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Story Musgrave
Story Musgrave is one of NASA's most educated astronauts, with bachelor's degrees in chemistry and in mathematics and statistics; master's degrees in business administration, in operations analysis and computer programming, in physiology and biophysics and in arts and literature and a doctorate in medicine. He also is a pilot and parachutist and put his skills to work on six Space Shuttle Missions.
Musgrave was born in 1935 in Boston and was educated at several schools between 1954 and 1987, including Syracuse University, UCLA, Marietta College, Columbia University, and the Universities of Kentucky and Houston. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1953 and served as an aviation electrician, instrumentation technician and aircraft crew chief while on assignment in Korea, Japan, Hawaii and aboard the carrier USS Wasp. He later earned U.S. Air Force Wings and has logged 17,700 hours in 160 different types of civilian and military aircraft, including 7,500 hours in jets.
Musgrave served a surgical internship at the University of Kentucky Medical Center from 1964 to 1965 and continued there as an Air Force post-doctoral fellow (1965-66), working in aerospace medicine and physiology, and as a National Heart Institute post-doctoral fellow (1966-67). He was continuing scientific training as a part-time surgeon at Denver General Hospital and as a part-time professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Kentucky Medical Center when NASA selected him in 1967 as a scientist-astronaut.
His first shuttle flight was in April 1983 as a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of Challenger with a crew of four. He and Don Peterson took the first shuttle space walks to test new space suits and EVA construction and repair devices. Musgrave was aboard Challenger again in 1985, working with six other crew members conducting experiments in astronomy, physics and life sciences for eight days. In 1989, he and four other astronauts flew a five-day classified mission aboard Discovery that operated experiments for the Defense Department. Musgrave's fourth flight also was a military mission aboard Atlantis in 1991.
Two years later, in 1993, Musgrave and six other crew members rode Endeavour into orbit on the first Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. During the 11-day trip, the disabled satellite was captured, restored to full capabilities, and released through the work of two pairs of astronauts during a record five space walks. Musgrave took three of those walks. Musgrave's sixth and final flight was aboard Columbia, a 17-day trip that began in November 1996. The seven-person crew deployed and retrieved two scientific satellites and performed microgravity, astronomy and other experiments.
In his six flights, Musgrave flew on all five orbiters and logged 1,282 hours in space. He left NASA in 1997 and currently serves as a consultant.
Story Musgrave was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on June 21, 2003.