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Credit: NASA

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Karen LuJean Nyberg was born, the fifth of six children, on October 7, 1969, in Vining, a very small town (fewer than 100 inhabitants) in central Minnesota, where she grew up in a house outside of town on a lake in the country. She says:

“The town that I went to school in is a neighboring town, Henning, and its one school was kindergarten through twelfth grade. So, I went to school with pretty much the same people my entire life. There are a couple drawbacks. Education-wise, it was a good education and it all ended up okay. The good side about being in a town like that, in a school that size, is I was able to participate in everything that I wanted to. I was playing sports. I was in the band, in the choir, student council and being a part of a team in that way. It made me a more well-rounded person. I think if I had gone to a bigger school, like my sports’ abilities, I was OK but I never would have been able to play in a big school.”

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Although she chose a career dedicated to science and technology, Karen still has varied interests. Her recreational interests include piano, running, drawing and painting, and sewing. She says:

“My mom and dad are both very creative people and made a lot for all of us kids: everything from snowmobile suits to prom dresses. My mom taught me to sew when I was about five or six years old. I would sew all day every day if I could, I love it that much.”

Karen especially enjoys quilting and appliqué work and used those skills to create a lot of the décor for her son’s nursery before he was born. Drawing and painting is another of her hobbies that she inherited from her father, Ken Nyberg—of Norwegian descent—who creates painted steel sculptures made from scrap metal. She also packed a sketch book and pencils when preparing for her long-duration mission in orbit. Before leaving, she said:

“I’m really hoping to spend some of my free time drawing, I used to mostly draw portraits, and gave them to friends, but I haven’t done it in a long time. I am hoping I can get back to some of that while I am in space.”

Karen started running as a graduate student while at the University of Texas and developed a love for long-distance running. She participated in nine marathons and made headlines when, in 2007, she completed the Boston Marathon in 3 h, 32 min, and 9 s, in tandem with fellow astronaut Sunita Williams , who ran the marathon while in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS) (see page 295). She graduated from Henning Public High School, Henning, Minnesota, in 1988. She wanted to be an astronaut since she was a little kid:

“I can’t pinpoint an event or a person or anything that made me decide that. I just decided that that’s what I wanted to do and I kept that with me and most of my friends in high school knew that’s what I wanted to do. They just called me ‘the rocket scientist’.”

Karen graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of North Dakota in 1994. She explains:

“It’s kind of funny how I chose mechanicals because this was before the time of computer-aided drawing and computer-aided modeling, and I like to draw so it was like drafting sounded fun. I do not think I knew enough about engineering to know that that’s what I wanted: at this time I knew that ‘astronaut ’ was my ultimate goal.”

Meanwhile, in 1991, Karen got into the Cooperative Education Program at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and worked as a co-op student in a variety of areas: in the robotics on the first semester, in the MOD (Mission Operations Directorate) for another semester, and then with Crew and Thermal Systems Division. In 1994, she received a patent for her work on robot-friendly probe and socket assembly. “It extended my graduation by a while,” she says, “but I think it was very valuable. I learned a lot about engineering and I got my foot in the door at JSC.” She decided to continue her studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where, at the Austin BioHeat Transfer Laboratory, she investigated human thermoregulation and experimental metabolic testing and control, specifically related to the control of thermal neutrality in spacesuits, which was NASA research. This work led to her doctorate in 1998 and she was hired at JSC with the Crew and Thermal Systems Division, working as an environmental control systems engineer in charge of improving the thermal control systems of the spacesuits and designing thermal systems for the future Lunar and Martian missions. That summer, she applied for the astronaut program. “I thought it is time,” she says. “I have my Ph.D., now I will put in my application. I never thought that I would be selected. Luckily, for some reason, I was selected.” She joined the 18th Group of NASA Astronauts in July 2000 and, after 2 years of basic training and evaluation, she qualified as mission specialist and was assigned for technical duties in the Astronaut Office Station Operations Branch. She was crew support astronaut for the Expedition-6 crew during their 6-month mission on the ISS and then was chief of the Robotics Branch.

From July 22 to 28, 2006, Karen lived and worked underwater for 7 days in NEEMO -10 (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations), a deep-sea training and simulation expedition at the Aquarius underwater laboratory, to help prepare for the return of astronauts to the Moon and manned missions to Mars.

