The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Bonnie was inspired to reach for the stars by her Scots grandparents
Bonnie Dunbar was inspired to reach for the stars by her Scots grandparents and went on to become a five-time space hero.
Only a handful of other American astronauts have heard the countdown to lift-off from the inside of a spacecraft more often than she has.
Ms Dunbar, 72, worked at Nasa for 27 years, successfully completing five shuttle missions, logging 1,208 hours of space flight and nearly 800 orbits of the Earth.
Her pioneering grandfather left Dundee for Ellis Island, New York, with little more than high hopes, a pioneering spirit and a bag of books.
He was 19 and had been working in jute factories in the City of Discovery.
Charles Cuthill Dunbar worked in upstate New York near Syracuse for a year breaking horses and earned enough money to come west.
He established a ranch in a Scottish community in the Condon area of Oregon and met his wife Mary West at a Portland baseball game.
She was originally from near Gardenstown, in Banffshire.
“They were married and had three sons, of which my father was the middle son,” said Ms Dunbar.
“When grandpa played the fiddle, grandma used to dance the Scottish fling.
“Unfortunately, I never met her – she died before I was born.
“I learned from him that if you have a vision, and if you follow your dreams, and you’re willing to work for them, this is important.
“You can’t blame anyone else for your failures.”
Ms Dunbar was raised on a cattle ranch in the eastern Washington town of Outlook and searched for Sputnik – the world’s first artificial satellite – in the night sky when she was eight.
“I remember that my parents took me out and we looked for Sputnik,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure we saw it, because eastern Washington has clear night skies, especially at that time of year, October.
“And I just became completely engrossed in space and stars and HG Wells and Jules Verne.
“I read any book about space I found in our very small rural school.
“So it was kind of natural for me.”
Ms Dunbar was 12 when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space in his Vostok 1 capsule on April 12 1961.
It was the culmination of a battle between superpowers and gave the former Soviet Union bragging rights in the Cold War space race with the US.
Ms Dunbar enrolled at the University of Washington in 1967 and became the first from her family to go to college.
After graduating in 1971, she worked for Boeing Computer Services for two years as a systems analyst.
Ms Dunbar applied when she heard that Nasa had opened the astronaut programme to women, and was one of the 60 chosen as finalists.
However, she was not one of the 35 who made the final cut.
The next time she applied, in 1980, her dream came true when she was accepted as an astronaut candidate.
Her first flight aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1985 broke new ground.
It was the first mission to carry eight crew members, the largest to fly in space.
She wrote her name into the history books again on Atlantis in 1995 as part of first space shuttle mission to dock with the Russian space station Mir and involve an exchange of crews.