Anyone is eligible to become a payload specialist.
NASA, Role of the Payload Specialist
NASA selected its first scientist-astronauts in astronaut group 4 in June 1965. Prior to group 4, only hotshot aviators were eligible to become astronauts. Owen Garriott, Edward G. Gibson, Duane E. Graveline, Joseph P. Kerwin, F. Curtis Michel, and Harrison H. Schmitt were chosen to become astronauts based on their research and academic backgrounds. Schmitt, a geologist, was the only one to fly into space during the lunar program, while Garriott, Gibson, and Kerwin crewed Skylab missions. Graveline and Michel never made it into outer space, both departing the space agency without being assigned to a mission.
Kerwin and Michel both had experience flying military aircraft prior to their selection, but all the scientists of group 4 were different from the existing astronauts. Initially they were treated as outsiders by their astronaut peers just as surely as the payload specialists of the shuttle program were treated differently when they arrived on the scene.
Three-time shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane claimed in his popular memoir Riding Rockets that during the early years of the shuttle program those astronauts with military backgrounds had an intrinsic distrust of the scientist- and civilian-astronaut candidates when they first arrived in 1978 in NASA’s astronaut group 8. They were different. Could they be trusted, and did they have the “right stuff”? Fortunately, NASA’s regimented astronaut training program provided ample opportunity for the academicians and civilians to prove their mettle. According to Mullane, after two years of training together, including rides in T-38 jets and stints in altitude chambers, the NASA astronauts came to trust their civilian and academic counterparts. The extended length of the training program was a key factor in gaining their trust.
Payload specialists, on the other hand, did not go through the same rigorous training process developed to mold them into crackerjack astronauts. Some of the payload specialists were selected by organizations hosting experiments and hardware to be delivered into space on the shuttle. Several were chosen by the military. It was often unclear how others came to be payload specialists. All received an abbreviated training program on basic shuttle operations. NASA performed medical and psychological evaluations on each candidate to ensure they were fit to fly into outer space, but nothing near the level of evaluation required by the NASA astronaut candidates.
Integrating the payload specialists into the mission crews was not going to be a walk in the park. Many, if not all, of those in the astronaut office in the early shuttle days were fully aware of JSC management’s opposition to the payload specialist position. Ulf Merbold, payload specialist on STS-9, remembers that he received a warm welcome from the folks at MSFC in Huntsville, Alabama, when he first became involved in the program. He was excited about being one of the first non-Americans to be considered for spaceflight on the shuttle. MSFC, as lead center for the ESA design and development of Spacelab, was excited to have him participate in their program-related activities. But the atmosphere was different when he reached Houston; the welcome mat was not rolled out. Merbold said he was treated like an intruder.
Additionally, many astronauts felt that flying crew members with minimal mission-independent training was inappropriate; without the rigorous training that the NASA astronauts received, they simply could not fully comprehend the dangers of launching into space on the equivalent of a lethal bomb, adapting to the vagaries of microgravity, and the searing temperatures of reentry the orbiter had to endure before it could safely land. Mike Mullane writes in Riding Rockets that it was an immoral program driven by public relations.
The brief mission-independent training that was afforded to the payload specialists led to another anxiety for the NASA astronauts; if you didn’t know someone extremely well, then how could you be absolutely certain how they would react in the alien environment of outer space? Furthermore, they weren’t trained to handle emergencies during the mission, so it is doubtful they could have helped resolve any problems that might have occurred. It’s conceivable that they might have made the problem worse.
These concerns were certainly valid reasons why many NASA astronauts balked at flying the outsiders, but they were intangible concerns. Payload specialists would never be allowed to fly the orbiters, thus the pilots were immune from being replaced by a payload specialist. On the other hand, mission specialists losing seats on the shuttle—taken by payload specialists—was a reality.
