Dr. Mae Jemison may have her feet firmly planted on the ground these days, but the world’s first woman astronaut of color continues to reach for the stars. Jemison was recently successful in leading a team that has secured a $500,000 federal grant to make interstellar space travel a reality.
The Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (named After Jemison’s mother) was selected in June by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to receive seed funding to form 100 Year Starship (100YSS™), an independent, non-governmental, long-term initiative that aims to ensure that the capabilities for human interstellar flight exist as soon as the next 100 years. The winning 100YSS™ proposal, titled “An Inclusive, Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond,” was created by the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence with team members Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.
The grant has been awarded in a climate of hyper sensitivity about government spending. Jemison’s former employer, NASA, could be facing significant cuts in its 2013 budget, prompting inquiries from some quarters about the “here on earth” justifications for federal spending.
“It’s not so much about who gets to go into space, but what happens in our world every day that we take for granted, the everyday applications that come from space exploration,” says Jemison.
She chuckles about the public’s adoption of Tang, the iconic fruit-flavored product whose popularity soared after astronauts drank it on board flights during the infancy of space travel in the early 1960s. Jemison then rattles off a list of now commonplace applications such as Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), weather satellites and miniaturization (the creation of ever-smaller scales for mechanical, optical, and electronic products and devices) as examples of practical products that had their genesis in space exploration.
“The 100YSS is one of those things that also can galvanize us,” says Jemison. “We believe that, by really trying to stretch ourselves, by mounting and meeting a grand challenge, we can start to fundamentally change life here on earth, and one of our tenets is to change it for the better.”
