Epilogue

If we do not consider Flight Safety First all the time at all levels of NASA, this machinery and this program will NOT make it . . . Our space machinery is not airline machinery.

John Young

Just prior to the first anniversary of the Challenger accident, NASA administrator James Fletcher, who had returned to head the agency for a second term in May 1986, was quoted by USA Today writer Jack Kelly as saying that civilians would not be riding on the space shuttle for “probably the first twenty missions, and maybe forever.” He also suggested that the agency had a semicommitment to fly Barbara Morgan, Christa McAuliffe’s backup, but that there was still much deliberation within the agency about how risky such a flight might be, in terms of both politics and her personal safety.

Bill Nelson, who had returned to Congress and penned a memoir of his experience flying on the shuttle, expressly stated that he was not in favor of continuing the citizen-in-space program in the near term. Yet he too would support Fletcher’s intentions and agreed that the one notable exception should be Morgan. Nelson felt that it was important enough to the schoolchildren of the country to see the teacher-in-space mission successfully completed.

In addition to Aldridge and Watterson on STS-62A, at the time of the accident, many more payload specialists and their backups were training for upcoming missions. Samuel Durrance, an astrogeophysicist from Johns Hopkins University, and Ron Parise, an astronomer who had developed an ultraviolet imaging telescope, were slated to fly on STS-61E’s Astro-1 flight in March 1986. Another multinational satellite deployment mission was planned for June aboard Columbia, including Britain’s Nigel Wood with the Skynet 4A and Indonesian payload specialist Pratiwi Sudarmono with the Palapa B3.

Toward the end of 1986 Frank Casserino was targeted to fly his classified mission aboard Discovery, and Katherine Sparks Roberts was to represent the DoD for the second Vandenberg launch of the same orbiter on STS-62B, in late September. Byron Lichtenberg, Michael Lampton, and oceanographer Bob Stevenson were in line to fly, as was Hughes Corporation’s John Konrad and Nagapathi Bhat of India. Group 2 MSE Chuck Jones would have rounded out the year with a classified mission in December aboard Challenger.

All these missions were either canceled outright with the removal of commercial payloads or remanifested in the years following Discovery’s return-to-flight mission in September 1988. With the exception of the scientist–payload specialists who would crew the Spacelab series of missions, none of the others would ever venture to space. Barbara Morgan lingered around the space agency for a time, still trying to help inspire schoolchildren after the horror of the accident. She too eventually returned to teaching in Idaho, yet she never let go of the dream to continue McAuliffe’s mission.

Over a two-year period following the return to flight, twelve space shuttle missions would fly with only the essential NASA crew members aboard. It wasn’t until December 1990 that Columbia once again lofted two payload specialists—Durrance and Parise—as part of the STS-35 crew. The Astro-1 Spacelab mission that was to immediately follow STS-51L spent years on the back burner, and several of the original crew members had moved to other roles or left the agency altogether.

From an altitude of 225 miles above the planet, Astro-1 employed a suite of four telescopes to study celestial targets in the x-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths. It was the second flight of the pallet-only configuration of Spacelab, utilizing the three-axis Instrument Pointing System and a two-axis pointing system for the x-ray telescope. As was done on Spacelab 2, the crew operated the telescopes remotely from the flight deck of the orbiter in round-the-clock split shifts.

The DoD undertook one final effort to fly a payload specialist when they assigned U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Thomas J. Hennen aboard STS-44 as part of the Terra Scout program. A military intelligence officer by training, Hennen was selected as a payload specialist candidate in September 1998 and named the primary crew member for Terra Scout a year later. Throughout the week-long mission, Hennen operated several instruments, including the Spaceborne Direct-View Optical System and the M88-1 Military Man in Space experiment, to evaluate what kinds of observations of strategic value were possible from orbit.

44. When Challenger disintegrated during ascent on 28 January 1986, payload specialists Sam Durrance (left), Ron Parise, and backup Ken Nordsieck were training for the Astro-1 Spacelab mission. Durrance and Parise would wait nearly five years before being the first payload specialists to fly after the tragedy. Courtesy NASA/Retro Space Images.

STS-44 represented both the first flight of a noncommissioned officer and the final flight for a dedicated DoD crew member. While experiments for other programs such as Terra View and Terra Geode were carried out by NASA mission specialists on other flights, the Defense Department curtailed any further participation in the shuttle program and even canceled a Strategic Defense Initiative–dedicated Spacelab mission named Starlab, which had been scheduled for the end of 1990. MSEs Capt. Craig Puz and Capt. Maureen LaComb had initially been assigned to the project, but eventually it was shelved to provide funding to higher-priority military programs.

Ulf Merbold would fly again aboard the International Microgravity Laboratory Spacelab mission in January 1992 with Roberta Bondar of Canada. In March his former Spacelab 1 crewmate Byron Lichtenberg flew aboard the Atlas-1 mission, along with Dirk Frimout of Belgium. Payload specialists from Italy, Japan, Germany, Ukraine, France, and Canada flew primarily on Spacelab missions throughout the 1990s, providing practical experience for the future multinational operations aboard the ISS. Although several Russian cosmonauts flew on the space shuttle during the years of the joint Shuttle-Mir space station program, they were designated mission specialists by NASA, due to their extensive professional experience in spaceflight.

When Columbia reached orbit on 4 April 1997 carrying payload specialists Roger Crouch and Greg Linteris aboard the Microgravity Science Laboratory, problems with one of the three power-generating fuel cells almost immediately revealed themselves. As a result, the unit had to be shut down, and the mission would be cut short before any of the research could even get started. When Columbia returned to Earth after barely four days in orbit, NASA made an unprecedented decision—they would leave the Spacelab module in the payload bay, service the orbiter, and refly the mission. Three months later, on 1 July 1997, Crouch and Linteris had the rare opportunity to fly twice as payload specialists.

