by Mary Cleave, the NASA astronaut who in 1989 was the first woman to fly on a space shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster, died at the age of 76, the space agency announced on Wednesday.
NASA did not give a cause of death.
“I’m sorry we lost the trailblazer Dr. Mary Cleave, a shuttle astronaut, veteran of two space flights, and the first woman to lead the Science Mission Directorate as associate administrator,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said in a statement. “Máire was a force of nature with her passion for science, exploration and the care we had for our home planet. She will be missed.”
Cleave – who died Monday, was from Great Neck, New York, according to the statement. She studied biological sciences at Colorado State University before earning her master’s in microbial ecology and doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from Utah State University.
From air to space
She told the NASA Oral History Project in 2002 that she was obsessed with flying airplanes growing up, and earned her pilot’s license before her driver’s license. At one point, Cleave said, she wanted to be a flight attendant, but found she was too short for the role under airline rules at 5-foot-2 at the time.
Cleave noted that affirmative action helped pave the way for her passions, which allowed her to fly supersonic jets known as T-38s.
“For me, the space flight was great, but it was gravy on top of flying in great airplanes,” she told NASA.
Cleave said she was working in a research lab and finishing her doctoral studies in Utah when she saw an ad at a local post office saying NASA was looking for scientists to join the astronaut corps. She applied and was selected in 1980.
Go into orbit
On her first mission, flying on NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1985, Cleave became the 10th woman to travel into space. On the mission, she served as flight engineer and helped operate the shuttle’s robotic arm.
“It seemed like they assigned women to fly the arm (Suttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS) or Canadarm) more often than guys, and the rumor on the street was that they thought women did it that’s better,” Cleave said in a 2002 interview with NASA. , noting that she never confirmed the rumor.
Cleave’s second flight in 1989, STS-30, also came on Atlantis, after NASA returned to all-male flight crews for three missions after the Challenger explosion in 1986, which killed all seven crew members on board, including the first one. teacher to be chosen to fly into space.
Cleave was familiar with the “firsts” she 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 a person to be doing. a separate point from here.
“It was just a normal part of it, and I didn’t think it was good to make anything special out of it, because at that point we were really part of the choir,” she said, noting that she close friends with astronaut Judith Resnick, who died on Challenger.
Women in space
Cleave emphasized to the women who were in the corps at that time, that the focus was always on their jobs.
She was part of a first ever when she served on NASA’s mission control CapCom – or capsule communications system – as Sally Ride became the first woman ever to travel into space on the STS-7 mission in 1983. When Cleave spoke with Ride in orbit , it was the first female-to-female space communication in the agency’s history. Neither Cleave nor Ride acknowledged the milestone during their conversation.
“I didn’t even notice it. Here’s me and Sally, we didn’t even notice it,” Cleave said, although she was later asked about the event by a reporter.
During its two shuttle missions, Cleave spent more than 10 days in orbit.
NASA and beyond
She was assigned to another flight after STS-30. But Cleave said she began to have a change of heart while waiting to fly, spending four years on the ground between the first and second missions. During that time she was becoming increasingly concerned about environmental issues.
Cleave said she could see the planet changing as she stared back at Earth from space. “The air looked dirtier, less trees, more roads, all those things,” she 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),” she said, referring to her job as an astronaut.
Cleave said she made the difficult decision to move on from the NASA astronaut corps and hub in Houston, taking a role at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1991. There, she worked on a project called SeaWiFS, an ocean monitoring sensor. to measure. global vegetation, according to NASA.
Cleave eventually moved to work at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2000, going on to become the first woman ever to hold the title of associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate—the key role overseeing the space agency’s research programs. . In that role, Cleave led “a range of scientific research and exploration programs for planetary Earth, space weather, the solar system and the universe,” according to NASA.
She resigned from NASA in 2007, choosing to volunteer and encourage young women to participate in science events, according to her biography on the Maryland government website.
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