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In between her two degrees, she worked for RCA, helping on high-level projects for major clients (including NASA) and then went on to work for the National Institutes of Health as a biomedical engineer. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. She scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT, attended Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate and then earned a Ph.D. Judith Resnik was just 28 when she was asked to join NASA as a part of the 1978 class. Photo: Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images He had planned to become the first person to play a concert via live feed during the Challenger mission that never made it past the Earth’s atmosphere. His first flight was aboard the Challenger in 1984, and on that journey, he became the first person to play music in space. The agency worked to recruit potential Black astronauts when it resumed its program, in part by using Nichelle Nichols, an iconic Star Trek cast member, in its commercials.Ī man of many talents, McNair was a six-degree black belt in karate and an accomplished saxophone player.
No Black person had ever flown into space at that point - two had been chosen for the astronaut training program in the 1960s, but one was not selected to join NASA and the other, who was invited to become an astronaut, died during a test flight. Just a few years later, he was invited to join that class of ‘78 at NASA. McNair went on to read a lot more books, earning his Ph.D. The police were called, but even at 9 years old, McNair knew his rights, stood up for himself and he wound up checking out that library book. His biography usually begins with his insistence, as a 9-year-old child living in a low-income community in segregated South Carolina, to check out a library book despite the refusal of a racist librarian. A remarkable mind and steely determination helped Ronald McNair to become the second African American to reach space.