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Millie Hughes-Fulford, a pioneering astronaut and scientist who became the first female payload specialist to fly into space for NASA, died last week after years of battling cancer, her family said. She was 75. Hughes-Fulford was selected by NASA for his astronaut program in 1983 and spent nine days in orbit on the shuttle Columbia in June 1991, conducting experiments on the effect of space travel on humans as part of the the agency’s first mission, dedicated to biomedical studies, STS-40. She and her crew members orbited the Earth 146 times, the AP reports. The research shaped the rest of her career, and upon her return, she founded the Hughes-Fulford Laboratory at the San Francisco VA Healthcare System, which worked to understand the mechanisms that regulate cell growth in mammals. “She came back to her world as a scientist carrying this experience of flying in space and that became a unique filter through which she went through all of her scientific work,” said Dr. Mike Barratt, a NASA flight surgeon assigned at Columbia. .
“She told me she had absolutely no fear when she took off in the shuttle,” said her granddaughter. “She was thinking logically about what her next job was, and that’s how she handled everything, including her cancer.” Millie Elizabeth Hughes was born in Mineral Wells, Texas in 1945. At the age of 16, she attended Tarleton State University, where she majored in chemistry and biology and was often the only woman in the class. The men didn’t appreciate her getting better on exams, her granddaughter said. After obtaining a PhD in Biochemistry, she applied for 100 academic jobs across the country and received four responses. She accepted a lab position. In 1978, Hughes-Fulford answered an ad in a magazine looking for candidates to be the first woman in space. She made it to the last 20 of 8,000 candidates before Sally Ride was selected, then went into space on Columbia as a researcher. “Millie was an inspiration on so many levels, from the Earth’s surface to the low Earth orbit,” said a colleague. “She imbued every conversation with compassion, optimism, energy, humor and an unshakable confidence that a solution could be found.”
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