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To find your answer, we began by searching on a very simple term -- "astronauts." That led us to Yahoo!'s Science > Space > Astronauts category. So far, so good. The dozen or so sites looked like a great place to start our journey into the unknown. A couple of the sites -- the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and NASA Astronaut Biographies -- looked like good places to find the youngest U.S. space traveler. However, after checking those sites and several others, we still didn't have an answer. We modified our search to include another important term: "youngest."
That proved to be a good idea, since we ended up with several useful search results. After browsing the list, we clicked on the Kennedy Space Center FAQs and began to read. As it turns out, Sally Ride was 32 years, 23 days old when she flew on STS-7 in June 1983, thereby making her the youngest American in space. To double-check, we clicked on Kennedy Space Center's Aerospace Links, which led us to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) web site. By entering the term "youngest" into their history search tool, we located 17 relevant documents, and although we didn't uncover any more information on Sally Ride, we did discover
that in 1967 31-year-old Roger Chaffee was scheduled to be the youngest American in space. Sadly, he was killed before his historic flight when a launchpad fire raged through the Apollo I spacecraft.
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