Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@guardian.co.tt

In hu­man­i­ty’s quest to an­swer ques­tions about the vast cos­mos we are a part of, Trinidad and To­ba­go-born Dr Camille Wardrop Al­leyne has been at the fore­front of ef­forts to learn more about our galaxy.

The aero­space en­gi­neer, space sci­en­tist, and sci­ence am­bas­sador spent three decades at the Na­tion­al Aero­nau­tics and Space Ad­min­is­tra­tion (NASA) in the Unit­ed States.

It was her life­long dream and a ma­jor ac­com­plish­ment for some­one who once “didn’t know there was a job as an as­tro­naut.”

To pur­sue that dream, she left Trinidad when she was 17 and head­ed to Howard Uni­ver­si­ty to study me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing with an aero­space op­tion.

She then pur­sued a Mas­ters from Flori­da A&M Uni­ver­si­ty in me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing with a spe­cial­i­sa­tion in com­pos­ite ma­te­ri­als. She would be­come one of two peo­ple se­lect­ed in her pro­gramme by NASA to work at the Kennedy Space Cen­ter as a flight sys­tems en­gi­neer.

Her time at the glob­al­ly pop­u­lar agency would be ground­break­ing. Wardrop Al­leyne would be­come the first per­son of colour to lead a ma­jor hu­man space flight pro­gramme at NASA.

Just over a week ago, CAF—De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean—flew her in­to Trinidad to de­liv­er a fea­ture ad­dress at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ World of Work pro­gramme and to be one of three pan­el­lists for a fire­side chat at the launch of the CAF In­no­va­tion Se­ries.

She sat down with the WE mag­a­zine, re­call­ing the men­tal and phys­i­cal strength re­quired to work at NASA.

She said, “It was not easy be­cause the sys­tems are not nat­u­ral­ly set up for bring­ing in di­verse tal­ent. I have made sure to do a lot of work at the agency to make sure that oth­ers who look like me are com­ing up in the pipeline.” Wardrop Al­leyne said that though she left T&T very ear­ly in her life, those for­ma­tive years in her coun­try proved cru­cial when she en­tered a com­pa­ny that “had very few peo­ple look­ing like her.”

Wardrop Al­leyne said be­ing sur­round­ed by lead­ers in T&T who looked like her gave her a sense of ‘I can do any­thing.’

The for­mer lead sys­tem en­gi­neer at NASA went fur­ther in re­mem­ber­ing, “It’s a lot of that foun­da­tion that I had that gave me the for­ti­tude, the tenac­i­ty, and the re­silience to rise through the ranks at a place like NASA where most of the peo­ple don’t look like me. You need a cer­tain lev­el of de­ter­mi­na­tion and re­silience to not just sur­vive in that en­vi­ron­ment but thrive in that en­vi­ron­ment. I re­al­ly cred­it my foun­da­tion grow­ing up in T&T.”

Now re­tired, Wardrop Al­leyne is tar­get­ing vis­it­ing space one day. She is con­fi­dent space will some time in the fu­ture be­come as com­mer­cialised as the air­line in­dus­try has be­come over time.

She added, “Now you could buy a tick­et [to go to space]. Not every­body could buy a tick­et; it’s still very ex­pen­sive, but the fact that avi­a­tion was at this place in the be­gin­ning where very few peo­ple could buy a tick­et to go trans-At­lantic or go from the US con­ti­nent to Eu­rope. It was very ex­pen­sive, and very few peo­ple could af­ford it. The way you dri­ve down costs is by hav­ing com­pe­ti­tion, so as more air­lines came on­line, peo­ple had choic­es, and as you dri­ve costs down, more peo­ple are able to af­ford it.”

She was con­fi­dent that “it’s on­ly a mat­ter of time” be­fore space trav­el be­comes like air trav­el. Hav­ing watched the world from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, she is now us­ing her knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence in aero­space en­gi­neer­ing to come up with so­lu­tions to meet one of the world’s biggest mod­ern chal­lenges, cli­mate change.

“What we don’t think about is how space is a van­tage point to look at Earth and to study our home plan­et,” Wardrop Al­leyne in­sist­ed.

She said space can hold the an­swer to how we con­front some of the chal­lenges cli­mate change pos­es to the world, par­tic­u­lar­ly Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States (SIDS).

The tech­nol­o­gy, she said, can be used to pre­dict and mod­el weath­er pat­terns, which can in turn lead to putting poli­cies in place to re­act in the case of a dis­as­ter, like mov­ing peo­ple or for­ti­fy­ing struc­tures and sys­tems.

She ac­knowl­edged that for SIDS to find the cli­mate fi­nance to in­vest in such tech­nolo­gies can of­ten be chal­leng­ing, but she did point to con­sor­tiums around the world and in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions that are pro­vid­ing ac­cess to the da­ta. As the world con­tin­ues to ex­plore space and go to more plan­ets fur­ther and fur­ther away, Wardrop Al­leyne said she was con­fi­dent one day hu­mans will be able to live on an­oth­er plan­et.

“It’s go­ing to take some time. I don’t know if it will hap­pen in my life­time, but I think we’re mov­ing to­wards that. I think as space trav­el be­comes more ac­ces­si­ble, I think we can do it. We do have some chal­lenges to over­come. For ex­am­ple, the tech­nol­o­gy may be ready to go to Mars, but is the hu­man body ready to go to Mars? Is the hu­man body ready to sus­tain such a jour­ney? I think we still have a lot of things to fig­ure out in that realm to sus­tain hu­man life out­side of our Earth,” she said.

Wardrop Al­leyne would take it a step fur­ther, say­ing she fore­sees in the next decade al­most every coun­try on Earth hav­ing some lev­el of in­volve­ment and par­tic­i­pa­tion in space.

She added, “It may not look like NASA and the US. It may not look like send­ing as­tro­nauts to the moon. That is prob­a­bly go­ing to be a small­er sub­set of coun­tries, but us­ing space tech­nol­o­gy, for ex­am­ple, for solv­ing prob­lems here on Earth is some­thing so many coun­tries, de­vel­op­ing and emerg­ing mar­kets, are see­ing as valu­able and some­thing that is crit­i­cal to sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment.”

Wardrop Al­leyne added that such an in­volve­ment in space par­tic­i­pa­tion for SIDS could al­so look like hav­ing a group of uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents learn­ing to build a cube satel­lite that could be launched. “Just that train­ing, that de­vel­op­ment is the road to more ad­vanced stud­ies,” she said.

From hum­ble be­gin­nings, Wardrop Al­leyne had an as­tro­nom­i­cal rise in aero­space en­gi­neer­ing, ex­plor­ing a world above our plan­et that as­tounds those who look to the heav­ens. Now, she wants more peo­ple from de­vel­op­ing coun­tries like the one she came from to dare to reach for the stars, lit­er­al­ly.