Payload specialists have often been unfairly maligned and treated differently by their peers, likely due to the disparity in training. A NASA pamphlet that announced the new position of payload specialist in the late 1970s called for volunteers and clearly stated, “They [payload specialists] are not professional astronauts,” reinforcing the perception that they would be different from the regular NASA astronauts. Astronaut Mike Massimino, in his 2016 autobiography Spaceman, writes that there were seven crew members on Challenger when it broke apart shortly after launch in January 1986; only five were NASA astronauts. Massimino referred to the remaining two crewpersons as a payload specialist (Greg Jarvis) and a school teacher (Christa McAuliffe), perpetuating the notion that payload specialists were not real astronauts.
The idea of a scientific specialist was not invented by NASA. The concept has been successfully deployed in many scientific endeavors, such as the exploration of deep ocean basins. Scientists carrying out research on the drill ship Glomar Challenger provide a close analogy to the payload specialist position on the space shuttle. The ship was designed in the late 1960s to sample rocks and sediments beneath Earth’s ocean basins as part of the Deep Sea Drilling Program. Core samples were taken from the deep ocean floor along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between South America and Africa to better understand the geology, and many significant discoveries were made as a result of this work. The ship was retired after fifteen years of operations and replaced by the JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling) drill ship Resolution. Visiting scientists on both ships were tasked with describing rock and sediment cores recovered during the drilling process. These scientists were trained in emergency procedures and how to use the ship’s facilities, but they were not trained to operate the ship or drilling rig. They were specialists, similar to the NASA payload specialists.
Former NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan, who holds a doctorate in geology, was a crew member on three space shuttle missions, and in March 2014 was appointed as undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Sullivan compared the payload specialist position to her experiences on oceanographic ships. She explained that as a visiting scientist on these expeditions, she didn’t need to know how to operate the ship in order to accomplish her mission. “I was scientific party,” she explained. “I sure didn’t know how to handle the ship like the chief mate, and I didn’t know how to work the deck like the boatswain, and I sure didn’t know all the ship’s wiring and tolerances for system loads like the chief engineer.” Her job was primarily in support of scientific research; she didn’t need to know how to operate the ship.
The conundrum is whether the space shuttle was operational and ready to carry specialists who may not have fully understood the stupendous risks involved in flying on the shuttle. Veteran NASA astronaut John Young wrote in his autobiography Forever Young that it wasn’t until the fatal breakup of Columbia in 2003 that NASA finally accepted that the shuttle was not operational and was still essentially an experimental vehicle.
Jerry Ross offered similar comments about the shuttle while discussing his first space mission on orbiter Atlantis in 1985. “Eighteen years later (after STS-61B), the space shuttle is not an operational vehicle in a normal sense. It’s still very much a research and development experimental vehicle.” Five-times-flown astronaut Hoot Gibson recalled that after four shuttle missions, President Reagan declared the shuttle operational and that many astronauts were skeptical and smiled at the concept. Some felt that it was unfair and misleading to those without an intimate understanding of the shuttle and its intrinsic risks, to naively launch into space aboard an unproven spacecraft and launch system.
Not surprisingly, some of the payload specialists believe they fully understood the risks involved in riding an unproven 4.5 million–pound, fire-belching behemoth into space. Oceanographer Dr. Paul Scully-Power, payload specialist on STS-41G, recently confided to the authors, “Yes, you can calculate the number of single point of failure nodes.” He placed the risk of flying his mission at about one in one hundred. It’s unclear how he came up with that number, but he clearly understood that there was some probability that once the launch sequence began, the crew might not make it to the end of the mission alive. One chance in one hundred that you might be killed is worthy of contemplation. For comparison, a NASA study showed that sport parachuting—which many consider to be very hazardous—carries a one in five hundred chance of loss of life, much less risky than what Scully-Power attributed to flying on the shuttle.
One veteran astronaut admits he did not fully grasp the inherent risks during his time in the program. Thrice-flown shuttle astronaut Rick Hauck, a graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School with over five thousand flight hours, is well versed in the risk associated with flying high-performance jet aircraft. Hauck informed the authors in January 2017, “Prior to STS-1, I had seen a PRA [probability risk analysis] estimating the risk of loss at 1/280 or so. But in its most simplistic terms, given a loss on flight 25 [Challenger], if I knew in advance that one in twenty-five would fail, I would probably think twice about flying three (as I did) out of the first twenty-six flights.” On the other hand, Scully-Power put it in perspective in 2015: “It depends on the individual. Remember that it is perhaps the only binary decision you will make—you either survive or not.”
