Joan Elizabeth Higginbotham
Joan Elizabeth Higginbotham is an American electrical engineer and former NASA astronaut. She flew on STS-116 and became the third African American woman to travel to space.
- Born
- August 3, 1964
- Died
- N/A
- Birthplace
- Chicago, Illinois,United States
Flights
1
Spacewalks
0
EVA time
N/A
In space
12 days, 20 hours, 45 minutes
Bio
Higginbotham began at Kennedy Space Center as an electrical engineer and worked through shuttle processing and launch operations before astronaut selection. That ground-operations background gave her a different path into the astronaut corps than pilots or research scientists.
NASA selected her with Astronaut Group 16 in 1996. She flew aboard Discovery on STS-116 in 2006, an International assembly mission that delivered the P5 truss and supported major station electrical reconfiguration.
After NASA, Higginbotham moved into private-sector leadership and public outreach. Her career remains important for representation, engineering pathways, and the connection between launch-site technical work and astronaut flight assignments.