Exploring New Frontiers: Leadership, Resilience and the Future of Spaceflight

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, recorded live at ASAE’s Annual Meeting & Exposition in Indianapolis, guest host Joanna Pineda of the Associations Thrive podcast welcomes Dr. Shawna Pandya, Canada’s first named commercial female astronaut, who is preparing to fly with Virgin Galactic. Dr. Pandya explores how commercial human spaceflight is creating new pathways to space and shares how her background as a physician informs her work in space medicine, focused on keeping people healthy and performing at their best in extreme environments. She also discusses her experiences as an aquanaut on NEPTUNE saturation missions in the Florida Keys and how underwater environments can help researchers study crew dynamics and test technologies for space. Dr. Pandya highlights research priorities ranging from neuroscience and women’s health to health technology and physical sciences, reflects on the role of leadership and resilience throughout her career, and looks ahead to the next generation of commercial spaceflight. Check out the video podcast here: https://youtu.be/32Zx7varMag This episode is sponsored by Destination Canada.  Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.   Transcript Joanna Pineda: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Series, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Joanna Pineda, CEO and chief troublemaker at Matrix Group International, and we're recording here in Indianapolis during ASAE's Annual Meeting & Exposition. This episode is sponsored by Destination Canada. And today, we are so excited to welcome Dr. Shawna Pandya, Canada's first named commercial female astronaut. Dr. Pandya, welcome to the show.  Dr. Shawna Pandya: Thank you so much for having me here. It's just wonderful to be here.  Joanna Pineda: Dr. Pandya, what does it mean to be a, I wanna make sure I get this right, a named commercial female astronaut? Dr. Shawna Pandya: Yeah, that's a great question. So once upon a time, the only path to get to space was to be an agency astronaut, so being a Canadian Space [00:01:00] Agency astronaut, being a NASA astronaut. And now I often like to say that this is the best possible time to be alive in human space flight because there are multiple paths to space. So you can be a commercial astronaut. You can be an agency astronaut. You can be an agency astronaut who retires and works with a commercial company as one of their astronauts. So when we talk about commercial astronauts, we mean an astronaut who's going to space with a company like SpaceX–in my case Virgin Galactic–Blue Origin, Axiom, Vast. And so the path of how to get to space and who gets to go to space is changing. So in Canada, we've had a number of commercial astronauts, including William Shatner, probably the most famous one. Makes sense. But there've been no females so far. So for women astronauts, we've had Dr.Roberta Bondar and Julie Payette, who have flown with the Canadian Space Agency, Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, who will soon fly with the Canadian Space Agency, and on the commercial side, I have the honor and privilege of being the first named commercial female astronaut.  Joanna Pineda: That is just amazing. [00:02:00] Congratulations. Dr. Shawna Pandya: Thank you. It still feels like I'm processing the information.  Joanna Pineda: Yeah. I'm curious, when you were a little girl, what did you want to be?  Dr. Shawna Pandya: I definitely wanted to be an astronaut, and so I think this is where the story of where representation matters. It does. I was a kid growing up in the '90s, and I got to watch Canada's first female astronaut go to space. I heard of Dr. Roberta Bondar and her space flight, and I thought, "Canadian women can do that. I want to do that. I'm a Canadian woman, so if I want to do that, I should just follow Dr. Bondar's path." And so she's a neuroscientist, a physician, and an astronaut, so I thought, "Okay, that's what I'll do. There's no question about it. I'll go study neuroscience, medicine, and then go be an astronaut."  Joanna Pineda: Oh, so you were trying to follow her path.  Dr. Shawna Pandya: From the very start, like when I was 15, I knew that I was going go do a neuroscience degree. There was no- nothing else I was gonna apply to, and so that became the blueprint for me, and then I took a few detours along the way. I did my master's degree in space studies at the International Space [00:03:00] University, and that's where I learned that space medicine is this whole field dedicated to keeping astronauts alive and healthy in space, and this was prior to my getting into med