(Before continuing below, please note that, YES, this is REAL, and NO, this is NOT made up).
The greatest human being of the 20th century.
Apart from being a six-time space shuttle voyager (the only one...ever), and flying 17,
700 hours in 160 different types of military and civilian aircraft, of which 7,500 hours were jets, he's also a decorated marine who served in Korea, Japan, and Hawaii and later as an instrument technician, an aviation electrician, and an aircraft crew chief. Being an
accomplished parachutist, he's also made more than 800 free-falls (over 100 which were purely
experimental).
On top of this, Story Musgrave was also a
mathematician, a chemist, an artist, who had an MBA in
operations analysis and computer programming, an MFA in literature, and was also a heart surgeon and National Heart Institute Fellow. He was also a a professor of physiology and biophysics who authored twenty five scientific papers in the areas of aerospace medicine and physiology, temperature regulation, exercise physiology, and clinical surgery. Oh, and by the way, he also designed over 300 tools for the Hubble Telescope, AND the space suit that astronauts use for space walks.
In his spare time he is a public speaker, a landscape architect, and a consultant to both Disney's Imagineering group and Applied Minds in California. I would have included all of his life's accomplishments but it would have taken me many centuries to document, so here's just a small glimpse.
I can't believe that when you ask young people who they look up to these days, they throw out names like
Justin Bieber and
Miley Cyrus instead of Story freakin' Musgrave.
It's
disgusting how more people care about a celebrity's sexuality, than Story Musgrave's opinion on the castration of the space program.
