In this post, I will briefly describe Story Musgrave’s life. Because I have always been fascinated by biographies of astronauts in general, one day, I randomly typed the keywords “smartest astronaut” on Google and his name appeared first. I then dived very deeply into his life and learned everything about him from his skills, his mentality, his achievements, his jobs, his life tips and his personal upbringing through interviews, public speeches or articles. Back then and even up until this very moment as I am publishing this article, I was and I will be forever stunned at just how insanely accomplished, well-rounded, skillful, wise and smart he is. You will feel throughout reading this how emotionally astounded it felt for me to just write down his life. Even when I think about how his profile would be perceived nowadays, he still embodies every achievement widely considered to be difficult in our society and it is simply beyond my wildest imagination to think that a human being could ever reach that superhuman level of intensive achievements. Although he is arguably not heavily publicized as a timeless household name present across any mainstream media platforms, I am grateful to have stumbled upon him (although online and not in real life). So without further ado, find out more about him in this blog post.
His life began on a dairy farm in the state of Massachusetts back in 1943. Already at the age of three years old, he began venturing alone in his nearby forest and he was able to build homemade rafts by the age of five. You might immediately be thinking that those two actions already speak volume about the kind of person he would later become, but we are not even getting started…
Among the best people that I have met, worked with, or heard of growing up, I have never encountered anyone who had the mentality, reflex or whatever the right word is for those kinds of behaviors, especially as young as he was. He did also highlight that he grew up isolated from other people with a very dysfunctional family particularly with a very abusive father. He also added that his broader family including his aunts, uncles or cousins have a very deep, widespread and intergenerational history of alcoholism and suicide. Once again, from the age of three, he even noticed that he had to take care of his dairy farm, because his dysfunctional family was falling apart and he understood that it was the only way of subsistence for all of his siblings. He therefore was able to drive and repair all of his farming equipment remarkably by the age of 10. While also running the farm, he founded a successful maple syrup business harvested once a year during winter from his own homegrown trees. Although he worked as hard as he could to maintain the farm, he admitted that it fell apart by the time he turned 16. He immediately got his next job as an oiler and a mechanic on heavy equipment to construct the Massachusetts Turnpike , an interstate highway. He worked on it for about a year and then he enrolled in the U.S. marines and flew to Korea while comically mentioning that he never actually graduated high school. Given all of his expertise by then, he was asked to be an aircraft mechanic which put him accountable and responsible for a 3000 horsepower turbo compound aircraft motor. Within a couple months, he was promoted to Crew Chief and he had an aircraft of his own to take care of not only the motor, but also all other maintenance specialties. That meant that at only 18 years old, he personally signed hundreds of technicalities and final sign-offs for airworthy and fit for war aircrafts with only one stripe on his arm. Upon reading this, I was completely flabbergasted because he reached technical mastery of military aircraft without any formal education that would normally require two or three years of trade school education. His experience as a child-farmer set him up for it and that was his trade school equivalent. Being the God he was, he looked after several other military machines at an airbase in Korea, on an aircraft carrier and at the corps base, but he left because he wanted to pursue higher education and without a high school degree, his opportunities would have been more limited, he stated. Although he did not get accepted into any universities despite showing all of his paperwork, he went to convince the dean of Syracuse University in his office directly and got enrolled in mathematics and statistics without hesitation on the same day. Although he enjoyed his student life, he still missed his previous military experience and living by the motto of just figuring it out and getting the job done. Therefore, while studying, he drove tanks for fun at a reserve and worked as a driver and a repairer of heavy construction equipment to help him pay for his college degrees, his car and motorcycles while concurrently becoming a national wrestling and chess champion. After graduating in 1958, he worked shortly as a corporate mathematician while earning an MBA in operations analysis and computer programming from UCLA in 1959. He gained valuable experience from working with the fastest computer at the time as an operator, programmer, compiler, systems engineer and assembler. His fascination for machine intelligence ultimately led him to become obsessed with neurophysiology. With the desire to enroll into medical school, he completed a pre-med in chemistry in 1960 from Marietta College before getting a doctor of medicine degree in 1964 from Columbia University. During his first week in medical school, he got a part-time job in the Neurosurgical Research Lab at Columbia University and worked there for four years while studying. He was therefore able to publish multiple research papers in neurophysiology even as a medical school freshman. Afterwards, he completed one year of surgical internship at the University of Kentucky Medical Centre in 1965. He pursued a post-doctorate at that same center and at the National Heart Institute. While at the University of Kentucky, he earned a masters of science in biophysics and physiology in 1966. While he was performing clinical training heading for neurosurgery and neurophysiology, he stumbled upon the astronaut recruitment period sent out by NASA in the science magazine. He mentioned how, at that point, he was already an experienced pilot and very eager to become an astronaut and leverage without exception every skill he had ever acquired. And so he was selected as an astronaut in 1967 and worked at it for the next 30 years while working part-time for three days a month as a trauma surgeon at Denver General Hospital and as an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky. On top of everything, he also has seven beautiful children, his first one born in 1960 while he was completing his pre-med in chemistry. At the time that his biography was published in the (insert name), he was 80 years old and his occupations remain a palm tree farmer, a tree surgeon, a landscape architect, engineer, contractor, equipment operator, mechanic and laborer. He remains adamant on playing to his strengths, leveraging all his past experiences and bringing synergies across domains and serving the needs of his clients. While doing all of these, he keeps on publishing research papers and working with various companies as a consultant. He also owns a palm farm in Orlando, Florida, a sculpture company in Burbank California and a production company in Sydney, Australia.
I encourage anyone to check him out even more and feel motivated to keep growing in life 😄
Subscribe and follow these!