Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger has had her eyes on the stars for more than 30 years. Now she’ll be getting a much better look.
The former Vancouver teacher and coach is scheduled to leave Earth early Monday morning, when the NASA shuttle Discovery heads for the International Space Station.
Metcalf-Lindenburger will be part of the seven-member crew when shuttle flight STS-131 is slated to launch Monday at 3:21 a.m., Pacific time, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 34-year-old astronaut, who was at Hudson’s Bay High School for five years, is a mission specialist. During a recent conference call from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, she had a chance to describe her role during the 14-day mission.
It’s a small world for local teacher, two friends on shuttle
“I will be on the flight deck during ascent and re-entry,” she said. Metcalf-Lindenburger will be keeping track of checklists, making sure everything gets done by the numbers.
“In orbit, I will fly the shuttle’s robotic arm,” she said.
Metcalf-Lindenburger will be Clark County’s second astronaut on the space station within the past few months. Camas native Mike Barratt returned from a seven-month assignment in October.
The two astronauts are part of a major transition for America’s space program. Only four shuttle flights remain on NASA’s schedule, and Metcalf-Lindenburger’s flight will be the second-to-last mission for Discovery.
Barratt’s Sept. 16 flight on Discovery is slated to be NASA’s final space shuttle mission.
Metcalf-Lindenburger started her teaching career in 1999 at Hudson’s Bay, where she taught science and astronomy and was a cross-country coach.
Her husband, Jason Metcalf-Lindenburger, was a social studies teacher at McLoughlin Middle School. Jason now teaches middle-school history in the Houston area. Their family now includes a 3-year-old daughter, Cambria.
The Hudson’s Bay teacher was just satisfying the curiosity of a science student when she came across her career turning point.
In a preflight interview a month ago, Metcalf-Lindenburger told a NASA publicist the story:
“When I was teaching astronomy at high school, one of my students said, ‘How do you go to the bathroom in space?’
“I looked it up that night, and at the same time, they had posted that educators could become astronauts. So, I had the answer to my student’s question, but I also got an answer to a dream that I had for a long time, and so I applied for the astronaut position.”
That long-time dream started when she was a lot younger than her Bay astronomy student. Growing up in Fort Collins, Colo., “You’re used to looking up at the sky, and at night the sky is gorgeous,” she told NASA.
Her interest in space grew, and she spent a lot of time at Denver’s planetarium as a youngster. The notion of going into space took hold when she was in the eighth grade.
A happy space camper
She entered a writing contest that offered a trip to Space Camp, a youth program at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.
o When Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger and her Discovery crewmates reach the International Space Station, it will mark the first time four women are in space at the same time. Two other women are aboard Discovery, and an American woman was on a Russian rocket that blasted off Friday.
“I took second place,” Metcalf-Lindenburger said. “I got a NASA T-shirt.”
Her parents knew how badly she wanted to go, so they sent her to Space Camp as a ninth-grader.
“It was there that I realized if I keep working hard in math and science, it’s a possibility that I could work at NASA,” she told the interviewer.
That gave Metcalf-Lindenburger a solid academic background.
She was an NAIA Academic All-American in track and cross country at Whitman College in Walla Walla.
As an accomplished runner and cross-country coach, Metcalf-Lindenburger also was prepared for the physical demands of astronaut training.
Still, she never figured to get a response from NASA. But she was summoned to an interview in November 2003.
Again, she figured that was about as to its good as it was going to get.
She told herself, “That’s the best thing ever. That’s the closest I’m going to get to being an astronaut.”
But in April 2004, NASA announced that Metcalf-Lindenburger was accepted for astronaut training. Now, almost six years later, Metcalf-Lindenburger is on the threshold of space.
Once the Discovery is in orbit, her role will begin as robotic arm operator. That includes a safety inspection of the shuttle. The robotic arm will be fitted with a sensor-equipped boom that can check all the protective thermal tiles, making sure that the vehicle didn’t take any damaging hits.
Discovery is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Day 3 of the mission
The shuttle will be bringing about 12 tons of cargo up to the space station, and, “I will help unload those supplies,” Metcalf-Lindenburger said by phone from Houston. “That’s a lot of transfer time.”
Spacewalks — extra-vehicular activities in NASA-speak — are always high-profile events in any shuttle mission, and Metcalf-Lindenburger will play a role in three of them.
Supporting spacewalks
“I will lead the spacewalks from the inside,” she said, supporting veteran spacewalkers Clay Anderson and Rick Mastracchio.
“In our training, we gave some input on what we were interested in. I was interested in helping with the spacewalk,” she said. “That’s how I got to be the IVA (intravehicular activity) crew member.”
A camera on the end of the robotic arm will help her monitor the spacewalkers, and she’ll also be linked into their helmet cameras so she can see what Anderson and Mastracchio are seeing outside the space station.
She will be working with a checklist to guide Anderson and Mastracchio during their assignments.
Some of that will be basic step-by-step instructions on their tasks, like “how many turns on the bolts,” Metcalf-Lindenburger said.
The other members of the shuttle crew are commander Alan Poindexter, pilot James Dutton and mission specialists Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki.
While America’s future in space is unclear, Metcalf-Lindenburger hopes there will be a place in it for her.
“I would like to stay at NASA, and if the opportunity is available, fly on the International Space Station,” the former Hudson’s Bay teacher said. “I haven’t had a lot of time to think about the future. I’ve been busy, but I want to stay here.”
