She was pregnant when NASA proposed to send it in space, Anna Fisher did not hesitate

Her boss asked to see her in his office. He asked her husband, who also participated in the astronaut training program, to follow him as well. They sat at his desk together.

"I think," said his boss, "to send Anna."

That was what Fisher, then 33, had wanted. There was only one thing to consider – and she was currently growing in it. The day she was asked to board a shuttle and enter the solar system, Fisher was eight and a half months pregnant.

She still has not hesitated.

"I was not going to say no," she said last month in an interview with the Washington Post. "You do not say no to this offer."

And so it is that Anna Fisher has become the world's first mother to go into space. A few weeks after being chosen for a flight, Fisher gave birth to a daughter, Kristin.

She will soon celebrate the 35th anniversary of her flight, the day she became an inspiring figure for working mothers, including her daughter. Kristin is now a correspondent for Fox News in the District of Columbia and mother of a 16-month-old girl.

"I've always grown up thinking that I could have a demanding job full time and be a mother," said Kristin. "The example that she gave me, it was never a question." It was only when I was pregnant and I was started thinking about the logistics that I started to think: "How did she do that? ""

The answer is something that Anna Fisher had to understand quickly. She gave birth to Kristin on a Friday. On Monday, she was back at NASA, wearing the donut-shaped pillow that would allow her to sit down for the team meeting.

She wanted to send a message to her colleagues and business leaders: she could have had a baby, but she was still at work.

"It was worth seeing the looks on their faces," she recalls.

Fisher had always considered starting a family and had even informed the selection committee of the astronaut training program during his interview. She and her husband, Bill, were doctors in emergency rooms in California in 1977, when they had applied for the open call launched by NASA in search of potential astronauts. Bill would not enter before two years. But Fisher, at age 28, made the cut and moved to Houston.

There were six women in the class of 35 new astronauts – all of whom were determined to have their fellow men treat them with the same qualities. Sally Ride, who will become the first American in space, will go shopping at Fisher with khaki pants so that they wear outfits similar to those of NASA men. Fisher has never worn makeup at work. She attended the Spouse's Astronaut Club so that the wives of her colleagues did not feel embarrassed by the fact that a woman worked so closely with them.

During the 14 months that preceded his flight, Fisher had to reconcile training and NASA's obligations with taking over his new daughter. She and Bill asked for help from her mother and hired a nanny. She began to point out to reporters that the men on her plane were also leaving their children.

At work, she learned to play the role of "Capcom", the person in charge of mission control who communicates with astronauts already in orbit. It was an important role, which required lengthy and intense shifts – his commander had suggested he drop it. "You have Kristin, you're training, that's too much," he says.

Fisher begged him to reconsider and win. This is only when Mission Control lost connection with the flight into orbit as Fisher rushed into the bathroom and pulled his milk.

"They never had pumping rooms or anything like that," Fisher recalls. "I have never even had the idea to ask for one." None of us had the idea of ​​asking for special accommodations for anything. is."

Soon, she was commissioned to design the crew patch that would represent the flight of her team, the STS-51-A. She put six stars there: one for each astronaut on board and one for little Kristin.

In the weeks leading up to its launch in November 1984, she recorded dozens of videos of herself with Kristin. In previous days she had written to her daughter a letter:

"If something happens to me, just know that I love you so much," he said. "Your father and your grandmother will take care of you, and I will watch over you."

His flight was only NASA's second voyage with the Discovery Space Shuttle. She understood the risk she was taking.

The day she went to the launch pad in Florida, her husband used his access to NASA to make sure he, Kristin and Fisher's mother could be there to say goodbye. Then Fisher boarded Discovery and shot in the sky.

His flight consisted of a seven-day, 23-hour mission focused on recovering and sending satellites. Unlike today's astronauts, who can call and videoconference their children, Fisher had no way of communicating with his family on board. Instead, she sat at the window of the probe, staring at the Earth while playing a tape that she had brought into her Walkman. It was a recording of Kristin saying, "I read, I read." I like you.

After traveling 3.3 million miles, Fisher returned home safely. She slipped the letter she had written to Kristin in her jewelry box, acknowledging that her daughter would never have read it – but prepared to write another one the next time she would go into l & # 39; space.

In one month, she was assigned to another flight. Six weeks before this happened, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. One of the six people who lost their lives that day is Judy Resnik, a friend of Fisher's, who had joined the astronaut program at her side.

After the Challenger, the shuttle program stopped and Fisher took a seven-year leave to raise Kristin and have his second child, Kara.

She returned to NASA in 1996 and became head of the space station branch and one of the oldest astronauts in the agency's history.

Today, 50 American women have visited the area, including many mothers. Many told Fisher that when they were children, they wrote to her and she sent them a photo and an autograph.

She loved to hear them talking to each other in the halls of NASA, spending effortlessly discussing space walks and mission checks at pediatricians and concerts.

In 2017, Fisher retired from NASA at the age of 67. The same year she became a grandmother and quickly found herself helping her daughter cope with the same concerns as herself when she was new mom. Kristin's work as a Fox News correspondent means that she is often asked to report trips across the country and the world.

"She calls me and asks about traveling," Fisher said. "I say:" Do you remember when I was gone when you had this age? "

Kristin no. She said that her mother always asked, "Are you happy that I did it? I took the time to run the risk and I went into space?" "

"And the answer," Kristin says, "is unequivocal:" Yes. ""

"I told Kristin not to feel guilty about being a party," Fisher said. "If you do something you love or bring money, you are doing something important for your child.

And when she can, her grandmother, or "Anna Nana" as Clara calls, comes to babysit while Kristin works. In April, Fisher came to Washington to watch Clara the night Kristin and her husband attended the White House Correspondents Dinner.

During the weekend, they read some of the books Fisher had bought for his granddaughter: "Organic Chemistry for Babies" and "Astrophysics for Babies". Then they went out for their favorite activity. Fisher placed Clara in a swing the size of a baby. She lifted her back and began to count.

"Five, four, three, two, one," she said. "To be fired."

Then she let herself go and watched her little girl swing to the sky.

This article was written by Jessica Contrera, a Washington Post reporter.