6 The Supermission

Its experiments call for the largest and heaviest astronomy instruments ever taken into space.

Walter Froehlich, Spacelab

Payload specialist John-David Francis Bartoe paced back and forth across the floor of the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on 6 November 2014, orbiting around the room with both hands tightly clasped around a microphone as he regaled the crowd with stories of flying into space. He lectured briefly about his 1985 STS-51F mission, joked about his 1970s hairstyle that he sported on that flight, and then spoke passionately for the next ten minutes about the International Space Station, a project that he championed following his flight. Earlier that day he had spoken to another crowded room of visitors, sharing his impressions of what it was like to fly into outer space. “Zero-g is an absolute blast!” he said with a wide smile.

An entertaining and passionate speaker, Bartoe explained that swimming in space is not an effective way to move around, although many rookies cannot resist flailing their arms on their initial albeit brief experience of weightlessness in the KC-135 Vomit Comet. His fondest memory of his first (and only) spaceflight, as with many astronauts, was “looking out the window. . . . It is an awesome experience to look at Earth.” He told the crowd that when he first peered out of Challenger’s window, he was completely lost, because there were no colors or lines like maps have, which delineate Earth’s geopolitical boundaries. It was another common reaction from astronauts, especially first-time fliers.

Bartoe, a solar physicist, was born on 17 November 1944 in historic Abington, Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor of science degree in physics from Lehigh University in 1966. Over the next twenty-two years, he worked as an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, with a focus on solar physics observations and instrumentation. During this period, he advanced his education, earning his master of science and PhD degrees in physics from Georgetown University in 1974 and 1976. Selected as a NASA payload specialist in 1978 while working as a civilian employee for the U.S. Navy, he was coinvestigator on two solar physics investigations that flew on STS-51F for Spacelab 2—exciting and groundbreaking work that helped him collect his seat on that mission.

Unlike many of the NASA astronauts, Bartoe never had dreams of being an astronaut as a youngster. His education in solar physics and subsequent employment at the Naval Research Laboratory led him to build solar telescopes, which, along with a bit of luck, earned him a slot on the shuttle. These telescopes were designed to allow astronomers on the ground to view the sun with greater accuracy than ever before. NASA decided to fly Bartoe’s telescopes into space on Spacelab and asked if any of the laboratory experts wanted to fly with them. Bartoe jumped at the serendipitous opportunity and volunteered for the journey of a lifetime.

Loren Wilber Acton, Bartoe’s fellow payload specialist on Spacelab 2, enthusiastically answered questions on 24 September 2015 during an interview with the authors about his flight into space, with the same fervor and pride exhibited by Bartoe on 6 November 2014 at the Debus Center. When it was suggested that he must have had a great time during the mission, his response was quite surprising. “Well,” he said after a pause, “you know I didn’t.” It turns out that Acton was so focused on doing his job, and also fighting space sickness, that he forgot to enjoy the fact that he was floating around Earth in the most complex machine ever built. “I did [have fun] in retrospect. But sometimes we learn about ourselves things that we didn’t know. I expected this to be sort of a fun camping trip in space with my friends, and when I got up there, I found that I overdosed on responsibility, to a degree which really impacted the joy of spaceflight. By the time we got well into the mission, I did force myself to look out the window and enjoy the view. But I really blindsided myself in terms of what my reaction to being up there was. . . . It wasn’t the experience I expected it to be, although in retrospect it was really great.”

Acton was born the son of a cattle rancher in Lewistown, Montana, on 7 March 1936. He took his education in a one-room country school until the seventh grade, when his father sold their ranch and the family moved to Billings, some one hundred miles away, where he attended junior high and high school and was active in the youth group of the Church of the Air. Following his high school days, he entered the Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon, for a year and then enrolled at Montana State College in Bozeman. Acton received his bachelor of science degree with honors in engineering physics in 1959 from Montana State University and his PhD in astrogeophysics in 1965 from the University of Colorado.