Karen flew for the first time into space in 2008 with Shuttle mission STS-124, the second of three missions that contributed to assembling and installing the Japanese Laboratory Kibō (“Hope”, in Japanese) and the Japanese robotic arm. In a pre-flight interview, she said:

“That’s one of the biggest payloads the space shuttle has ever flown, so there’s not a lot else that we’re taking up, other than that module. So that’s the main goal, to deliver that to the space station, install it, activate it, get it up and running.”

Karen, together with the Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, was responsible for the installation of Kibō and worked heavily on robotics, being the lead for all the robotic-arm operations: she was the first astronaut ever to operate all three robotic arms that were on station at the time: the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS), also known as Canadarm-1; the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), known as Canadarm2; and the Japanese Experiment Module Remote Manipulator System (JEMRMS), used to transfer the experiments from an airlock that the Japanese Kibō module has to the “Terrace” located outside, where they are exposed to the vacuum of space. One remarkable aspect of this mission was that it helped to highlight the international nature of the ISS program:

“We flew in an American space shuttle, carried a Japanese laboratory, used a Canadian robotic arm to install it to a module that was built in Italy, and we did all this traveling 17,000 miles an hour. These modules never having been mated on Earth to see if they fit, and it’s that international aspect of it that I think we have learned a lot.”

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Commemorative cover of Expedition-36/37 signed onboard the ISS by the Crew, including Karen Nyberg, on the day of the 50th anniversary of the flight of Vaentina Tereshkova (from the collection of Umberto Cavallaro)

This mission started the final assembly phase of the ISS. In a pre-flight interview, Karen highlighted:

“After this mission the space station is going to be very close to its final configuration, so that it can be used to do the things that it was originally meant to be for, all the science that originally it was intended for. And I hope that it can be used to look at the effects of microgravity on humans which is very important for the future of what we plan on doing in sending humans back to the moon and even on farther where we’re really going to be in microgravity for very long periods of time.”

In May 2009, Karen was assigned to mission STS-132, scheduled for launch in 2010, but had to be replaced a few months later due to a temporary medical condition. She flew to the ISS in May 2013 as flight engineer of the Soyuz TMA-09M mission, the second-ever express trip to the ISS, and for 5 months she was part of Expedition-36/37, along with the Russian cosmonaut Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, who carried into space the Olympic torch for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, and the Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano. She was one of only two women in space on June 16, 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the flight of Valentina Tereshkova , the other being Wang Yaping aboard the Tiangong-1 on the Shenzhou-10 mission. Karen was involved in a number of experiments on ocular health, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular health:

“We’ve discovered that there are quite a few astronauts coming home with decay in their eyesight. Luca Parmitano and I have been involved in numerous tests. We’re doing tonometry—we are looking at the pressure of the eye. We are doing ultrasounds to look at the morphology of the eye, we are doing fundoscopy to take images of the retina, vision tests. We are hoping that we can determine exactly what is causing this and hopefully mitigate the problem, especially if we start longer duration missions going to Mars. And I’m confident there will be some type of an Earth application that will come from this: that we could contribute to the success of solving some earthbound eye diseases. Another great one to talk about is bone density: there’s great potential for using that and applying it to earthbound osteoporosis.”

One of the fun pictures she sent during her mission was the “Made in space!” dinosaur, as she wrote on the caption, which she created for her 3-year-old son, Jack. “I made this dinosaur for my son last Sunday, September 22,” she says. “It is made out of velcro-like fabric that lines the Russian food containers that are found here on the International Space Station (Fig. 51.1).”

Fig. 51.1
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The “Made in space!” dinosaur that Karen made for her son: it is made out of Velcro-like fabric that lines the Russian food containers that she found on the International Space Station (ISS). Credit: NASA (CollectSpace)

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During Karen’s mission, as the Shuttles weren’t coming to the station anymore after their retirement in 2011, the ISS was visited by four different transfer vehicles, prepared by ISS partners to deliver supplies and equipment: the Russian PROGRESS, the European ATV (built in Italy), the Japanese HTV, and the first demonstration vehicle of the Orbital Science Corporation, CYGNUS, whose pressurized module was built in Italy by Thales Alenia Space . She played a major part in grabbing most of them with the robotic arm.

She is married with astronaut Douglas Hurley in 2009 and they have one son.