In 1992, Mae Jemison, who turns 55 today, became the first African American woman to venture into space. For about a week, she, her crew mates, and some frogs orbited Earth in the space shuttle Endeavour, assigned to the STS-47 Spacelab J mission, a collaborative project between the United States and Japan that was designed to investigate various aspects of materials science and the life sciences in space. One of their tasks was to study the effects of weightlessness on the development of amphibian eggs fertilized in space, hence Jemison’s amphibious travel companions.
Following the mission, Jemison formed the Jemison Group, a firm that developed and marketed advanced technologies, and later established BioSentient Corporation, which investigated the development of devices for real-time monitoring of the autonomic nervous system. She also established the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, was an avid public speaker, and appeared twice on Star Trek.