Mary Cleave: A Dire Message from Outer Space

The View from Orbit that Scared an Astronaut

Mary Cleave in NASA garb
For environmental engineer and NASA astronaut Mary Cleave, the Space Shuttle was the ultimate platform from which to study the massively destructive effects of climate change that threaten Earth and its inhabitants.

Dr. Mary Cleave was a pilot, an environmental engineer, and one of the NASA’s first female astronauts. Her name may not be well known, but she did remarkable work for NASA – both in space and here on planet Earth.

An environmental engineer aboard the shuttle Atlantis, operating its robotic arm during other astronauts’ space walks, she later joined a four-day mission on the same aircraft, sending the Magellan robotic space probe to Venus to map its surface.

A Dire Overview Effect

It’s not uncommon for astronauts to experience what they call the “overview effect” – seeing Earth as a gleaming planet suspended in darkness, an oasis of life in a silent void, that fills them with awe. But Dr. Cleave’s overview effect was marked by fear and a sense of urgency as she focused her attention on what she saw as growing crisis below her – the steady deterioration of planet Earth.

Mary Cleave in the NASA Atlantis Space Shuttle
Cleave in the Atlantis Space Shuttle.

In an interview with Annapolis’ newspaper The Capital, she said, “looking at the Earth, particularly the Amazon rainforest and amount of deforestation I could see, just in the five years between my two spaceflights, scared the hell out of me.” But that wasn’t all she saw.

She described what she saw during her two shuttle missions as “catastrophic.” As part of a 2002 NASA oral history interview, she described how the cities over which Atlantis orbited “were gray smudges; and those gray smudges were getting bigger. The air looked dirtier, with fewer trees, more roads, all those things.”

It was from the silent vastness of space that Dr. Mary Cleave realized her true calling was not to reach for the stars, but to return to Earth and help save it.

Early Life

Born in 1947 in New York and raised on Long Island, young Mary Cleave built model airplanes and, at age 14, used her babysitting money for flying lessons. She flew solo at 16 and earned her pilot’s license a year later – even before she got her driver’s license. She briefly thought about becoming a flight attendant until realizing that, at 5’ 2”, she couldn’t meet the height requirement.

Education

Cleave earned her bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Colorado State in 1969. She completed her postgraduate work at Utah State University, where she earned a master’s in Microbial Ecology in 1973 and received her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1979.

NASA's Atlantic Space Shuttle in orbit above the earth
Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2011

NASA Shuttle Years

It was while finishing her doctorate, working at the Utah Water Research Laboratory, that a co-worker shared a notice from NASA soliciting scientists and engineers to join the shuttle program, which had yet to launch its first mission into space. She recalled, “he came back to the lab and said, ‘you’re the only engineer I know who’s crazy enough to want to do this’.” Dr. Cleave was chosen for the shuttle program in 1980. One of her first duties was fixing a malfunctioning toilet in the shuttle Atlantis, leading to her being known as the “first space plumber.”

She served as a Mission Control Communicator with the crew of the Challenger in 1983 – the flight in which Sally Ride became the first woman in space. When Cleave spoke to Ride in orbit, it was the first female-to-female space communication in the agency’s history.

Two years later, Dr. Cleave had another memorable moment aboard the Atlantis as the shuttle passed over Houston at sunset. NASA had alerted the public this would be a particularly good time to see the shuttle, with the sun’s rays illuminating Atlantis like a bright star.

As luck would have it, a wastewater dump was scheduled for the same time, which was also illuminated for all those eager eyes to the skies. As Mission Control Communicator Dr. Ride told the shuttle crew, “people saw both the shuttle and the dump. The stream appeared to be about 15 miles long and was very bright. We’re calling it “Cleave’s comet.”

It was in late 1986 when the Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnik. When shuttle missions resumed in 1988, the first three flights had all-male crews until Dr. Cleave was chosen to ride the Atlantis again.

