Academy life member Story Musgrave has spent twelve hundred hours floating in space. The NASA astronaut made his first journey to the 'next horizon' thirteen years ago, and holds the unbreakable record of being the only person to have flown on all five U.S. space shuttles.

Setting records is nothing new for Musgrave. On his inaugural trip into space on board the Challenger's maiden voyage in 1983, he and astronaut Don Peterson completed the first shuttle space walk. With a total of six missions, Musgrave holds a tie for the most space voyages by one person. He is also on the record books as the eldest space traveler ever at 61 years of age.

Musgrave is perhaps most remembered for his work repairing the nearsighted Hubble space telescope. It was a difficult time for the space agency; two months after launching the $1.5 billion telescope, NASA scientists discovered that the shape of the lens blurred its view of extremely distant objects. Musgrave worked on the ground to design the replacement parts, then did three of the five spacewalks to fix the telescope. Despite intense pressure to turn the situation around, Musgrave maintained a cool sensibility: "Like a ballerina on opening night, I didn't worry about the finances of the company, or about my future, I just concentrated on completing that perfect turn at just the right moment."

Musgrave's life has been a series of successful turns. Just weeks before graduating from high school, he joined the Marines which opened a world of new experiences -- airplanes, flying, college, a medical degree, a surgical internship, and master's degrees in business administration, physiology and biophysics, and literature. Even with his busy work schedule, he still attends night school where he is finishing two more master's in psychology and history.

When NASA first recruited scientists as astronauts, Musgrave found his calling and a way to combine his flight experience, technical skills, and medical expertise. He was selected for NASA's 11-man astronaut class of 1967, two years before Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon.

Musgrave was instrumental in the design and development of many early NASA endeavors, including the Skylab program, and all of the space shuttle extravehicular equipment. The rest, as they say, is history. Musgrave has just completed shuttle mission STS-80 as lead crewmember for the Wake Field Facility project. This may be his last mission, but it's another pioneering enterprise which will pave the way for others to follow the stars: the facility promises to be a forerunner of commercial manufacturing in space.

Musgrave explains his 40-year love affair with space travel: "Zero g is kind of magical -- in an evolutionary sense, we weren't designed to be floating around, so space is a mystical, magical environment."