Hauck believed that NASA should not have placed payload specialists at risk until they had achieved “an indication of very high confidence in the risk level.” NASA had considered establishing a minimum Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR)—essentially an MOCR with a much smaller staff—which would have allowed two flights to be controlled simultaneously (from two MOCRs). In Hauck’s view, implementation of the minimum MOCR concept would have been a clear indication that NASA had gained a high level of confidence in the risk associated with flying on the shuttle.
Ultimately, the full risk of flying on the shuttle was not realized until many years later in hindsight. While the payload specialists may not have had the background to fully grasp the risk as soundly as the NASA astronauts, they undoubtedly understood that launching into space on the shuttle was a very risky proposition and that loss of life was not an unrealistic outcome. Still, for a variety of reasons—science, service to their country, or thrill—they were willing to take that risk.
Mike Massimino asserts in his book Spaceman that one does not become an astronaut by flying into space. Instead, one trains on the ground to become an astronaut, so they are prepared when they eventually fly into space. For the NASA astronauts of the shuttle era, the initial training flow for an astronaut candidate lasted about two years, where they learned the details of the shuttle system, plus a myriad of emergency procedures. Once an astronaut was assigned to a mission with a specific objective, there was additional training with their crew, which lasted from months to over a year. Often the crew participated in formal team-building exercises. By launch day, everyone on the crew knew one another intimately and knew what to expect of one another once the mission began. They were a team! The concern that some of the NASA astronauts had about inadequate training—bonding time—with the payload specialists held merit; they simply didn’t know the payload specialists well enough to understand how they would respond to an inflight crisis. Granted, the payload crew (mission and payload specialists in charge of the experiments) on each of the Spacelab missions had ample opportunity to get to know one another during mission-dependent training, which lasted much longer (six years on Spacelab 1) than the mission-independent training. Still, the entire crew—pilots and the mission and payload specialists—had not spent a significant amount of time training together as a team.
Hank Hartsfield expressed his concern by asking, “If you had a problem on orbit, am I going to have to babysit this person, or are they going to be able to respond to an emergency situation and take care of themselves like the crew has to?” He was concerned that a payload specialist could easily become a liability to the crew, explaining, “You could wind up having a person that wasn’t used to that kind of conditions to endanger the rest of the crew because you have to attend to them.”
Hartsfield also believed that the NASA selection process gave astronauts confidence that they could trust one another. “They’ve had a thorough psychiatric evaluation before they even got selected,” he stated. “We put them in hazardous situations.” Although the payload specialists were given a psychiatric evaluation by NASA, many were selected by their host organizations and did not go through the same thorough, regimented vetting process as NASA astronauts (although several European payload specialists went through the regular astronaut training program).
Hartsfield carried a soft voice but could be very passionate about his beliefs. He stressed the value of the T-38 jet in assessing the mission specialist’s reaction to adverse conditions. The pilot astronauts regularly flew the T-38 trainer as a mode of transportation from Ellington Field, located just southeast of Houston, to the cape and other destinations. It also served as a chase plane during shuttle launches and landings; plus, it provided them ample opportunities to maintain their flight proficiency and, no doubt, time to blow off a little steam on occasion. It also gave the mission specialists a lot of time in the back seat, where they learned how to react to what Hartsfield called “contingencies.” Hartsfield believed that “if you fly long enough, you’re going to have some contingencies, and you see how they react to that.” Furthermore, he believed that observing the mission specialists over the course of years flying in the back seat of a high-performance aircraft allowed the pilots to assess the pluck of the mission specialists. As he explained, “You get to watch them. . . . You’re building the database that this is a good, reliable person and you can count on them.” The payload specialists spent limited time in the back seat of the T-38s during their condensed training cycle, inadequate time for the pilots to adequately assess how they might react to adverse conditions.
