Profile: Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts

"I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order."

When Story Musgrave was a boy in western Massachusetts he could scarcely imagine the world outside his parents' farm. In time, his adventures would take him far from the farm, away from the earth itself, as one of NASA'a first astronaut-scientists.

Story Musgrave is unique in the modern world. He is a scientist, surgeon, pilot, teacher, photographer, athlete and poet. He has flown on all six vehicles of the Space Shuttle program, logging over 1200 hours in space flight. His ingenuity and stamina dazzled the world when he commanded the mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit high above the earth. He continued to fly in space in his 60s, an age when most of his colleagues were living comfortably in retirement.