Judith Resnik
Judith Arlene Resnik was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. She was the fourth woman, the second American woman and the first Jewish woman of any nationality to fly in space, logging 145 hours in orbit.
Recognized while still a child for her intellectual brilliance, Resnik was accepted at Carnegie Institute of Technology after becoming only the 16th woman in the history of the United States to have attained a perfect score on the SAT exam. She graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon before attaining a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.
Resnik worked for RCA as an engineer on Navy missile and radar projects, as a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation, and published research on special-purpose integrated circuitry. She was also a pilot and made research contributions to biomedical engineering as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health.
At age 28, Resnik was selected by NASA as a mission specialist. She was part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first group to include women. While training on the astronaut program, she developed software and operating procedures for NASA missions. Her first space flight was the STS-41-D mission in August and September 1984, the twelfth Space Shuttle flight, and the maiden voyage of, where her duties included operating its robotic arm. Her second Shuttle mission was STS-51-L in January 1986 aboard. She died when the orbiter broke up shortly after liftoff and crashed into the ocean.
Early life
Judith Arlene Resnik was born in Akron, Ohio, on April 5, 1949, the daughter of Marvin Resnik, an optometrist, and his wife Sarah, a legal secretary. She had a brother, Charles, who was four years younger. Her father was the son of a rabbi, and he had been born in Preluke in Ukraine. His family had emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s, and then to the United States after the 1929 Hebron massacre. He was fluent in eight languages and served in the U.S. Army during World War II in military intelligence, conducting prisoner of war interrogations and aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific Theater and the subsequent occupation of Japan. Resnik grew up in an observant Jewish home, studying at Hebrew school at Beth El Synagogue in Akron and celebrating her Bat Mitzvah in 1962, which at the time was not a common occurrence.Resnik was noticed for her intellectual ability while still in kindergarten, and she entered elementary school a year early. She attended Fairlawn Elementary School, Simon Perkins Junior High School, and Harvey S. Firestone High School. She was an outstanding student, excelling in mathematics, languages and piano. She played classical piano, and at one point considered a career as a concert pianist. Before college, she attained a perfect score on her SAT exam, the only woman in the country to do so that year and only the 16th woman in US history. She graduated from Firestone in 1966 as valedictorian and runner-up homecoming queen.
Although her mother disapproved of her dating, Resnik had a series of boyfriends. She preferred to socialize with boys from the nearby Copley High School rather than from Firestone, where her intellectual reputation preceded her. She met Len Nahmi at a basketball game. He was half Irish and half Lebanese, and her mother disapproved of him. Nonetheless, she continued to see him secretly, and when she stayed with a cousin in Cleveland while taking a college course available to high school students, she also met with him there. Her parents acrimoniously divorced while she was a teenager, and custody was given to her mother, as was the custom in the United States. Her mother's dislike of Nahmi became more intense, and Nahmi eventually ended their relationship to spare Resnik more pain. When she was 17, she prepared and filed a successful court case so that her custody could be switched from her mother to her father, with whom she was particularly close. She tore up letters from her mother unopened. Her father remarried, and she acquired twin stepsisters, Linda and Sandy, who were nine years older than she was, and with whom she became close.
At age 17, Resnik entered Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she joined the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority. She began college intending to become a math major, but in her second year, after attending electrical engineering lectures with her boyfriend Michael Oldak, she developed a passion for the subject. She was one of three female students in electrical engineering. She was a gourmet cook and a navigator in sports car rallies, in which she took part many times with Oldak in his Triumph TR6. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1970. She became a member of Tau Beta Pi, Mortar Board, and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies.
