SKY’S THE LIMIT

PALMER — Wasilla Girl Scout Ariel Haas can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be an astronaut.

“I saw my first space shuttle launch on TV when I was only 3,” Haas, 13, recalled Friday after a small group of Valley girls met with NASA astronaut Ellen Baker at the Alaska State Fairgrounds during a three-day Girl Scouts encampment over the weekend. “Then I found out I really loved engineering and building things, so now I aspire to be an aerospace engineer and work for NASA.”

Baker, a physician who has logged 686 hours in space during three shuttle trips, was the featured guest at the 100th Anniversary of the Girls Scouts of America celebration, which drew nearly 1,000 Scouts from Alaska and elsewhere.

But when Baker, now 58, was a young girl growing up in Queens, N.Y., being an astronaut was the furthest thing from her mind.

“Being an astronaut wasn’t even an option, because when I was your age, no girls were astronauts,” Baker told the girls at Raven Hall before giving a PowerPoint presentation about her space experiences to two groups later that afternoon. “Only guys could be astronauts. Women weren’t allowed to be military pilots, either, until about 30 years ago.”

Having a strong role model in her mother — a nurse who was the first woman to serve as president of Queens Borough — Baker pursued a doctorate in medicine at Cornell University.

By the time she graduated in 1978, the Russians had sent the first woman into space, followed in 1983 by America’s first woman astronaut, Sally Ride.

Two years before Ride became famous, Baker had joined NASA as a medical officer at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center and was selected to be an astronaut in 1985.

Although Baker chalked up her career in space to “being lucky,” she also made it clear to the Girl Scouts that she always did her best in school and always pursued her passions.

“Find something you really love,” she told them. “Don’t do something because you think it will help you be an astronaut. It’s hard getting to be an astronaut, so you don’t want to select a career you’re not really crazy about and then end up not making it as an astronaut. There are a lot of really talented people out there and not everyone who wants to be an astronaut is selected. But there are a lot of jobs at NASA as an aeronautical engineer or astrophysicist or another sort of support person if you want to contribute that way.”

Girl Scouts heading in that direction, however, are at an advantage these days because many of them are able to take part in Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., and also at a smaller, more convenient facility, the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska in Kenai.

Haas, who is going into the ninth grade at Mat-Su Career and Technical High School, attended Space Camp during the summer before sixth grade.

“It was really quite an experience,” said Haas, who also was on the Teeland Middle School team that won the national Design Challenge Competition this year to build a school of the future. “There were people from all over the world, like from Costa Rica, and we got to use the tools real astronauts use to train with. It got me even more excited about working for NASA.”

Julie Alexander, a Valley mom who works for Girl Scouts of America and attended Space Camp when she was 9 and again at 16, is excited that her 15-year-old daughter, Cassandra, is going to the Advanced Space Camp this summer.

“Being an astronaut was my big dream in life,” Alexander said. “The first time I wanted to go to camp, my parents said it was too expensive and that I would have to pay for half the cost of the event itself. So for two years before that, I asked for cash for every birthday and Christmas and I remember raking yards and doing odd jobs for people to earn money. I ended up raising about $300, which was a lot back then.”

Cassandra, a sophomore at Colony High this year, said she’ll earn college credit for attending the camp.

“I think it’d be pretty cool to go up into space and just to see all those amazingly beautiful things and to see the earth from far away and the moon up close,” she said.

Baker told the girls that if they’re serious about being astronauts, they’d better like to exercise, because astronauts have to exercise for two hours every day while in space to prevent their muscles and bones from weakening.

During her slide presentation, Baker explained how different everything is when there’s no gravity — from being strapped in a harness to walk on a treadmill to relying on Velcro to secure food supplies and sleeping bags.

“Every day in space can be a really bad hair day,” she chuckled as she showed them a photo of a female astronaut with her long blonde hair flying straight up above her head. “The first thing you notice when you get into space is that up and down have no meaning and your days are confusing because you see 16 sunsets and 16 sunrises in a 24-hour period.”

One thing’s for sure, however: Just like the space program, Girl Scouts has come a long way in the last 40 years.

Baker told the girls she never was a Girl Scout because she preferred the activities of the Boy Scouts.

“When I was your age, Girl Scouts was not the dynamic organization it is now,” Baker said. “I wanted to be a Boy Scout because they did things that were more fun. Girl Scouts was pretty sexist when I was your age. There was a lot of sewing and cooking, which are good skills to know, but I was not at all interested in doing that stuff when I was 12. I wanted to go camping and play sports. I didn’t want to be sitting inside baking and sewing.”

Based on the local Girl Scouts’ focus on the science, technology, engineering and math program and the myriad of activities going on during the fairgrounds encampment last weekend, the Girls Scouts definitely have moved beyond the sewing needle and baking pan.

“It’s interesting that women have made such a leap in such a small period of time,” Haas said. “Now we can do anything we set our hearts to.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.