From How Space Stations Work:

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched its first space station — Skylab 1 — into orbit. During the launch, the station was damaged. A critical meteoroid shield and one of the station’s two main solar panels were ripped off and the other solar panel was not fully stretched out. That meant that Skylab had little electrical power and the internal temperature rose to 126 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).

The first crew, Skylab2, was launched 10 days later to fix the ailing station. The crew consisted of Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin. The Skylab 2 astronauts stretched out the remaining solar panel and set up an umbrella-like sunshade to cool the station. With the station repaired, the astronauts spent 28 days in space conducting scientific and biomedical research.

Modified from the third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, Skylab had the following parts:

• Orbital workshop - living and working quarters for the crew
• Airlock module - allowed access to the outside of the station
• Multiple docking adapter - allowed more than one Apollo spacecraft to dock to the station at once (However, there were never any overlapping crews in the station.)
• Apollo telescope mount - contained telescopes for observing the sun, stars and Earth (Keep in mind that the Hubble Space Telescope had not been built yet.)
• Apollo spacecraft - command and service module for transporting the crew to and from the Earth’s surface

Skylab was manned by two additional crews. Skylab 3 consisted of Commander Alan Bean and astronauts Jack Lousma and Owen Garriot. They spent 59 days in space. The final crew, Skylab 4, consisted of Commander Gerald Carr and astronauts William Pogue and Edward Gibson. This crew spent 84 days in orbit, conducted experiments and photographed comet Kohoutek.

Skylab was never meant to be a permanent home in space, but rather a workshop where the United States could test the effects of long-duration space flights (that is, greater than the two weeks required to go to the moon) on the human body. When the flight of the third crew was finished, Skylab was abandoned. Skylab remained aloft until intense solar flare activity caused its orbit to decay sooner than expected. Skylab re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned over Australia in 1979.

Learn more about Skylab over at NASA’s mission hub. Image credit: NASA.

(Source: howstuffworks, via howstuffworks)

Lanzamiento del Skylab (NASA).

(Source: astroperlas, via space-pics)

Skylab: America’s Humanity’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s Humanity’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

Here’s a look back at the pioneering Skylab mission, including mechanical failures, an aborted rescue mission, a crew mutiny and an unplanned crash landing on Earth.

View Wired Skylab Gallery

video: NASA, space.com
article: wired.com

Skylab: America’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

Full Article

(Source: spaceplasma, via spaceplasma)

Astronauts, Space Walks and The ‘Overview Effect’

Nearly everyone is familiar with EVA’s (Extra-Vehicular Activities) or “Space Walks” - activities/tasks performed outside of a space craft by astronauts. However, since watching The Overview Effect when it first premiered, I haven’t come across a segment of interviews such as this.

This is a great tribute to the men and women who have actually stepped out into space and seen the Earth with their own eyes, only a thin sheet of protective material between their organic lenses and the natural beauty of our planet and universe.

Expect more of this. As humans progress above our atmosphere and further out into space, the psychological/neurological effects will become more widespread and unique to each individual, united by awe and humility. I encourage all of you to watch this 20-minute documentary, The Overview Effect, which truly exposes the cosmic perspective for what it is, which is solitary and distinctive to the human species. No one else in history has been able to grasp and articulate this perspective from the height of over 250 miles up from our planet’s surface.

We’ve speculated and verbally interpreted this viewpoint philosophically, psychologically, spiritually, historically and scientifically, but we now are able to share and partake in this human journey - via our ever-advancing technology - with other humans across the globe through multiple media forms; granting others such an experience, which, even for a moment, consumes our consciousness and peels back the layers of our biological, chemical, atomically-interwoven connectivity with all life on this planet and most probably, others.

Also, if you’re unfamiliar with entrepreneur/video game developer Richard Garriott, he is lesser-known as being the son of an astronaut. His father, Owen Garriott, lived on NASA’s Skylab/Spacelab-1 LEO facilities in the 70’s and 80’s. Richard Garriott’s lifelong dream was to follow in his father’s “bootsteps” and journey to space. Garriott underwent astronaut training in Star City where, with his Russian counterparts, he learned Russian (required as he flew abord the Soyuz craft) and via Space Adventures, became the first private citizen to venture into space and perform science experiments on board the International Space Station.