Not all astronauts shared the same apprehensions of Hartsfield and Mullane. Veteran astronaut Bob Crippen, John Young’s pilot on the very first space shuttle mission, STS-1, was a bit more accepting of the payload specialists. But Crippen made it clear that he didn’t consider payload specialist Marc Garneau a regular crew member, telling him, “Hey, stay on the middeck till I tell you it’s okay to come on the flight deck, and do your thing.”
Crippen continued, “Then we added Paul D. Scully-Power, an Australian that worked for the United States Navy.” Crippen knew Scully-Power prior to his being named to the STS-41G mission. “I sat down and explained to him, ‘Hey, we’d love to have you up there.’ Now, his mission, he needed to be on the flight deck, looking out the windows. So we had to pick out periods of time where that was going to be acceptable, and it ended up working out just fine.”
John-David Bartoe and Paul Scully-Power believe that they spent enough time training with their respective crews and that they were fully prepared for any anomalies or contingencies. Scully-Power said he had spent six months training with his crew, but he was also already part of the Astronaut Office briefers, so he was fully prepared for any anomalies that might have occurred. Bartoe only spent about two months training with his crew, but he said that the simulations fully prepared him to deal with any problems. During the hair-raising abort to orbit during his launch on STS-51F, Bartoe claimed that he knew what was happening and was never alarmed.
What might a payload specialist have done once on orbit to jeopardize the lives of the entire crew? Bob Crippen told a small group of space buffs at an Apollo 16 fortieth anniversary celebration that he always made his crewmates remove their boots once in orbit, mostly so they wouldn’t hit any switches and damage them. Payload specialist Bartoe admitted that initially he was a “real klutz in the microgravity [environment],” and it took a while for him to grow accustomed to his new surroundings, supporting Crippen’s concerns about boots.
Perhaps an inexperienced payload specialist might have flipped a switch or pressed a critical button—accidentally or intentionally—without any of the crew knowing. Or opened the hatch to the orbiter? Except for planned EVAs, no one actually opened a hatch while on orbit, but a rumor that a payload specialist thought about it has made the rounds and has been discussed, or gossiped, by many space aficionados over the years.
A number of astronauts have spoken of a payload specialist who showed a lot of interest in the side hatch of the orbiter on one of the early shuttle missions. Several commanders, early in the history of flying payload specialists, padlocked the hatch out of fear that one of the payload specialists whom they did not know very well might attempt to open the hatch once in orbit. Several of these commanders locked the hatch because it had been done on a mission prior to theirs and not because of any specific concerns with members of their crew.
Two shuttle astronauts told the authors the incident was a serious anomaly that gave the crew grave concern. Payload specialist Fred Leslie (STS-73) shared on the online group sci.space.shuttle that the commander of the mission on which this incident supposedly first occurred was seriously concerned and thus took action to ensure that the payload specialist could do no harm.
Fred Gregory—pilot on STS-51B, which carried Spacelab 3 and two payload specialists—shared with the authors in November 2016 that Taylor Wang was the payload specialist likely referred to in this account. Gregory readily admitted that commander Bob Overmyer secured the hatch due to concerns about Wang’s psychological condition after he discovered that his experiment in fluid physics failed to work and mission control would not give him the time to attempt to troubleshoot and, if successful, make appropriate repairs. However, Gregory believes that Overmyer overreacted. Wang had spent five years of his life developing his specialized apparatus and thus experienced a meltdown when he discovered that it didn’t work. Wang also had difficulty using the finicky orbiter toilet. No doubt he was having a bad day.
However, there was no lock used to secure the hatch as rumored. Gregory confirmed to the authors that Overmyer secured the side hatch of the orbiter with ordinary duct tape. He just wanted to be sure that a despondent payload specialist could not open it, thereby exposing the entire crew to the deadly vacuum of space.
