By Mahdi Abdulla Murad and Peshawa Ahmed
AUI-S Voice Staff Reporters
Retired Capt. William Shepherd, a former U.S. astronaut, dreamed of going into space since he was a small child.
“It was important for me to go to space,” he said. “In the United States program we had had men in the space for 15 years, so it is something that kids in the United States grow up and want to do.
I had that idea from a very small age, but when I came out of college, it became possible to do. By thirteen of my age, I started to work on my dream, and I finally got to be an astronaut.”
Shepherd spoke to AUI-S students and faculty at the Sulaimani Arts Palace on April 26. Shepherd was recently inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and presented a lecture and multimedia presentation about his experience with the first joint U.S. And Russian space mission and three other trips to space.
Shepherd identified the first moment of leaving the Earth as the busiest moment. “You feel very busy because you have a lot of works to do,” he said.
Shepherd said that the nicest moment during his trip was the moment when he could look up through the windows and see the earth, and the hardest moment was when he returned back to the earth.
The Kurdistan region of Iraq is a special place for Shepherd because it was the place where he met his wife, Beth Stringham, after a long time.
“Kurdistan is great place,” Stringham said. “We are very busy in the United States, and we live in two different places there. We haven’t seen each other for a long time, but we met each other again here in Kurdistan.”
When we asked her how she felt when his husband was in the space, she said that she wished she could have gone with him. Shepherd’s wife was there for her husband when he left the Earth.
“I was very happy for him when he made his first travel because he worked very hard,” she said. “He was the first American who went to a space station. At that time, all of the modeled were Russian, so all of his lessons and training were in Russian. He had to spend a lot of time translating from Russian to English.
Those who study in a foreign language know how hard it is.” Most of those who attended the lecture were happy and astonished with his travels.
“It is very important for the reputation of AUI-S and Kurdistan to have a famous person like Shepherd,” said Siva Omer, 19, from Sulaimani. “It was a very beneficial lecture because it relates to Physics, which is one of the subjects that we have in the academic program.”
Tammam Omer, 23, from Baghdad, said that he felt like he was in the space during the lecture.
“I felt like I was in the space,” he said. “The students asked excellent questions, and he taught us that we should never give up reaching our dreams.”
The lecture was held outside of the AUI-S campus because the expected number of the seats that were reserved for the lecture, and a number of newspapers were invited for the lecture.
“He is a very prestigious man,”said Nathaniel Rosenblatt, the assistant director of the AUI-S Re- search Centers. “It was necessary to hold the lecture in the Sulaimani Art Palace to show that we are grateful for his coming, and the hall could fit more students and more media.”
