(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.
