compete in the Women’s Premiership, England’s top rugby league, as a graduate student, and was selected as a member of the U.S. National Team in 2003. Her time with the Women Eagles was interrupted by a 15-month deployment to Iraq in 2006, but she later returned as a captain, then coach. McClain’s astronaut call sign “Annimal” was first earned as a national team member.

“It absolutely was an influencer on my job and on my career and my personality,” McClain told The Spokesman-Review in 2019. “I think that you don’t know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice, and that’s something that you learn in the 78th minute of a rugby match.”

McClain’s laundry list of accomplishments includes a Bronze Star, which heads a long list of military honors. Commissioned as an Army officer in 2002, McClain flew 216 combat mission on a 15-month deployment as a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and has logged more than 2,000 flight hours in 20 different planes and helicopters to date. She was selected as an astronaut in 2013 shortly after completing Naval Test Pilot School.

On Monday, Lamp shared she is in quarantine with her daughter at McClain’s home in Houston. Astronauts isolate themselves starting two weeks before a launch to prevent exposure to any illnesses that could be detrimental to mission timing, as well as those already aboard the vessel hurtling 250 miles above the surface.

“We’re having a fun mother-daughter two weeks together,” Lamp said.

Lamp will spend the last few days ahead of the launch with friends and family. The two are keeping each other company between McClain’s final preparations in the meantime, like how the astronaut and her mother tended to McClain’s garden Sunday, Lamp said.

While Lamp is proud of her daughter, she clarified she is no more proud of her than any parent would be of “a child who is doing what they want to do, is happy doing it and is successful.”

“That’s what parenting is about: raising our kids and letting them go and watching them fly,” Lamp said. “I didn’t realize when I said fly before in my life, that I literally meant fly.”