By Mary-Ann Muffoletto

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Utah State University alumna Mary Cleave, who died in 2023 at the age of 76, was a trailblazing veteran of two NASA shuttle spaceflights and was just the 10th woman to fly in space.

She flew as a mission specialist aboard space shuttle Atlantis mission STS-61B in 1985, and again on Atlantis mission STS-30, in 1989. During the latter mission, Cleave and fellow crew members successfully deployed the Magellan Venus exploration spacecraft, the first planetary probe to be deployed from a space shuttle.

“Mary Cleave was such a force of nature — I know this was often said about her, but it was so true,” said former USU President Elizabeth Cantwell, who met and worked with Cleave at NASA. “She was impassioned, whip-smart, and driven to make great science happen. I will always remember her as one of the guiding lights of my early career.”

After graduating from Colorado State in 1969, Cleave headed toward Salt Lake City to explore graduate opportunities at the University of Utah and Montana State. While traveling through Cache Valley, she stopped to take a look around USU’s campus. She struck up a conversation with botany professor Herman Wiebe and decided to make Utah State her destination.

Cleave earned a master’s degree in microbial ecology in 1975 and then a doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering in 1979. While working at USU’s Utah Water Research Laboratory, a colleague urged her to apply for a position with NASA’s expanding space shuttle program.

“Mary, you know this sounds like you’re the only engineer working here who is nuts enough to want to do something like that,” she recalled during an interview for a 2019 Utah State magazine article.

She did apply, and by 1980, Cleave became an official NASA astronaut.

Following her shuttle missions, she joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where she was project manager for SEAWIFS (Sea-viewing, Wide-Field-of-view-Sensor), an ocean color sensor that monitored vegetation globally.

In 2000, Cleave served as deputy associate administrator for advanced planning in the Office of Earth Sciences at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington D.C., and then from 2005 to 2007, she was the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, where she guided an array of research programs.

Officially retiring from NASA in 2007, Cleave stayed involved with research projects, including the NASA-funded OPAL (Oxygen Photometry of the Atmospheric Limb) project, a 3U CubeSat mission initiated in 2014, with USU’s Department of Physics and Space Dynamics Laboratory.

Throughout her career, Cleave returned to Utah State to speak with students, including a visit in January 2022 when she and fellow shuttle astronaut Charles Precourt spoke at a special event commemorating a new USU scholarship provided by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

“My wife, Susan, and I met Mary at a neighborhood party shortly after we arrived in Logan,” remembers Jan Sojka, professor and head of USU’s Department of Physics. “Coincidentally, it was the day she learned she’d been selected for NASA’s shuttle astronaut program.”

Through the years, Sojka says, he and Cleave crossed paths during her Utah State visits. He fondly remembers a keynote address Cleave gave at the 2006 American Physical Society Four Corners Region meeting hosted by Utah State in Logan.

“It was an inspiring talk in which Mary spoke of NASA’s unique mission and the importance of the next generation of space scientists,” Sojka says. “She was a champion of USU’s students and provided enthusiastic encouragement for their efforts.”  

This article was originally published in Utah State Today in November 2023. Some minor edits were made for its inclusion into this issue of the Utah State Magazine.