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Mae Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She was the first African-American woman to travel into space when she orbited aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.
After medical school and a brief internship, Jemison served in the Peace Corps from 1985 to 1987, when she was selected by NASA to join the astronaut corps. She resigned from NASA in 1993 to found a company that researched the application of technology to everyday life. She has appeared on television several times, once acting in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
She holds nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, letters, and humanities. She is currently the head of the 100 Year Starship Foundation.
The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was three years old, to take advantage of the better educational and employment opportunities available there. As a child, Jemison learned to connect with science through studying nature. Once, as a young girl, a splinter infected her thumb, and Jemison's mother turned it into a learning experience. She ended up doing an entire project on the pus. Jemison's parents were very supportive of her interest in science, unlike her teachers.
In an interview with MAKERS.com, she explains how her keen interest in science was not accepted. "I was just like any other kid. I liked space, the stars, and dinosaurs. I always knew I wanted to explore. At the time of Apollo, everyone was excited about space, but I remember finding it irritating that there were no female astronauts. People tried to explain it to me, but I just couldn't get it."
Jemison graduated from Morgan Park High School in Chicago in 1973 and at age 16 entered Stanford University, where she graduated in 1977 with a BS in chemical engineering and a BA in African and African American Studies. She took the initiative to further her involvement with the black community by serving as head of the Black Student Union during her college years. Jemison said that pursuing an engineering career as a black woman was difficult because competitiveness has always been a factor in the United States. "Some professors just pretended I wasn't there. I would ask a question and the professor would act like the question was stupid, the stupidest question I had ever heard. Then when a white guy asked the same question, the professor would say, 'That's a very pertinent observation.'
NASA
After Sally Ride's flight in 1983, Jemison realized that the astronaut program had opened up, so she applied. Jemison was inspired to join NASA by African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. Jemison's involvement with NASA was delayed after the Challenger accident in 1986, but after reapplying in 1987, she received word that she had been accepted into the astronaut program. "I got a call saying, 'Are you still interested?' And I said, 'Yes,'" Jemison recalls, being one of fifteen candidates chosen from about 2,000 applicants. His work at NASA prior to his spaceflight consisted of launch support activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and verification of Shuttle computer software at the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). "I was in the first class of astronauts that was selected after the Challenger accident in 1986 ... [I] actually worked on the launch of the first flight after the Challenger accident.
Jemison flew her only space mission from September 12–20, 1992, as a Mission Specialist on STS-47, a cooperative mission between the United States and Japan, and the 50th shuttle mission. Jemison was a co-investigator on two bone cell research experiments, one of 43 investigations conducted on STS-47. Jemison also conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness on herself and the six other crew members. "The first thing I saw from space was Chicago, my hometown," Jemison said. "I was working on the middeck where there aren't many windows, and as we were passing over Chicago, the commander called me to come to the flight deck. It was a very significant moment because since I was a little girl I had always assumed I would go to space," she added.
Because of her love of dance and as a salute to creativity, Jemison took a poster of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater with her on the flight. "A lot of people don't see a connection between science and dance," Jemison says. "But I think of them both as expressions of the boundless creativity that people have to share with others." Jemison also took several small objects of art from West African countries to symbolize that space belongs to all nations. Also on that flight, according to Bessie Coleman's biographer, Doris L. Rich, Jemison took a photo of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman to hold a pilot's license. On the STS-47 mission, Jemison spent 190 hours, 30 minutes, and 23 seconds in space.
Jemison left NASA in March 1993. "I left NASA because I'm very interested in how the social sciences interact with technology," she said. "People always think of technology as something that has silicon in it. But a pencil is technology. Any language is technology. Technology is a tool that is used to perform a particular task, and when you talk about appropriate technology in developing countries, that can mean anything from fire to solar power."
