 | Homesteading Space Owen Kay Garriott was born in Enid, Oklahoma on November 22, 1930. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1953 and a master's degree in 1957 and a doctorate in 1960 from Stanford University, both in electrical engineering. He served as an electronics officer on Navy destroyers. He was teaching at Stanford when he applied to NASA in 1965. He was among the first six candidates accepted as scientist-astronauts. He underwent a year of Air Force training and qualified as a jet pilot. He flew into space twice. In 1973, he was the science pilot of Skylab 3 and logged nearly 14 hours outside Skylab in three spacewalks. He returned to space in 1983 on the shuttle Columbia and became the first astronaut to operate an interstellar ham radio station. He was the space station project scientist before he retired from NASA in 1986. He wrote several books including Introduction to Ionospheric Physics written with Henry Rishbeth and Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story written with David Hitt and Joseph Kerwin. He was vice president for space engineering at Teledyne Brown Engineering and taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He died on April 15, 2019 at the age of 88. (Bowker Author Biography) |