There were other plausible explanations for the need of the padlock. At least two payload specialists who flew during the program were told that its genesis went all the way back to the very first shuttle flight. The lavatory was located immediately adjacent to the orbiter hatch on the aft left side of the middeck. It was used both for waste management as well as hygiene. With as many as eight crew members using that same area throughout weeklong missions, a steady line of crew members would bathe, shave, and clean up right next to the hatch.
As the story was related to some payload specialists by experienced astronauts, it takes a few days in space to unlearn many of the earthly encumbrances that space flyers have lived with since birth. In microgravity, one does not need to set something down or hang it up—it can simply be released to float until needed again. But when new to this environment, early shuttle crews found that the first instinct after toweling off in the waste compartment was to find a convenient place to “hang” the cloth. The most obvious hook was the knobbed hatch handle. As it was told, the concern was that sooner or later a crew member pulling a towel off of the knob would result in it being inadvertently rotated to the open position. It took several of the early shuttle crews making the same observation before program managers agreed that there was a potential issue. Ross, who was selected to be an astronaut in 1980 and wound up flying seven times, supports this story, recalling in November 2016 that using the hatch as a towel rack was a concern during the early shuttle days.
During the shuttle program, operational setbacks resulted in fewer flights than were originally planned, which meant there were many more astronauts prepared to fly than there were seats available on shuttle flights. Following the successful launch of the first shuttle mission, STS-1 in April 1981, NASA projected there would be twelve flights in the year 1984, fourteen in 1985, seventeen each in the years 1986 and 1987, and twenty-four in 1988, utilizing both Kennedy and Vandenberg, California, launch complexes. That estimate proved to be wildly optimistic, as there were only five flights in 1984 and nine in 1985—the most missions the shuttle would ever fly in a single year in the entire span of the program.
The positioning between JSC and MSFC over the role of the payload and mission specialists continued well into the operational shuttle program. Many of the NASA astronauts wondered why the mission specialists couldn’t perform the scientific experiments to be carried on the orbiter, just as Kraft had advocated back in the middle 1970s. After all, NASA selected many astronauts with PhDs who had specialties in the required fields of interest—such as oceanography, physics, and astronomy—who were capable of carrying out complex experiments and performing specialized research on shuttle missions. Even if the experiment or investigation was not their trained expertise, they were intelligent, creative, driven people and surely could have been trained to do the job. Mike Mullane certainly agreed with this logic: “We felt a little bit like the payload specialists were outsiders, and a lot of us, I think, felt like, hey, if they’re flying, that’s a slot one of us could be flying. So there was some friction there.”
Years later after payload specialists began launching into space, Kathy Sullivan shared Mullane’s logic: “We were giving away seats, is the way we kind of saw it, to nonprofessional astronauts, when we thought that the [NASA] astronauts could do the jobs if properly trained.” There were twenty-four slots filled by payload specialists (one flew three times) on the first thirteen shuttle missions carrying payload specialists. Eight of those slots were taken by passengers not critical to carrying out the primary objective of the mission—the mission would have likely proceeded without them—so there would have been no need for a mission specialist to take their place. Only sixteen mission specialists lost seats to payload specialists during just over two years (late 1983 to early 1986) of shuttle operations. That may have been deemed too many by the NASA astronauts, but neither they nor JSC management had the authority to decide if payload specialists were going to fly. NASA Headquarters held that power. Regardless, once payload specialists were assigned to missions, the professionalism of the NASA astronauts prevailed; the outsiders were welcomed by the crew members, treated respectfully, and given the support they needed to carry out their objectives. In many cases, the NASA astronauts became close friends with the payload specialists and developed long-term relationships that continued long after they left the astronaut corps.
NASA has an impressive track record for selecting astronauts who are professional, intelligent, and driven, and who are also team players. Astronauts are not all created from the same mold, and it’s probably unfair to make blanket statements about them. But all things being equal, astronauts want to fly into outer space, and they want to fly before their peers, regardless of how much they respect them. Shuttle astronaut Kathy Sullivan’s aspiration to make her first flight was preempted by another astronaut—a payload specialist! Sullivan, now a veteran of three spaceflights, eventually flew on STS-41G, STS-31, and STS-45 and holds the distinction of being the first American woman to conduct an EVA, or space walk. But she was rather blunt about her feelings toward payload specialists taking seats on the shuttle, specifically one flying before her. As she recalled, “One of the guys who was a payload specialist was an American who had not cut the mustard in our selection. . . . He goes and flies before almost anybody in our class. He flew on STS-9. Some [of] our guys had flown, but a whole bunch of us hadn’t.”
