Astronaut Kent V. Rominger works out on the bicycle ergometer on Space Shuttle Discovery in June 1999. Rominger, who hails from Del Norte, Colorado, was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday, May 30. (Photo: NASA)
Half of the 2015 U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame class, inducted Saturday at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., have ties to the Centennial State.
The pride of Del Norte, NASA Astronaut Kent Rominger. (Photo: NASA)
(Captain, USN, Ret.) was born in Del Norte, graduated from Del Norte High School and went on to earn an engineering degree from CSU before heading to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He became an astronaut in 1992 and took five spaceflights, one of the most notable as commander of STS-96, when Space Shuttle Discovery became the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station.
NASA selected Rominger to become an astronaut in 1992. Also a veteran of five spaceflights – three as pilot and two as commander – he logged more than 67 days in space. Several of Rominger’s missions were integral to the beginnings of the International Space Station. As commander of the STS-96 mission, Rominger oversaw the first docking of a space shuttle to the station. Rominger is currently a vice president at OrbitalATK.
Astronaut Steve Lindsey now manages the Dream Chaser program at Sierra Nevada Space Systems. (Photo: NASA)
(Colonel, USAF, Ret.) is the senior director of Space Exploration Systems at , where he manages the company’s Dream Chaser program. He hung out for a while in Colorado Springs earning an engineering degree at the U.S. Air Force Academy, continuing on to get master’s in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology and fly over 50 different types of aircraft and over 7,000 flight hours for the USAF.
Lindsey was selected as an astronaut in 1995 and he logged more than 63 days in space over five spaceflights. He flew on STS-95, the mission that took Mercury astronaut (and then-senator) John H. Glenn, Jr. into space for his second flight. Glen was 77, making him the oldest person to go to space. He was also on Discovery’s last flight, STS-133. Lindsey retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2006 and from NASA in 2011.
Rominger and Lindsey are joined by two other inductees:
John Grunsfeld logged more than 58 hours spacewalking during his time as an astronaut. (Photo: NASA)
has logged more 58 hours of spacewalk time. Among his five space missions are three of the critical ventures to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, including STS-125, the first space shuttle mission flown after the Columbia explosion and the final Hubble repair mission. He retired from NASA in 2009 to direct the Space Telescope Science Institute and teach physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He has since returned to NASA to serve as the agency’s Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate.
Dr. Rhea Seddon was part of the first NASA astronaut class to include women. Among her many accomplishments during her 19-year-long astronaut career, she greatly contributed to health science experiments in space. (Photo: NASA)
, a member of Astronaut Group 8, the 1978 astronaut class that for the first time included women candidates for the first time. Seddon, who logged more than 720 hours in space over three missions, conducted the first of NASA’s popular “” demonstrations. She also took the first ultrasound of a human heart in space and contributed greatly to our knowledge of how zero gravity affects humans and animals.
The inductees, which bring the total number of hall of famers to 91, join the ranks of Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, Alan Shepard, Eileen Collins and Neil Armstrong. This is the 25th anniversary of the hall of fame, which was founded in 1990 by six Mercury astronauts.
