Sullivan, Kathryn

Kathryn Sullivan, in full Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan, (born October 3, 1951, Paterson, New Jersey, U.S.), American oceanographer and astronaut, the first American woman to walk in space (1984).

Sullivan received a bachelor’s degree in Earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1973 and a doctorate in geology from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1978. While at Dalhousie she participated in several oceanographic expeditions that studied the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

In 1978 Sullivan was selected as an astronaut by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Her first spaceflight was aboard the space shuttle Challenger on the STS-41G mission (October 5–13, 1984). Sullivan and mission specialist David Leetsma performed a 3.5-hour space walk in which they operated a system designed to show that satellites could be refueled in orbit.

Sullivan flew on two more spaceflights. On STS-31 (April 24–29, 1990), the space shuttle Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. On STS-45 (March 24–April 2, 1992), Sullivan was the payload commander of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science, a laboratory on a pallet housed in the space shuttle Atlantis’s cargo bay that contained 12 experiments studying Earth’s atmosphere.

Sullivan left NASA in 1993 and became chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 1996 she was named president and chief executive officer of the Center of Science and Industry, a science museum in Columbus, Ohio. In 2006 Sullivan became the director of the Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy at The Ohio State University in Columbus. In 2011 Pres. Barack Obama appointed her assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction and deputy administrator of NOAA; she was confirmed by the Senate later that year. In 2013 she became acting administrator of NOAA and acting under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere. The following year she received Senate confirmation, and she served until 2017. She wrote a book, Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention (2019) about her experiences deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.