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Veteran Astronaut Speaks At Winter Park Institute

Astronauts Story Musgrave, left, and Don Peterson float in the cargo bay of the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Challenger during their spacewalk on the STS-6 mission. Photo: NASA
Astronauts Story Musgrave, left, and Don Peterson float in the cargo bay of the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Challenger during their spacewalk on the STS-6 mission. Photo: NASA

The only astronaut to have flown on all five space shuttles is speaking in Winter Park this week.

Story Musgrave is a NASA astronaut, a Marine, physician and a Disney Imagineer consultant, but he comes from humble beginnings. Musgrave calls Kentucky home and was a farm kid. Then he joined the Marines, specializing in repairing aircraft.

That would lead him to join NASA in 1967. His most notable achievement as an astronaut was repairing the $1.5 billion dollar Hubble space telescope. Musgrave led the spacewalks that fixed a flaw in a damaged observatory more than 350 miles above Earth.

“I know how to fix stuff," said Musgrave of the mission. "If you look at the path I took, it’s leading to Hubble. No one at the time had the skills or the imagination to create solutions to the problem.”

He plans to share his journey from a farmer with no high school diploma to record-setting astronaut at the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College Tuesday, March 6 at 7:30 p.m.

Brendan Byrne is WMFE's Assistant News Director, managing the day-to-day operations of the WMFE newsroom, editing daily news stories, and managing WMFE's internship program.

Byrne also hosts WMFE's weekly radio show and podcast "Are We There Yet?" which explores human space exploration.