Judy Resnik was selected as an astronaut candidate in January 1978, along with fellow Challenger crew members El Onizuka, Dick Scobee and Ron McNair. After completing a one-year training and evaluation period she qualified for future shuttle flights as a mission specialist.

Her first mission was the maiden voyage of Discovery, which was launched on August 20, 1984, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the mission the crew deployed three communications satellites, conducted tests on a 105-foot solar array and experimented with the new IMAX motion picture camera. The mission completed 96 Earth orbits.

Resnik, the second American woman in space, graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering. In 1977, she received her doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.

Before joining NASA, Resnik worked for RCA as a design engineer, conducting engineering support for NASA sounding rocket and telemetry systems programs. She was also a biomedical engineer and staff fellow in the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as well as a senior systems engineer with Xerox Corporation. Judy Resnik was born April 5, 1949, in Akron, Ohio. She logged 144 hours, 57 minutes in space, and was awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1984.