Laurel Blair Salton Clark, M.D.

NASA’s own biography opens with an Ames, Iowa, birth certificate and then the sentence that mattered to her: she considered Racine home. She logged fifteen days, twenty-two hours, and twenty minutes on STS-107, a science flight that carried moths, roses, two University of Wisconsin experiments, and a zoology teddy bear in the gear.

Born on March 10, 1961, the oldest of four, she was a nearly straight-A student at William Horlick High School, class of 1979, who joked that she was boring and then joined the Navy to test the claim. She studied zoology and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, served as a diving medical officer and as a submarine-squadron doctor in Holy Loch, Scotland, and became flight surgeon to a Marine Harrier squadron in Yuma. NASA selected her on the second try, while she was pregnant. Her husband, Jonathan, was also Navy and also NASA; their son, Iain, was eight when Columbia was lost.

From orbit she mailed home lightning over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis, and—the detail Racine kept—Wind Point sticking into Lake Michigan. Foam damage to the left wing at launch, unknown to the crew, doomed the ship sixteen minutes from landing over Texas. She had been filming shipmates, smiling, minutes before. She received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously. Horlick still says her name in the same breath as the golden football in the trophy case. Birth was Iowa; hometown, by her own word, was Racine.