On October 11, 1984, Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in outer space. As an astronaut, scientist and environmental steward, her work has set our sights outward to distant planets and inward on the importance of protecting the earth.
Born on October 3, 1961 in Paterson, NJ, Sullivan spent most of her childhood in Woodland Hills, CA. Sullivan grew up with an aerospace engineer father and amidst a growing national fervor over space travel. After graduating from her Los Angeles high school, she received her BS in earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz in 1973 and then her PhD in geology at Dalhousie University in 1978. As a graduate student at Dalhousie, she studied the ocean floors in the Atlantic and Pacific, with her sights set on pursuing an oceanography career. However, when NASA selected her to join the first class of female astronauts in 1978, it was an offer that she could not refuse.
Before going into space, Sullivan and the other women in her program, including her childhood friend, Sally Ride, had to navigate the brave new world of being the first female astronauts in training. In an interview, Sullivan shared, “All the guys we walked into, every woman in their life, before we arrived, was wife, girlfriend, daughter, or secretary, period; occasionally a nurse. But that’s it. That’s all you ever were, and so whether we wanted it or not, it fell to us to change their views about women.”
On October 11, 1984, Sullivan performed the first extra vehicular activity (EVA), aka space walk, by an American woman. This history-making three and a half hour space walk was during an expedition on the space shuttle Challenger STS-41-G mission where she helped operate a system that was set up to show that a satellite could be refueled in orbit. This eight-day mission on the Challenger would be one of her three space shuttle missions, including the five-day mission on the Discovery space ship in April 1990, that set up the famous Hubble Space Telescope. She took flight one last time on the 1992 Atlantis mission. By the time she left NASA in 1993, she had logged an impressive 532 hours in space. In 2004, she was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
During her time working for NASA, Sullivan also joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1988 as an oceanographer officer. She worked her way up to Captain by the time she retired in 2006. Dedicated to environmentalism, Sullivan took on other important positions, including Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Former President Obama recognized Sullivan’s dedication and talent when he appointed her as the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator of NOAA in 2013. Confirmed by the Senate in 2014, Sullivan served in that role until January 20, 2017. In her tenure at NOAA, she oversaw important efforts to better understand and address today’s environmental challenges. In 2016, The National Audubon Society recognized her environmental leadership when they awarded her the prestigious Rachel Carson Award.
Since leaving her post at NOAA, Sullivan was named the 2017 Charles A. Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Sullivan’s terrestrial and extraterrestrial work continues to inspire future generations of women looking to break boundaries in pursuit of scientific adventures and discoveries.