8-18 Media’s Eleanor Dohrenwend, left, stands with former astronaut Dr. Anna Fisher at a forum held in Marquette in July. (Photo courtesy 8-18 Media director Marnie Foucault)

The event was hosted by KMI — Kal Morris Inc. — a company based in Marquette that was founded in 2019 with the goal of removing space trash from our atmosphere. This group originally formed at Northern Michigan University in 2014 and regrouped in 2019.

It has invented a machine that uses Laelaps-Reacch technology to grab space debris. This technology is inspired by octopus tentacles and is somewhat like an advanced arcade arm.

I was surprised to learn that both astronauts were most grateful for gravity after having the experience of being in an environment with no gravity for a number of months.

Williams, who holds the record for the longest spacewalk by a woman of 62 hours and 6 minutes, was on Expedition 72 and has spent a significant amount of time in space. She explained some of the experiments she conducted during her Expedition 72.

8-18 Media’s Eleanor Dohrenwend, right, stands with former astronaut Sunita Williams at a forum held in Marquette in July. (Photo courtesy 8-18 Media director Marnie Foucault)

She specifically spoke about an experiment she conducted called the Lava Lamp, which is similar to the experiment of liquid rising higher through a straw compared to the level in the glass when you suck on it. The lava lamp experiment uses pink liquid in a cylinder and puts straws in and bends them in different directions.

“Fluid would climb, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, depending on how the capillary action was working,” Williams said.

The fluid would also climb in different directions based on the heaviness of gravity.

“I thought that was pretty cool because I never thought about it,” she said. “Everything that we do here on Earth is influenced by gravity, so why is this important? It could maybe help us build fuel tanks in space so that we don’t have to have a pump to move fluid from one place to another — we don’t have gravity as the dominant force weighing down on it.”

Williams also thinks this is pretty cool because machines break down in space after awhile, and they have been working on this problem for 12 years.

They have finally gotten to the place where they can feed plants only with capillary action. She says in space we can “take advantage of the things we can’t take advantage of here on Earth to work for us.”

Fisher, who is a consultant with KMI, was the first in her family to go to college, studying medicine at UCLA.

After hearing that NASA was looking for astronauts, she decided to apply. She sent in her application the day before the due date and was surprised to hear she got the job. She was eight months pregnant. In 1983, Fisher helped Sally Ride get ready for space, and in 1984, she launched on her mission, STS-51-A.

Fisher concurred with Williams about being grateful for gravity. Fisher brought it back to a quotation from Don Pettit on an Apollo space mission, when he said, “Even a little bit of gravity helps.”

“Being weightless was so much fun, but it tends to make things more difficult,” Fisher said.

She referenced a book she read by Scott Kelly, “Endurance: A Year in Space, a Liftime of Discovery.” In the book, Kelly writes about how he spent six months in space on one mission and a year on the space station on another occasion, and how hard it is not to be able to really sit down at a table or having to manually weigh everything down.

“I guess I kind of just took gravity for granted all my life, and now I think I appreciate it a little bit more after being weightless,” Fisher concurred with Kelly’s analysis.

Meeting and having lunch with these two incredible astronauts in a town as small as Marquette was such a surreal experience.

Being in the same room as two people who, at one point, had seen our planet from an angle I will only dream about is an experience I never thought I would have, and I am so grateful for it.

I know Dr. Anna Fisher and Suni Williams will continue to create change and inspire others, just as they inspired me.

Eleanor Dohrenwend is a 16-year-old, partly home-schooled student who has two cats, Sammy (or Boba), a big black cat, and Violet, a tuxedo cat who loves paper bags.