The first American woman to go into space who was not a professional astronaut but a working scientist, Millie Hughes-Fulford, has died at the age of 75.
Hughes-Fulford’s death was confirmed by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF) Thursday (Feb. 4).
“We are grateful for her research and progress in her work in the life sciences. Please share with us our sympathy with Millie’s family and friends at this time,” Caroline Schumacher, ASF Chairman and CEO, wrote in an email.
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Originally selected by NASA in 1983 to train as a non-career astronaut for a science-focused space shuttle mission, the first and only Hughes-Fulford launch was delayed by the Challenger tragedy in 1986. Hughes-Fulford departed June 5 1991 on the space shuttle Columbia and became the first female payload specialist to enter orbit and a member of the first crew with three women.
She was also the first person to fly into space to represent the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA), as she was a molecular biologist at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco at the time.
“It was a life dream, and not many of us are getting our life dream,” Hughes-Fulford said in an interview with the VA in 2014.
“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 the time, a little girl couldn’t walk around in pants. I would sneak into my pair of Levis and I would hear, “Get off those Levis, 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 came true, which was really nice,” she said.
As a member of the STS-40 crew, Hughes-Fulford was responsible for overseeing some of the experiments aboard Spacelab Life Sciences 1 (SLS-1), the fifth Spacelab mission and the first dedicated solely to biomedical research . As a cell biologist, one of her jobs was to help collect the blood of her crew members.
“It wasn’t like you just pulled a tube of blood and put it in the fridge. It was, you have to do a finger prick and get a hematocrit. You have to draw blood for this and separate the spiders and serum from the blood. It was like collecting six or seven things for each draw, and then you have four people, so you have a lot of different moving parts, ”said Rhea Seddon, one of the STS-40 crew from Hughes-Fulford , in a 2011 interview with NASA.
The STS-40 crew completed more than 18 experiments (including 10 with humans, seven with rodents, and one with jellyfish) and returned to Earth with more medical data than any previous NASA space flight. “We’re at 140% of what we expected to do,” said Hughes-Fulford in a televised space interview.
But even after being away from the planet for 9 days, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 2 seconds, the Hughes-Fulford mission was not over. Along with Seddon, mission specialist Jim Bagian, and fellow payload specialist Drew Gaffney, Hughes-Fulford stayed on the landing site for a week to continue to provide data on how the human body adapted to gravity.
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Millie Elizabeth Hughes-Fulford was born in Mineral Wells, Texas, on December 21, 1945. When she entered college at the age of 16, she received her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Biology from Tarleton State University in 1968, and then graduated plasma. chemistry from Texas Woman’s University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow from 1968 to 1971.
After completing her PhD from Texas Women’s University in 1972, Hughes-Fulford joined the faculty of the Southwestern Medical School at the University of Texas, Dallas as a postdoctoral fellow, where her research focused on the regulation of cholesterol metabolism. She also served as a major in the US Army Reserve Medical Corps from 1981 to 1995.
Hughes-Fulford was initially assigned to Robert Phillips, backup payload specialist on the SLS-1 (STS-40) mission, and joined the first crew after Phillips was medically disqualified from the flight.
After her space flight, Hughes-Fulford returned to the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, where she became director of the laboratory that now bears her name. She contributed to more than 120 papers and abstracts on T cell activation, bone and cancer growth regulation and continued to conduct research in space as lead investigator for experiments flying aboard STS-76 in March 1996, STS-81 in January 1997 and STS -84 in May 1997, which investigates the root causes of osteoporosis that occur in microgravity astronauts.
She also flew experiments aboard the Soyuz and SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, where she studied the decline in T cell activation – a medical problem first encountered in returning Apollo astronauts – and how isolated T cells were activated during space flights. (T cells are a type of white blood cell that is important for the body’s immune system.)
“If you think about it, we’ve all evolved in a gravitational field. If we go into space flight and we’ve got microgravity, we’ve eliminated one variable. In math, you can solve the equation if you delete a variable.” a whole new way of looking at the immune system, which was not possible, ”Hughes-Fulford said in a video interview for the ISS National Laboratory in 2015.
Hughes-Fulford received the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1991, and the research onboard the space station was awarded by NASA as a Top Discovery on ISS.
Hughes-Fulford was married to George Fulford, who led her death. She is survived by their daughter, Tori Herzog.
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