Mae Jemison Dances in Space

When Mae Jemison was a little girl in Chicago, she spent a lot of time looking up.

She loved the stars. She loved science. She also loved to dance, and she was very good at it. Grown-ups sometimes told her she would have to choose one thing. Mae did not see why.

So she did all of it. She studied engineering. She became a doctor and looked after people far away in West Africa. She kept dancing. And the whole time, she kept looking up.

Then one day Mae applied to be an astronaut — and NASA said yes.

On a September morning in 1992, Mae Jemison climbed into the space shuttle Endeavour and flew off the Earth. She was the first Black woman ever to go to space.

Up there, she floated. She did science experiments. She looked out of the little window at the blue curve of the world, and she thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

And she took something with her: a poster from a dance company back home, so that dancing went into space too.

Mae orbited the Earth one hundred and twenty-seven times before she came home.

So look up tonight. That is not somebody else's sky.

Goodnight, stargazer.