Spacelab 1: A Mannequin for Worldwide Cooperation

Forty years in the past, in 1983, the House Shuttle Columbia flew its first worldwide spaceflight, STS-9. The mission included—for the primary time—the European House Company’s Spacelab pressurized module and featured greater than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese scientists. Europeans have been significantly happy with this “exceptional step” as a result of “NASA, probably the most well-known house company on the globe,” included the laboratory on an early Shuttle mission. NASA was equally thrilled with the Spacelab and known as the hassle “historical past’s largest and most complete multinational house undertaking.” The Spacelab grew to become a unifying pressure for all of the taking part nations, scientists, and astronauts. As defined by one of many mission’s payload specialists, Ulf Merbold, whereas the principal investigators for the onboard experiments is likely to be British or French, “there is no such thing as a French science, and no British science [on this flight]. Science in itself is worldwide.” Scientists flying on the mission, and people who had experiments on board, have been working cooperatively for the advantage of humanity. As then Vice-President George H. W. Bush defined, “The data Spacelab will deliver again from its many missions will belong to all mankind.”¹

Coaching for the flight required worldwide cooperation on a wholly new scale for the American house program. At the moment it isn’t uncommon to listen to about an astronaut coaching for spaceflight at many various places and amenities throughout the globe. NASA’s astronauts have grown accustomed to coaching outdoors of america for months at a time earlier than flying onboard the Worldwide House Station, however that was not the expertise for many of NASA’s flight crews within the company’s early spaceflight packages. Mission coaching primarily happened in Houston on the Manned Spacecraft Middle (now Johnson House Middle) and in Florida on the Cape. The Apollo-era featured just one worldwide flight, the Apollo-Soyuz Check Venture (ASTP), with astronauts coaching within the two taking part nations: the USSR and america.

It additionally hardly ever makes information lately when somebody who will not be an expert astronaut or cosmonaut flies in house. Up to now, flying in house was an expert occupation. This all modified with the event of the House Shuttle and Spacelab, which birthed a brand new house traveler: the payload specialist. The people chosen for these positions weren’t profession astronauts. The payload specialists have been specialists on a selected payload or an experiment, and throughout the early years of the House Shuttle program got here from all kinds of backgrounds: the Air Pressure, Congress, business, and even the sphere of schooling. The principal investigators for this science-based mission chosen the payload specialists who flew in house and operated their experiments. Spacelab 1 was distinctive in offering the primary alternative for a non-American, a European, to fly onboard a NASA spacecraft.

In the summertime of 1978, NASA selected scientist-astronauts Owen Ok. Garriott and Robert A. R. Parker as mission specialists for the Spacelab 1 crew. Garriott, who had been chosen as an astronaut in 1965, had flown on America’s first house station as a member of the Skylab 3 crew, a group that exceeded all expectations of flight planners and principal investigators. Parker had additionally utilized to be a scientist-astronaut and was chosen in 1967. His class jokingly known as themselves the “XS-11” [pronounced excess-eleven], as a result of they’d been advised there was no room for them within the corps and they might not fly in house, not instantly anyway. Parker labored on Skylab as this system scientist, however as soon as this system ended, he accepted a brand new title: chief of the Astronaut Workplace Science and Functions Directorate, the place he spent the following few years engaged on Spacelab issues. It was good timing for the astronaut to show his consideration to this worldwide program. As soon as Skylab led to 1974, representatives of Europe’s House Analysis Group (ESRO) and members of ERNO, the Spacelab contractor, began touring to Houston and Huntsville to provide the 2 NASA facilities updates on the event of the Spacelab and to carry discussions on the module. In a 1974 press convention, ESRO’s Heinz Stoewer emphasised the “very intense cooperation,” he witnessed “with our associates right here in america in making this program come true.”²

Across the similar time, as Spacelab was being constructed, the European House Company (ESA) started contemplating who would possibly fly on that first flight. Three days earlier than Christmas in 1977, ESA launched the names of their 4 payload specialist candidates: Wubbo Ockels, Ulf Merbold, Franco Malerba, and Claude Nicollier. Two People, Byron Ok. Lichtenberg and Michael L. Lampton, have been chosen in the summertime of 1978 as potential payload specialists.³

The Spacelab 1 payload crew, which operated the module and the mission’s experiments within the payload bay of the Orbiter, included two mission specialists, Garriott and Parker, and two payload specialists, one from america and one other from the European House Company. The payload crew and their backups started coaching a few years earlier than the House Shuttle Columbia launched into house on STS-9. (The unique launch date of December 1980 saved slipping so the crew ended up coaching for 5 years.)⁴ Coaching in Europe started in earnest in 1978, whereas coaching in america and Canada started in 1979.⁵ Merbold was ultimately chosen to fly on the mission together with Lichtenberg. Your complete payload crew spent a lot of their time travelling to Europe that John W. Younger, who was then chief of the Astronaut Workplace, known as their flight task and European coaching, which concerned journey to unique places like Rome, Italy, “a powerful boondoggle. In my subsequent life,” he declared, “I’ll be an MS [mission specialist] on S Lab [Spacelab].”⁶

