Napa astronauts journey leads to International Space Station

Kate Rubins will go where no Napan has gone before 268 miles above the Earth.

The biochemist-turned-astronaut, who joined the NASA ranks in 2009, has been chosen for a mission to the International Space Station set to begin in May 2016. On Monday, the U.S. space agency formally announced the mission, which had begun to emerge in news reportslast year.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft will boost Rubins, the Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, and Takuya Onishi of Japan from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the remote steppes of Kazakhstan, to the space station, where Rubins will oversee more than 100 scientific experiments during her six months in microgravity.

For the 36-year-old Napa native, the journey will be the fulfillment of a dream born in childhood, in a bedroom patterned with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. More than a year before her first space flight, Rubins already was hoping simply to latch on to as many memories as possible amid the hectic rounds of training and preparation.

People have said even though its only six months, it goes by incredibly quickly, so pay attention to all the small things, she said Thursday by telephone from Friendswood, Texas, where she and her husband, Michael, Magnani live outside NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can have so much work to do and you can get absorbed in it, so you have to stop every now and then and realize where you are.

Space and the stars held an early fascination for Rubins, through an upbringing that included stargazing events and a weeklong trip as a seventh-grader to the NASA Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. However, another scientific initiation would set her onto her early path: a visit at age 16 to a conference on recombinant DNA at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which inspired her to study molecular biology at UC San Diego, after graduating from Vintage High School in 1996.

A career studying the genetics of viruses followed, starting with undergraduate work on finding HIV inhibitors for potential anti-AIDS treatments, and later studying the smallpox and Ebola viruses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She earned a doctorate at Stanford University in 2005, then spent the next four years with the Whitehead Medical Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading a 14-member infectious disease laboratory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Still, when NASA began recruiting another group of space travelers in 2008 more than 3,500 candidates pursuing nine slots Rubins, almost on a lark, gave her original dream one more chance, though with no real expectations. Despite feeling I didnt think I had a shot at all, she made the cut in 2009 after a year of evaluation and interviews.

It was one of those childhood dreams I couldnt let go of, she told Nature magazine in March 2013. I thought that NASA didnt take biologists and so nothing would come of it, but I knew I would regret it if I did not apply.

I really thought that was her career trajectory and knew she loved her work as a research virologist, Rubins mother L. Ann Hallisey, an Episcopal minister in Davis, said in an email. It seems, however, that the space bug never left her ... I think the message here is, hold on to your dreams.

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Napa astronauts journey leads to International Space Station