[2] He grew up on a small dairy farm outside Cincinnati, and his boyhood heroes were Buck Rogers and Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

[3] His hobbies included home computers, stamp collecting, mathematics, and astronomy, and he also enjoyed racquetball, baseball, skin diving, and mountain climbing.

Naval Reserve, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander and retained a draft status of A1 until being required to give that up when he became an astronaut in 1967.

[2][4] Henize married Caroline née Weber in Ann Arbor, and they had four children: Kurt, Marcia, Skye, and Vance.

While there, he conducted an objective-prism spectroscopic survey of the southern sky for stars and nebulae showing emission lines of hydrogen.

In 1954 he became a Carnegie post-doctoral fellow at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, and conducted spectroscopic and photometric studies of emission-line stars and nebulae.

[6] Henize was appointed associate professor in Northwestern University's Department of Astronomy in 1959 and was awarded a professorship in 1964.

During 1961 and 1962, he was a guest observer at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia, where he used instruments ranging from the Uppsala 20/26-inch schmidt to the 74-inch parabolic reflector.

[2] He also became principal investigator of experiment S-019 in which a 6-inch aperture objective-prism spectrograph was used on Skylab to obtain ultraviolet spectra of faint stars.

From 1974 to 1978 Henize chaired the NASA Facility Definition Team for STARLAB, a proposed 1-meter UV telescope for Spacelab.

[5][8] Astronauts that did not already know how to fly had to complete a 53-week jet pilot training program at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

After 126 orbits of the Earth, STS 51-F Challenger landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on August 6, 1985.

[11] In 1986, he retired as an astronaut and accepted a position as senior scientist in the Space Sciences Branch.

Henize, on leave from NASA at the time, went on a hiking expedition to Mount Everest with British research group High Adventure BVI.

The TEPC would reveal how people's bodies would be affected, including the way bodily tissues behaved, when struck by radiation, which was important for the planning of long duration space missions.