Judith Resnik Dies on Challenger

On this day, Judith Resnik died with the crew of the space shuttle Challenger. NASA records that STS-51-L left Kennedy Space Center at 11:38 a.m. Eastern time and that the crew died when Challenger exploded after launch. She was a mission specialist.

She was born in Akron, Ohio, on 5 April 1949. The Jewish Women’s Archive records that her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and that she went to Hebrew school. She earned an electrical-engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon in 1970 and a doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1977. NASA selected her in January 1978. On 30 August 1984 she flew on Discovery. That flight made her the second American woman in space and the first Jewish American woman in space.