Lockheed hired Acton in 1964 to work at its Palo Alto Research Laboratory as a senior consulting scientist doing research in solar and cosmic astronomy utilizing space instrumentation. Acton was working for Lockheed when he was selected to become a payload specialist.

Bartoe and Acton’s backgrounds and knowledge of the sun gave them a huge advantage in being selected as payload specialists for the Spacelab 2 mission. Although the selection of the Spacelab 1 payload specialists was announced before those for the Spacelab 2 crew, Acton remembers that he and Bartoe were the first payload specialists selected and that they were not selected in the same manner as the Spacelab 1 payload specialists. He explained that when they were chosen, “there weren’t any rules, and so the IWG discussed how to select the payload specialists, and it was realized that for our particular mission, the solar experiments were the ones that could profit the most from experiments in the field.” Spacelab 2 carried three solar experiments, and the solar investigators were encouraged to submit the names of ten individuals. If they passed the medical examinations, their names and qualifications would be passed on to the IWG for consideration, which would then vote on two prime and two backup candidates. Acton volunteered to write the requirements document, and once approved by the IWG, it used that document to make the final selections. One of the ten did not pass the physical, and another decided to withdraw from consideration, leaving eight contenders. Acton recalled, “There were actually only eight of us that gave our ten-minute talks. Of the eight, John Bartoe and I were selected as prime, and George Simon and Dianne Prinz were selected as backups.” Acton fondly recalled with a bit of pride, “That was a good day!”

Spacelab 1 mission scientist Rick Chappell does not agree with his good friend Loren Acton that the Spacelab 2 payload specialists were the first to be selected. He contends that the same process used to select the Spacelab 1 crew was used to select the Spacelab 2 payload specialists, and that was the process developed for Spacelab 1. Both Chappell and Acton volunteered that it is nearly impossible to remember all the details some thirty years later; it’s safe to say that all eight payload specialists, including backups, were selected within a tight time frame during an exciting and busy time at NASA.

Dr. George Simon, with a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology, was Bartoe’s backup. Simon was a senior scientist in the solar research branch of the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico. According to a 1985 Marshall Space Flight Center publication titled Spacelab 2, Simon was working on several NASA experiments, which placed him at the right place at the right time to be selected as part of the Spacelab 2 crew. Like his predecessors on the Spacelab 1 mission, Simon would play an important role in the POCC during the mission.

Mission scientist Dr. Eugene W. Urban of MSFC was responsible for coordination between the scientists and management teams. Dr. Dianne Prinz, who held a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University, backed up Loren Acton. She was heading up the Atmospheric Spectroscopy Section at the United States Naval Research Laboratory’s Space Science Division when she was selected as a candidate for the Spacelab 2 mission. She was a coinvestigator for one of the Spacelab 2 experiments, giving her a clear advantage for one of the payload specialist slots on the third Spacelab mission. She also worked diligently in the POCC during the mission in support of the scientific planning.

Gordon Fullerton, making his second shuttle flight, was the mission commander, with Roy Bridges as his pilot. Fullerton would work both the red and blue shifts as required. This would be Bridges’s first flight into space. Dr. F. Story Musgrave, the third mission specialist, was also part of the flight crew. His job was to assist the commander and pilot in support of the specialized flying requirements on this Spacelab mission.

Mission specialists Tony England and Karl Henize rounded out the payload crew. England held a PhD in geophysics from MIT and would work on the blue shift alongside Bartoe and Musgrave. Henize, assigned to the red shift along with Acton and Bridges, was an astronomer with a PhD from the University of Michigan.

Spacelab 2 did not carry a pressurized module like previous Spacelab missions. Instead, the instruments that the payload crew would use to carry out their scientific research were located on three pallets stacked inside the payload bay, operated from inside the orbiter on the flight deck, just behind the cockpit. The payload crew would carry out their duties in close proximity to the flight crew—a much cozier working environment than on the first two Spacelab missions.

