As well as being an engineer and retired NASA astronaut, Karen Nyberg has a passion for art, sewing and crafting. She was the first person to quilt and sew inside a spacecraft, a challenging activity in the weightless environment. In this article we find out how Nyberg’s love for science, arts and crafts, and her desire to share with others the experience of seeing the beauty of Earth from space, led her to design space-inspired fabrics for incorporating into quilts and other crafts.
Karen Nyberg follows her passions. She knew from an early age that she wanted to be an astronaut and she pursued her goal with great focus - she has three degrees in mechanical engineering and her graduate research investigated the control of thermal neutrality in space suits. She joined the Johnson Space Center in 1991 and was selected for the NASA Astronaut Corp in 2000, participating in two missions to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2008 and 2013, accumulating 180 days in space. As a mission specialist on STS-124 she rode on was part of a crew on Space Shuttle Discovery playing its part in building the ISS by installing the Japanese laboratory. Then, as a flight engineer for Expedition 36/37 she lived aboard the Station for almost six months.
