Tastronaut Rose, aiming to be Australia's first female astronaut

The lure of space, of the endless black and silver void, has called humanity further afield every year.

For a Launceston-born scientist, that pull to leave the comforts of Earth for a dizzying, airless place full of silence and cold, has taken her further and further afield.

Rose Tasker wants to be Tasmania’s first astronaut – and incidentally Australia’s first female astronaut.

Her scientific background, vision and determination has taken Tasker to several international space training programs, the latest in Florida in October last year.

Tested to the limits of physical capability – enduring a forced hypoxia to find her body’s limits of operating without oxygen, grappling with the massive pressure of increased g-force, wearing a full-body suit designed as a second skin – Tasker knows what it will take to be an astronaut.

Her goal is to be a commercial astronaut, linking science and business outside Earth.

Elon Musk is the most obvious name that links space to commercial gain, but Boeing and Virgin are also investigating further the role of space in future travel and industry.

It’s that industry, rather than the NASA-style missions best known for extending humanity’s horizons, that Tasker hopes to tap into.

Her love of science, of exploration and discovery, have taken her beyond a single-minded vision to a multi-pronged focus on scientific research, citizen science, and community outreach.

So why space?

Faced with the choice of a university scholarship for music or science, Tasker chose to science – much to the surprise of her parents and friends.

“I was always interested in space for a really long time,” she said.

“It was just never a thing that could be an option … I didn’t know anyone working in space, especially growing up in Tassie, there’s not a big space community down here.

“But then in 2012 I got offered a European space agency scholarship to go to a summer program in Adelaide, which is run by the International Space University and the University of South Australia.”

While Tasker couldn’t make it to that six-week summer program, she went in 2014, and discovered everything she’d been looking for.

“From that, just through meeting people, that just opened up all the doors,” she said.

In October last year, Tasker continued her training, travelling to Florida to take part in Project PoSSUM.

Project PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) is a NASA-supported citizen-science research program training astronauts at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

It was a far cry from Launceston.

“I got to do astronaut training with them … they call it the scientist astronaut candidate training program,” Tasker said.

“This is where commercial astronaut training gets very interesting, and may actually play a larger role than general agency astronauts.”

Agency astronauts, for instance through America’s NASA organisation, or other government-run programs, are often generalists trained for space travel, but are not necessarily scientists.

“Because commercial space is opening up and there’s a lot of commercial [space] companies … the commercial sector have started training specialists,” Tasker said.

The PoSSUM project focuses on training scientist astronauts to collect data from the edges of Earth’s atmosphere, between 120-150 kilometres above the globe, where space officially begins.

“They selected 11 people world-wide, I was the only Australian,” Tasker said.

Tasker followed in the footsteps of another Australian, Brisbane artist and space advocate Sarah Jane Pell.

"Experiencing negative and … zero g’s was amazing, getting to fly the planes was amazing,” Tasker said of the training..

“That was a lot of fun, we also did space suit training.”

Donning a space suit was a remarkable experience, Tasker said, with a commercial company testing their space suits outside a country’s agency for the first time.

Taking part in the two-week Project PoSSUM program also showed her where the shortfalls of today’s science and space programs lie.

“We didn’t have customised [suits] but despite that, it really surprised me that space suit design has not come further along,” Tasker said.

A flight simulation of the Virgin Galactic suborbital flight during training showed just how difficult the flight suits could be to navigate.

“Trying to move, and move the camera, and collect things with this … arm they send out to grab atmospheric data and bring it back in – trying to press all those buttons in a space suit and talking through the comms was very, very interesting,” Tasker said.

Hypoxia training, in a controlled environment, tested each would-be astronaut to the limits of oxygen deprivation.

“We got trained how to identify symptoms … as soon as you sense something, you have to tell someone,” she said.

“You could feel fine at 90 per cent but then pass out, everyone’s body is different … there’s no limit-pushing with this.”

As a scientist, and not just a generalist, Tasker kept noticing opportunities for more research, more scientific gaps that needed to be filled.

The training gave her fresh ideas for her astronaut career – not just in space, but on the ground as well.

“I’ve noticed things that need work on, a lot of that is to do with outreach – things like arts, performing arts, graphic design, those sorts of sectors are growing in the space sector, which is really interesting,” Tasker said.

“Now I’m more focused on the outreach stuff, and am in the process of helping set up a foundation that focuses on recruiting people into the space sector from diverse backgrounds or Indigenous [backgrounds].”

Returning home to Launceston, Tasker is continuing her scientific outreach, and her work toward becoming ‘Tastronaut Rose’.

Her interests extend to researching Indigeous astronomy and how scientists can use satellite data, combined with Indigenous astronomy knowledge, to better manage natural resources.

She is also setting up an international think-tank dedicated to expanding the understanding of space, working to resolve a “disconnect” between the science of space and the public awareness of its value.

“Every time [media] talks about ‘should Australia have a space agency?’, the comment section is always ‘no, we should spend our money here back on earth’,” Tasker said.

“The think-tank is focused around not just the research and policy of this, but the education and outreach to the public … in terms of how we use space technologies to improve life on earth.”

Alongside the harder sciences of finding out why, and how, Tasker said there was a simpler reason that drove her to pursue the chance to float weightless in the black of space:

”That looks cool: let’s go do that.”