Sian Proctor Height, Age, Boyfriend, Husband, Family, Biography & More

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sian Proctor

• Sian Proctor is an American college geology professor, science communicator, and analog and commercial astronaut.

• In childhood, she often moved with her family from place to place because of her father, who often changed jobs. She lived in Hamilton (New Jersey) for a year, then in Nashua (New Hampshire), then in Saint Paul (Minnesota) for five years, and other Notherneastern US states. When she was fourteen, she shifted with her family to Fairport, New York.
  

  A childhood picture of Sian Proctor

• A hobbyist photographer, she does photography whenever she has time. She became interested in photography after her father gifted her a Canon AE-1 in her teens.

• Many labeled her a tomboy in childhood, as she did things considered not suitable for girls and also because of her love of sports. In a Twitter post, she wrote,
  

  My mom was worried about me as a kid because I was so independent. I was labeled a “tomboy” which I learned early meant boys could do fun things that girls shouldn’t do. I loved to fish, play sports, & most of all I loved building airplanes and dreaming of being a fighter pilot.”

  

  Sian Proctor’s childhood picture in which she can be seen in a tomboyish look

• She was very athletic as a child and loved watching sports on television. In her school days, she contested in track & field and winter ski competitions.
  

  Sian Proctor during a track and field competition in her school days

• In childhood, she joined the Civil Air Patrol, a volunteer organization with an aviation-minded membership, as she wanted to be a military aviator. However, when she turned fifteen, her dreams shattered because she got classes.

• Sian’s maternal great-grandmother, Rev. Elizabeth Powell, was an active community worker. She was the founder of the organization South Side Prayer Band (providing services like cooking, cleaning, and raising money for the needy). A baptist minister, she founded the World Fellowship Interdenominational Church in 1962, headquartered on Dewey Avenue. Elizabeth Powell was a supporter of the organizations such as the NAACP and the Youngstown Human Rights Council. In 2001, Powell was instated in the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame.
  

  Sian Proctor’s maternal great-grandmother

• On July 4, 1996, her maternal great-grandmother, Powell, and the former US President Bill Clinton shared the stage in Youngstown, where he declared Powell as “the best-looking 94-year-old woman in the world.”
  

  Sian Proctor’s maternal great-grandmother with former US President Bill Clinton

• In 1992, Sian Proctor started her career as a video editor at WROC Channel 8, Rochester, New York. After working for WROC for two years and one month, she was employed as the geology field school graduate teaching assistant at Arizona State University from July to August 1996.

• Proctor spent the next two months working as an earth science instructor under the Upward Bound program at the GateWay Community College, Phoenix, Arizona.

• Between May 2004 and July 2004, Sian was a project counselor of ecology for NASA Spaceflight and Life Sciences Training Program (SLSTP) at NASA.

• Between 2006 and 2016, she was employed as a proposal reviewer for the US government independent agency National Science Foundation (NSF), supporting fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.

• In 2009, Proctor applied for the 2009 NASA Astronaut Selection Process, competing against 3,500 applicants. She became one of the 47 finalists of the process and received a “Yes/No” phone call from an astronaut, who told her that she was not one of the nine astronaut candidates selected for the 2009 NASA Astronaut Group. In many of her inspirational speeches, she has often discussed how she almost became an astronaut. Sian’s next ten years were spent applying for NASA two times, but she failed both times. In 2020, she succeeded in her attempt to work for NASA.

• In 2010, one of her friends recommended her name for the Discovery Channel’s ‘The Colony,’ a ten-episode series based in the post-apocalyptic US and shot in New Orleans. She then received a casting message from the Discovery Channel on Facebook.

• After she appeared in The Colony, she went on a solo hike of 500 miles to the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route in Spain.

• In 2012, she appeared in the American kids’ TV series ‘The STEM Journals: Season 1,’ which aired on Cox7 Arizona and covered science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
  

• In 2013, she was selected as the education outreach officer for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, an analog habitat for human spaceflight. HI-SEAS is situated at the isolated position on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano on the island of Hawaii, having Mars-like features. The mission was set up by NASA, the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and Cornell University, and it was carried on for four months. The mission was focused on determining the food strategies for long-duration space flights and missions to the Moon or Mars. In her HI-SEAS mission, the Discover magazine hired her as a photographer for Kate Greene’s article ‘Simulating Mars on Earth.’ During the Mars stimulation mission, she also filmed the ‘Meals for Mars’ YouTube Series.
  

  Sian Proctor during HI-SEAS mission

• Sian completed her 2013-14 sabbatical at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Emergency Management Institute, developing their science of disasters curriculum. It was during her time at FEMA, where she met her husband.

• In the 2014 PolarTREC, she was appointed as a teacher. PolarTREC is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded program for K-12 teachers who participate in field research in the polar regions. During the PolarTREC, she finished a month in Utqiagvik (then Barrow), Alaska, where she learned historical ecology for risk management and investigated the impact of climate change on the coastline and community.

• In 2016, she was selected to be the Astronomy Chile Educator Ambassadors Program (ACEAP) ambassador. A National Science Foundation (NSF) program, ACEAP sends K-16 formal and informal astronomy educators to US astronomy facilities in Chile. As an ACEAP ambassador, she made visits to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Gemini South Observatory, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) with eight other ambassadors.

• In 2016, she made an appearance in episode two titled ‘Are We Alone’ of the PBS TV series ‘Genius by Stephen Hawking,’ which was hosted by Stephen Hawking. In the show, Sian and two other individuals are challenged to think like geniuses in search of extraterrestrial life.
  

