Mar 22 1998
From The Space Library
NASA marked its second full year of "continuous human presence in Earth orbit" aboard Russia's Mir space station. Shuttle Atlantis had launched on 22 March 1996, with U.S. astronaut Shannon W. Lucid aboard. Lucid then spent 188 days in space, an American record. She was the second NASA astronaut to live aboard Mir. Following her tenure, an unbroken succession of astronauts, John E. Blaha, Jerry M. Linenger, C. Michael Foale, David A. Wolf, and Andrew S. W. Thomas, had spent time on Mir. Norman E. Thagard, the first American astronaut to live on Mir, had arrived in March 1995, spending 115 days on Mir before Lucid's stay. Nine months separated Thagard's mission and Lucid's. Frank L. Culbertson Jr., head of NASA's cooperative human spaceflight program with Russia, commented, "an unbroken presence has been extremely valuable to our having an awareness of what it takes to fly a space station, to maintain an outpost on the frontier.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
