Nov 19 1996
From The Space Library
Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:55 p.m. (EST). In addition to a five-day delay because of the weather, NASA had delayed the mission for a week so that its engineers could conduct a careful check of possible problems with the rocket nozzles. News agencies reported that the fifteen-year-old Columbia, the nation's oldest Space Shuttle, was carrying into space sixty-one-year-old F. Story Musgrave, the oldest astronaut. With his sixth spaceflight, Musgrave became the first astronaut to fly on all five of NASA's Shuttles. In Mission STS-80, NASA's final Shuttle flight of 1996, the crew planned to deploy and retrieve two free-flying spacecraft, conduct spacewalks, and carry out a number of microgravity research experiments. Additionally, NASA and the National Institutes of Health planned to collaborate on tests further exploring how the human body reacts to the space environment. Only hours after Columbia's launch, Shuttle crew released the U.S.-German Orbiting Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer, designed to make as many as 300 observations of stars and interstellar gas during the Shuttle's mission.
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