Mae Jemison

Jemison grew up in Chicago's Woodlawn and Morgan Park neighborhoods, the daughter of a maintenance supervisor and an elementary school teacher, and has said plainly that watching Nichelle Nichols play Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek helped fix space in her mind as somewhere she might actually go. She entered Stanford at 16, graduated in 1977 with degrees in chemical engineering and African and African-American studies at once, and went on to Cornell for a medical degree, finished in 1981. Rather than start a conventional practice, she spent 1983 to 1985 as a Peace Corps medical officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, running pharmacy and laboratory operations and working with the CDC on vaccine research, before coming home to general practice in Los Angeles.

NASA selected Jemison for astronaut training in 1987, one of 15 chosen from roughly 2,000 applicants in the first group picked after the Challenger disaster. On September 12, 1992, she flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour as a science mission specialist, the first African American woman in space, orbiting Earth 127 times over eight days while running bone-cell and motion-sickness experiments. She opened one shift with the Star Trek line 'Hailing frequencies open.' She resigned from NASA the following March, choosing to leave a program she had spent a decade preparing to reach rather than build a career staying inside it.

She turned down the astronaut track for a harder proposition: building a private research and consulting company, the Jemison Group, from nothing, when there was no established path from spaceflight into that kind of entrepreneurship, particularly for a Black woman scientist. The company and her foundation ran a free international science camp for teenagers, taught in South Africa, Tunisia, and Switzerland, on a budget nowhere close to NASA's. She took a cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993, becoming the first real astronaut to appear on the series that had partly inspired her, then spent decades teaching at Dartmouth and Cornell and running a DARPA-funded project, the 100 Year Starship, aimed at making interstellar travel achievable within a century — a horizon so distant most of the scientists funding it will not live to see whether it worked.

Jemison is 69 now and still active, still lecturing on science education and still directing the 100 Year Starship initiative she founded in 2012. Schools in Chicago, Detroit, and Huntsville, Alabama carry her name, and in 2017 Lego released her as a minifigure in its Women of NASA set, putting her in the hands of the children she has spent three decades trying to recruit. Her flight opened a path that has since widened rather than closed: more than a dozen Black American women have flown to space since 1992, most recently on commercial as well as government missions, a pace that would have been unthinkable the year she left NASA.

Mae Jemison's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• STS-47 (Endeavour) mission
  Eight-day Space Shuttle mission, 127 orbits of Earth 1992
• The Jemison Group company
  Consulting firm on technology and society 1993
• The Earth We Share other
  International science camp for teenagers 1994
• Find Where the Wind Goes book
  Memoir written for young readers 2001
• 100 Year Starship other
  DARPA-funded initiative on interstellar travel, with Jemison as principal investigator 2012

• 1973 aged ~17 Graduates from Morgan Park High School in Chicago
• 1977 aged ~21 Graduates from Stanford with degrees in chemical engineering and African studies
• 1981 aged ~25 Earns her M.D. from Cornell
• 1983 aged ~27 Begins two years as a Peace Corps medical officer in West Africa
• 1987 aged ~31 Selected for NASA astronaut training
• September 12, 1992 aged 35 Becomes the first African American woman in space aboard Endeavour
• March 1993 aged 36 Resigns from NASA to found the Jemison Group
• 1993 aged ~37 Appears as Lieutenant Palmer on Star Trek: The Next Generation
• 2012 aged ~56 Becomes principal investigator of the 100 Year Starship initiative

• Katherine Johnson 1918–2020
  NASA mathematician whose orbital trajectory calculations supported the Mercury and Apollo crewed flights. earlier NASA trajectory mathematician
• Percy Lavon Julian 1899–1975
  Pioneered synthesis of cortisone and other steroids from plant sterols. earlier Black scientist who broke barriers
• Amelia Earhart 1897–1937
  Aviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. earlier aviation first for American women
• John Glenn 1921–2016
  First American to orbit Earth and later the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. preceded her into orbit