Since then, Richard Garriott has become the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors for Space Adventures and trustee of the X-Prize Foundation, which we are all familiar with. The film not only excites with gorgeous photography/cinematography, but also educates, revealing the cultural significance and processes by which Russian astro/cosmonauts partake and endure along their journey to space.

His mission, from beginning to end, was documented and produced into a film, aptly entitled, “Man On A Mission.” Free up some time to watch this and share it with others. The more humans that venture into space, the more humans we will have returning to Earth (or not) sharing their experience and the importance of spaceflight upon our civilization and our psyche.

Ad Astra Per Aspera.

NASA Celebrates the 40th Anniversary of Skylab

NASA will commemorate the 40th anniversary of America’s first space station Monday, May 13, with a televised roundtable discussion featuring Skylab astronauts, a current astronaut and agency managers planning future space missions.

The discussion, open to NASA employees and the public, will begin at 2:30 p.m. EDT in the James Webb Auditorium of NASA Headquarters at 300 E St. SW in Washington. The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

NASA launched Skylab on May 14, 1973. It was the nation’s first foray into significant scientific research in microgravity. The three Skylab crews proved humans could live and work effectively for long durations in space. The knowledge gathered during Skylab helped inform development and construction of the International Space Station, just as the research and technology demonstrations being conducted aboard the ISS will help shape a new set of missions that will take Americans farther into the solar system.

The bottom image is the original Skylab concept

This sketch of Skylab was drawn by George E. Mueller, NASA associate administrator for Manned Space Flight. This concept drawing was created at a meeting at the Marshall Space Flight Center on Aug. 19, 1966. The image details the station’s major elements. In 1970, the station became known as Skylab. Three crewed Skylab missions (Skylab 2 in May 1973; Skylab 3 in July 1973; and Skylab 4 in November 1973) were flown, on which experiments were conducted in space science, Earth resources, life sciences, space technology and student projects.

Read more about Skylab at NASA History in:
SKYLAB, Our First Space Station
Living and Working in Space: A History of SKYLAB

(Source: crookedindifference.com, via crookedindifference)

pennyfournasa:

“When you take away the force of gravity, you can unmask some things you can’t readily see on Earth,” said cell biologist Jeanne Becker of Nano3D Biosciences in Houston. “When gravitational force is reduced, cell shape changes, the way they grow changes, the genes they activate change, the proteins they make change.”

The gravity present in low-Earth orbit — which can be between 10,000 to 1 million times less powerful than that of gravity felt here on Earth — allows cancer researchers to create experiments geared towards the study of cell behavior that is impossible to accomplish on Earth.

Such studies have taken place since place since the 1970s on Skylab, a retrofitted Saturn V rocket which became the first space station utilized by the United States. Upon Skylab, scientists discovered that red blood cells develop bumpy surfaces in space, but these alterations dissipated upon the samples being reevaluated hours after being exposed to Earth’s gravity.

“When you grow cancers in three dimensions as opposed to flat layers, their response to drugs is vastly different — they become more resistant to drugs,” Becker told SPACE.com.

These discoveries have led to exciting innovations, such as devices that mimic the effects of microgravity on Earth. Other instruments use magnetic fields to levitate blood cells to offset the effect of the Earth’s gravity. While these devices are more cost effective than research done aboard say, a space shuttle or the International Space Station, they cannot fully replace the effects of microgravity seen in low-Earth orbit.

“With the International Space Station, we have a lab that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Becker said. “It’s an exciting platform for discovery.”

Read more: http://www.space.com/20681-space-science-cancer-fight.html

Sagan & Swan’s Voyager Mars Landing Sites (1965)

Until the 1980s, most U.S. automated space explorers bore names connoting ventures into unknown parts – Explorer, Pioneer, Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, and Voyager. Most people today identify the last of these names with the spectacularly successful pair of outer Solar System flyby spacecraft launched in the late 1970s. There was, however, an earlier Voyager program. First proposed in 1960 as a follow-on to the planned Mariner planetary flyby program, the original Voyager aimed to explore Venus and (especially) Mars using orbiters and landing capsules.

