The Astronaut Who Danced

On September 12, 1992, the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off on mission STS-47, and among its crew was the science mission specialist Mae Jemison — who, once in orbit, became the first Black woman in space. She was born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama, and raised in Chicago, where as a girl she announced that she wanted to be a scientist and was told she probably meant a nurse. She meant a scientist. Part of what convinced her it was possible was watching Star Trek, and Lieutenant Uhura — proof, on television, that a Black woman could belong on the bridge of a starship.

Jemison in orbit aboard Endeavour during STS-47, 1992. NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Her path was gleefully plural. She entered Stanford at sixteen and left with degrees in chemical engineering and in African and African-American studies. She earned a medical degree from Cornell and served as a Peace Corps medical officer in West Africa. She was also a serious dancer — she has said she once had to choose between medical school and a career in dance. In 1987, NASA selected her as an astronaut, the first African American woman to earn the job.

During her eight days in orbit she ran experiments on bone cells and motion sickness. But she also, deliberately, brought things that had nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with the point of it: a poster from the Alvin Ailey dance company, a banner from her sorority, a small West African statuette. Space, she reasoned, belongs to all of us, and she wanted to carry evidence of human culture and creativity up with her. She began her shifts with a line borrowed from Star Trek.

Jemison as a 1987 astronaut candidate — the first African American woman selected. NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

She left NASA in 1993 — and, in a satisfying loop, appeared that same year on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first real astronaut to do so, invited by the show that had helped set her on her way. Nine years after Guion Bluford had become the first African American in space, she had opened the door the rest of the way, and she went on to found technology companies and to lead a research project on interstellar travel.

Jemison’s insistence is the whole lesson: that science and art are not opposites but two expressions of the same human urge — to understand, and to make. She trained as a physician and an engineer and never stopped being a dancer, and she carried all of it into orbit at once. The most complete designs, like the most complete people, refuse the false choice between rigor and wonder.