Aug 3 1978
From The Space Library
NASA announced it had selected astronauts Dr. Owen Garriott and Dr. Robert Parker to be mission specialists on Spacelab 1, scheduled for launch in the early 1980s. Mission specialists would be responsible for coordinating Shuttle operations with the commander and pilot in crew-activity planning, consumables usage, and Space Transportation Systems/payload interaction. The 7-day flight, a verification test of Spacelab systems and Spacelab/orbiter interfaces, would carry about 40 experiments. Garriott had flown on the second manned Skylab mission of 56da duration; Parker had been a mission scientist and spacecraft communicator during Apollo and Skylab.
Ten European nations, under agreements with the European Space Agency, had developed and financed Spacelab to be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle orbiter as a fully furnished laboratory adapted to the weightless environment of space and pressurized for working without space suits. Spacelab 1 would also carry two payload specialists (one European and one U.S. citizen) to operate the scientific instruments. (NASA Release 78-121; JSC Release 78-34; JSC Roundup, Aug 4/78, 1; Marshall Star. Aug 16/78, 3; DSFC X-Press, Aug 11/78, 3; Langley Researcher, Aug 11/78, 1)
NASA announced it had selected four American scientists as payload specialists for the second Spacelab mission scheduled for 1981. Those named were Dr. Loren Acton of Palo Alto, Calif., research scientist at Lockheed's Palo Alto research laboratory; Dr. John-David Bartoe of Reston, Va., and Dr. Dianne Prinz of Alexandria, Va., both research physicists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; and Dr. George Simon of Alamagordo, N.M., chief of the solar-research branch at the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory. Two of these scientists would be selected to fly on the orbiting space laboratory to operate the scientific experiments; the others would operate ground-based experiment equipment and assist the two in orbit. The Spacelab investigators' working group (IWG), composed of Spacelab 2 principal investigators having experiments on the mission, had selected the payload specialists, each of _whom was a coinvestigator on one of the Spacelab 2 experiments.
Scientific investigations on Spacelab 2 would be mainly in astronomy, high-energy astrophysics, and solar-physics research, with others in plasma physics, botany, medicine, and space technology. Scientific instruments on the mission would be "pallet only," exposed to space in the orbiter's cargo bay. Payload specialists would operate their experiment equipment from the orbiter's crew cabin, working in shifts to run the experiments 24hr a day. The mission, scheduled for launch from KSC in 1981, would orbit at an altitude of about 450km (250mi) for 9da. MSFC had been responsible for payload specialist training as part of its overall management responsibility for the Spacelab mission. (NASA Release 78-120; Marshall Star, Aug 9/78, 1)
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