Oh wow Ed, thank you for sharing. I can not imagine how that experience must have been for you.. Did you ever meet Judy during your time at KSC?
Wonderful pictures. Hope you don't mind, but here's a bit of info that I gleaned about Resnik whilst researching her life:“At the contractors’ factories, we also did some ‘widows and orphans’ appearances,” wrote Mike Mullane, “passing out ‘Maiden Voyage of Discovery’ safety posters to the workers.” Judy Resnik had joked that there were certainly no maidens on this mission! In Riding Rockets, Resnik herself is presented as a tragi-comic figure – tragic in terms of her estrangement from her mother and, of course, her untimely death aboard Challenger, but intensely witty in her interactions with others; her romantic crush on actor Tom Selleck became the stuff of banter among fellow astronauts. “Flirtatious, funny…just a live wire,” was classmate Rhea Seddon’s summary of her. Yet she was an outstanding over-achiever. Born Judith Arlene Resnik in Akron, Ohio, on 5 April 1949, she was the progeny of a first-generation Jewish-Russian family. Her father, Marvin, was an optometrist and part-time cantor, whilst her mother, Sarah, was a former legal secretary. Soon after entering kindergarten Resnik was able to read and solve simple mathematical problems. She and her younger brother, Charles, received Hebrew schooling and her teachers described as bright, disciplined, personable and a perfectionist. It was whilst at school that she developed her love for mathematics and classical piano. She achieved the highest possible score – 800 – on the mathematics component of her SAT test, graduated from Firestone High School in Akron in 1966 and was accepted into the Carnegie Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering. (By the time she completed her degree in 1970, the institute had been renamed ‘Carnegie-Mellon University’.) She was initially hesitant about entering engineering, since it was not traditionally a female career path, but realised that her aptitude for mathematics and the sciences would carry her through. “Maybe I liked it,” she once said, “because I was good in it.” Shortly after graduation, she married a fellow engineering student, Michael Oldak, but the pair divorced in 1974. During her short married life, she was employed by RCA, working on custom integrated circuitry for phased-array radar control systems and the specification, project management and evaluation of control systems. She also undertook work for NASA sounding rocket and telemetry programmes. Resnik later joined the National Institutes of Health as a biomedical engineer and staff fellow, working in the neurophysiology laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland, and at the same time commenced work on her doctorate in electrical engineering. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 1977 and joined Xerox as a senior systems engineer.In Riding Rockets, Mike Mullane noted that Resnik’s first exposure to the space programme and the idea of becoming an astronaut appeared that same year, when she first saw an announcement on the Xerox bulletin board. To Mullane, it underlined the reality that many women had grown up in society, totally closeted and unaware of the possibility that such careers were available, on the basis of gender or colour. In fact, one of the recruiters who drew Resnik to NASA was the African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, famed for her role alongside William Shatner in ‘Star Trek’. Nichols began by affiliating her company, Women in Motion, with the space agency, although its focus extended to ethnic minorities, too, and led to the selection of Resnik and Sally Ride, Guy Bluford and Ron McNair and inspired a number of others, including Mae Jemison, who in 1992 became the first black American woman in space. When Resnik was selected as one of the first six female astronauts in January 1978, it was widely expected that either she or Sally Ride would be the first to fly. In fact, Rhea Seddon remarked in her oral history that Resnik and Ride received “the sorts of technical assignments that really prepared them for flight”, such as RMS work and capcom duties. “I think most of us felt it would be Sally or Judy.” To Resnik, as one of the 41D crew members, it mattered little. Being a woman astronaut or the second American woman astronaut or the first Jewish woman astronaut was as insignificant as saying that she was “the 40th or 45th…American astronaut to go on the Space Shuttle in a period of a couple of years”. Resnik was simply amazed at how far the space programme had evolved in just a handful of years.
Great job, Ash!I'd give you an A+!That's the first time I've ever seen a crew arrival photo at KSC with a shuttle / 747 in the background.
Quote from: Ash41D on 08/30/2013 07:47 pmOh wow Ed, thank you for sharing. I can not imagine how that experience must have been for you.. Did you ever meet Judy during your time at KSC?I don't remember meeting Judy, but I'm sure I saw her in our building a time or two. I worked payload processing. The Mission Specialists would participate in the payload integration tests that we performed in the VPF and O&C Buildings. They would be out on the test stands flipping switches while we were buried in our control room mimicking ground control during the tests. Occasionally they would visit our control room or we would be allowed a meet and greet as a morale booster. I did meet Sally Ride and Cathy Sullivan and others. Sally spent a good bit of time with us one day when a test of ERBS (STS-41G) was stalled by data communications issues. She wanted to know *exactly* what was happening and why, down to the bit level. - Ed Kyle
I am a major Judy Resnik fan girl I am new to this forum so we'll see how this goes.
I heard this story about Judy told by 41-D Commander Hartsfield. (It was a gathering of most of the remaining crew so it may have been someone else but memory says it was the Commander.)41-D had an Imax camera. They had left the gear and chain cover behind to save weight. Judy's hair was a globe of hair in weightlessness. So, as the camera was running, her hair was ingested by the Imax.The Commander said she was able to describe her trouble with words even an old Navy salt had not heard in his travels. They extricated her and she swore eveyone to secrecy.Next morning wake up music was 'Hair'.
Yeah, I know this one. Hartsfield also shared this story with his STS-61A crew members. Needless to say, the story then percolated down to some press folks given that STS-61A was a high-profile mission in both Germany and the Netherlands. It was one of those journalists that told me about the little IMAX-meets-hair incident on 41-D.Check out this link to get an idea where Judy's hair got caught.http://www.nasa.gov/topics/shuttle_station/features/imax_84HC447_prt.htm