Originally published in Rolling Stone on March 3, 2021 featuring the experiences of Kathryn Sullivan (PhD’78, LLD’85).

The astronaut and oceanographer’s expeditions have taken her where few others have gone before — and have helped open up a universe of knowledge to scientists.

Photo: RollingStone

In 1976, Kathy Sullivan was finishing up her Ph.D. in oceanography when an intriguing, if somewhat far-fetched, opportunity presented itself: the chance to become an astronaut. Her expertise was in the geology of the deep-sea floor, a few hundred miles in the exact opposite direction of where a space flight would take her, and joining NASA, she realized, could shut the door forever on her career in oceanography.

“I loved the expeditionary part of oceanography best of all,” she says, “being out at sea, adapting to what odd circumstances came your way, bad weather or broken equipment. I adored that.” But on a visit home during Christmas break, her brother told her that NASA was recruiting astronauts for its new space-shuttle program. It seemed at first to have nothing to do with the path she was on, but once she read up on it, she realized NASA was looking for people to do in space what she loved doing at sea — planning and executing scientific expeditions. She applied and beat out more than 8,700 other applicants, becoming one of the first six women accepted to NASA’s astronaut corps.

Forty-two years and three space-shuttle missions later, including one in which she became the first American woman to do a spacewalk — i.e., float out there in the abyss tethered to the back of a spaceship orbiting at 17,500 miles per hour — she hit another milestone. In oceanography, no less. “As it turned out, the door didn’t end up being completely nailed shut,” she says. “I’ve been able to cross back and forth between the space arena and the ocean arena in a lot of wonderful ways.”

Last June, Sullivan, 69, became the first woman and only the eighth person overall to submerge 36,000 feet into a part of the Pacific known as the Challenger Deep, making her the only human — male or female — to have been in both outer space and the deepest part of the ocean.

Read the full story on rollingstone.com.