Early Life
Yeager grew up in Commerce, Texas. Her early hobbies included horseback riding and track running, and she also developed an interest in helicopters. She studied drafting at Commerce High School, a skill that would prove valuable later in designing the first-round-the-world aircraft. Yeager graduated from Commerce High School in 1970. When Yeager was 19, she married a police officer, but the two were divorced after five years of marriage.
In 1977 she gave up on her failing marriage and settled in Santa Rosa, California, performing drafting and surveying for a company specialising in geothermal energy. At age 26, she earned her private pilot license, her ultimate ambition being to fly helicopters.
Yeager became involved in experimental aerospace design when she met Bob Truax at about the time she received her pilot license. Truax was a rocket scientist and was developing a fully reusable spacecraft at a company called Project Private Enterprise. Yeager was hired to perform drafting for Truax at his company. She also volunteered to be a test subject in sub-orbital flights, but none took place.
Read more about this topic: Jeana Yeager
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)