From an early interest in music to a developing passion for math and science, Judith “Judy” Resnik stood out from her peers, even beginning elementary school a year earlier than most.
She was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1949, and her childhood was filled with many Jewish traditions. Resnik was even bat mitzvahed before it was common for girls to participate in this religious coming-of-age ceremony.
Throughout her childhood, she was an accomplished pianist and a dedicated student — one who received a perfect SAT score. She was the only female student in the country with that achievement the year she took the test, making her the 16th woman in total to reach that goal.
Resnik graduated from Harvey S. Firestone High School as valedictorian in 1966. Though she considered pursuing a career as a concert pianist, her love of math and science triumphed. At 17, she enrolled in Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she majored in electrical engineering. In 1977, she obtained a PhD in that same discipline from the University of Maryland.
Throughout the 1970s, she worked as an engineer for RCA Service Company, the National Institutes of Health and Xerox. She enjoyed staying active, be it flying, biking, or running. Resnik carried her love of music with her into adulthood, though by then it was clear her career lay along a different path.
A year after graduating from the University of Maryland, she joined the ranks of NASA’s Class of 1978. She was one of six women out of the 35 total selectees.
Becoming an astronaut hadn’t been her initial goal, but something about the program lit a fire within her.
“I didn’t really think about it until NASA announced that they were looking for astronauts who would be engineers and scientists on the space shuttle,” Resnik said once in a TV interview. “It was accidental that I heard about it, and I just took a chance and applied.”
She described the countless hours of training and learning as “worth the wait” to go into space.
Even among such an accomplished group of three-and-a-half-dozen people, Resnik shone for her vibrancy and intellect.
“I thought she was really, really bright, obviously a very beautiful person, flirtatious, funny,” recalled her fellow astronaut Rhea Seddon in an article published by the Astronauts Memorial Foundation. “She was just a live wire. We would do the happy hours, or we’d go on these NASA trips, and Judy was just a star attraction.”
At NASA, she worked on projects involving orbiter development, training techniques, and the Remote Manipulator System, also known as the robotic arm.
“It’s a fancy name for a very long arm, which is as long as the cargo bay, it’s 50 feet long, and it works just like a human arm. It has a shoulder,” she once explained in a TV interview.
Resnik felt inspired by Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut.
Her first flight, a week-long mission and the first voyage of Discovery, took place in 1984, making Resnik the second American woman — and the first Jewish American — to venture into space. She helped carry out solar cell wing experiments, satellite deployments, student crystal growth experiments and photography experiments, in addition to making 96 orbits of the Earth during that time.
NASA awarded her the Space Flight Medal of Honor for operating the robotic arm to break off ice particles on the exterior of the shuttle that could have put the spacecraft in danger.
Resnik was assigned to fly aboard Challenger in January 1986 as a mission specialist.
Challenger Commander Francis Richard “Dick” Scobee, also a member of the Class of 1978, described her once on a panel as “probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the astronaut office.”
In an interview with Netflix, Seddon recalled how Resnik didn’t act like she was breaking ground for women — she just did it.
“She was very serious about what she was going to do, and she didn’t want to be singled out because she was a female,” Seddon said.
Ahead of the Challenger flight, when she was again slated to operate the robotic arm, Resnik shared more about her goals.
“I’ve pursued my career on my own merits and this is my second flight and I’d like to stay with the space program as long as they want because I think it’s very important,” she said at a panel.
Resnik died at age 36, survived by her brother, Charles “Chuck” Resnik. Her legacy has been preserved in numerous ways, both on Earth and elsewhere. Academic scholarships, schools, a university dormitory, a sculpture garden and more carry her name, as do a star, a crater on the moon and a crater on Venus. The Society of Women Engineers established both a Resnik Challenger Medal and a Judith Resnik Memorial Scholarship.
Chuck Resnick viewed his sister as “brilliant.”
In a 2016 interview with WBALTV, he said, “This is somewhat a quote from her, that hard work and perseverance can get you anywhere you want to go.”
