Terry Hart '68, '88H, is a Lehigh alum and a professor of practice in mechanical engineering and mechanics. He's also a former telecommunications executive, fighter pilot, and astronaut. His life is a series of remarkable stories, some of which he was planning on sharing with students as commencement speaker for the 2020 class. But like everything else, graduation was upended by the pandemic.

Host Christine Fennessy caught up with Terry to learn more about the path he took after his own graduation from Lehigh, a path that eventually landed him in NASA's Astronaut Group 8. In part one of a two-part interview, Terry talks about the event that initially captured his imagination about space, the edge engineering gave him as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, the most fortuitous failure of his life, and why Sally Ride was his favorite copilot. 

Rossin Connection is hosted and produced by Christine Fennessy, with support from the Dean's office at the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.

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