Spacelab 2 was a verification test flight to confirm the operability of the pallet systems and interface capability of the pallets and the orbiter. But meaningful research was just as important an objective. Spacelab 2 carried thirteen scientific investigations in seven disciplines: solar physics, atmospheric physics, plasma physics, high-energy astrophysics, infrared astronomy, technology research, and life sciences. However, solar physics was the five-hundred-pound gorilla on this mission.

Bartoe and Acton were coinvestigators on three of the thirteen experiments, which made the mission-dependent training much easier for them; they were already experts in these areas. Acton and his backup, George Simon, were both coinvestigators on the solar magnetic and velocity field measurement system experiment—the Solar Optical Universal Polarimeter (SOUP). According to the Spacelab 2 publication, the objective of SOUP was to “observe the strength, structure, and evolution of magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere and to determine the relationship between these magnetic elements and other solar features.” Bartoe was coinvestigator on the solar ultraviolet high-resolution telescope and spectrograph (HRTS, pronounced “Hurts”), another solar physics investigation designed to study “features in the sun’s outer layers: the chromosphere, the corona, and the transition zone between them.” Simply put, the idea was to ascertain how the sun creates the solar wind. Bartoe and backup Prinz were coinvestigators on the Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SUSIM), which would assess variations of the total ultraviolet flux emitted by the sun—both short and long term. The only atmospheric experiment on board, SUSIM would measure variations in a range of wavelengths through solar cycles, which might influence Earth’s climate. The third solar physics investigation, Coronal Helium Abundance Spacelab Experiment (CHASE), was to accurately measure the helium abundance of the sun. That left only ten experiments that the payload crew needed to become proficient in prior to launch.

The mission-independent training for Spacelab 2 was very similar to the two previous Spacelab endeavors. But Acton recalled that the payload crew for Spacelab 2 had more control over how the mission-dependent training was carried out. Bartoe, Acton, Tony England, and Karl Henize were assigned the task of writing the operations manuals and checklists for all the experiments. This required them to spend a lot of time with the people building the experiments. Acton explained, “So we visited every experimenter, and because we worked with them to write the books, we knew a lot. And that was such a much better system than having some contractor write the operations and then we have to learn them. By the time we flew, we were very well knowledgeable about every experiment. It was great; it was a lot of fun!” He said that in addition to learning the scientific basis of the experiments and how to operate them, they also learned the intricacies of the hardware, which might come in handy once on orbit if they encountered operational problems.

Acton was impressed with the mission-independent training program and relished doing “the same sort of things that our real astronaut colleagues did, and I just enjoyed every moment of it.” They rode shotgun on the STA flights with the pilot and commander when they were practicing landings. T-38 familiarization and zero-g flights were also part of the training regimen.

Challenger, with the Spacelab 2 pallets and telescopes nestled snugly inside its cavernous payload bay, blazed a fiery trail into space on 29 July 1985. Although one engine failed shortly after launch, the remaining two engines performed well enough to push the orbiter to an altitude of 173 nautical miles at an inclination of 49.5 degrees to Earth’s equator. The orbit was not ideal for pointing their cadre of specialized telescopes at their intended targets, but the scientists and engineers on the ground were able to make adjustments that allowed the payload crew to successfully accomplish all the mission objectives. Acton recently shared, “The lower orbit had very little impact on the science.”

Once in orbit the payload crew quickly began their busy schedule for the next week. The blue shift began to work while the red crew settled down for a rest. Acton recalled that as the pilot, Bridges was responsible for ensuring that spacecraft maneuvers were performed on time, which kept him quite busy. Spacelab 2 carried a plethora of telescopes on the pallets and other experiments that required the commander and pilot to perform numerous changes in Challenger’s attitude; therefore, they stayed busy throughout the mission. Acton described how the astronauts worked on the flight deck. “We were close together so we could communicate readily,” he explained. “The team that was off shift was down below sleeping and eating or doing whatever they were doing. So the layout of the orbiter for our particular function worked just fine.” The flight deck was considerably smaller than the Spacelab module, but Acton remembered that it “was quite a convenient work environment. Karl Henize, who was the red team mission specialist worked on one side of the flight deck. He was responsible for Spacelab systems. I worked on the other side of the flight deck. I was responsible for experiment operations.”

