‘I absolutely would love to explore off this planet,’ says Chris Birch, the USA track cyclist turned NASA astronaut

After a career on the US track cycling team, Chris Birch has switched lanes and become a NASA astronaut, completing her training earlier this year.

Scroll through the athlete profiles on the USA Cycling website and you’ll find someone whose favorite movie is listed as “Interstellar” – Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed sci-fi adventure released in 2014. “I love realistic space movies … I’m definitely a nerd,” reads Chris Birch’s answer on her profile page. That response proved prescient: shortly after stepping away from her professional cycling career, the Arizona native was selected from more than 12,000 applicants to join NASA’s astronaut class of 2021. As career sidesteps go, it was an unusual one, though Birch had an extensive background in science with degrees in mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and a doctorate in biological engineering. The further she progressed with her application to join NASA, the more convinced she became that she had a future in spaceflight. Interviews with panels of current and former astronauts, she thought, were stimulating, not intimidating, and so too were the selection exercises undertaken with other candidates. “I really just had a blast,” Birch tells CNN Sport. “It didn’t feel like an interview at all, it didn’t feel like a test. It was just super fun. And it felt like fun and games for me.”