Shannon W. Lucid
Shannon W. Lucid is a pioneering American astronaut known for her significant contributions to space exploration and for being one of the first women selected by NASA for its astronaut program. Born in Shanghai, China, in 1943, Lucid's early life was shaped by her family's missionary work and their experiences during the Japanese occupation of China. She pursued a strong educational path, earning degrees in chemistry and biochemistry, before embarking on a career in research and academia.
Lucid became a NASA astronaut in 1978 and participated in five shuttle missions, accumulating a total of 223 days in space, making her the most experienced female astronaut at the time. Notably, during her mission aboard the Mir space station, she set records for the longest U.S. single-mission space endurance, logging 188 days. Lucid’s work helped advance scientific understanding of the effects of long-term space travel on the human body, and she was involved in numerous experiments and satellite deployments. After retiring from NASA in 2012, she focused on her family, particularly caring for her husband during his illness, and has since authored books reflecting on her experiences in space and caregiving. Lucid's career remains a testament to women's capabilities in science and space exploration.
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Shannon W. Lucid
American astronaut
- Born: January 14, 1943
- Place of Birth: Shanghai, China
Chosen by NASA as one of the first American female astronauts, Lucid was a mission specialist on five shuttle flights and lived for six months on Russia’s Mir space station. Her time on Mir led to the US record for the most flight hours in orbit by a non-Russian and the international record for the most flight hours of any woman, a record held for more than a decade.
Early Life
Shannon W. Lucid was born Shannon Matilda Wells in Shanghai, China, where her parents, Oscar and Myrtle Wells, were serving as Baptist missionaries. During the Japanese occupation, Lucid and her parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncle were interned by the Japanese in the Chapei Civil Assembly Center prison camp. Early in 1944 they were evacuated aboard the Swedish ship Gripsholm in an exchange of noncombatant citizens of the warring nations. Lucid learned to walk onboard ship and received her first pair of shoes when the ship was docked in the port of Johannesburg on its way to the United States. The family spent the remaining years of the war in Fort Worth, Texas, where Lucid’s younger sister, Ann, and brother, Joe, were born. The family later returned to China, where Lucid was enrolled at a Chinese-speaking school.
When the Communist Party took over China in 1949, Lucid and her family returned to the United States and settled in Bethany, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City. As a young girl, she was fascinated with airplanes and was influenced by a book about Robert H. Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry. After graduating from Bethany High School in 1960, she began college in Illinois at Wheaton, where she spent two years completing basic science and mathematics courses along with German, literature, and Biblical studies. In 1962, she transferred to the University of Oklahoma after taking summer courses there, and along with her work in chemistry, she learned to fly and earned a pilot’s license. She completed a bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1963 and remained for another year as a teaching assistant in the chemistry department.
Life’s Work
During the next few years after graduation, Lucid held several positions in chemistry and obtained commercial, instrument, and multiengine ratings as a pilot. From 1963 to 1964 she served as a teaching assistant at Oklahoma, was a senior laboratory technician at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation from 1964 to 1966, and was a research chemist at Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma City from 1966 to 1968. While at Kerr-McGee, she met and married Michael F. Lucid of Indianapolis, Indiana, and they had two daughters, Kawai Dawn and Shandra Michelle, and one son, Michael Kermit. Lucid returned to the University of Oklahoma in 1969 as a graduate assistant in the university’s Health Science Center, earning a master of science degree in biochemistry in 1970 and a doctor of philosophy degree in biochemistry in 1973. From 1974 to 1978, Lucid returned to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation as a research associate and began the application process for the space program as soon as women were recruited for the astronaut corps.
On January 16, 1978, Lucid was selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of thirty-five astronauts from a pool of more than two hundred finalists. She was one of six women in the first astronaut class that accepted women, a class that included Sally Ride, Anna Fisher, Judith Resnik, Margaret Seddon, and Kathryn Sullivan. After a period of intense training and rigorous physical and psychological testing, Lucid became an astronaut in August 1979, qualifying as a mission specialist on space shuttle flight crews. Although Lucid was not the first American woman in space, she became America’s most experienced female astronaut.
Lucid’s technical assignments included work with the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory; the Flight Software Laboratory in Downey, California; and the Astronaut Office interface at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on shuttle testing and launch countdowns. She also was a spacecraft capsule communicator at the Johnson Space Center, Mission Control, Houston, during many space shuttle missions. She was chief of Mission Support, chief of Astronaut Appearances, and chief scientist of NASA from 2002 to 2003.
