Martin J. Fettman

Martin Joseph Fettman (born December 31, 1956) is an American veterinarian, pathologist and researcher who flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia on mission STS-58 in 1993 as a payload specialist. He was the first veterinarian to fly in space. He joined the faculty of Colorado State University (CSU) and researched the pathophysiology of nutritional and metabolic disease. In October 1992, he was named the prime payload specialist, making him the first professional veterinarian assigned to a spaceflight; Buckey and Young served as alternates.

STS-58 Fettman flew on STS-58, which launched aboard Columbia from Kennedy Space Center on October 18, 1993. The mission was the second dedicated Spacelab Life Sciences flight, on which the seven-member crew conducted 14 experiments on the cardiovascular, pulmonary, regulatory, neurovestibular and musculoskeletal systems, serving as both operators and test subjects. The crew also included commander John E. Blaha, pilot Richard A. Searfoss, payload commander M. Rhea Seddon, and mission specialists William S. McArthur, David A. Wolf and Shannon M. Lucid. At just under 14 days, it was the longest Space Shuttle flight up to that time.

As a subject, Fettman took part in vestibular experiments using a rotating chair operated by Seddon, and, with Lucid, volunteered to have a catheter threaded through an arm vein into the heart to measure changes in central venous pressure caused by the fluid shift of weightlessness. Six of the experiments used 48 laboratory rats housed aboard the Spacelab module; Seddon, a surgeon by training, assigned herself and Fettman to carry out in-flight dissections of some of the animals, among the first such procedures performed in space. Columbia landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on November 1, 1993, after 225 orbits; Fettman was among the crew members who remained at the Dryden Flight Research Center for several days of post-flight data collection.

After the flight, Fettman made more than seventy public appearances on behalf of space life sciences research and visited more than twenty K–12 schools in the United States and Canada, and he served on the NASA Advisory Council's Life and Biomedical Sciences and Applications Advisory Subcommittee.