![]() (The original launch date of December 1980 kept slipping so the crew ended up training for five years.) 4 Training in Europe began in earnest in 1978, while training in the United States and Canada began in 1979. ![]() The payload crew and their backups began training many years before the Space Shuttle Columbia launched into space on STS-9. The Spacelab 1 payload crew, which operated the module and the mission’s experiments in the payload bay of the Orbiter, included two mission specialists, Garriott and Parker, and two payload specialists, one from the United States and another from the European Space Agency. Lampton, were selected in the summer of 1978 as potential payload specialists. Three days before Christmas in 1977, ESA released the names of their four payload specialist candidates: Wubbo Ockels, Ulf Merbold, Franco Malerba, and Claude Nicollier. In a 1974 press conference, ESRO’s Heinz Stoewer emphasized the “very intense cooperation,” he witnessed “with our friends here in the United States in making this program come true.” 2Īround the same time, as Spacelab was being built, the European Space Agency (ESA) began considering who might fly on that first flight. Once Skylab ended in 1974, representatives of Europe’s Space Research Organization (ESRO) and members of ERNO, the Spacelab contractor, started traveling to Houston and Huntsville to give the two NASA centers updates on the development of the Spacelab and to hold discussions on the module. ![]() It was perfect timing for the astronaut to turn his attention to this international program. Parker worked on Skylab as the program scientist, but once the program ended, he accepted a new title: chief of the Astronaut Office Science and Applications Directorate, where he spent the next few years working on Spacelab matters. His class jokingly called themselves the “XS-11”, because they had been told there was no room for them in the corps and they would not fly in space, not immediately anyway. Parker had also applied to be a scientist-astronaut and was selected in 1967. Garriott, who had been selected as an astronaut in 1965, had flown on America’s first space station as a member of the Skylab 3 crew, a team that exceeded all expectations of flight planners and principal investigators. Parker as mission specialists for the Spacelab 1 crew. In the summer of 1978, NASA chose scientist-astronauts Owen K. Spacelab 1 was unique in providing the first opportunity for a non-American, a European, to fly onboard a NASA spacecraft. The principal investigators for this science-based mission selected the payload specialists who flew in space and operated their experiments. The payload specialists were experts on a specific payload or an experiment, and during the early years of the Space Shuttle program came from a wide variety of backgrounds: the Air Force, Congress, industry, and even the field of education. The individuals selected for these positions were not career astronauts. This all changed with the development of the Space Shuttle and Spacelab, which birthed a new space traveler: the payload specialist. In the past, flying in space was a professional occupation. It also rarely makes news these days when someone who is not a professional astronaut or cosmonaut flies in space. Bush explained, “The knowledge Spacelab will bring back from its many missions will belong to all mankind.” 1 Science in itself is international.” Scientists flying on the mission, and those who had experiments on board, were working cooperatively for the benefit of humanity. As explained by one of the mission’s payload specialists, Ulf Merbold, while the principal investigators for the onboard experiments might be British or French, “there is no French science, and no British science. NASA was equally thrilled with the Spacelab and called the effort “history’s largest and most comprehensive multinational space project.” The Spacelab became a unifying force for all the participating nations, scientists, and astronauts. Europeans were particularly proud of this “remarkable step” because “NASA, the most famous space agency on the globe,” included the laboratory on an early Shuttle mission. The mission included-for the first time-the European Space Agency’s Spacelab pressurized module and featured more than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese scientists. Forty years ago, in 1983, the Space Shuttle Columbia flew its first international spaceflight, STS-9.
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