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Doctor-astronaut made history with walk in space
Wednesday, February 07, 2001 By John G. Radzilowicz, director, Henry Buhl, Jr. Planetarium & Observatory
Bernard Harris Jr. was born in 1956 in Temple, Texas. A strong interest in science and medicine led him to the University of Houston and a degree in biology in 1978. Harris wanted a career as a doctor, and four years later received his M.D. from Texas Tech.
After completing his residency at the Mayo Clinic in 1985, Harris joined NASA at the Ames Research Center in California. He studied the human musculoskeletal system and how it functions in space. Two years later, he accepted appointment as a clinical scientist and flight surgeon at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. There he studied ways to overcome the negative biological effects of long-term space travel.
By 1989, Harris decided he wanted to study effects of space travel personally, and he applied for reassignment to the astronaut corps. He was accepted in 1990 and graduated the next year from the astronaut candidate program.
Harris flew his first mission in 1993 when he served as a mission specialist aboard the shuttle Columbia. During this Spacelab mission, he researched the effects of weightlessness on the body.
In 1995, he flew as payload commander for the first flight of the joint Russian-American program. During this mission, Harris visited the Mir space station, conducted more extensive research on humans in space and conducted a five-hour space walk outside the shuttle Discovery.
Interestingly, in this long list of accomplishments, it is the last one that earned Harris a place in history books. With that five-hour excursion, Dr. Bernard Harris Jr. became the first African--American to walk in space.
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