Godwin says her space trips are over

Linda Godwin doesn't figure on having any more bad hair days, at least not from a lack of gravity.

After four space flights, she's ready to settle down.

"I am done with space flight," she said in an interview last week from her office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. "I decided that four would be enough."

But the 52-year-old Cape Girardeau County native continues to work for NASA and hopes to be involved in planning for future space exploration, including the agency's goal of taking astronauts to Mars in the next 40 years.

Godwin returned to Cape Girardeau Tuesday as the featured speaker at a NASA Educator Resource Center conference at Southeast Missouri State University.

Tuesday's conference brought together educators from NASA educator resource centers in a six-state region from Iowa to Louisiana. The event was sponsored by Southeast's NASA Educator Resource Center, which makes materials on math and science available to area teachers and the general public.

Godwin hopes more schoolchildren will become interested in math and science, subjects essential to space exploration.

That won't be a problem for Kim Harmon's children.

"Math and science are their two favorite subjects," the Perryville woman said of her two sons and a daughter, who are educated at home.

Harmon brought her children to the meeting to hear Godwin's lecture.

As part of her speech, Godwin showed a series of PowerPoint slides of her last space trip, which occurred nearly three years ago.

"I'm the one with bad hair," she said, referring to her hair tossed up by the lack of gravity.

"We plan to develop a vehicle to go back to the moon and onto Mars," Godwin told a group of about 25 people at the conference in the University Center.

But first the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to resume its schedule of space shuttle flights to finish building the international space station, Godwin said.

NASA plans to launch a shuttle next March, the first such flight since the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Godwin said the flight may be delayed until May because of recent hurricane damage to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In an interview last week, Godwin said she and her fellow NASA workers strongly anticipate the shuttle flights resuming.

Photographs of the astronauts walking to the ill-fated Columbia are displayed in her office.

"They are never out of our thoughts," she said. "They were our friends."

Restarting space flights will be a morale booster for NASA. "It provides an incentive for the job that is just not there when we are not flying," Godwin said.

NASA hopes to phase out shuttle flights by 2010 as it looks to build a new spaceship that will allow for more long-distance space exploration.

"I think it is a great vision to have. I think that is what excites the American people," Godwin told the audience.

Godwin, who graduated from Southeast Missouri State University in 1974 with a math and science degree, joined NASA in 1980 and was chosen as an astronaut candidate in June 1985.

Her last space flight was in December 2001 and involved a journey to the international space station.

The shuttle journey into space takes minutes thanks to 7 million pounds of rocket thrust.

"The whole segment of powered flight takes 8 1/2 minutes," she told the audience. "It's the quickest way out of town."

Gearing up for more long-distance travel will be a challenge. "Since the early '70s, we haven't been out of lower Earth orbit," Godwin said.

While the international space station is a marvel of technology, there's little storage space -- just like in many people's homes, Godwin said. "We just end up with a lot of stuff floating around."

But the view of Earth from space is breathtaking, she said. "It's a beautiful world to watch it go by."

The astronauts orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes. "Every 45 minutes we see a sunrise or a sunset," she said.

Returning to Earth, Godwin said even small objects like camcorders seem extremely heavy at first as astronauts get readjusted to gravity.

"Walking seems very strange," she said. "It's like walking on the deck of a ship."

mbliss@semissourian.com

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