Story Musgrave

Story Musgrave lost his older brother Percy, a naval aviator, in a 1959 flight-deck accident aboard the USS Wasp, and grew up between Massachusetts and a self-claimed hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, that had nothing to do with where he actually lived. A car accident cost him the exam time he needed to graduate from St. Mark's School on schedule, and he left high school without a diploma to enlist in the Marine Corps in 1953, working as an aviation electrician through tours in Korea and Japan. What followed was one of the odder academic runs on record: a GED, then degrees in mathematics, business, chemistry, medicine and physiology, piled up across six institutions through 1966, each aimed loosely at the same goal — understanding, from every angle, how a human being survives extreme environments.

NASA selected Musgrave as a scientist-astronaut in 1967, and he spent his early years there helping design the Space Shuttle's spacesuits, life-support systems and airlocks before ever flying in one. He tested his own equipment on STS-6 in April 1983, performing the first spacewalk from a Space Shuttle, and went on to fly six missions total, the last at 61, making him the oldest person to reach orbit at the time and the only astronaut ever to fly all five orbiters. His signature mission was STS-61 in December 1993, the first Hubble servicing flight, where he performed three of the five spacewalks that pulled the telescope back from being a half-billion-dollar embarrassment. Across six flights he logged more than 53 days in space and nearly 27 hours outside a spacecraft.

Musgrave built a career on being the most credentialed person in almost any room at NASA, six degrees against most astronauts' one or two, and colleagues have described him as brilliant and genuinely difficult to work alongside in roughly equal measure — a man who treated spaceflight as a research problem to be solved from first principles rather than a program to be executed inside someone else's procedures. He married multiple times over his career and has seven children, one of whom died. NASA let him fly six missions across three decades, longer than almost anyone else in the astronaut corps, but never gave him a command; he flew as mission specialist or payload specialist every time, the most over-qualified subordinate in the program's history.

Musgrave left NASA in 1997 after thirty years and has spent the decades since as a public speaker and design consultant, including work with Disney's Imagineering group, still active past 90. His six degrees, six flights and five orbiters remain a record nobody in the astronaut corps has approached, less because it is a hard record to chase than because almost nobody else arrived at the launch pad by way of a Marine Corps discharge and a medical degree. He is remembered less for a single mission than for the range: the man NASA kept finding one more use for.

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

• Space Shuttle spacesuit and life-support design invention
  Designed the EVA equipment before ever wearing it in orbit 1975
• STS-6 mission
  First Space Shuttle spacewalk, with Don Peterson 1983
• STS-61, Hubble servicing mission mission
  Performed three of five spacewalks that repaired the telescope's optics 1993
• STS-80 mission
  Sixth and final spaceflight, at 61 1996

• August 19, 1935 aged 0 Born in Boston, Massachusetts
• 1953 aged ~18 Enlists in the Marine Corps without a high school diploma
• 1964 aged ~29 Earns his MD from Columbia
• August 1967 aged 31 Selected as a NASA scientist-astronaut
• April 4, 1983 aged 47 Flies STS-6 and performs the first Space Shuttle spacewalk
• December 2, 1993 aged 58 Flies STS-61, the first Hubble servicing mission Performed three of the mission's five spacewalks.
• November 19, 1996 aged 61 Flies STS-80, his sixth and final spaceflight, at 61 The oldest person to reach orbit at the time.
• 1997 aged ~62 Retires from NASA after 30 years

• John Glenn 1921–2016
  First American to orbit Earth and later the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. fellow multiple-flight astronaut