Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

I'm great, thank you.

Yeah, I'm at work here in Adelaide at Lot 14 where the Space Agency headquarters is.

This is where I spend most of my days here when I'm in the office.

What is that?

This is my flight jacket, we call it.

So basically on the left, you wear your country that you represent, obviously Australia.

You wear your astronaut wings, which you receive when you pass basic training and are eligible for a flight assignment.

Your space agency, Australian Space Agency.

And this is my class patch.

It's the hoppers.

So I'm in a class with five others and we named the hoppers in part because Australia is represented on astronaut training for the first time and we liked how our

You know, kangaroos go forwards and not backwards.

And when you get missions, you get patches down your arms and across your chest as well.

So you can kind of get a sense of what astronauts have done by looking at their jackets and their flight suits.

But I'm a rookie astronaut by comparison to many.

It's allocated by the class that's ahead of you.

So the class that was ahead of us at the European Space Agency, or ESA, is called the Shenanigans, and they gave us the name.

Yeah, well, they played a lot of tricks on each other apparently, so that's why they got that name.

Yeah, it's definitely pinched me stuff to be a qualified astronaut, you know, ready for missions to the International Space Station or even the moon.

It's been a long time coming, but it's still really kind of a new beginning of what the future could hold.