An Astronaut Reared the World’s Highest-Flying Birds

Later this month, when she launches off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Jessica Meir will rapidly ascend further than any bird, past the Earth’s atmosphere, to the International Space Station. Among the ISS’s usual crew of engineers, she will be the rare physiologist, looking at how the body reacts to space travel.

Meir has always been interested in extreme environments, and how the planet’s hardiest animals cope with them. In the early 2000s, she coordinated experiments at the NASA Johnson Space Center on how human bones, muscles, and lungs react to the rigors of spaceflight. She earned her doctoral degree diving in Antarctic waters, studying emperor penguins and elephant seals as they did the same. And in the summer of 2010, a few years before she realized her lifelong dream of becoming