"I keep calling it Bob's station because Bob put it together, right?" laughs Clark, 41, from behind a desk covered in schedules and planners. Cabana has since started calling it that himself, she said. And when the STS-96 crew returned from its mission to the station, having eaten meals in the modules, "Bob took them to task for 'getting crumbs all over my station,'" Clark said.
Clark is even more likely to call it "my station." That's how she repeatedly referred to it at an astrobiology symposium on Capitol Hill on October 21. As senior scientist, Clark is responsible for coordinating all science experiments and representing all scientific interests in the ISS program.
A tall woman with short brown hair and an animated personality, the irrepressible Clark was a whirling dervish in a sharp red suit that blazed bright in a room full of Washington standard-issue gray. She was waving her arms in excitement as she talked, handing out space station pins like they were loose change, and meeting and greeting scientists from across the country by their first names.
As Senior Scientist, that's her job, she criss-crosses the country constantly and makes regular jaunts to Japan, Amsterdam, and Brazil, meeting with scientists to coordinate projects on the ISS. She hasn't yet traveled to Russia, despite the fact that her business card is printed in both English and Russian and her keyboard is marked in both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets.
"The job description is to be the voice of science and engineering among the program," Clark said.
"She does a terrific job explaining the science to NASA and the capabilities of the Space Station to the scientists," said William Readdy, an ex-astronaut who works down the hall and is now NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Flight.
Readdy called her enthusiasm "infectious."
"All the chief scientists before me have had to worry about the Space Station being usable," Clark said, noting that the Space Station has officially existed since Cabana's mission in December of 1998. "But what I have to worry about is that the utilization is as efficient as possible, because it's a reality, and that's really exciting."
But Clark's enthusiasm runs deeper than that. It runs all the way back to when she really was as old as her office décor suggests.
"I have a picture of me and John Glenn," she says. "I was eight. I was wearing a Lucy sweatshirt, you know from the Peanuts gang, and he signed the corner of it because I didn't have anything else. And I still have that sweatshirt."
Clark is in the applicant pool for NASA's selection of this year's astronaut class. She has been applying regularly since 1992, when she met astronaut Dan Berry.
She wanted to be an astronaut as a kid "and then I got to high school and I got my glasses, and when I was growing up every astronaut was male and perfect," she says, referring to NASA's early astronaut class of military test pilots. "And I assumed I was ineligible because of that."
Then Clark met Berry, who served on the crumb-infested STS-96 mission, at the University of Michigan where she has studied and worked since 1983. He told her that the rules had changed. Clark found out that her vision was within the limits "…and I went right out and applied."
"They've said no three times," she says curtly. Then she brightens, gesturing down the hall to Readdy's office. "But this time, I've got that man helping me," she says.
Clark is a life scientist by training who works at Michigan's Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. She has specialized in neuromuscular development and how those systems adapt to altered environments.
She is excited about the possibilities the space station will open to her field. One of the things she's most interested in is growing nerves and muscles away from gravity. When tissue is grown on Earth, it cannot accurately replicate the way systems interact in the body.
"When you take a bunch of cells out of the human body they just go plop, all flat, and I don't know about you but there's nothing in my body that's flat," deadpans Clark. "And it's the way these nerves and receptors are shaped that defines how they interact."
When those tissue samples are grown in a microgravity environment, she says, the tissue can grow in all three dimensions and those relationships are preserved, giving scientists an accurate picture of how the system really works.
"Were I not doing administrative stuff," she says, "I would be doing this tissue culture stuff." Three of her experiments have already flown on shuttle missions.
Her work at Michigan led to involvement with NASA's Commercial Space Center working at the Center for Microgravity Automation Technology. On August 3, 1998, she started as senior scientist, a position that changes every two years so that a different type of scientist can get a crack at the head job.
Clark stresses that she is an advocate for all sciences at the program, not just life sciences.
"I personally think the first really big scientific gains are going to be in fluid physics and combustion," she says, scampering out from behind her desk to point to a picture of a candle flame in free-fall. Rather than the tapered cone of a flame on earth, the microgravity flame is a hemisphere, blue at the core and yellow on the outside.
She hasn't permanently ended her research to hob-nob with all the astronauts at NASA. Technically, she still works for the University of Michigan and is only on loan to NASA for her two-year stint. Husband Bob Ike, a physician at the university, is back in Ann Arbor.
"It's harder for him that it is for me. He's the one in the same old town with the same old job," she says. But at least she gets back there every weekend.
"I haven't missed a football game yet," she says solemnly.
Clark is counting on her work as a scientist to land her a mission specialist slot on one of the space station missions.
"They told me, 'do what you love and do it well and act like you're never going to get in,'" Clark explains. "And I'm probably not, most people don't. But it doesn't matter because... the road to get there has been so much fun. I have a pilot's license. I've gotten to meet Bill [Readdy] and Dan [Berry]… I chatted with Walter Cronkite."
Leaning across the desk with wide eyes and a smile, all the wonder of the eight-year-old back again, Clark asks, "I mean, how much better could it be?"
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