Shannon Lucid

Shannon Matilda Wells Lucid was born on January 14, 1943, in Shanghai, China, the daughter of American Baptist missionaries, and spent part of her early childhood interned by Japanese forces during the Second World War before the family settled in Oklahoma. Inspired as a child by the pioneering rocketry of Robert Goddard, she reportedly sold her bicycle to buy a telescope and experimented with homemade rockets. She built a scientific career first, working as a laboratory technician at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and as a research chemist at Kerr-McGee before earning her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma in 1973. In 1978 she was chosen for NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class to include women.

Lucid flew five times over eleven years, an unusually long and productive career. Her first flight, STS-51-G aboard Discovery in June 1985, was a busy satellite-deployment mission that also carried the first Arab and first Saudi astronaut into orbit. On STS-34 aboard Atlantis in October 1989 she helped deploy the Galileo probe on its journey to Jupiter, and on STS-43 aboard Atlantis in August 1991 she helped deploy a TDRS communications satellite. STS-58 aboard Columbia in October 1993 was a two-week Spacelab life-sciences research flight. Her fifth and defining mission came in 1996, when she launched on STS-76 to the Russian space station Mir and remained aboard as a member of its long-duration crew, returning on STS-79 after 188 days in space. It was the longest spaceflight by a woman at the time and set an American single-mission endurance record, and she became the only American woman ever to serve aboard Mir, conducting experiments while adapting to life on a Russian station and learning to work in Russian.

For her Mir mission Lucid was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in December 1996, becoming the first woman to receive the nation's highest space award. From 1996 until 2007 she held the record for the longest time in space by an American and by a woman, and she accumulated more than 5,300 hours across her five flights. She later served as NASA's chief scientist and worked as a capsule communicator in Mission Control before retiring in 2012. Now retired, Lucid is remembered as a scientist-astronaut who helped open human spaceflight to women, a pioneer whose endurance record and steady presence aboard Mir helped lay the groundwork for the international cooperation that built the International Space Station.