Ringgold County located in the most southern tier of Iowa counties was home to a woman that certainly belongs in the category of WOMEN WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE.

Peggy Whitson grew up on a farm outside the town of Beaconsfield, Iowa currently with a population of 15 persons, making it one of the smallest incorporated cities in Iowa.

She along with her sister, Kathy, her brothers, Brian, and Hugh, attended Mount Ayr Community High School. Her parents were farmers. She decided to become an astronaut after she watched the first Moon landing on television as a child in 1969.

She graduated from Mount Ayr Community High School in 1978 and received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and chemistry from Iowa Wesleyan College in1981 in Mount Pleasant. She then went on to earn her doctorate degree in biochemistry from Rice University in 1986.

After her fellowship at Rice, she began working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate. From April 1988 until September 1989, Whitson served as the Supervisor for the Biochemistry Research Group at KRUG International, a medical sciences contractor at NASA-JSC.

From 1991 through 1997, Whitson became an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.

In April 1996, Whitson was selected as an astronaut candidate; she started training in August 1996. Upon completing the two years of training and evaluation, she was assigned technical duties in the Astronaut Office Operations Planning Branch, Peggy Whitson is America’s most experienced astronaut and the first female commander of the International Space Station.

Today, she holds the record for spending more days in space than any other American astronaut or female astronaut in the world: 675 days in space. Whitson also has conducted 10 spacewalks for a total of more than 60 hours.

Whitson said the perspective of seeing Earth from space gave her a special appreciation for our “delicate” atmosphere and how special life is.

“When you’re passing on the eclipse side of the Earth, you can see all of those stars and it gives you a perspective of how big just our little galaxy is — because that’s all you’re seeing is the stars in our galaxy,” Whitson said. “And then recognizing there are billions and billions of galaxies out there. It gives you this perspective of, you know, where we are and all of that and how important our planet Earth is, but how small we are in the cosmos.”

Whitson said when she left NASA in 2018, she did not anticipate flying in space again. But the rise of commercial space companies led to another opportunity. Axiom Space launched Ax-2 on May 21, 2023, with Whitson as the first female commander of a private space mission. Today, Whitson is the director of human spaceflight for Axiom Space.

“You see and you hear about all the different companies that are out there launching satellites, launching people, cargo, and it’s really exciting how space is changing,“ Whitson said. ”And the paradigm of how we do exploration is ever changing.

“For instance, Axiom Space is building the spacesuit that will be used by NASA astronauts when they land on the luna. Other companies are building lunar landers, and it is getting those commercial entities involved is changing a lot about how space is happening and how we anticipate it to happen in the future.”

Whitson said she does not know when her next flight may happen.

“But you know, I’ll always have my fingers crossed for another space flight.”

Whitson has donated several items — her ISS Flight Suit and some crew insignia patches — to the Iowa State Historical Society. She said it is important for young people to recognize opportunity.

“… I think having young people in rural Iowa recognize that hey, I have options, I can do whatever I want to do, it is really important,” Whitson said.

The public can view artifacts from Whitson and “The Father of Space Science” at the Iowa State Historical Society.

Astronaut Whiston will soon be honored with induction into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on May 31, 2025, at the Kennedy Space Center