Bonnie Dunbar has orbited the earth 800 times
For the first time, Dr Bonnie Dunbar’s tone is terse. “I’m not a movie star,” she protests firmly, after being asked to pose sitting on the grass. The irony is that when you are this close to one of the world’s most experienced astronauts, who has orbited our planet nearly 800 times and travelled more than 20 million miles, you instinctively want to reach out and touch her. It might be the closest you ever get to Mars.
It makes sense that Dunbar does not want to be glamorised. The disintegration of the Columbia shuttle last year, which killed all seven crew, caused a global reassessment of space exploration. Was it mankind’s multi-million dollar dreams astronauts were fulfilling, or just their own?
Dunbar has certainly seen hers realised. The granddaughter of an immigrant from Dundee, she was brought up on a cattle ranch east of the Cascade mountains in Seattle. “You could see the Milky Way, see that Mars was red, shooting stars and satellites. I was fascinated,” she says. Her ambition fed by works of Jules Verne and HG Wells, she decided that she didn’t want to admire these things from so far away. “And I was raised not to draw boundaries,” she says.
No-one in her family had ever had the opportunity to go to university. Her mother was one of nine children and couldn’t afford college. Her father had fought in the Second World War, and had to work on the ranch on his return.
Today Dunbar is in Scotland with a group of 10 senior Nasa officials to support the Festival of Science. The programme of workshops, including talks from Nasa astronauts, aims to encourage young people to develop an interest in science and enterprise. Dunbar knows herself what an incentive the thought of donning a space-suit can be. Her parents impressed on her that she would have to study hard or stay earthbound.
“I made that link between school and my future, but some young people take their options for granted or get distracted for the wrong reasons. What we are trying to say is this is maybe the kind of thing you should aim for,” she says.
While persisting with her bachelor’s degree during the late sixties, Dunbar was told that there were no jobs for women in engineering. After a spell at Boeing as a systems analyst, she completed a masters degree which led to a senior position at Rockwell International Space Division. She became an astronaut in 1981, and has joined five shuttle missions on Columbia, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Since Valentina Tereshkova became the first female cosmonaut in 1963, only six other women have spent more time in space than Dunbar. She laments that girls are still allowed to lose interest in science, although her focus was not on being a female pioneer. “What you achieve shouldn’t be to do with what you look like on the outside, but you should follow what your desires and interests are,” she says.
While this is marvellous inspiration for potential future female astronauts, it doesn’t explain to the sceptics why we should spend money on sending them up there in the first place. Dunbar doesn’t think we spend nearly enough. “The entire Nasa budget is about $15bn ((pounds) 8.93bn), but only a third of that goes on human spacecraft. That is less than half of one percent of our federal budget. If they cancelled the entire Nasa budget, it would only pay for human services in the US for one week,” she says.
“And let’s talk about what Americans spend money on,” she adds, hastily. “They spend three times as much on cosmetics and make-up as Nasa does on its human spacecraft. According to the last figures, Americans spend $70bn ((pounds) 41.66bn) a year on alcohol, a lot of that on Scottish Scotch. So, how much is too much?”
Dunbar, 54, is unmarried, has no children, and wears no make-up. At Nasa, universal priorities override personal ones. “Being in orbit and looking down on earth for the first time didn’t make me feel insignificant. I thought ‘this is an exciting time’. Here I am and I have less than 100 years to make a difference and do something significant. It was exciting but it also gave me a timetable. I don’t do what I do for my achievement.”
She does it because she loves it, she says, and believes it is worthwhile. She compares her journeys to the voyages of discovery in past centuries, pointing out that exploration then and now pushes the boundaries of technology. “If you want to see what it takes to move forward and explore, go to Discovery Point in Dundee. There were other ships that broke up in the Antarctic ice but Discovery didn’t because they built it of layered wood that could be compressed. It was engineered for that new frontier, and now that frontier is space.
“That information and knowledge we gather from making the first space station helps us build more stations more cheaply. That knowledge doesn’t disappear. It goes back into universities and trains the next generations of engineers.
“People don’t remember that when we funded the technology for Apollo, strictly a project about going to the moon, it resulted in the computer being developed in the US. There were learned economists and companies that said we would never use computers except in space and that it was a waste of money.”
Access to God’s eyeview of the world often makes a deep spiritual impression on many astronauts, Dunbar agrees, but she prefers to keep her thoughts private. “I think it’s more about really understanding our place in the universe, regardless of what religion you are, regardless of whether you’re spiritual or not. It’s about realising that we do have a very small planet and that you can’t see borders in space. It’s time we just stopped fighting. I think a much more pressing question for us right now is how we’re going to get fresh water to everyone.”
Nasa, funnily enough, may have the answer to that, too. Recently they funded Texas Tech University to develop ways to recycle urine and grey water – water used for washing – so that shuttles in the future need take less with them. A test system has been placed in a small community on the Texas-Mexico border where there is no sewage system.
She says: “The investment in that technology may have been millions of dollars to go to space but the application would be down here. Exploration helps drive this kind of investment. Otherwise, where are the motivators?” With these questions reeling through her mind, is it any wonder that Dunbar isn’t interested in make-up?