Katherine Bennell-Pegg remembers always having the same answer when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“Well, what else could be cooler than being an astronaut?” she said.
It was an ambitious dream for a young child growing up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches in the 1990s to have, particularly since this was decades before the nation founded its own space agency.
Sitting outside the Australian Space Summit in Sydney, Bennell-Pegg tells us how she never strayed from it.
“Instead of patronising me, my school and my parents said we’ll go figure out what that would take,” she said.
Bennell-Pegg went on to graduate with degrees in engineering and advanced science, specialising in aeronautical engineering and physics, from the University of Sydney in 2007.
With nowhere to apply her skills in Australia, she followed the footsteps of Australian-born NASA astronauts like Paul Scully-Power and headed abroad.
She spent the next decade working on a number of space projects in Europe before she returned home to join the Australian Space Agency not long after it was established in 2018.
She moved to Adelaide with her husband, who also works for the Australian Space Agency, and two daughters and settled into her new life.
“There’d always been some space activity, but not a full ecosystem, and that was the start of a great adventure getting Australia to grow space technology,” she said.
Australia now had its own space agency, but it was still lacking an astronaut program.
Then, the European Space Agency opened applications for new astronauts.
Bennell-Pegg was eligible due to her dual British citizenship and took the leap to fulfil her childhood dream.
“It was an absolute roller coaster. The whole selection process was about a year and a half. Just being eligible to apply was exciting,” she said.
Bennell-Pegg had to travel to Europe several times during the COVID-19 pandemic to compete against almost 23,000 candidates from 22 countries.
They trained under conditions that mimicked the feeling of zero-gravity.
“With a push of a pinky, you can shoot across the room, if you’re moving around and your toe taps something, you might flip into a somersault,” Bennell-Pegg said.
“It’s really skittish, and you have to be really controlled.”
They underwent “every medical test you could do without a scalpel”, psychological and stress tests, individual and panel interviews and impromptu speeches.
By the end of the strenuous selection process, she received the call.
The European Space Agency had made the “unsolicited” offer to take her on as an astronaut representing Australia.
While Australians like Scully-Power have been to space before, they did so representing NASA as dual American citizens.
Bennell-Pegg is the first to represent Australia.
“I recognise I stand on the shoulders of giants, Andrew, Thomas, Power and others that supported them and our industry at the time,” she said.
“But to be the first to wear the Australian flag, officially represent Australia, is a massive honour. I know I carry the hopes and dreams of many on my shoulders.”
Bennell-Pegg’s next big dream is to undergo her first space mission to the moon.
She hopes to help create opportunities for researchers and organisations working in space and science.
“Every kind of field of science is represented up there. Every kind of stage of technology is represented up there,” she said.
“You’ve got a lot of startups from human spaceflight nations, amazing like artificial organs or artificial retinas or different pharmaceutical products, materials.
“Astronauts go there to make breakthroughs you can’t make down here. So that’s why we put our lives on the line. It’s for those breakthroughs.”
Bennell-Pegg hopes Australian kids will feel inspired to take the same leap she did and not count themselves out.
“What I learned was that to be an astronaut, you can have almost any kind of STEM career,” she said.
“Astronauts are normal people. We just fit a particular box that’s needed to do this work in space right now.
“This is a tangible dream, and it’s a powerful dream.”