The principal investigators, along with Simon and Prinz, worked closely with the management team in the POCC during the flight to ensure maximum return on their investment from the battery of scientific investigations. Bartoe described the job of the alternate payload specialist as being much more difficult than actually flying the mission. He viewed Prinz’s and Simon’s positions as the “top of the pyramid,” controlling all the scientists trying to get their own most important experiment particulars up to the astronauts. They had to manage a half dozen or so telephone discussions concurrently, stay in touch with the crew, and then make efficient decisions on the fly to maximize productivity. Prinz remembered that the scientists were naturally focused on their own experiment, forcing her to prioritize so as not to overburden the crew. Often she was called on to referee problems in the back rooms. She agreed with Bartoe; it was a demanding and tiresome job.

The primary objective of Spacelab 2 may have been equipment verification and scientific research, but the crew had one additional task to carry out that captured the attention of the media and public—the cola war. Bartoe explained that Coca-Cola had approached NASA for approval to test a new can that would allow soda to be consumed in space. Later, Pepsi found out about the deal and petitioned NASA to place Pepsi on board. NASA finally relented, but the executives at Coke were not pleased when they learned of the decision. U.S. senator Sam Nunn, who in 1997 became Coca-Cola’s chief executive officer, wrote a blistering letter to NASA administrator James Beggs on 27 June 1985, demanding that Pepsi adhere to the same arduous development process they had been asked to follow.

According to Nunn, the initial agreement stipulated that only Coke would be allowed to fly their product on 51F in recognition of their initiative to develop a drink container technology. Other companies, they said, would be able to fly their product on future flights, but Coke demanded to be first. They had worked for over a year, spending over a quarter-million dollars, and Nunn expected NASA to require Pepsi to adhere to the same requirements. NASA held tight; Pepsi would fly along with Coke. However, NASA was not prepared to become a marketing tool for either company; they banned the astronauts from conducting or commenting on any taste test of the rival products over TV or radio while aloft.

Meanwhile, the astronauts were expressing annoyance over the overt preflight publicity being given to the so-called cola wars in the media. As astronaut Mike Mullane revealed in his memoir, Riding Rockets, a disgusted John Young had returned from a management meeting at which the cola rivalry had occupied valuable hours of the committee’s time. One astronaut was heard to growl, “Sure hope they’re spending as much time working on the things that can kill us.”

Bartoe humorously shared that much to the company’s satisfaction, Coca-Cola did score one major marketing coup when—under orders to the crew from NASA—it became the first soda to be consumed in space. The specially adapted zero-g containers resembled shaving cream aerosol cans and were designed to retain carbonation in the weightlessness of space without spewing its contents. Pepsi, Bartoe said, had less time to develop their can, and it was not as effective as the Coke can. Despite this, Bartoe claimed that the Pepsi can created wonderful Pepsi balls when the carbonated beverage escaped from the can, which were fun to investigate and manipulate as the gas separated from the fluid inside the ball. Coke and Pepsi created quite an advertising coup at the time, but neither drink has permanently returned to space. Acton lamented the fact that many of the questions he gets about his mission focus on the beverage of choice instead of the science.

Spacelab 2 carried several new major components, including an igloo and the Instrument Pointing System (IPS). The igloo, located on the pallet outside Challenger’s cabin, carried subsystems necessary for Spacelab to operate, including equipment for computer operations, data transmission, and thermal control. This equipment was located inside the pressurized habitable module, when it was flown. The IPS, tested in flight for the first time on Spacelab 2, was developed by ESA to accurately point instruments toward celestial objects.

