Linda Godwin: 915 Hours in Space, Two Historic Spacewalks & NASA Career

Andrew Corselli

Lights illuminate NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft at Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 18, 2026. (Image: NASA/Brandon Hancock)

Selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 1985 after earning her Master's and Doctorate degrees from the University of Missouri, Linda Godwin has under her belt more than 915 hours in space across four shuttle missions and two historic spacewalks — including a six-hour spacewalk at the Mir Space Station.

Whose brain better to pick about NASA, the Artemis II mission, and space travel in general than the professor of astronomy emerita? Read on for an exclusive Tech Briefs interview — edited for length and clarity — with Godwin.

Tech Briefs: You’ve completed four missions for a total of 915 hours in space. What parts do you look back on fondly?

Linda Godwin: It is just really amazing the first time you experience it: The ease of motion and getting around; the fact that you learn to move slowly because you're going to bang into something; tossing something at someone is entirely different because it's got to go straight — you can't have the little arc in it that we instinctively put in when you expect gravity to pull it down. It is quite an interesting environment.

Things would float out of my pocket and get lost — at least temporarily. Usually, you'd find it somewhere by an air filter. It is a different way of living.

Tech Briefs: How does a spacecraft from today compare to one from the 1980s or even the ‘90s or 10- 15 years ago?

Godwin: There's been a continual evolution of lighter-weight materials, better avionics, the computer technology may be one of the biggest changes. We still use a lot of the same chemical energy to launch off the ground to get out of the initial gravity well into low-Earth orbit and then beyond. So, some things stay the same if they're dictated by the laws of physics. It's still just as hard to move mass around.

But the computational ability for these orbits — instead of conserving more mass for correction burns when you can't calculate it as precisely, now you can save some of that mass because you can do better and you can fly something else instead. It’s a continual evolution of technology in several areas.

Tech Briefs: Hypothetically, if NASA were to call, what would it take to get you back up for another mission?

Godwin: [Laughs] Well, sometimes the older I get and the farther I get into retirement, I do kind of enjoy my days. It would be a busy training flow, but certainly the lure of getting to go to the Moon or something would be a strong pull.

Linda Godwin (Image: missouri.edu)

But, you know, your life is in the timing of when your prime years are. And I feel really lucky to have been at NASA during the shuttle program when we had a flight rate that allowed a lot of people to get to Earth orbit.

Tech Briefs: What's one major thing about training that the general public doesn't know that you want to point out?

Godwin: There's a lot of classroom training that many don’t think about. There's interesting simulator training; there are simulators for the subsystems of your launch vehicle. You do a lot of training flows within the whole vehicle. And then simulation, coordinating with mission control. There's a team of trainers training scientists and engineers that put failures into the system. We all have to react, we get critiqued.

For spacewalks, you've got to train in the big water tank. There are simulators for the robotics that are on some of the missions. I guess they don't really have that for Orion yet, but we certainly do it for shuttle and space station.

You can't really train for weightlessness. We do different pieces of things. For the whole mission, you practice pieces of it that then have to come together for the final one. And it's just really a huge team of people that make it come together, make it work, and craft the crew.

Tech Briefs: What's one piece of advice you would give to an astronaut about to head to space?

Godwin: The guys on this [Artemis II] mission, they've been at NASA for a while, and they've already had space flight. So, I don't know that they need to hear from me, but at some point, you’ve got to step back and take in what you're doing. Because I know they're so intensely focused on the mission.

The eyes of the world are on them — I would say that's not an exaggeration — but somehow enjoy the trip, take the time and enjoy the trip. One of my favorite things to do on orbit when we had time in a busy flight was to look out the window and watch the Earth as we orbited it. It all looks fairly slow because we're so high, and I cannot imagine the views they're going to have as they watch Earth recede in the distance. I’m sure they're going to take time to take that in.

I've met some of these crew members; I think they're great people.

Tech Briefs: Not just the Artemis II crew, per se, but to someone who's never been to space. What would you tell them?

Godwin: If you're going to go into any kind of free-fall microgravity, you just take away the tiny, tiny, tiny bit of drag that we still have in low-Earth orbit, where there's still some atoms, you know, up there. So, either way, you're going to experience this feeling of weightlessness because you're falling through gravity. And you better expect maybe for the first amount of time not to feel so good for a while, you know, and remember what you do, and you just work your way into it.

Think about what you want to do to make your days meaningful. No matter how you're getting to go to space, everybody goes with a plan of what they're going to do and enjoy your crewmates and your team and trust the people back on Earth that are monitoring your data and helping the crew make the right decisions.

This is a kind of a question I haven't ever answered before, but I would tell them to go with meaningful things to do; prepare to take some time to adapt to the free-fall sensation of no gravity; and enjoy looking at our planet, take along some music.

Tech Briefs: Those are the questions I have. Is there anything else you'd like to add that I didn't touch upon?

Godwin: I think this is such an important mission that we've waited on for decades. I can't believe it's been 60-plus years since we've been to the Moon. I'm so happy for NASA that we're getting a crew to orbit the Moon and come back.

It's a big, big step. And I hope you kind of realize that it's still not easy to do. We did it in the ‘60s, but it is still not easy to move mass around under all the gravitational influences in our solar system. So, this is an important step.