Although Sullivan politely didn’t mention the name of the payload specialist she was referring to, the only American payload specialist who flew on STS-9 was Byron Lichtenberg, one of the first two payload specialists to fly on the shuttle. Sullivan’s resentment of Lichtenberg at the time is understandable; she had followed the conventional NASA path to outer space and wanted to fly first. Lichtenberg applied for astronaut groups both 8 and 9 but was not selected. Lichtenberg wanted to fly too, and in spite of NASA’s rejection, he followed his childhood dream—via the payload specialist path—all the way to launchpad 39A, where he rocketed into outer space aboard space shuttle Columbia in 1983.
Curiously, Sullivan didn’t mention another payload specialist who flew before her on STS-41D. Charlie Walker was also unsuccessful in his quest to become a NASA astronaut. He was turned down for the 1978 astronaut class. Sullivan conceded, “You can tie yourself into knots over, ‘I won out over him in the heat to be an astronaut, but he gets to go fly before me.’” Sullivan wanted to “fly first . . . fly soon . . . fly a lot.” She felt that because she had worked hard and competed hard, it was unfair for a payload specialist to “go in front of me, really,” which she claimed were “very natural human reactions.”
By 1983, when the first payload specialists were assigned to the STS-9 mission, there were just under eighty active astronauts qualified for shuttle missions. Some were in management positions and perhaps not on the prime list for mission assignments; over thirty were pilots. That left approximately forty-five mission specialists looking for a seat on one of the five shuttle flights scheduled to launch in 1984. During the first three years of shuttle operations, no more than three mission specialists had flown on any single mission, so the expectations for an aspiring mission specialist to garner one of those fifteen seats for 1984 were slim—fifteen seats being sought by three times as many driven and highly competitive astronauts.
The three seats taken by payload specialists on STS-41D and STS-41G in 1984 would have made the odds only slightly better for the mission specialists’ chances of securing a ride into space. But NASA was ready to step up their number of flights scheduled for 1985, trying to prove that their lofty flight predictions made to justify the building of the reusable shuttle were realistic. Nine missions flew in 1985, and eight of them carried a total of fifteen payload specialists (Charlie Walker flew twice that year), the same number of mission specialists that flew in 1984. Mission specialists looking toward their chances of securing one of the coveted seats must have been concerned, perhaps furious, about payload specialists taking more and more seats.
Surely the NASA astronauts understood the reasons for adding payload specialists—experts in a particular area of investigation—to flight crews and endorsed their inclusion. For example, the nine Spacelab payload specialists who flew from 1983 to 1985 were all authorities in their respective scientific fields. Charlie Walker was an expert in electrophoresis, a technique that separates molecules based on size and charge. Hartsfield commanded STS-41D, which was Walker’s first mission, and was generally very critical of the payload specialist position. However, he was extremely complimentary of Walker, saying, “In fact, I worked hard to integrate Charlie into the crew because I felt that was essential for our success. He was a good student. He was going into a strange environment, and he wanted to learn, and he gave it his full attention.”
Mike Mullane stated in Riding Rockets that Spacelab astronauts, other scientists, and Charlie Walker made legitimate contributions to the missions they flew on. But then there were the passengers, or part-timers as Mullane called them, cloaked as payload specialists whose reasons for flying were circumspect at best. Make no mistake about it; their flying on the shuttle was more than sour grapes to the pilots and mission specialists. Mullane even placed the honorable and much-adored late John Glenn into this category. Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth and overnight became an American hero, but he also flew many years later aboard Discovery as a seventy-seven-year-old senior citizen payload specialist on the STS-95 mission. Also included in this passenger-junket category were a U.S. senator and representative, a Saudi Arabian prince, a Frenchman, a Mexican, an engineer, and a school teacher.
