Kathryn+C.+Thornton

__//**By: Lauren F.**//__

===Kathryn C. Thornton was born on August 17,1952 in Montgomery,Alabama. She married Stephen T. Thornton,of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.She has two stepsons and three daughters. Kathryn gruaduated from Sindy Lanier High School, Montgomery, Alabama, in 1970. She earned her Ph.D in Physics in Virginia. Her experience with NASA is that she was is in space for 975 hours and she was the first person to walk of the space shuttle by her self after that long in space!!=== === On her second flight, Kathryn served on the crew of STS-49, May 7-16, 1992, on board the maiden flight of the new Space Shuttle //Endeavour//. During the mission the crew conducted the initial test flight of //Endeavour//, performed a record four EVA's to retrieve, repair and deploy the International Telecommunications Satellite ,and to demonstrate and evaluate numerous EVA tasks to be used for the assembly of Space Station Freedom. Dr. Thornton was one of two EVA crew members who evaluated Space Station assembly techniques on the fourth EVA. STS-49 logged 213 hours in space and 141 Earth orbits prior to landing at Edwards Air Force Base, California. From October 20 to November 5, 1995, Kathryn served aboard Space Shuttle //Columbia// on STS-73, as the payload commander of the second United States Microgravity Laboratory mission. The mission focused on materials science, biotechnology, combustion science, the physics of fluids, and numerous scientific experiments housed in the pressurized Spacelab module. In completing her fourth space flight, Dr. Thornton orbited the Earth 256 times, traveled over 6 million miles, and logged a total of 15 days, 21 hours, 52 minutes and 21 seconds in space. === [|http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/thornt-k.html