Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an African American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first woman of recent African ancestry to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.
Mae Carol Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama, the youngest child to Charlie Jemison and Dorothy Green. Her father was a maintenance supervisor for a charity organization, and her mother worked most...
more
Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an African American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first woman of recent African ancestry to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.
Mae Carol Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama, the youngest child to Charlie Jemison and Dorothy Green. Her father was a maintenance supervisor for a charity organization, and her mother worked most of her career as an elementary school teacher of English and math at the Beethoven School in Chicago. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was 3, to take advantage of better educational opportunities there. Jemison says that as a young girl growing up in Chicago she always assumed she would get into space. "I thought, by now, we'd be going into space like you were going to work." She said it was easier to apply to be a shuttle astronaut, "rather than waiting around in a cornfield, waiting for ET to pick me up or something."
As...
less
