Rhea Seddon
Margaret Rhea Seddon is an American surgeon and retired NASA astronaut. After being selected as part of the first group of astronauts to include women in 1978, she flew on three Space Shuttle flights: as a mission specialist on STS-51-D and STS-40, and as a payload commander for STS-58, accumulating over 722 hours in space. On these flights, she built repair tools for a US Navy satellite and performed medical experiments.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Seddon was awarded her doctor of medicine degree in 1973. During her residency with the University of Tennessee hospitals, she was the only woman in the General Surgery Residency Program. Before, during, and after her career in the astronaut program, she was active in hospitals emergency departments in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas.
Seddon became an astronaut on August 9, 1979, after selection as a candidate the year prior. At NASA her development work included the Space Shuttle Orbiter and payload software, the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, the Flight Data File, the Space Shuttle medical kit, and checklists for launch and landing. She was a rescue helicopter physician for the early Space Shuttle flights and a support crew member for STS-6. She served as a member of NASA's Aerospace Medical Advisory Committee, as a technical assistant to the director of flight crew operations, and as a capsule communicator in the Mission Control Center. In 1996 she was detailed by NASA to Vanderbilt University Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she assisted in the preparation of cardiovascular experiments that flew on the STS-90 Neurolab Spacelab flight in April 1998. She retired from NASA in November 1997 and became Assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group.
Early life and education
Margaret Rhea Seddon was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on November 8, 1947, the first child of Edward C. Seddon, a lawyer, and his wife Clayton Ransom Dann. She had a younger sister, Louise. Seddon was named after her maternal grandmother, and known by her middle name, Rhea, which is pronounced "ray". She grew up in Murfreesboro, where she attended St. Rose of Lima Catholic School. The nuns at St. Rose did not teach science until the Sputnik crisis made it a national priority. A science teacher was then recruited, and Seddon began studying science in the seventh grade. In 1960 she wrote a school report on what would happen to people who ventured into space. She attended Central High School in Murfreesboro, where she was a cheerleader. She graduated in 1965.A friend of the family, Lois Kennedy, was a physician—Seddon worked in her office one summer—and inspired her to pursue a career in medicine. Another friend of the family, Florence Ridley, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, recommended some universities in California with good life sciences programs. Seddon entered the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined the Sigma Kappa sorority. Her father had been on the board of directors of Rutherford County Hospital, which was opening a new coronary care unit in the summer after her freshman year, and he arranged for Seddon to spend her summer there as an aide. However, the new center's opening was delayed, and she spent the summer working in the surgical unit, where she decided to become a surgeon. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in physiology in 1970.
During her senior year at Berkeley, Seddon was accepted by the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. When she matriculated in 1970, there were only six women in the class of more than one hundred medical students. She was awarded her Doctor of Medicine degree in 1973. Her father paid for flying lessons as a graduation gift. Seddon did her one-year internship at the Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis. Women were not permitted in the surgery doctors' lounge there, so she had to wait between cases on a folding chair in the nurses' bathroom. She then did three years of residency at the University of Tennessee hospitals in Memphis, where she was the only woman in the General Surgery Residency Program. She worked in emergency departments at several hospitals in Mississippi and Tennessee, despite this being against the rules of the residency program.
NASA career
Selection
On July 8, 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued a call for applications for pilot and mission specialist candidates. It was the first time that women were encouraged to apply. A colleague, Russ Greer, a neurosurgery resident who had worked at NASA and was aware that Seddon had expressed an interest in becoming an astronaut, informed Seddon of the selection process that was underway, and she decided to apply. She wrote to NASA and was sent an application form. She found that at in height, she was just tall enough to meet the minimum height requirement of for mission specialists. The application required three references, and she chose three people who had most strongly influenced her to that point: James Pate, the head of surgery at the hospital; Jose Guma, her flying instructor; and Jim Arnhart, the administrator of Rutherford Hospital.From 8,079 applicants NASA identified 208 for further screening, conducted in groups of about twenty. Seddon was contacted by Jay F. Honeycutt from NASA and was asked to come to the Johnson Space Center for a week of interviews and physical examinations, beginning August 29, 1977. Her group of twenty applicants was the first one that included women. Among the eight women in the group were Anna Sims, Shannon Lucid, Nitza Cintron, and Millie Hughes-Wiley. Afterwards, she returned to the Memphis Veterans Administration Hospital, where she commenced a residency in plastic surgery. She soon changed course again after she developed a particular interest in the nutrition of surgery patients. In January 1978 journalist Jules Bergman asked if he could interview her on Good Morning America, and he revealed that she had been selected for astronaut training; Seddon received official word from George Abbey, NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations on January 16. The names of the 35 successful candidates in NASA Astronaut Group 8 were publicly released later that day.
