Atlanta native Roy Bridges was already in rare company as a former NASA astronaut who piloted a mission to space. Now he’s joining an even more exclusive group as one of the newest members of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
Bridges flew one NASA mission to space and later served as director of both the Kennedy Space Center and the Langley Research Center. He was notified about his induction into the Astronaut Hall of Fame in February.
“It was a very big surprise,” he told WABE. “I’m fully retired at 79 years old and I flew into space when I was 42 … Obviously, it had something to do with my later assignments at NASA.”
Bridges grew up in Atlanta, Pendergrass and Gainesville, Georgia. He first got interested in space as a boy after the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 — the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The launch triggered the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
“I thought it would be pretty neat to get involved in this new frontier of space,” Bridges said.
After graduating from Gainesville High School, Bridges went on to the U.S. Air Force Academy then got his master’s in astronautics from Purdue University. He flew a fighter jet in over 200 missions in the Vietnam War before going to test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base and graduating number one in his class.
NASA selected Bridges to be an astronaut in 1980 and he piloted the space shuttle Challenger for the eight-day Spacelab 2 mission in 1985.
Bridges was in training for a second flight aboard the Challenger, but the shuttle exploded on a subsequent mission in 1986. Seven crew members, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe, were killed.
“It was heartbreaking,” Bridges said. “I had been sharing an office with the pilot of the Challenger. And all of the members of that crew were good friends … The whole office was stunned by this.”
Bridges served as director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center from 1997 to 2003 and director of the Langley Research Center from 2003 to 2005. He retired from the aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman in 2019.
He wrote the book “An Improbable Astronaut: How a Georgia Farmboy Wound Up Flying the Space Shuttle” in 2022 and is now writing a second book.
Bridges will return to the Kennedy Space Center to be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in May alongside veteran astronaut and U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly.
“This year’s class is another example of excellence from our space program,” said Curt Brown, board chair of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, in a statement. “Both Kelly and Bridges represent the committed spirit of exploration, bravery and teamwork that make our space program a continued success.”
It will be the second year in a row that someone with Georgia connections is inducted. Georgia Tech professor Sandy Magnus became a member in 2022.
