Fantasy Flight: Chiaki Mukai, Japan's First Female AstronautRaised by a working mother in

Fantasy Flight: Chiaki Mukai, Japan's First Female Astronaut

Raised by a working mother in Gunma Prefecture, a place known for dry winds and tough women, Chiaki Mukai decided she wanted to become a doctor while she was still in elementary school. At 32, she was a cardiovascular(心血管的)surgeon and chief resident at the Keio Hospital in Tokyo. Then she saw the newspaper ad that changed her life.

The beginning of a dream

The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) was looking for astronauts. What really shocked Chiaki, as she prefers to be known, was that there were no gender restrictions.

She suffered for three days. Weightlessness has much to offer scientific research, she thought. If I don't try, I'll regret it for the rest of my life.

"I had no idea what to expect," Chiaki said, giving one of her trademark smiles. "But I started two training programs the day I sent in my application. First, I started learning English. Then I began working out with weights."

Her English study program was entirely self-constructed. She made English labels for everything in the house. "I wanted it to seem like I was living in an English-speaking country," she explained. She answered the phone in English. She read English-language books. In August 1985, NASDA chose three payload specialists for the 1992 Spacelab-J launch — Mamoru Mohri, Takao Doi, and Chiaki Mukai. Chiaki's journey to the stars had begun.

The journey to space

"You can never give up," Chiaki says. "The life of Marie Curie taught me that. I read time and again how she struggled with her home, her children, and her scientific dream. And she achieved her goals — even though it cost her life.'

"My mother is the same kind of woman. She didn't want to depend on someone else for her livelihood, so she opened a haberdashery(男子服饰用品店)in our hometown. She still runs it."

Chiaki's mother didn't blink an eye when her daughter told her of being chosen as an astronaut. "You never know what life's going to deal you," she said to Chiaki. "So you must do what you really want to."

Once she started her training for space, Chief's roster(名单)of heroes grew longer. "Yuri Gagarin was the pioneer," she said. "I have immense respect for him. And Nell Armstrong — it was really great, what he did. That must have been a 'fantastic voyage'. But then all the people I worked with at NASA and NASDA are heroes in their own way. So how do I choose？

Chiaki gestured at the bustle(喧嚣)of Tokyo outside the window. "From here, we can't see very much. But from 300 miles up, you realize how small the earth is. But you know what I first learned in Orlando, Florida — at Disneyworld." Which brings Chiaki to another of her heroes: Walt Disney. Like Chiaki, he was a dreamer. And he shared his dreams of fantastic worlds with others. She is fascinated by the way his movies, gentle and natural, teach us about humanity.

"Disney, and science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, realized the Earth is just a small planet without having to go into space. Their accomplishment is much greater in a way than ours. We saw with our eyes. They saw with their minds' eyes."

The first Japanese astronaut to fly an American space shuttle was Mamoru Mohri, who went as payload specialist on the Spacelab-J, a flight funded largely by Japan. Chiaki and Takao Doi backed him up.

After Mohri's flight touched down, Chiaki journeyed back to Japan to begin work in the microgravity lab at Tsukuba. But word soon came that she had been chosen as payload specialist for the International Microgravity Laboratory-2 (IML-2), so she returned to take up the training where she'd paused.

"Mohri was chosen to fly the Japanese-funded space shuttle, so there was never any doubt that he'd go. But the IML-2 was an international

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