Allen-Sierpinski said her passion for space exploration started when she was about four, and a “once-in-a-lifetime” holiday to Florida ended up being the launchpad for a lifelong love. <\/p>\n
“We did the Disney thing, and we came to the Space Center, and there was the man walking around in an astronaut suit, and I told my mum ‘that’s what I want to do’,” she said.<\/p>\n
“She said ‘yeah, OK’, and when I was about 10 I’d still got the bug, so she said, ‘OK, we’ll send you to Space Camp’.<\/p>\n
“So I went to Space Camp for a week [and] had a great time.<\/p>\n
“I think my mum was hoping that would ruin me on space, but it was the opposite, and from there I started to learn to fly.”<\/p>\n
Allen-Sierpinski’s dreams hit a roadblock when she realised there were few university courses in the UK that could help her study space.<\/p>\n
After finding a Florida college with the right course, she moved to the US, initially on her own, before her parents packed up life running a pub and flew over in support.<\/p>\n
“Being an only child I was missed severely, so they followed,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Allen-Sierpinski said her passion for space exploration started when she was about four, and a “once-in-a-lifetime” holiday to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-524886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}