“I'll wave to you on my way to the moon.”
— Tracy Caldwell, in a 1989 Beaumont High School friend's yearbook
Way back in high school, she knew her destiny was in the stars. Actually, it was even before then. Light years before she wrote those words to a classmate, Tracy Caldwell rode motorcycles as a kid in the Mojave Desert on family vacations. “At night, I’d lay on the motorcycle trailer and see millions and millions of stars and wonder what it would be like to be up there.
“You’re lying in total darkness. You can’t hear anything except for coyotes and lizards rustling in the tumbleweeds. When you look up, you see this immense light from stars everywhere. I thought to myself, if I can see this much from earth, imagine what it would be like to look around from up there.”
Yet before the stars called her name, she was exploring the scientific worlds of electricity and construction, thanks to her father, Jim Caldwell, an electrician who began taking her to job sites when she was just 7. He said, “If you have enough energy to run around, you have enough energy to put a tool in your hand and do something with it.” As a result, Tracy learned to use lots of tools, eventually working part time in high school performing maintenance on trucks and getting so good working with her dad that she nearly became a journeyman electrician.
“My dad never set boundaries for me or my sister because we were girls,” Caldwell now tells student groups. “We learned how to use tools, fix cars, do electrical work – we’re girls without limitations. You don’t know how much that attitude helped me. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do something because I’m a girl.”
