Reach higher, astronaut urges

POTSDAM — When Bonnie J. Dunbar tells people to reach for the stars, she means it.

The former astronaut — and one of the first women in space — spoke Thursday to a crowd of high school and college students and professors at Clarkson University.

"A hundred years ago, the Wright brothers took their first flight. In another 100 years, with the talent in this room, the sky's no longer the limit. Maybe it's Alpha Centauri," she said. "I've learned to never say never. We should always keep our visions high."

Now the CEO of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Ms. Dunbar told a rapt audience about her achievements in the sciences and gave an insider's view of what it's like to live and conduct experiments in space.

Ms. Dunbar said she first voiced her ambitions when she was an eighth-grader in Sunnyside, Wash., and told a teacher she wanted to build spaceships and fly in them.

"Some time ago, she was just a little girl running around her family farm. She wanted to fly. She wanted to go into space. What a beautiful dream," said professor Liya L. Regel, who introduced Ms. Dunbar as part of the college's Space Day celebration.

After getting bachelor's and master's degrees in ceramic engineering from the University of Washington, Ms. Dunbar went to work for Boeing and Harwell Laboratories, and eventually ended up at Rockwell International, where she helped to develop the thermal protection tiles for the space shuttle Columbia.

She earned her doctorate in mechanical and biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, and got her pilot's license.

She joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1978 as a guidance and navigation flight controller, and was selected to become an astronaut two years later.

With five space flights under her belt, Ms. Dunbar has spent a total of 50 days in orbit aboard the space shuttles Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia and Endeavor, docking with the Russian Mir Space Station twice. Her last mission was in 1998.

Ms. Dunbar showed the audience footage from her missions in space, including photographs of the Earth and video of astronauts catching floating M&Ms and bubbles of strawberry Kool-Aid in their mouths. She also detailed the variety of experiments that she and other crew members conducted while in orbit.

She said that she believes exploration is key to humanity's survival.

"The human population as it grows will grow not just across the surface of the earth, but will be outward bound," she said. "I've always said that if we didn't explore for one reason or another, we'd all be in high-rise buildings around the Euphrates. So what's over the next hill?"

Ms. Dunbar was awarded an honorary degree from Clarkson in 1993. She was the keynote speaker for the college's Space Day celebration, which also included a space quiz competition for area high school students Thursday.

She encouraged the young scientists to push toward the next frontier: Mars.

"We explore because we should be exploring. That's what makes life exciting," Ms. Dunbar said.