Carl Sagan, an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard, and Paul Swan, Senior Project Scientist at Avco Corporation, published results of a study of possible Voyager Mars landing sites in the January-February 1965 issue of Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. For their study, they invoked a Voyager design Avco had developed in 1963 on contract to NASA Headquarters. The “split-payload” design comprised an orbiter “bus” based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mariner (or proposed advanced Mariner-B) design and a landing capsule shaped like the Apollo Command Module (that is, conical, with a bowl-shaped heat shield). Bus and capsule would leave Earth together on a Saturn IB rocket with an “S-VI” upper stage (a modified Centaur stage).

The Voyager lander would be sterilized to prevent biological contamination of Mars. Near Mars it would separate from the orbiter, enter the martian atmosphere, and float to a gentle touchdown suspended from a parachute. The Avco design included no landing rockets, which meant that more lander mass could be devoted to instruments for exploring the planet. The lander would operate on Mars for at least 180 days. The Voyager orbiter, meanwhile, would fire rockets to slow down so that Mars’s gravity could capture it into a polar orbit, from which it would image the entire martian surface and serve as a radio relay for the lander.

Swan and Sagan noted that operational constraints would limit possible Mars landing sites. For example, the orbiter and Earth would need to rise at least 10° above the horizon at the landing site to permit daily radio communication sessions, and the Sun would need to be rise at least 10° above the horizon so that the lander’s solar-powered science instruments could function properly. Such constraints would combine to create landing “footprints” that would vary widely depending on the Earth-Mars transfer opportunity used. The footprint for the 1969 minimum-energy opportunity, for example, would take the form of a north-pointing wedge centered on 270° longitude and spanning from 70° south to 60° north latitude.

Avco’s Voyager lander was designed so that it could be targeted to specific regions within such footprints, Sagan and Swan noted. They proposed that exobiologically interesting sites be accorded top priority in Voyager lander site selection. Sagan and Swan then looked at possible exobiologically interesting areas accessible to the Voyager landers launched during the 1969, 1971, 1973, and 1975 minimum-energy opportunities.

Their list of such sites was, of course, based entirely on Earth-based telescopic observations, for no spacecraft had yet visited Mars. They also used surface feature names that had been assigned by telescopic observers (image at top of post); those names would be superseded soon after the 1971-1972 Mariner 9 Mars orbiter mission.Sagan and Swan described the “wave of darkening” observed since the 19th century. The “wave” was regularly observed spreading from the pole to the equator in the martian springtime hemisphere. When they wrote their paper, it was widely interpreted as indicative of martian water, atmospheric circulation, and vegetation. Theory had it that, as the polar ice cap melted, atmospheric moisture increased and circulated toward the equator. Hardy plants then darkened as they absorbed the moisture from the thin air.

The first two Voyager landers would reach Mars on 31 October 1969, during springtime in the planet’s southern hemisphere. The wave of darkening would be near its peak, making it the best biological exploration opportunity until 1984. Top priority landing sites would include the northern hemisphere regions Solis Lacus and Syrtis Major, which Sagan and Swan described as the “[d]arkest of the Martian dark areas.” On the landing date, both regions would lie at the northern extreme of the southern hemisphere darkening wave and would be relatively warm.

Voyager spacecraft launched in the 1971 minimum-energy opportunity would arrive at the planet on 14 December 1971. Swan and Sagan noted that the 1971 opportunity would need the least amount of energy of any opportunity they considered, and suggested two possible ways of taking advantage of this. Four landers (two per orbiter) could reach Mars as the southern hemisphere wave of darkening faded. Top priority landing sites for this approach would be the southern polar cap, southern hemisphere dark areas Mare Cimmerium and Aurorae Sinus, and Lunae Palus in the north.

Alternately, the 1971 Voyager missions could use a higher-energy path to deliver two landers to Mars as the southern hemisphere darkening wave began. “Thus,” they wrote, “the exobiologically highly desirable characteristics of the 1969 arrival [could] be completely duplicated in the 1971 launch period.”