Lichtenberg recalled the science crew, the prime and backup payload specialists and mission specialists, traveled the globe “like itinerant graduate college students … to check on the laboratories of the principal investigators and their colleagues.” In these laboratories, universities, and at analysis facilities throughout Europe, Canada, and Japan, they realized concerning the gear and experiments, together with easy methods to restore the {hardware} if one thing broke or failed in flight. Lichtenberg felt like he was incomes a number of superior levels within the fields of astronomy and photo voltaic physics, house plasma physics, atmospheric physics, Earth observations, life sciences, and supplies science. The advantages of coaching have been quite a few, however maybe an important have been the non-public {and professional} relationships that have been constructed with the investigators from internationally and along with his crewmates.⁷

For the payload specialists, constructing relationships throughout the astronaut corps proved to be extra difficult. Merbold recalled touring to the Marshall House Flight Middle in Alabama and receiving a heat welcome. “However in Houston you would really feel that not everybody was comfortable that Europe was concerned. Some additionally resented the brand new idea of the payload specialist ‘astronaut scientist,’ who was not below their management just like the pilots. We have been perceived to be intruders in an space that was reserved for ‘actual’ astronauts.” For instance, the European astronauts couldn’t use the astronaut fitness center or participate in T-38 flight coaching. Over time, attitudes modified, and Garriott credited STS-9 Mission Commander John Younger with the shift, and so did Merbold. Because the crew was making ready to fly, the previous moonwalker took Merbold on a T-38 journey, and when the payload specialist requested if he may fly the airplane, Younger willingly provided him the chance. After that flight, Merbold recalled that he “loved John Younger’s unqualified help.”⁸

Friendships blossomed on the six man-crew. Parker known as Pilot Brewster H. Shaw and Commander Younger “two of [his] greatest associates to this present day.”⁹ For Merbold, the flight cemented a big bond between the STS-9 astronauts. He had “no brothers, no sisters,” he was an solely youngster, however the Columbia crew grew to become his household. “My brothers are these guys with whom I skilled and flew,” he stated.¹⁰ Younger and Merbold had an particularly shut bond. Garriott noticed that relationship up shut on the Shuttle, and later advised an oral historian, “Younger had no higher pal on board our flight than Ulf Merbold.” The 2 remained shut till Younger’s demise.¹¹

Following touchdown, Flight Crew Operations Directorate Chief George W.S. Abbey advised the crew that the science group was “more than happy.”¹² The primary worldwide spaceflight since ASTP introduced scientists, astronauts, and house companies from throughout the globe collectively, laying the inspiration for bringing Europe into human spaceflight operations and kicking off a unique strategy to coaching and performing science in house. As Spacelab 1 Mission Supervisor Henry G. Craft and Richard A. Marmann defined, this system “exemplified what could be completed when scientists and engineers from everywhere in the world be a part of forces, speaking and cooperating to additional advance scientific intelligence.”¹³ Ultimately, the worldwide cooperation Craft and Marmann witnessed led to at present’s extremely profitable Worldwide House Station Program.

Notes

1. Walter Froehlich, Spacelab: An Worldwide Quick-Keep Orbiting Laboratory (Washington, DC: NASA, 1983); St. Louis Publish-Dispatch, November 28, 1983.
2. JSC Information Launch, “Mission Specialists for Spacelab 1 Named at JSC,” 78-34, August 1, 1978; Robert A.R. Parker, interview by creator, October 23, 2002, transcript, JSC Oral Historical past Venture; “Europeans To Fly Aboard Shuttle,” Roundup, March 29, 1974, 1.
3. “4 European Candidates Chosen for First Spacelab Flight,” ESA Bulletin (February 1978), no. 12: 62; “Two US scientists chosen Spacelab payload specialists,” Roundup, June 9, 1978, 4.
4. Within the crew report, Parker counted his time monitoring the Spacelab, so he concluded that the mission specialists skilled even longer, from 5 to 9 years.
5. “Spacelab Scientists Tour USA,” House Information Roundup, January 12, 1979, 1.
6. Harry G. Craft, Jr. to George W.S. Abbey, February 25, 1982, Spacelab 1 Payload Crew Experiment Coaching Necessities, Robert A.R. Parker Papers II, Field 28, JSC Historical past Assortment, College of Houston-Clear Lake.
7. Byron Lichtenberg, “A New Breed of House Traveller [sic],” New Scientist, August 1984, 9.
8. ESA, “Ulf Merbold: STS-9 Payload Specialist,” November 26, 2013; ESA, “Ulf Merbold: remembering John Younger [1930-2018],” August 22, 2018.
9. Parker interview.
10. ESA Explores, “Time and House: ESA’s first astronaut,” podcast, November 25, 2020.
11. Owen Ok. Garriott, interview by Kevin M. Rusnak, November 6, 2000, transcript, JSC Oral Historical past Venture; ESA, “Ulf Merbold: remembering John Younger.”
12. Garriott interview.
13. Henry G. Craft, Jr., and Richard A. Marmann, “Spacelab Program’s Scientific Advantages to Mankind,” Acta Astronautica 34 (1994): 304.