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10?s
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In this recurring feature,
Sky’s Up gives students
the opportunity to ask
10 Questions to leading
astronomers, space explorers,
scientists and cosmologists.
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The questions for this
installment were submitted
by 5th grade students at
Central Riverside Elementary
School in Jacksonville, Fla.
COURTESY OF NASA
A true explorer:
NASA Astronaut
Story Musgrave
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53 days, 9 hours, 59 minutes — That is the amount of
time NASA Astronaut Story Musgrave has spent in orbit, but it is not
where his adventures in exploration began.
“I am a farm kid, raised in nature, the fields, forests, rivers and the
sky,” he said. “I was an explorer at age three, then 25 years later the
space program happened.”
During his 30-year tenure at NASA, he flew on six spaceflights.
Over the course of these missions, he performed the first shuttle
spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy
mission, conducted two classified Department of Defense missions,
was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission
and operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia.
His Earth-bound NASA highlights include serving as the
communicator in Mission Control for 25 missions, working on the
development of the Skylab program and participating in the design of
all Space Shuttle extravehicular activity equipment.
In this installment of Sky’s Up’s “10 Questions feature, Musgrave
talks about his experiences in space exploration.
Sky’s