Blacks In Space: Joan Higginbotham

Over the summer, we had Stephanie Wilson go up into space. Now two of us are going into space on December 7 on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. Joan Higginbotham - my fellow Chicagoan - will be aboard Space Shuttle Discovery nest week. The 42-year-old astronaut will be the third black woman after Mae Jemison - ahem, also from Chicago - and Stephanie Wilson) in space, and will serve as the primary operator of the International Space Station's robotic arm, direct payload transfers and deploy three satellites.

Ms Higginbotham earned an electrical engineering degree from Southern Illinois University, and later became a payload engineer at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She had intended to become an electrical engineer and work at IBM. But when Higginbotham couldn't get a job at IBM due to a job freeze there, she turned her eyes to NASA. She received two master's degrees from the Florida Institute of Technology while working for NASA. Ms. Higginbotham was scheduled for a September 2003 mission, but the loss of the Columbia shuttle that February put it on hold.