Catherine “Cady” Coleman is one of the few people in the world who can say she’s gone to outer space – twice. “I always thought space was somewhere else but space is part of where we live,” said the retired NASA astronaut. In a conversation with Esther Dyson, Coleman shared her extraordinary experiences with the audience, showed rare pictures from a space station and discussed how her time in space changed the way she saw things on Earth.
For Coleman, sharing her experiences in space is a duty because “if you don’t talk about it then people don’t know”. She believes that everyone has a right to be educated about what’s happening in space. “There’s so much Earth observation data from satellites,” she said, “and yet, it’s like having the world’s treasures in a vault with no inventory system and no way to access it effectively to tell the stories that we need to tell today, especially about climate change.”