Were all the NASA astronauts leery of this new breed of astronaut? There are a handful of responses from astronauts captured in NASA’s Oral History program regarding payload specialists and more specifically the so-called passengers. Many astronauts were publically supportive of the program, but some were critical, especially of those they perceived as merely passengers thrust on them and taking up valuable flight seats. Many astronauts who were not supportive of payload specialists flying on shuttle missions were more critical about NASA management allowing them to fly than they were about the individual payload specialists. Regardless, it’s difficult to criticize someone who jumped at the opportunity of a lifetime to fly into outer space.
Jeff Hoffman, who flew over 21 million miles on five shuttle missions, initially thought the idea of carrying a passenger aboard the shuttle was a crazy idea, but eventually he flew with Republican senator Jake Garn on STS-51D. Although skeptical during training, he was very complimentary of Garn years later, but he admits, “He [Garn] told me afterwards, he said, ‘Jeff, don’t ever play poker.’ He said, ‘It took you a while to disguise your initial skepticism about this whole thing.’”
Rumors abounded that NASA was considering flying other dignitaries on shuttle missions, including the popular news anchor and space enthusiast Walter Cronkite. The popular musician John Denver also campaigned strongly for a ride. At first glance this may seem preposterous, but NASA had considered flying nonprofessional astronauts on the space shuttle years before the first payload specialist flew on STS-9 in 1983. In a memorandum dated 7 October 1976, to NASA administrator Dr. James Fletcher, Chris Kraft wrote, “Also, there may be requirements to carry flight observers, pilot trainees, political or media representatives, a physician, or any other person one would normally find in a routine operation. All of these people, including payload specialists, I call the passengers.” There it was; NASA had given thought to, perhaps even intended, flying passengers way back in 1976. Kraft noted later in the same memorandum, “There may be some doubt in others’ minds about how responsive the mission specialist will be to the requirements and desires of the sponsoring investigators.” Kraft seemed clairvoyant!
Rick Hauck recollected in January 2017, “Sometime in the 1983–85 time frame, astronauts were solicited for their thoughts on the subject [of payload specialists]. Recall that because some were of the opinion that astronauts weren’t very good at conveying the excitement, the grandeur, the thrill of rocketing into space, there was talk of flying journalists, poets, artists, congressmen (oh, we did that, didn’t we?).” Hauck believed that NASA shouldn’t put those folks at risk until the space agency had adequate experience to understand that they had a “very high confidence in the risk level achieved by that point.”
Following his first flight, Mullane’s position on flying payload specialists softened, admitting that he became a little more tolerant of the “outsiders” once he had his first mission behind him. In fact, he was quite complimentary of payload specialist Charlie Walker. Scully-Power believes the program was “very successful. It enabled subject matter experts to join the crew to enhance specific missions. I think the balance was about right between the career astronauts and the payload specialists.”
Following the breakup of Challenger in January of 1986, the passenger program ended. Payload specialists did not fly again until late 1990 when Samuel Durrance and Ronald Parise joined the crew of STS-35 on a Spacelab mission dedicated to astrophysics. Payload specialists then continued to fly regularly on the shuttle for the next thirteen years until construction of the International Space Station became the primary focus for the shuttle. The last payload specialist to launch on the shuttle was Ilan Ramon from Israel, on the ill-fated STS-107 mission flown by shuttle Columbia.
Kathy Sullivan summarized, “I think the reaction [to payload specialists] was probably about as varied as folks in the astronaut corps. It’s not homogeneous by any means.” While a few astronauts have been forthcoming in their assessment of the program, both positive and negative, we know very little about what the majority of them think of the experiment. The first payload specialists flew in late 1983 on the very first Spacelab flight, a highly successful mission focused on scientific research. By the end of 1985, twenty payload specialists had made a total of 1,289 revolutions of Earth and traveled over 30 million miles. Science, national security, and goodwill were served on twelve fascinating missions that brought forth a new era in American spaceflight.