NASA astronaut Mary Cleave, who was the first woman to fly on a space shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster in 1989, died at the age of 76, the space agency announced on Wednesday.
NASA did not specify the cause of death.
“I am saddened to have lost groundbreaking Dr. Mary Cleave, a shuttle astronaut, veteran of two space flights, and the first woman to lead the Science Mission Directorate as deputy administrator,” NASA Deputy Administrator Bob Cabana said in a statement. “Mary was a force of nature, passionate about science, research and caring for our planet. “He will be missed.”
Cleave, who died Monday, was a native of Great Neck, New York, according to the statement. He studied biological sciences at Colorado State University before earning a master’s degree in microbial ecology and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from Utah State University.
air to space
He told NASA’s Oral History Project in 2002 that he was fascinated by flying airplanes when he was a kid and got his pilot’s license before he got his driver’s license. Cleave said she wanted to be a flight attendant at one point, but realized that, at 6 feet tall, she was too short for the role under airline rules at the time.
Cleave credited affirmative action with helping pave the way for his ambitions and giving him the opportunity to fly supersonic jets known as T-38s.
“For me, spaceflight was great, but it was more than just flying in cool airplanes,” he told NASA.
Cleave said he was working in a research lab in Utah and completing his doctoral studies when he saw an ad at a local post office saying NASA was looking for scientists to join the astronaut corps. He applied and was selected in 1980.
arrive in orbit
Cleave became the 10th woman to go to space on her first mission, flying aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1985. She served as the flight engineer on the mission and helped operate the shuttle’s robotic arm.
“They seemed to assign women to the arm-flying mission (Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS) or Canadarm) more often than men, and the word on the street was that they thought women did it better,” Cleave said in a 2002 NASA interview. , she stated that she never confirmed the rumor.
Cleave’s second flight in 1989, STS-30, also aboard Atlantis, came after the Challenger explosion in 1986, when NASA began flying three missions with all-male crews; this explosion killed all seven crew members on board, including the first. The teacher will be selected to fly into space.
Cleave was known to belittle the “firsts” she had marked as a female astronaut during her time at NASA, saying: “People tried to make a point of it, and I let everyone know that I didn’t think anyone should do anything like that, except that there’s a special point to it.”
“It was a normal part of the event and I didn’t think it would be good to make anything special out of it, because we were really part of the unit at that point,” he added, noting that it was close. She is friends with Judith Resnick, the astronaut who died on Challenger.
women in space
Cleave emphasized at the time that the focus of women in the agency was always their work.
He was also part of a historic first when he manned NASA mission control’s CapCom (or capsule communications system); Sally Ride became the first woman in space on the STS-7 mission in 1983. When Cleave spoke to Ride in orbit, it became the first female-to-female space communication in the agency’s history. Neither Cleave nor Ride acknowledged this milestone during their speeches.
“I didn’t even notice it. Here we are, Sally and I, we didn’t even realize it,” Cleave said, but a reporter later asked him about the incident.
Cleave spent more than 10 days in orbit during two shuttle missions.
NASA and beyond
After STS-30, he was assigned to another flight. But Cleave said he began to change his mind while waiting to fly, spending four years on the ground between his first and second mission. During this time she became increasingly interested in environmental issues.
Cleave said that when looking at Earth from space, he could see the planet changing. “The air seemed dirtier, fewer trees, more roads, all that,” he told NASA’s Oral History Project.
“I couldn’t get that excited about what I was doing because it had nothing to do with (the environment),” he added, referring to his work as an astronaut.
Cleave said he made the difficult decision to leave the Corps and NASA’s astronaut center in Houston in 1991, taking a job at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. There he worked on a project called SeaWiFS, an ocean monitoring sensor that measures the oceans. Global vegetation according to NASA.
Cleave eventually began working at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 2000, becoming the first woman to hold the title of deputy administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the top role overseeing the space agency’s research programs. In this role, Cleave “guided a series of research and scientific discovery programs for planet Earth, space weather, the solar system, and the universe,” according to NASA.
She retired from NASA in 2007, choosing to engage in volunteer work and encouraging young women to participate in scientific research, according to her biography on the Maryland government website.
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