Resnik married Oldak on July 14, 1970. Her mother attended the wedding; two sets of invitations were sent out, one describing her as her father's daughter, and the other as her mother's. Upon graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Resnik and Oldak moved to Moorestown, New Jersey, where they both worked for RCA. She was a design engineer on missile and radar projects and won the Graduate Study Program Award. She performed circuit design for the missile and surface radar division. While at RCA, she worked for the Navy building custom integrated circuitry for the phased-array radar control systems and developed electronics and software for NASA's sounding rocket and telemetry systems programs. An academic paper she wrote on special purpose integrated circuitry caught the attention of NASA during this time. She registered for master's degree evening courses at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1971, Oldak was accepted into Georgetown University Law Center, and they moved to Washington, D.C. Resnik continued to work for RCA, transferring to its office in Springfield, Virginia, and she continued pursuing her master's degree at the University of Maryland. She then entered a doctoral program. Resnik and Oldak divorced in 1975—he wanted children and she did not—but they remained in contact and on good terms.
While working on her doctorate, Resnik switched jobs in 1974, and went to work as a research fellow in biomedical engineering at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health. As a biomedical engineer, Resnik researched the physiology of visual systems. In 1977 she earned her PhD in electrical engineering with honors at the University of Maryland, writing her dissertation on "Bleaching kinetics of visual pigments". Her research involved the effects of electrical currents on the retina. An academic paper co-written by her concerning the biomedical engineering of optometry was published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America in 1978.
NASA astronaut
Selection and training
After her divorce from Oldak, Resnik reconnected with Nahmi, who was now a commercial airline pilot. When he heard that the National Air and Space Administration was recruiting women to become astronauts, he encouraged her to apply. They read Carrying the Fire, the 1974 book by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, and she met with him in his office at the National Air and Space Museum. She also met with another former astronaut, John Glenn, who was now a United States senator from her home state of Ohio. Nahmi convinced her to obtain a private pilot's license to bolster her credentials. Resnik qualified as a pilot in 1977, while completing her Ph.D., having achieved near-perfect scores in her flying exams. When she received a promotion at RCA and again when she completed her doctorate, he suggested she send NASA a telegram informing them.Resnik's mentor and advisor, Professor Angel G. Jordan, then Dean of Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering and later provost of Carnegie Mellon, also encouraged Resnik to apply for the program. After she completed her doctorate, Resnik became a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation in Los Angeles, working in product development. She rented an apartment in Redondo Beach, California, where she would jog along the beach to improve her stamina and reduce her weight.
In January 1978, at age 28, Resnik was selected as a mission specialist with NASA Astronaut Group 8, one of 29 men and six women selected out of 8,029 applicants in the first NASA astronaut selection that included women. This involved taking a pay cut, as her new salary was considerably less than what she was being paid at Xerox. Her fellow astronaut candidates nicknamed her "JR". She dated some of them. She trained intensely and with great determination, focusing particularly on her physical fitness. She piloted the Northrop T-38 Talon, an aircraft used by NASA astronauts for transportation and training. Astronaut Jerome Apt described her as "an excellent pilot". Asked about Resnik, fellow astronaut Rhea Seddon said: "I thought she was really really bright, obviously a very beautiful person, flirtatious, funny. She was just a live wire. We would do the happy hours, or we'd go on these NASA trips, and Judy was just a star attraction."
Resnik worked on research into the principle of orbital systems, flight software and the development of systems of manual control of spacecraft. She developed the software and operating procedures for the Space Shuttle's Remote Manipulator System. She also developed the deployment systems for the tethered satellite systems and worked on orbiter development, writing software for NASA to use on its missions. She disliked the part of her job that required making public appearances and drumming up support for the space program. She avoided television interviews when possible, and resented intrusive questions about her private life, such as questions about her divorce.
Other astronauts felt that either Resnik or Sally Ride would become the first woman in the group to fly in space, as they received the sorts of technical assignments that best prepared them for flight, such as capsule communicator duties. The shortlisted candidates for the mission specialist assignments for the STS-7 mission included all six women, but since the mission involved the use of the RMS, the choice of the first to fly on the Space Shuttle narrowed to Resnik, Ride and Anna Fisher, who had specialized on it. Resnik was considered best qualified, but was passed over in favor of Ride because it was felt that Resnik was less comfortable with public affairs, and the first American woman to fly in space would attract an unusual amount of public interest.