Judith Resnik was born in 1949 to Sarah and Marvin, an optometrist, in Akron, Ohio. Both her parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. A graduate of Firestone High School in 1966, she excelled in mathematics and played classical piano. While at Firestone she achieved a perfect SAT score, the only female to do so that year. She received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, the year she married fellow student Michael Oldak. They divorced in 1975. In 1977 she earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. She was a member of Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Epsilon Phi. Upon graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Judith Resnik was employed at RCA as a design engineer, and later worked with various NASA projects contracted to the company. While working toward her doctorate, Resnik was affiliated with the National Institutes of Health as a biomedical engineer. Later, she was a systems engineer with Xerox Corporation. Resnik was recruited into the astronaut program January 1978 by actress Nichelle Nichols, who was working as a recruiter for NASA. Her first space flight was as a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of Discovery, from August to September 1984. She was likewise a mission specialist aboard Challenger for STS-51-L. She was the first American Jewish astronaut to go into space, the first Jewish woman, and at the time only the second Jew to go to space (after Boris Volynov of the Soviet Union).

For people accustomed to seeing images of astronauts in space, Judith Resnik’s first space mission still caused some notoriety. Resnik was the second American women in space, after Sally Ride, and fourth overall, her hair displayed a halo of flowing locks, a startling sight to many viewers who were accustomed to seeing closely cropped men. During the flight, she was acclaimed for her weightless acrobatics and a playful sense of humor, once holding a sign reading “Hi Dad” up to the camera, and displaying a sticker on her flight locker that advertised her crush on actor Tom Selleck. Following the Challenger disaster, examination of the recovered vehicle cockpit revealed that three of the crew members’ Personal Egress Air Packs were activated: those of Resnik, mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, and pilot Michael J. Smith. The location of Smith’s activation switch, on the back side of his seat, means that either Resnik or Onizuka could have activated it for him. This is the only evidence available from the disaster that shows Onizuka and Resnik were alive after the cockpit separated from the vehicle. If the cabin had lost pressure, the packs alone would not have sustained the crew during the two-minute descent.