Overall, though, she says it hasn’t been a big issue. “I know I keep saying space is hard, but it is, and that means there is not a lot of time for people messing around. Our approach is, this is the problem, let’s all focus on the solution.”
The work she does is, then, a shared mission for all involved, male and female, “and we march in the same direction without a lot of drama. You respect one another.”
In the mid-2000s, Fox was in Sweden with a group of other scientists studying the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, when she met her husband, John Sigwarth, a fellow scientist, also working at Nasa. They fell in love. “We were,” she recalls, “unashamedly a pair of nerds.”
But tragedy struck on December 13, 2010. She was away in San Francisco for work, leaving John at home to look after their two small children, James, then three, and Darcy, 13 months. An instinct that she couldn’t explain told her to ring home. There was no reply.
She waited anxiously until the next morning to try again, but no matter how many times she called, it rang out. Eventually, her son picked up.
“We had taught him well not to answer the phone. He told me, ‘daddy was still asleep’, that he couldn’t wake him, and that he was hungry for breakfast.”
Staying on the line with James to reassure him, she simultaneously used a separate phone to call the emergency services, and then persuaded her son to open the front door to a stranger. “I told him the policeman would get the breakfast cereal down for him from the shelf.”
John’s dead body was found in the bedroom. He had suffered an aortic aneurysm.
“You can often think bad stuff happens to other people and then it happens to you. I had every emotion known to man at that time – hurt, anger, I was angry at the world. You either give up or you keep walking and I kept walking. I couldn’t fall apart because I had two little kids who needed me.”
In the years since, Fox has risen through the ranks at Nasa while bringing up two small, traumatised children alone, always worrying that she wasn’t doing either role as well as she might. “I feel I do 80 per cent in each area, but recently I have come to see that that means I am operating at 160 per cent. So I am not failing everywhere. I am killing it. You have to have that attitude.”
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
