Near the trailer park community in rural Colorado, past the gas station, was a dark spot where she would go at nights to look up at the stars. She didn’t dream of space travel – that’s too cliché for a budding astronaut.
She couldn’t dream of something so unfathomable.
Celene Meraz-Benavente couldn’t afford college. Neither could her parents. Then she heard from a Grand Canyon University recruiter. She could get a scholarship for playing flute in the band and for academics. That was 12 years ago.
“From that day, everything has been incredible,” she said.
Today, she is in the Scientist-Astronaut Qualification Program of the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, a NASA-supported research program.
“I felt like GCU was looking after me. I felt like I was in the right place,” she said via video call from her home in Australia.
When she came to GCU in 2012, she had never been in an airplane. But after she got involved on campus, playing in the band, being a student leader, studying business and volunteering in the community, she gained confidence to branch out.
Meraz-Benavente became one of the first 13 GCU students to spend the spring semester of 2014 in the Disney College Program at Walt Disney World in Florida. She took that first flight. It changed everything.
She learned business from one of the premier entertainment companies but also met her future husband, an intern from Australia. She eventually followed him there to enroll at Federation University, where today she is in her third year of studying physiotherapy.
One day, the now married couple was watching “First Man,” the inspirational movie about Neil Armstrong, when she turned to her husband and asked: “Do you think this is something I could do?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
So she turned her attention to what she knew. From earlier studies in electrical engineering at Federation, she had helped a robot learn to walk, then was doing the same helping people to walk in physiotherapy rotations at hospitals in Victoria.
With space medicine a growing area, she wants to help astronauts more comfortably walk.
In 2023 she and seven other candidates from the U.S., France and Mexico were accepted into the program and started a week-long training course at the Florida Institute of Technology, working in low-gravity environments. She studied how to self-diagnose hypoxic symptoms that astronauts many encounter in low oxygen.
Meraz-Benavente was put in a chamber and measured her oxygen levels, which plummeted to 67% to test her abilities, when she said an extended period below 89% can cause damage to the brain.
“This training is about learning how to be safe, being exposed to situations where you are training under pressure, and being able to make quick decisions without panicking,” she said. “Space is not forgiving.”
Earlier this summer, she did another round of training in Canada, conducting experiments in microgravity – testing lower extremity coordination and balancing tests.
“In the Apollo missions, there were 23 falls across 14 missions. This is quite substantial. Why are they falling?” she said. “This is important, especially if we are going to be working on the moon for seven days for eight hours. It’s critical, we need to know what is happening so we can be safe and provide guidance and interventions to help when performing our duties.”
She expects to publish a research paper on it later this year.
They also conducted a simulated “moon walk,” testing how gait changes in reduced gravity.
“I put too much force in (my step down) and I actually ended up bouncing up, a sort of kangaroo jump,” she said. “Even just a little force in space – poof.”
They also did aerobatic flight training, experiencing gravitational forces from three times Earth’s gravity to weightlessness, and how to utilize breathing techniques.
Her data collection in these experiments continues as she awaits a mission – “probably not in the next two to three years but hoping within five to 10 years to go sub-orbitally.”
With increased space travel and involvement of private companies, such as “our ride” Virgin Galactic, it is opening up opportunities for more scientists to be aboard, she said.
“We’ve seen a lot of benefits from this in the space sector. We are also helping people on Earth who have neurological disorders or balance disorders or have vertigo, a lot of conditions where we can improve treatment of them.”
Meraz-Benavente has come a long way from looking at the stars above her trailer park, thanks in part to the unforeseen start and confidence she got at GCU – and the business acumen she learned in dealing with her sponsors, including MKPro Engineering and Fleet Space Technologies, who "believe that I can represent Australia and America in space.”
“It hasn’t been a linear experience. For me, that’s how I love approaching life. Is this something I can do? I said a lot of prayers, but you need to believe that you can do this, that you have this capability,” she said. “It’s been done before. Why can it not be done again? Why cannot it be me?”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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