In the 1973 opportunity, which would see a landing on 24 February 1974, two landers would explore Mars’s deserts and “the so-called canal features.” The accessible landing sites would be relatively cold on the arrival date. Top-priority sites would include Propontis, a region containing a “typical Martian canal,” and Elysium, a “near circular anomalous bright region of ‘pinkish’ coloration” in the northern hemisphere.

Sagan and Swan proposed that two Voyager landers leave Earth during the 1975 minimum-energy opportunity. They would land on Mars on 28 August 1976. Top-priority sites would include the northern polar cap and Mare Cimmerium, where the wave of darkening would reach its peak as the 1975 landers arrived.

Swan and Sagan looked briefly at the possibility of launching Voyager spacecraft on the powerful Saturn V rockets that were under development for the Apollo manned lunar program at the time they wrote their paper. They found that “superior site selection could be performed” if the giant moon rocket were applied to Mars exploration. In fact, their “preliminary calculations” showed that “the landing footprints for all post-1971 opportunities may be made to superimpose on the [highly favorable] 1969 footprint” if the Saturn V were used.

The first successful automated Mars spacecraft, 261-kilogram Mariner IV, departed Cape Kennedy, Florida, on an Atlas-Agena rocket on 28 November 1964, and flew past Mars on 14-15 July 1965, six months after Sagan & Swan’s paper saw print. Mariner IV revealed a cratered, distressingly moon-like Mars with an atmosphere ten times less dense than expected. The 21 grainy images of the planet the little spacecraft beamed to Earth revealed no signs of water or life. The Avco Voyager design Sagan & Swan had invoked for their study would have depended entirely on parachutes to descend to a soft landing; Mariner IV showed that, while parachutes might still be used, heavy landing rockets would also be needed to enable a soft landing.

This new operational constraint contributed to NASA’s October 1965 decision to employ the Saturn V as Voyager’s launcher. At least as important as the new Mars atmosphere data in this decision was, however, the desire to find new tasks for the Saturn V after it had done its part to place a man on the moon. In 1964-1965, at the request of president Lyndon B. Johnson, NASA had begun to plan its post-Apollo future. In January 1965, the Future Programs Task Group, a body appointed by NASA Administrator James Webb, recommended that the post-Apollo NASA program be based on Apollo-Saturn hardware.Accordingly, in August 1965, NASA Headquarters formed the Saturn-Apollo Applications (SAA) Program Office. By mid-1966, SAA planners expected to fly as many as 40 manned missions using Saturn-Apollo hardware beginning in 1968.

At about the same time, NASA began high-level agency-wide studies of Saturn V-launched manned Mars/Venus flyby missions – what Charles Townes, chair of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, dubbed a “manned Voyager” program. The first of these missions was expected to leave Earth in 1975.

Despite Sagan & Swan’s endorsement of the Saturn V, the fledgling planetary science community harbored mixed feelings about the decision to launch Voyager spacecraft on the giant rocket. The decision in December 1965 to postpone the first Voyager mission to the 1973 Mars-Earth transfer opportunity reinforced these misgivings. Combined with the post-Mariner IV redesign, the switch to the Saturn V drove the estimated Voyager cost-per-mission past $2 billion. The high cost made the program increasingly vulnerable as NASA funding reached its Apollo-era peak in 1965-1966 and began a speedy decline.

In August 1967, in the wake of the Apollo 1 fire, Congress killed Voyager and manned flyby mission studies and slashed funding for the Apollo Applications Program (AAP), as SAA had become known. The manned flyby program all but disappeared from NASA’s collective memory and AAP shrank rapidly to become the Skylab Program. In October 1970, NASA permanently closed the Saturn V assembly line, which had been on standby since 1968. The last Saturn V to fly launched the Skylab Orbital Workshop in May 1973.

Voyager, for its part, rose again. In fact, one might argue that it rose again twice. In October 1967, NASA officials, citing Soviet planetary ambitions, met with Congressional leaders to propose a new NASA robotic program for the 1970s. In the new plan, which Congress first funded in 1968, Viking replaced Voyager. Like the Avco Voyager, Viking comprised a lander and a Mariner-derived orbiter; unlike Avco’s Voyager, the Viking orbiter was meant to retain its lander until after it had captured into Mars orbit. The Viking Program’s Titan IIIE-Centaur launch vehicle was approximately equivalent to Saturn IB-Centaur in capability.

