GILBERT, Ariz. — A PhD and a seat on the U.S. national track cycling team was not enough for Chris Birch.
Sitting in a dorm room at the Olympic training center during the COVID-19 pandemic, she threw her hat in the ring and applied to NASA. Today, the Gilbert High School grad has a better chance of walking on the moon than winning a gold medal, and Birch is OK with that.
“I would love to go work and do science on the moon,” she said. “There’s a lot of really interesting geological questions that we can answer by going back.”
Growing up in Gilbert, the desert night sky planted a cosmic seed in her mind.
“Such a great place to get excited, both about our solar system at night, the desert stars come out incredibly bright, you have great views of the Milky Way,” Birch said.
Teachers at Gilbert High School remember her as a straight-A student who asked questions and took advantage of every opportunity — and AP course — she could enroll in.
“It’s something she is born with,” said her former guidance counselor Christopher Mack. “It is that internal motivation to just — I want to do this, and I am going to do this.”
High-school Birch wanted to push the boundaries of knowledge and make a novel contribution in some way, she said. But how? It’s a lot for a teenage girl to ponder.
“I didn’t really know what that meant at the time, but that was the internal fire,” Birch said.
After graduating from Gilbert High in 2004, she attended the University of Arizona, earning degrees in mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics.
She didn’t stop there.
Birch moved to Boston to earn a doctorate in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She didn’t have a car, so she peddled to campus each day — and discovered cycling was a great way to relieve grad-school stress.
It also led her to the U.S. national track cycling team. The high-school achiever, UArizona three-degree earner and PhD student applied that same drive to the velodrome. One was an extension of the other.
“My desire to be the best possible on the bike that I could be, pushing myself in that direction,” she said. “My desire to produce new knowledge by pursuing a PhD, those really fit well with this exploration mindset.”
Training on the velodrome every day, Birch and her teammates found themselves in a holding pattern. The pandemic kept delaying the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
In college, she noticed female astronauts living and working in space, doing the same experiments she had done in labs at UArizona.
In her Olympics training dorm, she filled out an astronaut application.
Then she hit send.
She continued to train, not knowing what path her life would take. Would she be competing in Tokyo? Attending astronaut school at the Johnson Space Center in Houston?
“I was going through both of those selection processes simultaneously, both of them delayed, two really, really big unknowns in my life at the same time,” Birch said.
NASA responded a year after she applied: Birch and nine others were selected from a pool of 12,000 to join Astronaut Group 23. She reported for training in January 2022.
“I might start in the morning flying 500 miles per hour in the T-38, and then a couple hours later I have to switch gears entirely and try and think in Russian,” she said. “Later in the day, I might be doing some self-study looking at some engineering schematics for how our life support systems in the space suits work.”
Birch said the most difficult part was learning how to balance all the different skills and information she had to absorb. Birch said some of the best advice she received came from the current commander of the Artemis II mission, Reid Wiseman.
"He told us 'be where your feet are' and that has been so true in helping me find balance — just being very, very present on what I'm working on at the time," Birch said.
She is now qualified for spaceflight after two years of training. That means her destinations could be the International Space Station, the moon or even Mars. For now, she continues to train and provide ground support to other space crews as she awaits a mission assignment.
Birch still keeps in touch with some of her former teachers at Gilbert High, including Brendan Keyes.
“Honestly, when I tell my students we have an astronaut who is an alumnus, they kind of give you that look, like, 'really?'” Keyes said.
He’s proud to be Birch’s former teacher and often brags about her to other students. Keyes said the Gilbert-Tiger-turned-astronaut will inspire more than she will know.
Mack, her guidance counselor, said the fact that Birch is a woman makes her story even more inspiring.
“Christine, I’m super proud to say you were a Tiger,” Mack said. “If you do get to visit the Moon, scratch my name ‘Mack’ on the Moon. That would be kind of cool to have my name on the Moon,” Mack said.
It’s the kind of tribute any teacher would want. But only a kid who dreamed of the stars and made it there can deliver.
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