“I would like to grow old there,” she says. “I tell my friends, you fix the government, and then I will come and start a space program.”

But Mohamed is quick to point out that her country’s problems far outweigh the need for space exploration.

“If you have six million people starving, you don’t really need a space program,” she says, explaining that she also took pre-med courses when she began her studies at Harvard in the hope that she could return home to help.

Though the prospects of developing a Zimbabwean space program in the near future may be dim, Mohamed doesn’t have to think twice about what she’d do if she did become an astronaut.

“As a serious scientist, of course I would do experiments,” she says with a chuckle. “Otherwise I’d just be floating around. I’d like to go bounce on a planet or two. A lot of my friends say I should write their names on the moon.”

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@post.harvard.edu