were eating, otherwise they would slide off the table. It was so bad
you’d learn to put your laundry in your bunk with you to kind of
wedge yourself against the wall when you were trying to sleep. But
there wasn’t anything you could do about big swells, though.
Sometimes you’d be sleeping and then you’d sort of wake up in
a free-fall. There wasn’t really anything you could do about that.
You just kind of had to catch your sleep in between.”
This is no cruise ship. These boats are smelly, noisy, rock-
ing, and frenzied. It’s not the laboratory environment that most
biologists are used to.
“They process the fish on board, so it’s actually a factory,”
Olathe explained. “They’re actually fileting and freezing the fish on
board, and it’s tremendously noisy, so you’re wearing ear plugs
most of the time, ear plugs to sleep, ear plugs when you’re working.
You pretty much just need that protection the whole time because
it’s very very loud.”
All of this while taking measurements, recording data, and
sleeping whenever she could.
So when the Canadian Space Agency announced they were
recruiting new astronauts, Olathe jumped at the chance. She wasn’t
the only one. Nearly 9,000 people started an application. Who signed
up? Physicists, geologists, jet pilots. Some 3,771 submitted com-
pleted applications and were invited to do a government exam. Of
those, 2,000 passed.After that Olathe was notified that she was inthe
top 160.^11 Then things got serious. She got a trainer, and started
a rigorous fitness and nutrition routine. The possibility of being an
astronaut made getting up at 6am, going to the gym, daily swims,
and huge salads easier. She was training for her lifelong dream.
When she passed the medical exam, the number of can-
didates was down to 72 and she was selected for the next
assessment: four days of intense tests, most of which she
couldn’t talk about.
“It was the most intense four days of my life. I can say that
having been crab fishing in Alaska in the middle of winter. It started
out with breakfast. Then we had to turn off our cell phones. There
was no outside communication. You’re not distracted. Your focus is
complete. You’re not thinking about work obligations or family
obligations. Nothing. You’re just doing this one thing.
“We were tested for flexibility, for strength, agility,
being able to be a leader in a team, being able just as quickly
to follow our spatial abilities, our spatial perception, our128 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge