Joan Higginbotham Retraces Inspiring Journey to Space

Joan Higginbotham didn’t want to be an astronaut.

Despite her childhood affinity for math and science and her later prowess in aerospace engineering, the now-retired astronaut had no interest in space exploration at an early age.

Higginbotham credits the people throughout her journey who believed in her and pushed her to go further than she thought herself capable with helping her to make history as the third Black woman to ever go to space.

More than 20 years after her space flight, Higginbotham will return to space (or something like it) when she participates in the launch of Blumenthal Art’s upcoming immersive space experience, Space Explorers: THE INFINITE, set to open on Sept. 20 at the organization’s new Blume Studios.

Higginbotham will be there when Blumenthal helps launch every sixth grader in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools’ into space with the help of virtual reality headsets, giving them first-person perspective into the day-to-day lives of astronauts on board the ISS.

The experience is as close as you get to going to space without leaving Earth, said Andie Maloney, Blumenthal’s vice president of education.

Higginbotham has also loaned some of her personal effects from her career in space travel to Blumenthal, including her flight suit, which will be on display in the exhibit along with a mockup of the shuttle and her childhood astronaut Barbie doll.

“For me, from an education standpoint, it really is just one of those learning opportunities that makes it tangible,” Maloney said. “Space is so ethereal and you do this and you’re like, ‘Oh, these are real people … I could be there and I could do this myself.’”

Higginbotham is living proof of that concept. She’ll be there to show the students that, although being an astronaut may seem like an out-of-this-world dream, each one of them are just regular people who may live right down the street.

Participants in the immersive experience will also view a pre-recorded video interview with Higginbotham in which she answers questions about her journey in becoming an astronaut and her experience in space.

Joan Higginbotham sets her path through the INROADS Program

As a child, Higginbotham excelled in and enjoyed math and science classes, but she never thought to turn that passion into a career until she was nearing high school.

It was after her eighth-grade graduation in 1978 that Higginbotham began taking placement tests for prospective high schools. While attending an orientation for one such school, the students who had performed well on the math and science portion of the entrance exam were pulled into another room.

There, a representative of the INROADS Program introduced the students to its mission. The pre-engineering program supports women and minorities who may have an interest in going into engineering, familiarizing them with professionals in the field and what different jobs exist within the industry.

Before participating in the program, Higginbotham would’ve told anyone who asked that an engineer was someone who drove a train. It was through INROADS, however, that she started on her path, deciding to pursue a career as an electrical engineer.

After sticking with INROADS through her four years in high school, the program set Higginbotham up with interviews for potential internships. Two days after graduating high school, she started an internship with what was then known as Zenith Radio Corporation.

She spent her first summer with the corporation then went to intern with the International Business Machines Corporation, known as IBM, for the subsequent several summers. Higginbotham thought IBM would be her employer of choice after graduating college. She likened the corporation at the time to Google or Apple today, a place where engineers thrived.

The job they offered her, however, was in technical sales, something Higginbotham did not want to pursue. While contemplating that offer in her Southern Illinois University dorm room, Higginbotham received a call from a man at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) who asked if she had any interest in coming to Florida to help launch space shuttles.

To Higginbotham, the offer was a potentially career-limiting one. On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger fractured 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven members of its crew. Higginbotham received the call from the KSC in 1987, one year after the tragedy.

“The Challenger gave me pause when I was considering employment with NASA because I didn’t know how [much] longer they would be viable,” she said.

She flew down to Florida for an interview, though still skeptical of the agency at that point. While there, she saw the vast space shuttles and giant launch pads, which led to her decision to take a job there. She committed to five years with NASA, telling herself she would reconsider which path to take from there.

Her first role at the space center was a payload electrical engineer in the Electrical and Telecommunications Systems Division, working on the space shuttle’s electrical systems. Whatever the payload needed, whether it be heating, cooling or electricity, she had to provide the wiring for it.

Three years later, Higginbotham became an orbiter project engineer. Instead of owning one system, she owned the entire shuttle.

Still in her late twenties at that time, Higginbotham’s job was to tell the management during a flight readiness review why the shuttle was ready to fly based on her engineering know-how.

“At the time, I didn’t realize the gravity of my responsibilities and I think if I had it would have scared me out of my mind,” Higginbotham said in a broadcast from the Intrepid Museum’s Kids Week festival. “But I was having so much fun back then I didn’t realize how serious my job was.”

Dr. Mae Jemison made history as the first Black woman to go to space in 1992, while Higginbotham was working at the space center.

Although Higginbotham admired Jemison for breaking an incredible barrier, she hadn’t even considered becoming an astronaut herself. She was happy where she was, preparing the shuttles the astronauts got to fly.

“I will say that it was still a time where there were not a lot of African American women within NASA, be it in the astronaut corps or just as an engineer,” Higginbotham told Queen City Nerve. “For most of the time that I was an engineer with NASA, I was the only Black female working on the shuttle hardware,” she continued. “So it was still kind of an anomaly… me being an engineer and her being an astronaut.”

Higginbotham’s stance on space travel shifted around eight or nine years into a stellar career with the space center. Having long surpassed her original self-imposed five-year deadline, Higginbotham’s boss convinced her to apply for the astronaut corps. Though hesitant, her boss was not taking “No” for an answer, she recalled.

The year she applied, NASA received around 6,000 applications. When Higginbotham answered a call from Houston after a night shift at the space center, she thought the woman on the other line had made a mistake. Higginbotham was one of just 120 applicants selected to fly to Houston, Texas, for a week-long interview process.

After six months of background checks and sifting through medical data, Houston finally called to tell her the disappointing news: out of 120 finalists, 15 people were chosen to continue astronaut training. Higginbotham was not one of them.

The selection process had awoken something in Higginbotham, however, as the idea of going to space began to appeal to her more and more. She believes it was her own competitive spirit that drove her decision to keep going.

“I think the big part of it was I just never thought I’d be selected, you know,” Higginbotham said. “And the fact that I got an interview and came that darn close, I’m like, ‘Well heck, let me at least try to better myself, to see if that makes the difference.’”

Higginbotham asked the astronaut selection board what she could do to position herself as a more feasible candidate. She learned that her Bachelor’s of Science Degree in electrical engineering wasn’t considered technical enough, so she went to graduate school to obtain a Masters of Management from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1992 and a Masters in Space Systems in 1996.

Higginbotham reapplied to the astronaut corps along with 4,000 other applicants and was accepted into the class of 1996, nicknamed “The Sardines” as it was the largest class ever selected at 44 candidates. Higginbotham packed up her things at the KSC and moved to the Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1996 to begin astronaut training.

Higginbotham reaches new heights as a NASA astronaut

Joan Higginbotham underwent initial training as an astronaut candidate, or ASCAN, for between 16 to 24 months before she was deemed ready for space flight. In 2002, Higgintbotham got a call from the head of the astronaut corps assigning her to Space Flight STS-117, scheduled for September 2003. But tragedy struck before that could happen.

In February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members, three of which were Higginbotham’s classmates. As a result of the accident, NASA stopped flying shuttles, delaying Higginbotham’s flight.

Despite the devastating loss of her classmates, the Columbia disaster did not make Higginbotham reconsider her decision to fly.

“I would think that they would want us to figure out what went wrong, to fix it and continue on with space exploration,” she said. “I know that’s what I would want if something happened to me.”

Nearly six years after being selected as an ASCAN and then coming so close to a space flight before seeing the program grounded, Higginbotham began to accept the idea that she would never get to go to space. Though resigned to that idea, she continued training, taking a reassignment from STS-117 to Space Flight STS-116, bonding with her new crew members.

Finally, on Dec. 10, 2006, Higginbotham and her crew departed from Earth en route to the International Space Station (ISS).

Her seven-member crew’s mission was to continue construction of the ISS outpost with Higginbotham as the robotic operator on the ISS arm. Her primary tasks included setting up communications between the ISS and the ground and transferring about two tons of supplies and equipment as the load master.

Higginbotham developed a greater appreciation for two things during her nearly 13-day space mission. One of those things was the Earth itself.

“You’re looking down on Earth, 250 miles above it, and you can actually see the atmosphere, which looks like a very thin blue line,” Higginbotham said. “It made me realize just how incredibly fragile the Earth is and how much we need to be very cognizant of how we treat Mother Earth.”

She also took away a lesson about how people should treat one another. Higginbotham’s crew consisted of six other people, including one other African American astronaut, marking the first time in history two African Americans flew together.

The rest of the team was diverse, too: one astronaut of Jewish and Korean descent, one born in the UK with dual citizenship, one with parents from India, and another who was the first astronaut of Scandinavian descent.

The crew was met on the ISS by a Spanish-American astronaut, a German astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut. Higginbotham called them the “United Nations crew” because they had a little bit of everything on board. At some point during the mission, she was looking out the window at Earth, thinking about the discord and unrest in different regions of the world.

“I thought, ‘There are 10 of us here with a whole bunch of differences, if you will, and look how we can get along and work together for a common goal while we’re confined on this tin can of a spacecraft,’” she said. “And why can’t we do that on Earth where there’s just so much more space?”

When Higginbotham returned to Earth, she took on a role at the space station branch ensuring each module sent to the space station would fit with the existing modules on the station. Then in late 2007, Higginbotham retired from NASA, having logged over 308 hours in space and actively participated in the launch of 53 space shuttle launches.

She would go on to work in the energy business with Marathon Oil before moving to North Carolina, where she took a corporate job with Lowe’s then Collins Aerospace.

She remains in the space travel industry, having opened her own aerospace consulting firm in 2022, working with organizations like Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and the Pentagon on space-related programs.

Read more: Bree Stallings Discusses Blume Studios and Its Impact on Local Arts

And on Sept. 20, she’ll have a chance to revisit the space station she hasn’t seen in nearly two decades, if only virtually. The most exciting part of the immersive experience for Higginbotham isn’t in reliving her glory days as an astronaut but in showing local children that they can set any goals they want, no matter how far in the clouds they may seem.

“The ultimate message that we want the students to take away from the exhibition is that with hard work and perseverance, you can accomplish whatever goals that you want,” she said. “Be it being an astronaut or whatever they aspire to be in life.”