*Mae
Jemison was born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama. She is an
American physician and the first African American woman to become an astronaut.
In 1992, she spent more than a week orbiting Earth in
the space shuttle Endeavour.
Jemison’s
family moved to Chicago when she was three years old. At an early age, she was
introduced to science by her uncle; she developed interests throughout
her childhood in anthropology, archaeology, evolution, and astronomy.
While still a high school student, she became interested in biomedical engineering, and after graduating in 1973, at the
age of 16, she entered Stanford University. There she received degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies (1977).
In 1977
Jemison entered medical school at Cornell University in New York City,
where she pursued an interest in international medicine. After volunteering for
a summer in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand, she studied in Kenya in 1979.
She graduated from medical school in 1981, and, after a short time as a
general practitioner with a Los Angeles medical group, she became
a medical officer with the Peace Corps in West Africa.
There she managed health care for Peace Corps and U.S. embassy
personnel and worked in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control on several research projects,
including development of a hepatitis B vaccine.
After
returning to the United States, Jemison applied to the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to be an astronaut.
In 1987 she was 1 of 15 accepted out of 2,000 applicants. Jemison completed her
training as a mission specialist with NASA in 1988. She became an astronaut
office representative with the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral,
Florida, working to process space shuttles for launching and to verify shuttle
software. Next, she was assigned to support a cooperative mission between the
United States and Japan designed to conduct experiments in materials processing and the life sciences. In September
1992, STS-47 Spacelab J became the first successful joint U.S.-Japan space
mission.
Jemison’s
maiden space flight came with the weeklong September 1992 mission of the
shuttle Endeavour. At that time, she was the only African American
woman astronaut. After completing her NASA mission, she formed the Jemison
Group to develop and market advanced technologies.
As part of
the Artemis space program, launched in 2017, NASA aims not
only to return humans to the Moon by 2025, with the goal of
establishing a sustainable presence there and on other planets, but to
land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, and that woman may
be Jessica Meir. Jemison’s pioneering career helped pave the way
for these future ventures in space.
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