Mary Cleave, Feb 5, 1947 – Nov. 27, 2023

*****

On January 2, 1990, Mary Cleave gained that rare thing, a seat on the Shuttle.  She was selected to fly on STS-42, a Spacelab mission, the first International Microgravity Laboratory (IML), then scheduled for launch in at the end of the year.

It would be her third flight.  In  Nov.-Dec. 1985, she flew Mission 23, the second flight of Atlantis, and became the first woman from the astronaut class of 1980 to fly.  She operated the Shuttle’s robot arm during tests of space station construction techniques.  In May 1989, she flew aboard Atlantis a second time for STS-30 (actually the 29th Shuttle flight), the mission that deployed the Magellan probe to Venus.  She was the first woman to fly following the Challenger disaster.

Yet before January 1990 ended, she gave up her seat on STS-42 as well as her astronaut career.  Something had gnawed at her since her second flight.  During it, she was shocked at the degradation in the Earth’s environment in just four years since her first flight.  The gray smudge of pollution that clung to cities had expanded.  The atmosphere looked dirtier.  Deforestation had expanded — more roads, more incursions.  It was all too visible.  And she wanted to help do something about the environmental decline, something more than she could as an astronaut.

So she gave up the coveted Shuttle seat, and soon was working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on a satellite sensor that would monitor worldwide vegetation loss and the abundance of phytoplankton in the oceans.  From there she would, in 2000, go on to become the first woman to hold the position of associate administrator for NASA’s Science Directorate.

Mary Cleave, age 76, died on Nov. 27th.