Funding shortfalls pushed launch of the twin Vikings from 1973 to 1975. Viking 1 left Earth on 20 August 1975 (image at top of post), and Viking 2 followed on 9 September 1975. In July-August 1976, the Viking landers became the first and second spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

Meanwhile, in 1972, Congress approved the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn (MJS) flyby mission. The twin MJS spacecraft were christened Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and launched in 1977. Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980); Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter (1979), Saturn (1981), Uranus (1986), and Neptune (1989). To date, Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft from Earth to have visited Uranus and Neptune.

Carl Sagan’s career after 1965 is well documented. He was involved in nearly all subsequent planetary missions, including the twin Vikings and twin Voyagers, and became by the early 1980s arguably the most important science popularizer since Galileo Galilei. His death at age 62 in December 1996 left a void that has not been filled. Paul Swan, for his part, led Avco’s seminal 1966 study of manned Mars surface operations and joined the staff of NASA’s Ames Research Center by 1970. He remained active there until at least the late 1970s.

The Voyagers continue to operate more than 34 years after launch and more than 50 years after the Voyager name was first proposed. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object; at this writing it is about 120 Astronomical Units (AUs) out (one AU = the Earth-Sun distance of about 93 million miles). Sunlight needs more than 17 hours to reach Voyager 1. Both Voyagers have entered a poorly understood borderland called the heliosheath; Voyager 1 is widely expected to cross the heliopause and enter interstellar space before 2015.

image 2: Avco’s 1963 Voyager design. Image: NASA
image 3: The U.S. Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information Center based its MEC-1 prototype Mars map on data current as of 1962. This is the Mars Sagan & Swan knew when they planned their Voyager landing sites. Image: U.S. Air Force/Lunar and Planetary Institute
image 4: Mariner IV captured image frame 11E at a distance of 12,600 kilometers from Mars on 15 July 1965. The largest crater in the frame, which is 151 kilometers wide, was named Mariner in honor of the spacecraft. The frame is centered in the region labeled Mare Cimmerium in the MEC-1 map above. Image: NASA
image 5: Voyager as envisioned shortly before its cancellation in 1967. Two such spacecraft would have been launched on a single Saturn V rocket. Image: NASA
image 6: The twin Voyagers are outward bound for the stars. Image: NASA

Reference:
Martian Landing Sites for the Voyager Mission, P. Swan and C. Sagan, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Volume 2, Number 1, January-February 1965, pp. 18-25.

Mission Milestones: 2013’s Space Exploration Anniversaries
“Spaceship” Earth has completed another revolution around the sun, and has set off on another 365-day, 583-million-mile (940 million kilometers) journey across time and space.

image: An orbital sunrise is seen in this crop from the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 35 insignia. The mission is set to begin in 2013.
CREDIT: NASA/collectSPACE.com

Over the past year, humankind’s efforts to push farther out into the solar system have resulted in launching the first commercial spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station, landing a car-size rover on Mars, docking the first Chinese manned spacecraft and sending 18 people to live and work off the planet.

In 2012, two probes completed the most detailed map of the moon’s gravity and North Korea (controversially) joined the nations that have lofted a satellite into space.

Over the next 12 months, more commercial spacecraft will visit the station, new probes will be launched to the moon and Mars, and if all goes as planned, the first spacecraft created to fly paying tourists on suborbital spaceflights will leave the Earth’s atmosphere for the first time.

As these and other firsts enter history, they will join a half century of international space milestones. Looking ahead into the coming year, 2013 will mark several key anniversaries for the events of the previous five decades of human activity outside the Earth. [13 Space Missions to Watch In 2013]

First women
Celebrations over the previous few years have marked the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, the first man from the United States in space, and the first American man in orbit. The 40th anniversaries of the manned lunar landings was also commemorated.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly to space when she launched on the Vostok 6 mission June 16, 1963.
CREDIT: NASA

The new year brings with it the 50-year anniversary of the first woman in space. Launched by the Soviet Union on June 16, 1963, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first female space explorer as she circled the Earth 48 times. [Women in Space: A Space History Gallery]

Flying under the callsign “Chayka” (Seagull), Tereshkova, aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft, flew in orbit at the same time as Vostok 5 with pilot Valery Bykovsky on board.

