Support the Mary L. Cleave
Memorial Scholarship Endowment

Join us in honoring the trailblazing ecologist, engineer, and shuttle astronaut who was a champion of Utah State's students.

Your contribution helps create the Mary L. Cleave Memorial Scholarship Endowment.

Every gift multiplies the impact, providing enduring support for generations of Environmental Engineering students, and helps toward the $25,000 goal to have the scholarship permanently endowed.

Mary Cleave was the 10th woman to fly in space. She flew as a mission specialist aboard space shuttle Atlantis mission STS-61B in 1985, and again on Atlantis mission STS-30, in 1989. During the latter mission, Cleave and fellow crew members successfully deployed the Magellan Venus exploration spacecraft, the first planetary probe to be deployed from a space shuttle.

After graduating from Colorado State in 1969, Cleave headed toward Salt Lake City to explore graduate opportunities at the University of Utah and Montana State. While traveling through Cache Valley, she stopped to take a look around USU’s campus. Cleave struck up a conversation with botany professor Herman Wiebe and decided to make Utah State her destination.

Cleave earned a master’s degree in microbial ecology in 1975 and then embarked on a doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering, which she completed in 1979. While working at USU’s Utah Water Research Laboratory in 1979, a colleague urged her to apply for a position with NASA’s expanding space shuttle program. She did, and by 1980, Cleave became an official NASA astronaut.