Beaumont Astronaut To Spend 6 Months On International Space Station

BEAUMONT, CA—NASA flight engineer and Beaumont High School graduate Dr. Tracy Caldwell Dyson will live and work as a flight engineer on the International Space Station for the next six months. This is her second tour on the International Space Station.

According to NASA, Dyson considers herself to have "grown up in space," having spent over 188 days off the planet. She joined the space station in late March and will spend six months on board with the rest of the International Space Station 71 Crew, working as a flight engineer, conducting human research activities and cargo operations, and space physics.

Since being selected as a NASA astronaut in June 1998, Dyson has served as a mission specialist and flight engineer and has logged 22 hours in three spacewalks. After this six-month stint, she'll have spent 370 days, more than a year of her life, in space.

Dyson has flown in the Space Shuttle program on the Endeavor as both a mission specialist and flight engineer, but she began looking up at the stars from the Pass Area and Beaumont High School, where she graduated in 1987, according to the Record Gazette.

While onboard the space station, Dyson's experiments in space will include observing how fire spreads and behaves in space and photographing Earth to analyze changes over time.

This week, they're testing eye health in space. After removing a small satellite orbital deployer from the Kibo laboratory module's airlock, she tested her vision by reading characters off a standard eye chart.

At the end of last week, she worked on Advanced Space Biology, attempting microgravity 3D bioprinting, a stepping stone toward generating whole human organs in space, according to ISS Science for Everyone.

"The 3D bioprinting biotechnology study may enable future space crews to print meals and medicines on demand and doctors on Earth to engineer replacement organs and tissues for patients," a NASA spokesperson said.

She'll return to Earth later this fall on a Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft with cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub.

You can follow their progress on the Space Station blog.

How To See The International Space Station:

If you're an early riser, you may have a chance to see the International Space Station this week, the current "home away from home of former Beaumont resident and astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson.

The station will be visible about 10 degrees above the south-southeastern sky just after 5 a.m., Wednesday and Friday, according to SpotTheStation.nasa.gov.