page_title: NASA Astronaut Group 8
section_title: Special achievements
hierarchical_section_title: NASA Astronaut Group 8 / Special achievements
caption_attribution_description: English: S78-33616 (31 July-2 Aug 1978) --- Taking a break from the various training exercises at a three-day water survival school held near Homestead Air Force Base, Florida are these five astronaut candidates left to right are Sally K. Ride, Judith A. Resnik, Anne L. Fisher, Kathryn D. Sullivan and Rhea Seddon. They were among fifteen mission specialist-astronaut candidates who joined one of the pilot astronaut candidates for the training.
context_page_description: NASA Astronaut Group 8 was a group of 35 astronauts announced on January 16, 1978. It was the first selection in nine years of astronaut candidates since Group 7 in August 1969, and also included NASA's first female astronauts. Due to the long delay between the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, few astronauts from the older groups stayed with NASA. Since then, a new group of candidates has been selected roughly every two years.
  In Astronaut Group 8, two different astronaut groups were formed: pilots and mission specialists. Of the 35 selected, six were women, three were male African Americans, and one was a male Asian American.
context_section_description: Within this group a sizable number of American spaceflight firsts were achieved:
  First American woman in space: Sally Ride (June 18, 1983, STS-7)
  First African-American in space: Guion Bluford (August 30, 1983, STS-8)
  First Jewish-American in space: Judith Resnik (August 30, 1984, STS-41-D)
  First American woman to perform an EVA: Kathryn Sullivan (October 11, 1984, STS-41-G)
  First mother in space: Anna Fisher (November 8, 1984, STS-51-A)
  First Asian-American in space: Ellison Onizuka (January 24, 1985, STS-51-C)
  First African-American to pilot and command a mission: Frederick Gregory (April 29, 1985, STS-51-B; November 23, 1989, STS-33)
  First American to launch on a Russian rocket: Norman Thagard (March 14, 1995, Soyuz TM-21)
  First American woman to make a long-duration spaceflight: Shannon Lucid (March to September 1996, Mir NASA-1)
  First American active duty astronauts to marry: Robert Gibson and Rhea Seddon
  First mother to be hired as an astronaut: Shannon Lucid
  First Army astronaut: Bob Stewart
  (The previous seven groups had only Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps officers and civilians, with the West Point graduates having accepted commissions in the Air Force.)
  Of this group, Scobee, Resnik, Onizuka, and McNair would perish in the Challenger accident. These four astronauts, plus Lucid, would all receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, giving this astronaut class five total recipients of this top NASA award.  This is second to the New Nine class which won seven.
caption: The first five American female astronauts to travel into space – Sally Ride, Judith Resnik, Anna Lee Fisher, Kathryn D. Sullivan and Margaret Rhea Seddon
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