Review: Sharing Space

by Jeff Foust
Monday, September 30, 2024

Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change
by Cady Coleman
Penguin Life, 2024
hardcover, 272 pp.
ISBN 978-0-593-49401-1
US$28.00

To the average person, an astronaut—a professional trained to fly to space—presumably spends much of their time in space. Those in the space community, though, know otherwise. Early in her book Sharing Space, former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman notes her career at NASA spanned exactly 8,888 days, or more than 24 years. She spent just half a year, 180 days, in space, on two shuttle flights in the late 1990s and a long-duration flight on the International Space Station in 2010–11.

What goes into being an astronaut, then, involves all that time spent on the ground training for flights and waiting for the next mission assignment, not to mention the years of effort leading up to being selected as an astronaut. Coleman uses that experience to both tell what it’s like to be an astronaut as well as mine that experience for lessons that an earthbound reader can also apply.

The book, in many respects, is a typical astronaut memoir. Coleman describes how she first became interested in becoming an astronaut as a student at MIT when Sally Ride gave a talk there in the early 1980s. Ride was “surprisingly real and relatable,” she recalled. “As I listened to her speak that day, an utterly unexpected idea popped into my head: Maybe I—Cady Coleman—could have that job.”

Coleman, who became a research chemist in the Air Force, went on to get that job, convincing herself and the inevitable skeptics that she was astronaut material. She got her opportunities to fly to space, along the way getting married and having a son, but also dealing with challenges along the way, such as subtle but very real sexism she encountered while in the astronaut corps. But, some of those challenges were her own doing, she acknowledged, such as a lack of organization that put a burden on support staff and others.

As the subtitle suggests, those experiences become fodder for life lessons she passes along to readers, subtly, in the book. Seeing Sally Ride, she recalls, gave her “permission” to pursue a career as an astronaut: “If you can see it, you can be it.” Other lessons involve dealing with doubters, and self-doubt, and working with others. None of those lessons are terribly surprising, but they have the benefit of coming from someone who used them in space, or to get to space.

Coleman was also one the key figures in the recent documentary Space: The Longest Goodbye, which covered her mission to the ISS and keeping in touch with family while away (see “Review: Space: The Longest Goodbye”, The Space Review, March 18, 2024.) At the end of the documentary, she confesses, “If I could have spent another six months, I would have stayed in a minute.” In the book, she recalls saying to a crewmate, as they neared the end of their time on the station, “I would spend another six months here in a minute.” She credited that to the bonds built up with her crewmates. “Yes, I missed my family and couldn’t wait to see them again. But my crew were family too.”

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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