Space Marathoner Already a Record-Setter
April 16, 2007 — -- Astronaut Suni Williams is a tall, willowy brunette with a sparkle in her eye that hints at her sense of humor.
She is just the kind of woman you would expect to cut her hair off the first week she was in space, then help shake a balky solar array into place on one of her first spacewalks, and later set a record for most spacewalking time for women -- 22 hours and 2 minutes.
Williams' hometown is Needham, Mass., and she said she always knew she wanted to be an astronaut. First she graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, then racked up 2,700 flight hours in 30 different aircraft before she was selected as an astronaut in 1998. She trained for almost 10 years before her first flight, which launched last December, and became one of the few women spacewalkers.
She isn't shy about her devotion to the Red Sox, and she loves to run, so much so that she figured out how to compete in the Boston Marathon even though --at her very closest -- she is orbiting 200 miles above it.
Running in Space
Williams qualified for the Boston Marathon in January 2006 by placing among the Top 100 in the women's category in the Houston Marathon. She couldn't compete last year because of her training schedule for her shuttle flight, and Expedition 14 on the International Space Station. So she decided to become the first astronaut to compete in the Boston Marathon from space.
Williams is doing it on the treadmill on the space station.
"I've been training for it, and working out for it, " she said in a series of interviews from the space station earlier this month.
Williams planned to start around 10 a.m. today, but may not complete the 26.2 mile course for a few days. The schedule on the space station is pretty busy right now with a crew change in the works. Her Expedition 14 colleagues, Mikhail Tyurin and Michael Lopez Algeria, are getting ready to return to Earth on a Soyuz Friday, while the new Expedition 15 crew adapts to life on the space station.
ABC News has interviewed Williams several times. What has emerged is a portrait of a smart, strong and funny woman who meets each challenge with a smile.
A Role Model
Does she see herself as a role model for girls?
"I hope so," Williams told ABC. "I wasn't always the sharpest tool in the shed, the smartest kid on the block, but I think there is a lot of persistence there, and I hope kids understand it is okay to fail, if you learn something from failing.
"I didn't do that great at the Naval Academy, I did OK there -- enough to get me a billet where I was doing something operational. I tell little girls about the story. I started flight school when 'Top Gun' came out, so of course everybody wanted to fly jets. That was the cool thing to do, and I put that down as my first choice. But I got helicopters because there weren't that many jet billets. I did pretty good at that. You just sort of take what you get, maybe you don't get the first thing that you want. If you are good at what you do, and you try hard, some things sort of fall into place."
The Importance of the International Space Station.
The International Space Station is still under construction. Work stopped while the shuttle was grounded after the Columbia accident in 2003. Since the accident, the mission of the space station has evolved.
Williams sees the space station as a necessary stepping stone.
"We are seeing how the body adapts and changes. That is an amazing, great thing, but also it creates some problems when people are living in a microgravity environment, insofar as we lose bone mass and muscle mass.
"We need to figure out if that happens, what kind of counter measures we have -- either nutrition or exercise -- what type of medical procedures we can do in space, what type of materials work in space, we need to figure out all of those answers to those questions before we leave low earth orbit and try to go live, venture to places like back to the moon or on to Mars."
What's Next?
Would Williams like to go to the moon? Absolutely, she said. She has had such a wonderful experience on the space station.
"Can you imagine going to the moon and looking back at the Earth? Like our forefathers did? That is just going to be incredible when you can actually see the whole round shape of the Earth -- that will just be awesome… There is lots of adventure out there for the generations -- knock on wood, I hope I will be able to see it happen and maybe participate in it.
Suni's Ponytail
Just days into her mission, Williams gave a pair of scissors to fellow astronaut Joan Higginbotham and had her cut off her ponytail. The ponytail came back to Earth, and was donated to a charity, Locks of Love, to be made into a wig for a child who needed it.
Williams said she was inspired by the daughter of a friend.
"I thought, 'Wow, that is a good idea.' I am just happy that I am healthy and had long hair and could give it to someone else. Like I said, I was not going to have it up here anyway, so I thought. 'What the heck, I will start growing it out and give it to somebody who really needs it.'"
Her hair will have plenty of time to grow back. Williams was supposed to hitch a ride back on shuttle flight STS 118, which was supposed to launch on June 28. But a hail storm has knocked the schedule for shuttle flights out of whack, delaying the next flight -- STS 117 -- until June so engineers could repair the damaged external tank. So STS 118 isn't likely to launch until late summer.
So Williams will break one more record -- most continuous time in space. By the time she lands later this summer or early this fall she will have spent eight or nine months orbiting the Earth.