The IPS was capable of accurately zeroing in on coin-sized objects almost three thousand feet away. Some of the solar telescopes that Bartoe had helped to develop, which he controlled from inside Challenger, were capable of focusing on tiny features of the sun, and accurate, unwavering pointing of his telescopes was vital to successful observations. Unfortunately, the IPS behaved erratically throughout most of the mission. The ground discovered a variety of problems, including software errors; but working together, the ground and payload crew made corrections and work-arounds, allowing the crew to eventually make the planned observations. Douglas Lord reported that the plan was to operate the SOUP telescope for fifty hours. Although it only attained sixteen hours of operation near the end of the mission, it took all 12,800 frames in its magazine.

In addition to the faulty software, the crew encountered another snag when operating the IPS; it operated in the same volume as the x-ray telescope (XRT), potentially allowing two expensive and delicate telescopes to collide. NASA had developed collision-avoidance software to prevent a potentially embarrassing situation. According to Fullerton, the software had to be activated six times during the flight, each time requiring ten to thirty minutes to recover. “During recovery the IPS had to be pointed forward so that solar observing was unlikely,” he recalled. “We lost more than three solar passes performing collision-avoidance recoveries.”

A smaller but significant problem was realized once the crew began their scientific investigations on the flight deck. Foot loops! With all the experience that NASA had gained over the years of flying to the moon and doing EVAs, it seems incomprehensible that inadequate foot loops on the aft flight deck became a problem on 51F. After all, foot restraints helped Buzz Aldrin carry out a successful EVA on the Gemini 12 mission, following frustrating attempts on three previous Gemini flights. Although the payload crew were not working outside Challenger, the same problem of maintaining a steady base applied to them while working inside the orbiter. Fullerton noted that adequate foot loops were “indispensable for maintaining correct body position to carry out various tasks on the aft flight deck . . . crew members frequently found themselves sharing a foot loop with someone else’s foot.” There just weren’t enough loops to pass muster while operating the computer keyboards or stretching to look out the payload bay windows for visual contact of external equipment.

In June 2016, NASA engineer Ed Rezac described the foot restraints as approximately twelve-inch square pieces of duct tape material that incorporated a cloth web strap loop in the center. “Prior to launch the backing was peeled away and the foot restraints were placed on the floor per crew preference based on their training on the ground,” he explained. “Crew preference placement did not always take differences in 1 g and microgravity into account.” Rezac recalled that additional restraints were usually flown, but removing the backing and placing the restraint accurately in a weightless environment would have likely been more work than it was worth. Bo Bobko had documented the need for adequate foot loops and restraints in the flight crew report for STS-51D—flown only three months earlier.

Acton assessed the ability of payload specialists on board to help troubleshoot and repair faulty equipment:

I think it was probably helpful. I don’t think that we contributed anything that a mission specialist properly trained could not have contributed. The place where we were at an advantage was in the actual operations and choice of choosing targets and being able to communicate seamlessly with the solar astronomers on the ground about targeting and procedures. So I think that we were useful, but I don’t know that we were particularly helpful in terms of instrument anomalies more than a well-trained mission specialist would have been. I think it was the scientific expertise that was an advantage to fly in our case.

Speaking frankly, Acton recalled the integration of the payload specialists into the crew alongside the NASA astronauts. Management and staff at MSFC welcomed the Spacelab payload specialists with open arms. They were provided offices in the hope that they were going to become MSFC’s astronauts. Unfortunately, as he reflected, “the JSC people were not really excited about that, so there were some kinks to work out between the two.” However, Acton made it crystal clear that he and Bartoe were made to feel like an integral part of the STS-51F crew and were never treated as outsiders.

