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Fox News’ Kristin Fisher grows as’ astro-tot ‘
When the correspondent was based at Fox News’ Washington D.C. Kristin Fisher including the launch of two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crew Dragon on Wednesday, he will be one above his rival in other networks. Fisher, 36, is the daughter of two astronauts. His mother, Dr. Anna Fisher, now 70 years old “first mother in space” when he is climbing on Discovery in November 1984; Kristin is 14 months old. His father, Dr. Bill Fisher, 74, is now an emergency room doctor in Houston, followed his wife into space in 1985. He made two space trips on his flight, one of which was the longest of its kind at the time. The two astronauts flew into space once on a one-week mission. Anna continued to work for NASA until she retired in 2017. Bill left NASA in 1992 and returned to emergency medicine, which he still practices today. Here Kristin Fisher remembers how it feels to grow into an “astro-tot” Dana Kennedy from The Post.
I take my childhood for granted. I grew up in a neighborhood about five miles from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Our friends are other astronaut families. That’s exciting – but for me it’s normal.
My mother will wake me up for every space launch. He did a countdown and cheered for each explosion – and my sister and I would roll our eyes.
Now I’m counting down for my 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter Clara during unmanned space launches such as the SpaceX mission which is the precursor of this launch.
My parents met when they were medical students at UCLA in the mid-1970s. My father saw something in the newspaper about the opening of an astronaut and he took it to my mother and said, “We have to register.” (My father signed up once – when he was 12 years old!)
Both do not have a military background. My mother accepted first. My father was rejected twice by NASA before finally being accepted. He brought one of the rejection letters into space with him in 1985 when he flew on the Discovery STS-51-I shuttle as a mission specialist.
This is one big regret in my life that I am too little to remember when my mother flew a year or two later when my father flew. I have seen so many pictures and there is little memory here and there but that’s it.
One thing that I remember is Challenger accident in 1986. My mother came to school to pick me up. I am 4 years old and I remember him explaining it to me. My parents are friends with the victims. My mother is a first-class female astronaut with Judy Resnik, the second woman in space on a Challenger mission.
My mother was supposed to be on the plane after Challenger. That’s very devastating. It makes a real risk.
Everyone asked all my life if I wanted to be an astronaut. I was fascinated by it but I also wanted to carve my own way apart from my parents. I am very interested in television. Integrating public performance and doing services appeal to me. At one point in the fourth grade, my teacher turned our classroom into a newsroom and I was captivated.
Also, my parents and younger sister are rather geniuses. I’m smart but not at their math and science level. My strength is always in writing and in English.
I love accompany the president as a reporter on a secret trip to Afghanistan last year. I got a call right before Thanksgiving and I couldn’t really tell anyone that. My mother came for vacation but she didn’t pay attention when I told her that I had to leave. That is the coolest task of my career. My father said, “That may be your space.”
One of the reasons given for pushing humans into space is because of concerns about what will happen to the human species if something terrible happens on Planet Earth. So the fact that this launch occurred during the pandemic, I think, is very fitting.
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