Today in Technology History

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January 14

Today is the sixtieth birthday of Shannon Lucid, a record-setting NASA astronaut.

Shannon Wells Lucid was born on January 14, 1943 in Shanghai, China, where her American parents were Christian missionaries. Soon after her birth, her parents were thrown into a POW camp run by the Japanese, who had been at war with China for years. The family stayed in prison for a year, came to the U.S. after being released; they returned to China after the war, and then left again in 1949 when the new communist government kicked out all missionaries. They settled in Oklahoma, where Lucid grew up.

She got a pilot's license soon after graduating from high school, then studied chemistry, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1973 from the University of Oklahoma.

When NASA started recruiting women to be astronauts in the 1970s, Lucid was one of the first to apply, and she was in the first group of women accepted. She went into space on shuttle missions in 1985, 1989, 1991 and 1993, performing biomedical and life science experiments, and working on other projects with the shuttle crews. By the end of that fourth mission, she had logged more time in space than any other American woman.

Lucid's next mission was the real record-breaker, though. She was assigned to spend four and a half months on Mir, the Russian space station, alone with two male cosmonauts. In the space station's cramped quarters, which Lucid likened to "living in a camper in the back of your pickup with your kids... when it's raining and no one can get out," she performed experiments, exercised, wrote e-mails to her family, and read books to stave off boredom.

Lucid's stay on Mir was supposed to end in July 1996, but it was extended by seven weeks because of shuttle repairs and bad weather. By the time she came back to Earth in late September, she had spent more time in space than any woman in the world. In fact, she'd logged more hours in space than any other American, man or woman. (Those records still stand.) Once she was back on the ground, NASA researchers poked and prodded her to study the effects of longtime weightlessness on the human body -- making her, as one writer put it, "the most important body of data -- literally -- that NASA ever got its stethoscopes on."

For the past eleven months, Dr. Lucid has held the position of NASA Chief Scientist.

Related links:

• Click here and here for NASA's official homepages for Dr. Lucid.

• Use these links to read about the space shuttle flights Lucid was on before her trip to Mir: STS-51G, STS-34, STS-43, STS-58.

• Use these links to read about the shuttle missions that brought Shannon Lucid to Mir and back: STS-76 and STS-79.

 

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