  Sian Proctor in Genius by Stephen Hawking (2016)

• In 2017, after she returned to San Pedro, Chile, she was chosen as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Teacher At Sea program in the STEM education outreach activities with the local high school. NOAA Teacher At Sea helps teachers in providing real working experience at sea. As a teacher at sea, she carried out the Pollack research in the Bering Sea on the fisheries vessel Oscar Dyson. She also wrote a blog post about her experience with NOAA.

• In 2017-2018, she was cast in Science Channel’s show ‘Strange Evidence’ in which a team of experts (including Sian) inspects video footage that eludes explanation.

• In 2018, she became a part of the two-week LunAres SPECTRA Mission and lived in LunAres habitat, Pila, Poland. The mission comprised of a broad range of experiments on biological and living systems technology and studies on communication types and procedures.
  

  Sian Proctor with her team members during LunAres SPECTRA Mission 2018

• In 2019, she wrote the book ‘Meals for Mars: An Analog Astronaut Living and Cooking in a Simulated Mars Mission,’ published by Psy’s Creations, which is a collection of stories and recipes that chronicles her experience at HI-SEAS 2013.
  

• Sian also writes for the website Analog Astronaut – Chasing Space on Earth’s ‘Space to Inspire’ series, centered around notions of space and how she uses her space to inspire.

• In 2019, she became the education outreach officer on the two-month JOEDES Resolution Expedition 383 – Summer, which was about the Southern Ocean, its currents, and how far it goes to the South. For two months, she investigated the Dynamics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current while living in the sea.

• Sian appeared in other American series such as NASA’s Unexplained Files (2019), A World Without NASA (2020), Working Over Time (2020), Phantom Signals (2020), and Ancient Unexplained Files (2021).

• In 2019-2020, she was employed as the chief executive officer for Flight Ready Systems consultancy, specializing in field research, curriculum development, and science communications.

• In 2020, she was a part of the all-female SENSORIA Mars 2020 mission at the HI-SEAS habitat.

• For 21 years (as of 2021), she has worked as geology, sustainability, and planetary science professor at the South Mountain Community College, Phoenix, Arizona.
  

  Sian Proctor talking about SENSORIA Mars 2020 mission in an Instagram post

• Since August 2020, she is employed as the open educations resource coordinator at the Maricopa County Community College District, Tempe, Arizona.

• In 2021, she was chosen to be the pilot of the Crew Dragon mission Inspiration4. Inspiration4 is a three-day spaceflight for four people aboard the SpaceX Resilience capsule. Spaceflight is the first human spaceflight to orbit Earth with private citizens. She was given the ‘Prosperity’ seat. In an interview with the Associated Press, she said,
  

  It was like when Harry Potter found out he was a wizard, a little bit of shock and awe.”

• One of the four people in Inspiration4 is the American billionaire businessman and pilot Jared Isaacman (representing the Leadership seat), who is also the sponsor of the flight. The other two are St. Jude employee Hayley Arceneaux (representing the Hope seat ) and American data engineer and commercial astronaut Christopher Sembroski (representing the Generosity seat). All the crew members are undergoing commercial astronaut training by SpaceX, and the flight is set to take off on September 15, 2021, and return on September 18, 2021.
  

  Sian Proctor with Inspiration4 crew members

• Sian spent a sabbatical at Arizona State University’s Center for Education Through Exploration and created virtual field trips.

• Sian has also finished a 2-week Mars mission at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS).

• Proctor is a NASA Solar System Ambassador. She is also on the Explore Mars board of directors, The JustSpace Alliance advisory board, the Science in the Wild board of advisors, the SEDS USA Advisory Board, and the National Science Teaching Association’s Aerospace Advisory Board.

• Sian is a serving Major in the Civil Air Patrol and is an Arizona Wing Aerospace Education Officer.

• Sian was the citizen scientist-astronaut candidate for Project PoSSUM (Septmber 2019-August 2020) and worked as the career and leadership motivational strategist and public speaker for Psy’s Creation (January 2006-Present).

• An international speaker, Sian gives speeches on leadership, making connections, maximizing opportunity, and exploring the world and beyond. She has spoken at several TEDx conferences.

• She has also taken part in a two-week faculty development seminar in India, where she explored urban sustainability.

• During the COVID lockdown in the US, Sian spent her time in poetry and painting. In an interview, she said,
  

  I put my time and all of my creative energy into training myself to be an artist.”

  Her art pieces show Afrofuturism style, which was centerpieces for the online marketplace she needed to participate in an astronaut competition. In the same interview, she said,

  My art reflects the idea in my poem submission about ‘JEDI’ space [Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion], and how we need to think about access to space. We all want that ‘Star Trek’ world, where you have representation and equal access to space. And when you start looking at how many female Black astronauts there have been at NASA, it’s a poor showing. There’s been just one Black astronaut assigned to the ISS in the past 20 years. You start thinking about all of the phone calls to schools, and the science videos they’ve done on the ISS, and there are no Black people in them. When kids are looking for role models in those places, we’ve got to be actively pursuing that ‘JEDI’ space.”

  

  A painting of Sian Proctor

• Sian Proctor also spends her time playing ice hockey with her ice hockey team. She has a pilot’s license and is scuba-certified.

• In a Twitter post, Sian said that she considered her father her biggest inspiration. According to her,
  

  What I loved about my dad is he supported me w/ EVERYTHING I wanted to do. I liked building model airplanes so he took me to the hobby store. I wanted a Rambo knife -he bought it for me. I wanted to play baseball -not a problem. He never told me I couldn’t do it.”

• According to Sian, she is a ‘#NASA Moon celebration baby’ because she came into the world when eight and a half months had passed of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

• She loves animals and has a pet goat.
  

  Sian Proctor with her pet goat