Women of Discovery

Judith Resnik
Judith Resnik, an engineer, was a member of the first class of NASA astronauts to include women in 1978. She served as a mission specialist aboard STS 41-D, Discovery’s first mission in 1984. She logged 144 hours and 57 minutes in space and became the second American woman in orbit, preceded by Sally Ride in 1983.

Resnik was a specialist on the 1986 Challenger mission. She, along with the other six Space Shuttle crew members, died just 73 seconds into their ascent on January 28, 1986. Resnik was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Ellen Ochoa
When STS-1 Columbia, the first spaceflight of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, launched on April 12, 1981, the world was watching—including Ellen Ochoa, an engineering student who would go on to become the first Hispanic woman in space.

Ochoa joined the crew of the STS-56 mission aboard Discovery in 1993, studying the Earth’s ozone layer. This was the first of four separate space missions Ochoa would fly, experience that led her eventually to become the first Hispanic director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Of her time aboard Discovery, Ochoa said: “It was not just about experiencing space. We were up there for a purpose. We had people counting on us. We had a job to do and we needed to work together to do it.”

Eileen Collins
The first woman pilot of a Space Shuttle, Eileen Collins was selected for the astronaut program in 1990, while she was still in the Air Force’s test pilot school. (She was groundbreaking in the Air Force, too. Collins was the second female pilot to attend the USAF’s pilot school.)

Collins served as Discovery’s pilot for STS-63 in 1995. The mission kicked off the then-new joint Russian-American Space Program, and involved a rendezvous with Mir, the Russian Space Station. Four years later, Collins served as commander of Columbia's STS-93 mission, launching the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and becoming the first woman commander of the Space Shuttle era in the process.

Stephanie Wilson
Stephanie Wilson went on her first mission to space in 2006, on STS-121. It was the first of three missions she served on Discovery to the International Space Station. Wilson would go on to spend more than 42 days in space, the most of any African American astronaut.

Wilson, an engineer, worked as a robotic arm operator for all three of her missions. On her last mission in 2001, she worked on installing the Leonardo Permanent Multipurpose Module to the ISS.

Sunita Williams
Astronaut Sunita Williams traveled the 220 miles from Earth to the International Space Station aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in December of 2006. In April, she added another 26.2 miles to her journey by running the Boston Marathon while in space, the first to do so!

Williams joined the astronaut corps in 1998, and traveled to the ISS with STS-116 eight years later. While aboard the ISS, Williams completed four spacewalks.