Linda M. Godwin
Linda M. Godwin
Linda Maxine Godwin Ph.D.is an American scientist and retired NASA astronaut. Godwin joined NASA in 1980 and became an astronaut in July 1986. She retired in 2010. During her career, Godwin completed four space flights and logged over 38 days in space. Godwin is the Assistant to the Director for Exploration, Flight Crew Operations Directorate at the Johnson Space Center. Since retiring she accepted the position of Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Missouri...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth2 July 1952
CountryUnited States of America
I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.
We didn't use the shuttle robot arm before, so this has been a training flow to get ready for that.
We're on the same radius from the Earth, and then we start to swing around to where we're ahead of them on the velocity vector, so we come in relative to the station from this forward velocity position and dock on to the forward end of the Lab.
I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it.
I'll be the person using the shuttle robotic arm.
The training comes to us with the benefit of what has gone before.
A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.
It's really a good feeling to know that we put this up there, that it's working, that all these people's plans that worked so hard came together and things fit and we've got a real space station.
It's really kind of a challenge to keep coordinated with the two station crews that we'll be interacting with. And of course one of them launched quite some time before our mission.
Although I know a lot of the previous shuttle flights, in theory, had their tasks laid out; but there were still some changes that came along for them.
UF is Utilization Flight. That got put in the manifest quite some time ago.
In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.
Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy.
There's a lot of interest from the medical community on how things develop in microgravity, and the hope, later, that is expected to apply to what the changes are in humans as well.