Goddard Years

Dr. Cleave retired from her role as an astronaut, transferring to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, in 1991. There, she managed a $43-million NASA-funded project using satellite sensors to collect ocean data on the impact of global warming by measuring the abundance and distribution patterns of phytoplankton.

phytoplankton patterns in the Baltic Sea
NASA images of phytoplankton patterns (green) in the sea around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea.

Most of us don’t give much thought to phytoplankton, but these microscopic plants convert carbon dioxide into their cellular makeup and provide the basis of the marine food chain while, at the same time, producing oxygen. Dr. Cleave summed up her work in a 1997 speech to the Association for Women Geoscientists in Utah by saying, “I get to study green slime on a global basis.”

Combining self-deprecating wit with blunt urgency, she also noted that the pace and scale of disruptions in ocean patterns and ecology caused by human-triggered climate change were irrefutable. “Boom! You get fish kills – no food and less oxygen,” she said in describing the Pacific warming cycle known as El Niño and its effect on ocean life and monsoon-like storms.

Heavily polluted North and South Carolina rivers emptying into the ocean
NASA image of heavily polluted rivers in North and South Carolina emptying into the ocean.

Oxygen-depleting hypoxic – or “dead”— zones occur naturally, but they’re made worse by human activity. Excess nutrients that run off land or are piped as wastewater into rivers and off our coasts stimulate algae growth, which then sinks and decomposes. The process of decomposition consumes oxygen and depletes the supply available to maintain healthy marine life.

She saw her move to Goddard as a throwback of sorts to her undergraduate studies in biological sciences at Colorado State University, where a botany professor once told her it was those lower plants that made the world go ‘round.

Post-Goddard Years and Retirement

After leaving Goddard in 2000, she moved to Washington, DC, to become NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning in its Office of Earth Science. For two years, from 2005 until her retirement in 2007, she oversaw research and scientific programs focused on the Earth, solar system and universe.

NASA image of deforestation in the Amazon
NASA image of vast areas of deforestation in the Amazon.

When she was assigned to a third shuttle flight on the Columbia, Dr. Cleave opted not to go. She was anxious to start her environmental work. As she told interviewers for NASA’s 2002 oral history project, “the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me how fast the Earth was changing. I mean, in only four years, I was looking down from above on what were huge changes. And that’s really no time at all.”

She retired from NASA in 2007, devoting herself to volunteer work and encouraging young women to pursue interests in science and engineering. She also mentored NASA’s Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, supporting the best and brightest STEM scholars while honoring the legacy of America’s pioneering astronauts with 50 scholarships valued at up to $15,000 to each selected scholar.

Wordwide “Call to Earth”

In 2015, astronauts from around the world contributed to a video titled “Call to Earth,” urging world leaders to act ahead of the Paris Agreement. Their plea? If we don’t clean up our act, and fast, we could irreversibly destroy the only home we’ve got.

This 8-minute video was made by Mary Cleave and other astronauts around the world for the attendees at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference for world leaders in Paris.

Mary Cleave: “It’s amazing how fragile the atmosphere looks from space. All we have is a thin film of air to protect us from the terrible vacuum of outer space. It is quite literally part of our life support system. We need to be really careful with it.”

Michael López-Alegría, astronaut: “Those of us lucky enough to have orbited the Earth have not only heard about the negative impact the industrial age has had on our planet; we’ve seen it with our own eyes.”

Ernst Messerschmid, German astronaut: “We have witnessed the shrinking of the Aral Sea, burning rainforests along the Amazon and in Indonesia, the polluted air over industrial zones, and the dirty water at the river deltas.”

Wubbo Ockels, Dutch astronaut: “When you have the spirit and insight and attitude of an astronaut, you start to love the Earth. And when you love something, you don’t want to lose it. Our Earth has cancer. I have cancer, too.” Mr. Ockels died the day after he recorded his message for the video.

