The first American woman to start in space, who was not a professional astronaut but a working scientist, Millie Hughes-Fulford, died at the age of 75.
Hughes-Fulford’s death was confirmed by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF) on Thursday (February 4).
“We are grateful for her research and progress with her work in the life sciences. Please join us in expressing our condolences to Millie’s family and friends at this time,” said Caroline Schumacher, ASF President and CEO, in ‘ wrote an email.
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Hughes-Fulford, the first and only launch of Hughes-Fulford, was originally selected by NASA in 1983 to train as a non-career astronaut for a scientifically dedicated spacecraft mission. Hughes-Fulford launched the Columbia spacecraft on June 5, 1991, becoming the first female payload specialist to enter the orbit, and a member of the first crew to include three women.
She was also the first person to fly into space to represent the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and at the time was a molecular biologist at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco.
“It was a life dream, and not many of us get our life dream,” Hughes-Fulford said in a 2014 interview with the VA.
“I watched Buck Rogers in 1950 when I was 5 years old, and their pilot was a woman named Wilma Deering. I wanted to be Wilma Deering because she could wear pants. At that time, a little girl could not I would sneak around in my pair of Levi’s and hear, “Get out of the Levi’s, put on your dress!” she said. “And so I wanted to be Wilma Deering, because she could wear anything she wanted. “She flew a spaceship and was a professional woman.”
“It was a dream and it changed into reality, which was awfully fun,” she said.
As a member of the STS-40 crew, Hughes-Fulford was responsible for overseeing some experiments aboard Spacelab Life Sciences 1 (SLS-1), the fifth Spacelab mission and the first to be dedicated exclusively to biomedical research. As a cell biologist, one of her tasks was to help collect blood from her crew members.
“It was not like you just pulled a tube of blood and put it in the fridge. It was, you have to do a finger stick and get a hematocrit. For that you have to draw blood and spin it and the serum from the blood. “You have to put this one in the fridge right away. It was like you were collecting six or seven things for each draw, and then you had four people, so you have a lot of different moving parts,” Rhea said. Seddon, one of Hughes-Fulford’s STS-40 crew members, in a 2011 oral history interview with NASA.
The STS-40 crew completed more than 18 experiments (including 10 humans, including seven rodents and one with jellyfish), and returned to Earth with more medical data than any previous NASA spaceflight. “We are at 140% of what we expected to do,” Hughes-Fulford said in a television interview while in space.
But even after logging off the planet for 9 days, 2 hours, 14 minutes and 2 seconds, Hughes-Fulford’s mission was not over. Hughes-Fulford, along with Seddon, mission specialist Jim Bagian and fellow cargo specialist Drew Gaffney, stayed at the landing site for a week to continue providing data on how the human body has re-adapted to gravity.
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Millie Elizabeth Hughes-Fulford was born on December 21, 1945 in Mineral Wells, Texas. When she graduated from the university at the age of 16, she earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Biology from Tarleton State University in 1968 and then studied plasma chemistry at Texas Woman’s University as a graduate of the 1968 National Science Foundation. to 1971.
After completing her doctorate at Texas Women’s University in 1972, Hughes-Fulford joined Southwestern Medical School at the University of Texas, Dallas, as a postdoctoral fellow, where her research focused on regulating cholesterol metabolism. She also served as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps from 1981 to 1995.
Hughes-Fulford, who was first assigned to backup cargo specialist Robert Phillips on the SLS-1 (STS-40) mission, joined the main crew after Phillips was medically denied flight.
After her spaceflight, Hughes-Fulford returned to the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, where she became director of the laboratory now bearing her name. She has contributed to more than 120 articles and excerpts on T-cell activation, bone and cancer growth regulation, and continues to conduct research in space as lead researcher on experiments flown aboard STS-76 in March 1996. het, STS-81. 1997 and STS-84 in May 1997, which investigates the causes of osteoporosis that occur in astronauts while in gravity.
She also flew experiments aboard Soyuz and SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to study the decline in T-cell activation – a medical problem first discovered in returning Apollo astronauts – and how isolated T cells in space are activated. (T cells are a type of white blood cell that are important for the body’s immune system.)
“If you think about it, we’re all evolved into a gravitational field. If we’re going into space and we have microgravity, we’ve eliminated one variable. If you get rid of a variable, you can solve the equation, and we ‘We’ can look at the immune system in a whole new way that was not possible, ‘Hughes-Fulford said in a video interview with the ISS National Laboratory in 2015.
A recipient of the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1991, Hughes-Fulford’s research aboard the space station was awarded by NASA as a top discovery on the ISS.
Hughes-Fulford was married to George Fulford, who preceded her. She is survived by their daughter, Tori Herzog.
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