Twenty years later on June 24, 1983, NASA’s Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. A member of the seventh space shuttle mission’s crew, Ride circled the Earth aboard the orbiter Challenger for six days.

On July 23, 2012, Ride succumbed to pancreatic cancer at age 61, less than a year before the 30th anniversary of her historic first spaceflight.

Last single men
Bykovsky, who shared time in Earth orbit with Tereshkova in 1963, set the record on that mission for the most time spent flying in space alone 50 years ago this June. His Vostok 5 mission landed after almost five days.

The last NASA astronaut to circle the planet solo, Gordon Cooper, did so from May 15-16, 1963, for one day and 10 hours. His 22-orbit mission aboard “Faith 7” was the final flight of the United States’ Mercury one-seater spacecraft program.

In the 50 years since Cooper flew, the only Americans to soar through space alone were the six Apollo pilots who orbited the moon solo and the two private pilots who won the suborbital X Prize in 2004.

China’s first astronaut, or taikonaut, also flew alone, ten years ago this Oct. 15. Yang Liwei lifted off on Shenzhou 5 in 2003 for a one-day, 14-orbit mission that established China as only the third nation to send a human into space.

Fallen crew
The first major milestone anniversary of the new year is also perhaps its most solemn: 10 years since the loss of space shuttle Columbia and the STS-107 crew.

Space shuttle Columbia launches on mission STS-107, January 16, 2003.
CREDIT: NASA

Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Michael Anderson, and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon were returning to Earth onboard Columbia when the vehicle broke apart during reentry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. The 16-day science mission was just 16 minutes from landing.

It was the second time a shuttle was lost in flight after the STS-51L crew was killed aboard space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986.

An investigation found that Columbia sustained damage to its left wing after foam from its external fuel tank fell and impacted the orbiter’s leading edge during launch. Though NASA worked to prevent foam from separating from future tanks and additional safety measures were implemented, the decision was made to retire the shuttle fleet after the completion of the International Space Station.

In 2012, the remaining three retired shuttle orbiters were delivered to museums for their permanent public display.

First outpost
Skylab, the United States’ first space station, lifted off 40 years ago this May 14.

The U.S. space station Skylab in its prime during the mid-1970s.
CREDIT: NASA

Built into a modified upper stage of a Saturn 5 rocket, the orbital workshop was damaged at launch when its debris shield separated and tore away, depriving Skylab of most of its power, removing protection from solar heating, and threatening to make the station unusable. The first crew, which launched just days later, was able to save Skylab in the first ever in-space repair, by deploying a replacement heat shade and freeing the single remaining, jammed main solar array.

Skylab hosted 300 scientific and technical experiments, including medical studies on the adaptability of humans to zero gravity, solar observations and investigations into Earth resources. The program was deemed successful in all respects, despite its early mechanical difficulties.

Mission milestones

2013 also marks the:
30th anniversary of the first launch of space shuttle Challenger (STS-6) on April 4;
50th anniversary of the first winged craft in space, the U.S. Air Force’s X-15 rocketplane with pilot Joe Walker, on July 19;
30th anniversary of Guion “Guy” Bluford becoming the first African-American in space on Aug. 30;
30th anniversary of the first (and only to date) use of a launch escape system on the launch pad, the former Soviet Union’s Soyuz T-10-1, on Sept. 26;
40th anniversary of Soyuz 12, the return to flight for the Russian spacecraft (after the loss of the Soyuz 11 crew) on Sept. 27;
25th anniversary of STS-26, the first return to flight for the U.S. space shuttle program (after the loss of the STS-51L crew) on Sept. 28;
30th anniversary of the first European to fly on the space shuttle (Ulf Merbold) and the first launch of the European-built Spacelab on Nov. 28;
20th anniversary of the first mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, STS-61, on Dec. 2.
25th anniversary of the first spacewalk (EVA) by a European astronaut (Jean-Loup Chrétien) on Dec. 9.