Dec 29 1978
From The Space Library
Five European and U.S. scientists named in July as experimenters on NASA/ESA's first Spacelab mission would begin training in the U.S. in Jan. 1979, NASA announced. The training tour, taking them to seven U.S. and two Canadian cities, would prepare them to operate equipment for scientific investigations that would fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1981. Selection and training of these scientists to fly in space had been a departure from earlier NASA practice, as they were not career astronauts and had been chosen for the mission by the scientists who devised the experiments. This was also the first time that Western Europeans would fly in space, and the first time that NASA would orbit people who were not U.S. nationals. Of the five persons training for the mission, two-a European and an American-would actually fly on Spacelab l; the others would operate ground-based experiment equipment and support the two in orbit.
The chosen five had just returned from Europe where they had been since Oct. learning to operate the experiments chosen for Spacelab by European scientists. The science payload was about equally divided between NASA and ESA experiments in terms of weight, power, and volume requirements. Areas of investigation would include stratosphere and upper-atmosphere physics, materials processing, space-plasma physics, biology, medicine, astronomy, solar physics, earth observations, and technology areas such as thermodynamics and lubrications. MSFC would manage training in the U.S. as part of its overall responsibility for the first three Spacelab missions; ESA had managed the training in Europe. (NASA Release 78-198)
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