Awards and Honors

Long considered a role model in science and space exploration, Dr. Cleave is the recipient of various honors. They include the American Astronautical Society Neil Armstrong Flight Achievement Award (1989); the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal (1994); and being profiled along with Sally Ride, Anna Fisher, and America’s other women astronauts in the Women in Space DVD (2004) and the original Women’s Adventures in Science book series published by the National Academies Press.

Mary Cleave in her retirement years
Cleave in retirement.

When Dr. Mary Cleave suffered a stroke and died in Annapolis in November of 2023 at the age of 76, NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana remembered her as a trail blazer and “a force of nature with a passion for science, exploration, and caring for our home planet.”

She was also a fervent admirer of the late astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan, who captured millions of imaginations with his 1980-1981 television series Cosmos and his Pale Blue Dot prose, contending his video (link below) was the only argument that made conservation and sustainability everybody’s responsibility on the planet we all call home, appealing to “both the intellect and the emotions in a way nothing before had.”

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A Trailblazer in Promoting Motorcycling for Women

Dot Robinson, co-founder of the Motor Maids of America
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Dot Robinson, born in Australia in 1912, was quite literally a biker babe. When her mother went into labor, her father loaded his heavily pregnant wife into a Harley-Davidson motorcycle sidecar rig and rushed her to the hospital. And when her mother came home, it was in that same sidecar, holding her tightly swaddled newborn daughter.

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María Ylagan Orosa – Filipina War Hero and Banana Ketchup Queen

Killed by U.S. Friendly Fire, She Left a Legacy Including Much of What Filipinos Eat Today

Maria Orosa and a bottle of her banana ketchup
With chemistry and pharmaceutical degrees from a U.S. university, María Ylagan Orosa was also a captain in a guerilla unit battling the Japanese invasion of her homeland during World War II. Her weapon was unique, nutrient-dense foods that kept local Filipino freedom fighters going. The most famous of her creations was banana ketchup that took on a commercial life of its own after the war.

This is a serious story about a unique woman — Filipina food technologist, pharmaceutical chemist, humanitarian, and war hero – that starts with ketchup.

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Cecelia Rose O’Neill: Before Barbie There was Kewpie

Self-Taught Artist and Savvy Business Woman Who Invented the First Novelty Toy Distributed Worldwide

The 1913 patent for the Kewpie Doll
In the turn-of-the-century world of artists and illustrators that did not welcome women, Cecelia Rose O’Neill broke through as a superstar producer who created the first novelty toy distributed worldwide. It made her fabulously wealthy.

Cecelia Rose O’Neill was many things … self-taught artist and sculptor, author and poet, suffragist and, for a time, one of the world’s richest women. But to most people, she was the woman who birthed “The Kewpies” — plump little cartoon characters and world-famous dolls with top knots, rosy cheeks, broad smiles, and sidelong eyes. Debuting in 1909, Kewpies were the world’s most widely known cartoon character until a guy named Disney introduced us to a cheeky mouse named Mickey in 1928.

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Stephanie St. Clair: Harlem Renaissance by the Numbers

From the Slums of Martinique to the Top of Harlem’s Numbers Rackets

The vibrant streets of Harlem in the 1920s
Queen of the numbers rackets during Harlem’s Renaissance, Stephanie St. Clair was an outlaw as well as an entrepreneur and Civil Rights Advocate.

The Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s and ‘30s was a hotbed of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, politics, and scholarship. It gave us luminaries like Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, W.E.B. DuBois and Jessie Redmon Fauset. But for many, when it came to Black identity, community and the everyday experience of Black people, a woman named Stephanie St. Clair loomed large.

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Vanilla Beane: The Beloved “Hat Lady” of Washington, D.C.

She was Still Making Internationally Acclaimed Hats When She was 100

Vanilla Beane in her shop with a display of her hats
Vanilla Beane, who ran Bené Millinery & Bridal Supplies, was a beloved figure in Washington, D.C., and her hat creations were internationally famous.

She was a fashion icon, successful entrepreneur, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother — and a centenarian businesswoman with a name so charming you can’t help but smile.

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