Lucid was part of the crew of five spaceflights and logged 223 days in space, more than any other woman until surpassed by US astronaut Sunita Williams on June 16, 2007. Lucid’s first space voyage was a seven-day mission on the space shuttle Discovery (STS-51-G) from June 17 to 24, 1985. On this mission the crew deployed three communication satellites and used the Remote Manipulator System to deploy and retrieve the Spartan satellite after its seventeen hours of X-ray astronomy observations. The crew also conducted biomedical experiments during Discovery’s 112 orbits of Earth, covering a distance of 2.5 million miles.
Lucid’s next two orbital flights were both on space shuttle Atlantis. Her second shuttle flight was a five-day mission (STS-34) from October 18 to 23, 1989. On this flight she deployed the Galileo spacecraft to explore Jupiter and its moons, mapped atmospheric ozone using ultraviolet solar back-scattering, and conducted research on lightning, microgravity effects on plants, ice crystal growth in space, and many other secondary experiments during seventy-nine orbits. Her third shuttle flight was a nine-day mission (STS-43) from August 2 to 11, 1991. On this mission, the crew deployed a tracking and data relay satellite (TDRS-E) and conducted during 142 orbits thirty-two science experiments related to extended space flights.
Lucid’s fourth spaceflight was a fourteen-day mission on the shuttle Columbia (STS-58) from October 18 to November 1, 1993. This record-duration shuttle flight was considered the most successful Spacelab-related mission flown by NASA. The crew conducted sixteen engineering tests and twenty extended-duration medical experiments on themselves and on 48 rats during 225 orbits. Even before her record-breaking Mir flight, Lucid had logged 838 hours and 54 minutes in space, more than any other American woman.
On her last and most famous spaceflight, Lucid gained the US single-mission space-endurance record of 188 days while aboard Mir. After a year of training in Star City, Russia, she began her journey from Kennedy Space Center on March 22, 1996, aboard Atlantis (STS-76) and was transferred to Mir, where she served as board engineer 2 with Russian cosmonauts Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev. She conducted many science experiments during her six months in space, and became the first American to participate in extravehicular activity, or spacewalking, while stationed on Mir. Her return was scheduled for July 31 but was delayed nearly two months because of mechanical and weather problems with shuttle launches. She returned to Kennedy Space Center aboard Atlantis on September 26 after traveling more than 75 million miles in space.
From 2002 to 2003, Lucid worked in Washington, DC, as NASA's chief scientist. In the fall of 2003, she returned to Johnson Space Center to work in the Astronaut Office. She also served as a capsule communicator in the Mission Control Center for many missions before her retirement from NASA in January 2012.
In 2014, Lucid’s husband, Michael, died after a battle with dementia. After her retirement, Lucid devoted herself to caring for Michael before his passing. She wrote about the experience in a 2019 book, No Sugar Added: One Family's Saga of Dementia and Caretaking. The following year, she wrote about her time aboard the Mir in Tumbleweed: Six Months Living on Mir.
Significance
Lucid’s space career reaffirmed that female astronauts could equal or surpass their male counterparts. When no other astronaut seemed interested in an extended trip on the sparse Mir space station, she was the one who volunteered, and by doing so she established several space records. Given her six months of weightlessness on Mir, doctors thought that she would have to be carried off the shuttle upon her return to Earth. She surprised the experts, however, by walking on her own to the medical transporter. She became NASA’s most important source for data on the effects of space on the human body and was monitored and tested for three years after her trip.
In addition to her many scientific experiments in space, Lucid helped to facilitate space exploration. She launched several satellites, contributed to the exploration of Jupiter by launching the Galileo spacecraft, and assisted with many aspects of the space program on the ground. In December 1996, she became the tenth astronaut to receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and, in February 1997, she won the Free Spirit Award from the Freedom Forum. On April 24, 2013, the US National Air and Space Museum awarded Lucid a current achievement Trophy Award. The following year, she was inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame. Feeling that the public was not as familiar with the original female astronauts aside from Ride, in 2023 Loren Grush published a book, The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, that includes coverage of Lucid's significant contributions.
Bibliography
Atkins, Jeannine. Wings and Rockets: The Story of Women in Air and Space. Farrar, 2003.
"Briefly Noted." Mechanical Engineering 134.3 (2012): 11. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.
Lucid, Shannon. No Sugar Added: One Family's Saga of Dementia and Caretaking. Self-published, 2019.
Lucid, Shannon. Tumbleweed: Six Months Living on Mir. Self-published, 2020.
Lucid, Shannon W. “Six Months on Mir.” Scientific American, May 1998, 46–55.
NASA. "Biographical Data: Shannon W. Lucid (Ph.D.)" NASA: Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. NASA, Feb. 2012. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.
"Shannon Lucid." Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, www.astronautscholarship.org/astronauts-shannon-lucid.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Shayler, David, and Ian Moule. Women in Space Following Valentina. Springer, 2005.