Acton further commented on the ability of the payload specialists to assess the data they were capturing in real time and to make interpretations from those data. Most of the data were transmitted to the ground, never to be seen by the payload crew on orbit. However, they did have access to the telescope images from the SOUP instruments, from Bartoe’s HRTS instrument, and some pointing information from the British instrument (a Hard X-ray Imager). Thus, they were able to provide some feedback and suggestions on where to point these instruments, allowing the ground to make the necessary adjustments. But for the most part the data from these experiments were analyzed by experts on the ground following completion of the mission, and the results were published in numerous scientific papers over the years, some coauthored by Acton and Bartoe. Their primary job, Acton related, was to capture the data accurately.

Acton admitted making a mistake during the mission while operating the HRTS experiment. “In fact, I made a really stupid blunder,” he said laughing. “One of the HRTS sequences involved stepping the slit in the spectrograph across an active region [of the sun]. Well . . . for some reason I got my experiments mixed up, and I saw that slit moving and thought it was the IPS drifting, and very carefully zeroed all that out. [I] kept the slit in one place instead of letting it stand, which was a really awful mistake to make because that particular experiment was then compromised to some degree by me.” Given the long hours the astronauts were working on each shift, along with the complexity of the instruments, it’s no surprise that Acton made an error. Surely, he was not the first astronaut to have a slipup in orbit? Like a good scientist, he didn’t dwell on the mistake; instead, reflecting back on his training, he analyzed what had happened and how to correct it.

I just mentioned one blunder, and I made some others on the flight, and my feeling is that my training in terms of following checklists was inadequate. A pilot learns to always follow the checklist, even though you know everything about everything, you go through the checklist. That in my case was not impressed upon me strongly enough, and I never really learned to do it. People sort of assumed that we knew what we were doing. I had always operated from experience of following the seat of my pants instead of rigorously using the checklists. And as a result of this I made some blunders. I really wish in retrospect that I had somebody beat me over the head and say, “Always follow the checklist rather than doing experiments from memory.”

The fuel cells performed better than expected; therefore, the mission was extended an extra day, allowing the crew to make up time lost by the erratic IPS. Approximately 80–85 percent of the mission’s science objectives were realized. The telescopes on Spacelab 2 allowed the scientists undisturbed views of the sun, far superior to those provided by the solar telescopes flown on the Skylab space station over a decade earlier. The pallet-only configuration proved to be a highly effective platform for scientific investigations. Not surprisingly, the differences between the mission and payload specialists continued to be blurred, often out of necessity. For STS-51F, Fullerton made it clear that due to operational efficiency it was mandatory for Acton and Bartoe to operate certain pieces of equipment that would normally be controlled by the mission specialists. Special permission had to be given in order for them to operate the IPS manual pointing controller and flight camera, but with the appropriate training, Bartoe and Acton carried out these procedures safely and efficiently.

After 127 orbits and almost eight days in space, it was time for Challenger to come home. On 6 August 1985, having successfully completed its eighth space mission, the heat-scarred orbiter touched down and rolled to a halt on runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Unfortunately, due to the heavy workload, the crew had been thoroughly occupied throughout the eight days and never found time to consume a meal together. Nor was there any time to exercise on the treadmill. Bartoe recalled that after landing he undid his harness but found he could not stand up. His body had easily adapted to microgravity in orbit, but now back home under the influence of the 5.9 sextillion tons of Earth’s mass, he was paying the price for not exercising while in orbit. Fortunately, he recovered in about five minutes.

Mission commander Gordon Fullerton labeled the flight a “mission of challenge.” Gratified with the outcome, he boasted, “The crew is proud to have been part of the great team that was able to meet the challenge to produce a very significant scientific success.” Fullerton was a pilot from the old days but was exceptionally proud of his scientific experts. “Worthy of special note,” he declared, “was the exemplary performance of the payload specialists, Drs. Loren Acton and John-David Bartoe.”

Acton reflected on the legacy of Spacelab 2 in September 2015, very proud of the week that he spent off Earth.

