Shannon Matilda Wells Lucid (née Wells; born January 14, 1943) is an American biochemist and retired NASA astronaut. She has flown in space five times, including a prolonged mission aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1996, and is the only American woman to have stayed on Mir. From 1996 to 2007, Lucid held the record for the longest duration spent in space by an American and by a woman. She was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in December 1996, making her the tenth person and the first woman to be accorded the honor.
Lucid is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where she earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1963, a master's degree in biochemistry in 1970, and a PhD in biochemistry in 1973. She was a laboratory technician at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation from 1964 to 1966, a research chemist at Kerr-McGee from 1966 to 1968, and a research associate at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation from 1973 to 1978.
In 1978, Lucid was recruited by NASA for astronaut training with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of astronauts to include women. She flew in space five times: on STS-51-G, STS-34, STS-43, STS-58, and her mission to Mir, for which Lucid traveled to the space station on with STS-76 and returned six months later with STS-79. She was the NASA Chief Scientist from 2002 to 2003 and a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) at Mission Control for numerous Space Shuttle missions, including STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. Lucid announced her retirement from NASA in 2012.
Early life Shannon Matilda Wells was born in Shanghai, Republic of China, on January 14, 1943, the daughter of Joseph Oscar Wells, a Baptist missionary, and his wife Myrtle, a missionary nurse. Due to America's ongoing war with Japan, when she was six weeks old, the family was detained by the Japanese, who had occupied Shanghai at the time. The three of them were imprisoned in an internment camp but were released during a prisoner exchange later that year. They returned to the United States on the Swedish ocean liner and stayed in the US until the end of the war.
After the war ended, the family returned to China but decided to leave again after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. They moved to Lubbock, Texas, and then settled in Bethany, Oklahoma, the family's original hometown, where Wells graduated from Bethany High School in 1960. She was fascinated by stories of the American frontier and wanted to become an explorer. She concluded that she had been born too late for this, but discovered the works of Robert Goddard, the American rocket scientist, and decided that she could become a space explorer. Wells sold her bicycle to buy a telescope so she could look at the stars, and began building her own rockets. Shortly after graduating from high school, Wells earned her private pilot's license with instrument and multi-engine ratings and bought a preowned Piper PA-16 Clipper that she used to fly her father to revival meetings. She applied for jobs as a commercial pilot, but was rejected, as women were not yet accepted for training as commercial pilots in the United States.
Wells attended Wheaton College in Illinois, where she majored in chemistry. She then transferred to the University of Oklahoma, where she earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1963. She was a teaching assistant in the University of Oklahoma's Department of Chemistry from 1963 to 1964 and a senior laboratory technician at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, from 1964 to 1966. She then became a research chemist at Kerr-McGee, an oil company there. At Kerr-McGee she met Michael F. Lucid, a fellow research chemist. They married in 1967, and their first child, Kawai Dawn, was born in 1968.
Afterward, Lucid left Kerr-McGee and returned to the University of Oklahoma as graduate assistant in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, where she pursued a master's degree in biochemistry. She sat for her final examinations two days after the birth of her second daughter, Shandara Michelle, in 1970. She went on to earn her PhD in biochemistry in 1973, writing her thesis on the Effect of Cholera Toxin on Phosphorylation and Kinase Activity of Intestinal Epithelial Cells and Their Brush Borders under the supervision of A. Chadwick Cox. She then returned to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation as a research associate. A third child, Michael Kermit, was born in 1975.
NASA career Selection and training
On July 8, 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued a call for applications for at least 15 pilot candidates and 15 mission specialist candidates. For the first time, new selections would be considered astronaut candidates rather than fully-fledged astronauts until they finished training and evaluation, which was expected to take two years. The enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 reinforced the promise of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address the persistent and entrenched employment discrimination against women, African Americans and minority groups in American society. While they had never been explicitly precluded from becoming NASA astronauts, none had ever been selected either. This time, minorities and women were encouraged to apply. Lucid's was one of the first of 8,079 applications received.
As one of 208 finalists, Lucid was invited to come to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, for a week of interviews, evaluations and examinations, commencing on August 29, 1977. She was part of the third group of twenty applicants to be interviewed, and the first one that included women. The eight women in the group included Rhea Seddon, Anna Sims, Nitza Cintron and Millie Hughes-Wiley. On January 16, 1978, NASA announced the names of the 35 successful candidates, of whom 20 were mission specialist candidates. Of the six women in this first class with female astronauts, Lucid was the only one who was a mother at the time of being selected. George Abbey, the Director of Flight Crew Operations at JSC and the chairman of the selection panel, later stated that this was not taken into consideration during the selection process.
