Germany's First Female Astronaut Rabea Rogge on What Liftoff Actually Does to Your Body, Why Space Is No Longer Only For Experts, And The 200-Person Rule For Starting a Society on Mars.

She boarded a SpaceX Dragon atop a Falcon 9 in the middle of a lightning storm and didn't believe it was real until the rocket started moving. She reveals what your body actually does when gravity disappears, why the capsule felt like a camper van you can walk on the walls of, and why she thinks the mission that will decide humanity's future isn't to Mars. It's to the ocean floor.

Rabea Rogge is a robotics researcher, mission pilot on FRAM-2 — the first private spaceflight to orbit both poles — and the first German woman in space. Trained at ETH Zurich where she led a student satellite team, she now researches autonomous ocean robots at a ...