Rhea Seddon

Margaret Rhea Seddon (born November 8, 1947) is an American surgeon and retired NASA astronaut.

Margaret Rhea Seddon was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on November 8, 1947, the first child of Edward C. Seddon, a lawyer, and his wife Clayton Ransom Dann.

She had a younger sister, Louise.

Seddon was named after her maternal grandmother, and known by her middle name, Rhea, which is pronounced "ray".

She grew up in Murfreesboro, where she attended St. Rose of Lima Catholic School.

The nuns at St. Rose did not teach science until the Sputnik crisis made it a national priority.

A science teacher was then recruited, and Seddon began studying science in the seventh grade.

In 1960 she wrote a school report on what would happen to people who ventured into space.

She attended Central High School in Murfreesboro, where she was a cheerleader.

She graduated in 1965.

A friend of the family, Lois Kennedy, was a physician—Seddon worked in her office one summer—and inspired her to pursue a career in medicine.

Another friend of the family, Florence Ridley, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, recommended some universities in California with good life sciences programs.

Seddon entered the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined the Sigma Kappa sorority.

Her father had been on the board of directors of Rutherford County Hospital, which was opening a new coronary care unit in the summer after her freshman year, and he arranged for Seddon to spend her summer there as an aide.

However, the new center's opening was delayed, and she spent the summer working in the surgical unit, where she decided to become a surgeon.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in physiology in 1970.

During her senior year at Berkeley, Seddon was accepted by the University of Tennessee College of Medicine.

When she matriculated in 1970, there were only six women in the class of more than one hundred medical students.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Seddon was awarded her doctor of medicine (MD) degree in 1973.

During her residency with the University of Tennessee hospitals, she was the only woman in the General Surgery Residency Program.

Before, during, and after her career in the astronaut program, she was active in hospitals emergency departments in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas.

She was awarded her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in 1973.

Her father paid for flying lessons as a graduation gift.

Seddon did her one-year internship at the Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis.

Women were not permitted in the surgery doctors' lounge there, so she had to wait between cases on a folding chair in the nurses' bathroom.

She then did three years of residency at the University of Tennessee hospitals in Memphis, where she was the only woman in the General Surgery Residency Program.

She worked in emergency departments at several hospitals in Mississippi and Tennessee, despite this being against the rules of the residency program.

On July 8, 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued a call for applications for pilot and mission specialist candidates.

It was the first time that women were encouraged to apply.

A colleague, Russ Greer, a neurosurgery resident who had worked at NASA and was aware that Seddon had expressed an interest in becoming an astronaut, informed Seddon of the selection process that was underway, and she decided to apply.

She wrote to NASA and was sent an application form.

She found that at 62 in in height, she was just tall enough to meet the minimum height requirement of 60 in for mission specialists.

After being selected as part of the first group of astronauts to include women in 1978, she flew on three Space Shuttle flights: as a mission specialist on STS-51-D and STS-40, and as a payload commander for STS-58, accumulating over 722 hours in space.

On these flights, she built repair tools for a US Navy satellite and performed medical experiments.

Seddon became an astronaut on August 9, 1979, after selection as a candidate the year prior.

At NASA her development work included the Space Shuttle Orbiter and payload software, the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, the Flight Data File, the Space Shuttle medical kit, and checklists for launch and landing.

She was a rescue helicopter physician for the early Space Shuttle flights and a support crew member for STS-6.

She served as a member of NASA's Aerospace Medical Advisory Committee, as a technical assistant to the director of flight crew operations, and as a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in the Mission Control Center.

In 1996 she was detailed by NASA to Vanderbilt University Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she assisted in the preparation of cardiovascular experiments that flew on the STS-90 Neurolab Spacelab flight in April 1998.

She retired from NASA in November 1997 and became Assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group.