Group 8's name for itself was "TFNG". The abbreviation was deliberately ambiguous; for public purposes, it stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys", but within the group itself, it was known to stand for the military phrase, "the fucking new guy", used to denote newcomers to a military unit. Much of the first eight months of their training was in the classroom. Because there were so many of them, the TFNGs did not fit easily into the existing classrooms, so for classroom instruction they were split into two groups, red and blue, led by Rick Hauck and John Fabian respectively. Classroom training was given on a wide variety of subjects, including an introduction to the Space Shuttle program, space flight engineering, astronomy, orbital mechanics, ascent and entry aerodynamics and space flight physiology. Those accustomed to military and academic environments were surprised that subjects were taught, but not tested. Training in geology, a feature of the training of earlier classes, was continued, but the locations visited changed because the focus was now on observations of the Earth rather than the Moon.
Astronaut candidates had to complete survival training, be able to swim and scuba dive, and master the basics of aviation safety, as well as the specifics of the spacecraft they would have to fly. Water survival training was conducted with the 3613th Combat Crew Training Squadron at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and parasail training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. On August 31, 1979, NASA announced that the 35 astronaut candidates had completed their training and evaluation, and were now officially astronauts, qualified for selection on space flight crews. Their training, which had been expected to last eighteen to twenty-four months, had been completed in fourteen. That of subsequent classes was shortened to twelve months.
Each of the new astronauts specialized in certain aspects of the Space Shuttle program, providing astronaut support and input. Lucid was involved with Spacelab 1 crew training, and the development of the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL) at JSC and Rockwell International's Flight Systems Laboratory (FSL) in Downey, California. She also worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and rendezvous proximity operations. She was at Edwards Air Force Base as a member of the exchange crew for the landing of the STS-5 mission in November 1982. The exchange crew took over from the flight crew after they had landed, and handled the post-flight activities. She was an astronaut support person (ASP) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for the STS-8 mission in August 1983. Also known as a "Cape Crusader", an ASP was an astronaut who supported vehicle and payload testing at KSC, and strapped the flight crew into their seats before takeoff. For the STS-41-B mission in February 1984 she was the backup ASP and once again a member of the exchange crew.
STS-51-G
On November 17, 1983, Lucid was assigned to her first flight, the STS-51-A mission. Tentatively scheduled for October 24, 1984, the mission would be commanded by Daniel Brandenstein, with pilot John O. Creighton and Lucid, Fabian and Steven R. Nagel as mission specialists. She would be the last of the six women in the TFNG group to fly. Due to slippages, the crew was reassigned to the STS-51-D mission in August 1984. This mission had a different payload, and it was scheduled to be launched on March 18, 1985. The mission was scrubbed just three weeks before the launch date. In May 1985 the crew was reassigned to the STS-51-G mission. A French astronaut, Patrick Baudry, and a Saudi Arabian prince, Sultan bin Salman Al Saud were assigned as payload specialists.
STS-51-G lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at KSC in the on June 17, 1985. The seven-day mission was to deploy three communications satellites: Morelos I for Mexico, Arabsat-1B for the Arab League, and Telstar 303 for the United States. The satellites were launched on successive days during the first three days of the mission. Lucid and Fabian operated the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) to deploy the satellites, which were boosted into geostationary transfer orbits by Payload Assist Module (PAM-D) booster stages.
Lucid also used the RMS to deploy the Spartan (Shuttle Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy) satellite, which performed 17 hours of X-ray astronomy experiments while separated from the Space Shuttle, while Fabian handled its retrieval 45 hours later. In addition to the satellite deployments, the crew activated the Automated Directional Solidification Furnace (ADSF), six Getaway Specials and participated in biomedical experiments. Discovery landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on June 24. The mission was accomplished in 112 orbits of the Earth, traveling in 169 hours and 39 minutes (just over one week).
The publicity tour that usually followed a Space Shuttle mission included a trip to Saudi Arabia. Married women were not permitted to travel to Saudi Arabia without their husband, and Michael Lucid was unavailable, so Lucid decided not to go. A devout Christian, she disapproved of the way Saudi Arabia treated women. When the rest of the crew arrived in Riyadh, her absence was noted. This prompted a call from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to President Ronald Reagan. Lucid went to Saudi Arabia and shook hands with the king, but she stayed for only one day. For the visit to be possible, Lucid was designated by the Saudi Arabian government as an honorary man.
STS-34