My postmission information is pretty largely constrained to the solar experiments. I did follow a little bit the other experiments, but in solar it really changed and advanced a great deal the understanding of how gas flows in the solar atmosphere push around and concentrate magnetic fields. The prime objective of the experiments was to study solar magnetism and why it behaves the way we observe. Up to that time, active optics had not been invented, so the ground-based images in movie mode were always compromised by atmospheric affects. With the SOUP instrument, we had to believe every image, because every image was perfect optically. It was learned from that a lot about the motions of the weaker magnetic fields on the surface of the sun, so that was a real step forward. I think there were some comparable advances from the HRTS instrument. I know the helium-abundancy experiment, although they had considerable challenges in the data analysis, ended up producing a number for the abundance of helium in the sun’s atmosphere. All in all, the solar experiments were a great success, and we won the Space Flight Achievement [Award] for 1985 because of the good scientific results from the mission.

For his part, John-David Bartoe reflected on the social nuances of flying a complicated science mission with a mixed crew of pilots and scientists. He stressed that there was a lot of training overlap but that no one could do everything: “I knew nothing about flying the front seat.” In spite of all the education and specialized training of the crew members, Bartoe believes that being a team player is one of the most important skills required to be an effective astronaut. He stressed that spaceflight looks easy, but it is not routine: “We are pushing ourselves; this is what exploration is all about.” He called his crew a space family; they all became good friends.

Acton shares the same sentiments about the Spacelab 2 crew.

I think our crew was one of the most collegial and effective crews of the Spacelab series because of the career astronauts that we flew with. Gordon Fullerton, Roy Bridges, Story Musgrave, although they—particularly Gordo and Roy—didn’t have a science background, they really appreciated the importance of the science to the mission. Although they were test pilots, they did not have a test pilot mentality. Our crew worked together very well; there was never a harsh word in the years we worked together. We had a lot of confidence in each other, and we have gotten together from time to time postmission.

Following a short conversation with the authors about the skills and abilities of Story Musgrave, he added with a chuckle, “Story is a kick!” He then teasingly tossed in a zinger: “I guess there were some missions in which there were some [crew] issues.” He would not elaborate!

Following his flight, John-David Bartoe went to work for NASA Headquarters, where he became the chief scientist for the space station from 1987 to 1990 and then director of operations and utilization in the Space Station Office of NASA Headquarters from 1990 to 1994. He was then appointed research manager for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He holds the distinction of flying into space before being hired by NASA.

Loren Acton left Lockheed in 1994 after a long and distinguished career. He then returned to his native state and went into academics as a research professor of physics at Montana State University in the city of Bozeman, where he is still active.

David Simon and Dianne Prinz were subsequently assigned to a later solar physics mission, but it was cancelled following the loss of Challenger on 28 January 1986. Simon returned to the U.S. Air Force Geophysics Laboratory, while Prinz went back to the Naval Research Laboratory, where she continued her research with the SUSIM experiment. On 12 October 2002, aged sixty-four, Dr. Dianne Kasnic Prinz died at the Hospice of Northern Virginia after a long struggle with lymphatic cancer.

Spacelab 2 was another overwhelming success, providing further proof that scientists—payload specialists—could be recruited to fly on the shuttle and trained to carry out specialized scientific research in space to increase our collective knowledge of the universe and its many mysteries. The Spacelab 2 mission aboard STS-51F also provided further verification that career scientists could volunteer to discharge their scientific specialty in space and then return to their previous work without becoming career astronauts. The training provided by NASA gave these scientists the basic knowledge necessary to travel safely on the shuttle. They did not need to know how fly the spacecraft, nor did they need to understand the innards of the shuttle or be prepared to react to any of the hundreds of emergency situations that might occur. However, Bartoe—a noncareer astronaut—admitted, perhaps with a hint of jealously, that he would have loved to perform an EVA. “It was the thing to do,” he mused.