Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

So, yeah, I'm excited for myself, yes, but also I hope what this can enable more broadly for the country.

And I'm really grateful to be in this position too.

Yeah.

So when you finish school, there's no kind of graduate job or apprentice to be an astronaut.

You have to have a first career in advance of even being able to apply.

And that first career is

has to be something that's in a technical field.

You can be a scientist of any kind.

You can be an engineer of any kind.

You can be a pilot.

You can be a medical doctor.

And on top of that, you need to be fit and healthy, not like an Olympic athlete, but kind of like you're in the military, fit enough and healthy enough to do your job.

You need to have expeditionary experience, meaning things like being in the military or in Antarctica or on

like scientific field ships.

You should have operational skills, which means things like having been in the emergency service or flying or scuba diving, situations where you have to make decisions in real time where someone could die if you screw up.

And on top of that, you should have kind of international experience or speak other languages.

So it's really broad.

And building out a CV to hopefully one day be an astronaut is an awesome journey in its own right.

So I tell people with this dream, you know, pick something in that huge breadth of fields that you love anyway.

And becoming an astronaut is just the cherry on the top.