Photo of Story Musgrave. Courtesy NASA. All rights reserved.

Dr. F. Story Musgrave was born on August 19, 1935, in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent his early years living with his family on the Linwood Estate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. During an interview with Norman Rockwell Museum in 2004, Musgrave recalls climbing the apple trees of the working dairy farm as a kid, with an eye to skies. He also floated homemade rafts on the nearby Housatonic River starting at the age of five.

Dr. Musgrave never finished school, but ran off to Korea with the U.S. Marines where he was an aircraft electrician and an engine mechanic. He started flying with the Marines and over the next 55 years accumulated 18,000 hours in over 160 aircraft.

Musgrave worked as a NASA astronaut for over 30 years and flew on six spaceflights. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, conducted two classified DOD missions, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission and on his last flight, he operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia.

Dr. Musgrave has seven graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology. He has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates. He was a part-time trauma surgeon during his 30 year astronaut career. Today he operates a palm farm in Orlando, FL, a production company in Sydney and a sculpture company in Burbank, CA. He is also a landscape architect, a concept artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds Inc. and a professor of design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

A philosopher, poet, and motivational speaker, Musgrave believes that mankind has always looked to the universe for answers to questions of life and death on earth.

Learn more about Story on his website: www.storymusgrave.com