Our beloved Judy Resnik

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Judy signing autographs   

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NASA Lewis Research Center (1979)

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Top photo - Dr. Resnik inflates a solar water still during life raft training on Biscayne Bay (1978).

Female TFNGs taking a break from water survival training (Turkey Point, Florida).

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Some additional photos of Judy's visit to the Lewis Research Center. A big thanks to Ash41D for this amazing thread!

[Archibald]

She was, indeed, stunningly beautiful. As for her character - I would say "it was complicated". Well actually it was the overall situation that was complicated.

Let's have a glance at the women that were part of the TFNG in 1978. Each one was singular and got her how peculiar history. Their situation was not exactly easy.
 In fact it was extremely polarized. One one side was Sally Ride, a natural born leader and strongly on the feminist side - she was an accointance of Gloria Steneim. And this clashed head-on with NASA / astronaut culture, which was even in 1978 a lot of macho bull, The Right Stuff style.

Sally Ride herself was a complex human being, with some difficult internal contradictions that were probably very painful. I will no go further down this path, this is private life.

All six others were mostly stuck between the two ends, doing their best to handle an ackward in-between status.

Where thing goes interesting is that each single of them handled that her own way.

Shannon Lucid and Katy Sullivan were not really affected by all this, focused on their missions and careers and surely enough, fully succeded. Lucid was the one that flew the most, including a memorable long duration trip to Mir.

Rea Sheddon was another interesting case. She was a surgeon, and as such, she was pretty much "prepared" to the test pilots somewhat crass attitude to women - because physicians and surgeons are somewhat similar (see the case of France very own Michel Cymès, one of the more sexist pigs ever on TV)
Sheddon dated and married Hoot Gibson, who, according to Mike Mullane, was one hell of a prankster as far as women went.

Anna Fisher was the first astronaut ever to be pregnant, and her husband Bill Fisher was an astronaut, too. So it was the astronaut family.

And, at the end of the list, remain Judy Renisk. From what we know (then again, private life) she had some difficulties with her family - some tensions over faith and some others about her early failed marriage.

Her sheer beauty (all too visible on the above pictures) had some unnerving side effects. Mullane tells how every single man in a room, be it a politician, an astronaut, or... a stalker, was just kind of hypnotized. Of politicians dropping cigarettes and drinks and pumping her hand over and over just to be on a press photo with her by their side. While showing next to zero interest for the male astronauts standing in line near Resnik. They were just... transparent. Invisible.
And Resnik was stalked, actually, by some nut.
So Resnik had some good reasons to show some kind of nervousness at times. Overall, her situation was not easy.

For most of the TFNG women astronauts, it was quite unsettling to be trapped between two such polarized cultures. The press really did not helped, and neither did NASA.

 Sometimes it could be pretty ackward, like when in 1985 NASA flew a Saudi prince, and one of the woman astronauts was to go to Saudi Arabia to help preparing that flight. That country archaic and backward culture (even today, cutting diplomats into pieces...) couldn't handle or even figure an independant woman and even less a woman astronaut.
So NASA and Saudi Arabia found a compromise: she was to enter the country declared as... a men, so that she could kept her independance, I mean, not be accompanied by a men everywhere she went. You guess, the test pilot astronaut culture had a field day.

And when the shuttle toilet failed right in the middle of a mission, it was even more complicated and awfully ackward, because men and women are not similar in that regard - let's say men have an easier time when peeing in zero-G, for obvious reasons - condoms, for a start.
Yet Resnik reasoned that if the Shuttle mission was interrupted because of THAT, then the press would jump on it, with all kind of consequences.
So she - heroically - decided to endure the "Apollo bags" as if she was a man. You can only guess how it was a rather painful and unhappy experience. Yet that was the kind of complicated, tortured reasoning early women astronauts faced. Later generations had easier times.

... and well, if that post make some people uneasy, then the moderators are free to nuke it into oblivion.

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The Zoo Crew 

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Mealtime on the mid-deck

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[Archibald]

Zoo crew. The name only speaks volume. All this because of Tarzan. Steve Hawley was Cheetah. Mullane was Tarzan. Resnik, obviously, was Jane.
Incidentally, Mike Coats looked uncannily like Christopher Reeves's Superman.
Hank Hartsfield being the mission commander, he become the zookeeper.  Make sense.

Charles Walker was a kind of outsider, although he was well respected since his company was related to aerospace, so flying with his satellite made sense to the astronaut corps. Much more than teacher-in-space or worse, journalist-in-space.
Considering the antics of Zoo crew, he must have wondered, at times, about the sanity of NASA astronaut corps, notably the efficiency of their pyschological screening. 

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Eileen Hawley shared this picture of Jane and Cheetah 

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1) Article from June 1986 (Updated)

2) The Akron Beacon (June 21, 1984)

3) The Akron Beacon (January 17, 1978)

[achatham]

Thank you @Ash41D for starting this magnificent topic and to everyone who has contributed so many wonderful pictures and stories and remembrances of our beloved Judy.  Three days ago, on a whim, I thought to search the University of Maryland Digital Archives for "Resnick" (spelled incorrectly with a 'c') and incredibly several photos of Judy came back, none of which I had seen before.  Moreover, the resolution of the images is remarkable.  I post them here for posterity.  All credit to the University of Maryland Digital Archives Collection.

[rodface]

A very old thread, but I think it’s the appropriate place to add my comments.

I was born in 1988 and grew up with the Shuttle. To me, it will always be the way human beings travel to space, no matter what has followed since. The Shuttle defined its era, and its triumphs and tragedies will always remain vivid, living memories.

When I reflect on the Shuttle disasters—as I often do—the sense of loss feels as immediate as ever. It is remarkable that Challenger was lost almost forty years ago. One day it will join the Titanic among the ranks of century-ago accidents that could never happen again, for they happened before we knew better.

The greatest losses, of course, were not the machines but the people—the ones who could make the era’s irrational exuberance come to fruition, if anyone could. They were an extraordinary few by definition, and losing them meant losing some of our most dedicated, most brilliant, and most generous companions.

I have always felt a particular sense of sorrow when I return to the story of Dr. Resnik. Even within such an exceptional crew, she stood out as gifted—a brilliant engineer, an accomplished scientist, and an inspiration to countless others who would follow her path. Astronauts are the very best of the best—the people we can least afford to lose.

Thank you to everyone who has posted here and contributed to this celebration of a very special person, and thank you for reading my comments.