Excellence Unveiled: Karsen Kitchen

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Each month, WCHL will feature stories highlighting Carolina excellence from outstanding Tar Heels to share why they’re passionate about their work and shine a light on their important contributions to the community, state and beyond.

Tune in to Excellence Unveiled during morning, noon and evening drive times to hear their stories and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Excellence Unveiled is an exclusive program on WCHL, sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill. You can listen to WCHL at 97.9 FM or 1360 AM.

Read a transcript of the segment below:

Chancellor Lee H. Roberts: Welcome to Excellence Unveiled, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Chancellor Lee Roberts, and it’s my pleasure to shine a light on our talented Carolina community and its outstanding work. This month, we feature extraordinary undergraduate student Karsen Kitchen, class of 2025, to talk about her trailblazing journey into outer space and how she helps empower other women to pursue opportunities in space exploration.

Karsen Kitchen: Last August, I had the chance of becoming the youngest woman to go to space on mission NS-26 with Blue Origin, the youngest woman to go past the Kármán line. And that sentence is never going to get less crazy coming out of my mouth. It still doesn’t feel like it really happened to me. But I was astronaut five. The whole trip took about 20 minutes in total. And it was the most outstanding and unimaginable 20 minutes that you can ever have in your entire life. It changes your entire perspective on life. It broadens your worldview. Since I was a little girl, I’ve had this incredibly fervent interest in space. I remember that it’s always felt like a purpose of mine, as cheesy as that is. But I remember looking to the night sky when I was younger and feeling this sense of comfort, this feeling of belonging that I didn’t feel anywhere else. And I still feel like that when I look at the night sky. It just feels like that’s what I’m here to do. Space and exploring the universe around us and working in the space industry is why I’m here. It’s my purpose. Honestly, it is so hard to describe what being in space felt like because there is not vocabulary in the human language that can describe that experience, just because it’s not that frequently lived experience.

But it is such an ethereal and honestly ineffable feeling, being in space. It’s so quiet. I never realized how loud Earth was even in its silent moments until coming back from space. You’re just immediately thrown into this feeling of weightlessness. It is genuinely like time stops. Your entire life just like stops in its tracks.

The zero-g is, it’s really fun, being able to float around the cabin and basically use none of your muscles at all. And the view, it’s what I imagine an out-of-body experience to be like. Stepping out of everything you’ve ever known and looking at it from a third-person point of view. And it really broadens your worldview and puts your life in perspective. And it makes you really appreciative for your life in general. Being able to look back at your home, at a planet that holds everything that you’ve ever known, a planet that holds everything you’ve ever loved, that you’ve ever experienced — it makes you feel so grateful for the life you have, and it makes you feel lucky for the chance to even live. And so I’m going to choose to spend my life helping this world in any way that I can, and I’m going to wake up grateful for that chance every day because it’s the only chance I have.

I run an organization called Orbitelle, O-R-B-I-T-E-L-L-E, and it aims to inspire young women to pursue opportunities and careers in the space industry because historically the space industry has been very male-driven, and that’s just not the case anymore. What this organization aims to do is to demystify the process and highlight all these unique paths that you can get into in order to make your way into the space industry.

Roberts: This has been Excellence Unveiled, proudly presented by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.