Training
New selections were considered astronaut candidates rather than full-fledged astronauts until they finished their training and evaluation, which was expected to take two years. Group8's name for itself was "TFNG". The abbreviation was deliberately ambiguous; for public purposes, it stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys", but within the group itself, it was known to stand for the military phrase, "the fucking new guy", used to denote newcomers to a military unit. Pilot training was not required of mission specialist candidates, but they were given training in how to handle emergencies while flying in the back seat of NASA's Northrop T-38 Talon jets. Seddon had a private pilot license, and logged time spent in the T-38 as co-pilot time. Due to her small size and the ill-fitting parachute harness she had to wear, she had trouble climbing into the aircraft.A particularly difficult part of the curriculum for Seddon was SCUBA training, which was conducted in the pool at the Clear Lake Recreational Center. She was not a strong swimmer, and it took practice and exercise to develop proficiency. SCUBA training was a prerequisite for Extravehicular Activity training, but Seddon was never considered for this because NASA did not have space suits in her small size. She was sent to the 1979 Paris Air Show to represent NASA along with Mercury Seven astronaut Deke Slayton. The two of them drew crowds of people who wanted to see a famous astronaut or were curious about what a woman astronaut was like.
As an astronaut candidate, Seddon drew a civil service salary of about US$22,000, which was more than she made as a surgical resident. Nonetheless, when she went to buy a townhouse she was told that her income was $3,000 short of what was required, even with her father putting up the deposit. United Savings and Loan refused to lend her the money without her father's co-signature. She also bought a new Chevrolet Corvette. She figured that her astronaut job took up only fifty to sixty hours a week, which left time to practice medicine. This required six months to obtain a Texas medical license and secure permission from NASA Headquarters, and another loan from her father to cover the license fee and malpractice insurance. After several months of serving in the emergency rooms of various hospitals, she met Diana Fire, a physician who worked at Sam Houston Memorial Hospital, and accepted an offer to work in the emergency room there on weekends. Seddon worked there until it closed twelve years later, then moved to Spring Branch Hospital, where she remained until she left Houston.
Seddon officially became an astronaut in August 1979, after NASA decided that one year of training was sufficient. As with earlier astronaut groups, each astronaut candidate was assigned a particular specialization; Seddon's assignment was the Space Shuttle food system and the orbital medical kit. For STS-1, the first orbital spaceflight of NASA's Space Shuttle program and the inaugural flight of the, Abbey decided that the five MDs of the 1978 and 1980 astronaut groupsNorman Thagard, Anna Fisher and Seddon from the 1978 group, and Bill Fisher and Jim Bagian from the 1980 groupwould be assigned to the search and rescue helicopters supporting the flight. These would be required if the Space Shuttle crashed or the astronauts had to eject. Seddon was placed in charge of the group, and as such could choose her assignment. She, therefore, decided to join the group at Cape Canaveral. In the event, the mission went well, and search and rescue were not required.
In February 1981 Seddon became engaged to fellow astronaut Robert L. "Hoot" Gibson. They were married on May 30 in a ceremony at the First United Methodist Church in Murfreesboro, followed by a reception at the Stones River Country Club. A second reception was held in Houston, followed by a honeymoon in Hawaii. Seddon then resumed her role with search and rescue in preparation for the upcoming STS-2 mission. She also worked in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, where the Space Shuttle's software was tested.
Seddon's first child was born in July 1982 and was named Paul Seddon Gibson after Gibson's father. Gibson already had one child, a daughter called Julie, from his first marriage. While many astronauts had children, this was the first child born to an astronaut couple. The newborn suffered from a serious condition arising from inhaling meconium and was rushed by helicopter from Clear Lake Hospital to Houston's Hermann Hospital, where he soon responded to treatment.