During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sian Proctor, a geoscience professor, wrote poetry as a way to cope with the social isolation the health crisis brought.
Proctor, who has a pilot license and maintains a deep interest in space exploration, decided to record her recitation of her poem “Space to Inspire” for a NASA application to fill an open seat on a space flight.
Earlier, Procter had piloted a commercial space flight for SpaceX, but it was the poem, she says, that “won me a seat to space.”
The NASA flight gave her “orbital perspective” and a feeling of connectivity to humanity and the Earth.
Recently she became a science envoy for the U.S. Department of State, a role in which she plans to share information about the importance of protecting the Earth’s environment.