For the most part, these missions were undertaken without much of the public attention of the early shuttle program or, for that matter, many of the high-profile spectacles such as the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions or Shuttle-Mir dockings. Overfamiliarity with scenes of successive shuttle launches and landings and astronauts waving at TV cameras from orbit meant that the American people once again had lost interest in the routine, space-based research missions that most of the payload specialists risked their lives to undertake. That interest, however, would once again be reignited in the fall of 1998, when a payload specialist who was already a household name for generations of Americans would depart from a Florida launchpad under the most unlikely series of fortunate events.

“Dan, I want you to send me back to space.” NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin could not believe what he had just heard the American icon seated before him say. Senator and former Mercury astronaut John Glenn, at the healthy age of seventy-six, had marched into Goldin’s office with binders full of medical journal data and presumably his own medical history going all the way back to his NASA days beginning in 1959. Goldin recalled in a 2016 op-ed contemplating for a moment the risks and potential political fallout of such an endeavor and immediately came to his conclusion. “Absolutely not,” he stated flatly.

Glenn, once grounded from spaceflight by President Kennedy following his historic orbital flight in 1962, now faced a similar uphill battle for another mission in 1997. But his justification went far beyond that of a sentimental joyride for a retiring politician; throughout his career in public service, Glenn had been exposed to the plight of aging Americans in the nation’s health-care system and maintained contacts at the National Institutes of Health. Glenn pointed out to Goldin that many of the effects of weightlessness on the human body were similar to the aging process on Earth and was convinced that this was an untapped area for new scientific research. The former Project Mercury astronaut felt that he would be the ideal subject for this research.

Glenn was relentless. He detailed several possible experiments that he could perform, backed them up with peer-reviewed medical papers that his doctor friends had collected for him, and pressed the idea with Goldin at every opportunity. The administrator finally relented and opened the door to the possibility, however remote, that Glenn’s long-dreamed-of second spaceflight might—might—happen. In order to make sure the flight would pass muster with the press and the public, not to mention Goldin’s own reservations, he imposed four strict conditions.

Most importantly, he wanted to hear directly from Glenn’s wife, Annie, that she fully recognized the risk involved and approved of her husband’s desire. In order to be fully committed to training for the mission in terms of time and attention, Goldin wanted to be assured that Glenn would not seek reelection for his Senate seat. The science had to be good, and he was not willing to take Glenn’s word for it. Goldin had been around Washington DC long enough to know that you had to cover your bases, and he wanted to hear it right from the director of the National Institutes of Health. And last, Glenn had to be able to pass a standard NASA physical and be medically cleared for the flight—no exceptions. One thing the nation’s first astronaut to orbit Earth could not foresee was that in pursuing his dream of a second spaceflight, he was opening the door for another to finally make her first.

On 16 January 1998 Goldin was joined by Glenn for the press conference that would reveal to the world that he was going to fly aboard STS-95, a mission that would feature the deployment and later retrieval of the Spartan free-flyer satellite. The orbiter Discovery would also carry a host of biomedical and materials processing research within Spacehab, a pressurized laboratory similar to a short Spacelab module in the payload bay. Of course, Glenn himself would be the subject of many of the experiments, as he had used the research as justification to pursue the mission. It was certain that he would be the most famous payload specialist ever to fly on the shuttle.

On that same day, Goldin announced that at long last, after twelve years of waiting and wondering, NASA was offering Barbara Morgan the opportunity to fulfill her dream of flying aboard the shuttle and finally completing the educational mission of her friend and fellow teacher, Christa McAuliffe. As the negotiations were taking place regarding the possibility of sending Glenn—at that point a private citizen with no official ties to the space agency—into orbit, Goldin decided that he could not in good conscience offer Glenn a flight without also considering his predecessor’s commitment to Morgan. She would not, however, be flying as a payload specialist.

NASA had no intention of reviving the Teacher in Space Program, fearing renewed memories of 1986 and the questions regarding astronaut safety. Rather, Morgan was offered the chance to come to Houston as a full-time educator–mission specialist, a newly contrived classification of astronaut consisting of accomplished professional teachers. The January announcement was merely the first day of a long journey for Morgan. She was named to astronaut group 17 on 4 June 1998, among a class consisting of eight pilots and seventeen other mission specialist candidates. She would have to wait more than nine additional years to finally make it to orbit.

Following weeks of nostalgic media coverage of John Glenn’s return to orbit, the space shuttle Discovery leaped from launchpad 39B into a cloudless sky on 29 October 1998. The words of launch controller Lisa Malone, broadcast live to the nation, captured the spirit of the mission when she intoned, “Liftoff of Discovery with a crew of six astronaut heroes and one American hero.” As Discovery ascended, cameras around the launchpad captured a rectangular white object falling from the orbiter through the blue engine exhaust of the three main engines. The object turned out to be the cover panel of the shuttle’s huge drag chute, housed at the base of the vertical tail, leading to fears that the chute could inadvertently deploy during reentry or landing. Managers decided to disarm the drag chute and not attempt to use it for landing, and simulations later indicated that it would not likely deploy on its own.

During the nearly nine-day mission full of almost daily public relations television transmissions, the celebrity payload specialist repeatedly steered reporters’ questions away from himself and back to the eighty-eight scientific research experiments being performed by him and the other six astronauts in the Spacehab science module. Mission specialist Scott Parazynski, a medical doctor by training, supervised many of the biomedical experiments performed on Glenn and ESA mission specialist Pedro Duque. Chiaki Mukai, a payload specialist from Japan, and mission specialist Steve Robinson conducted still more research in life sciences, materials processing, and student-sponsored experiments.

After two days of solar corona observations flying separately from Discovery, Parazynski retrieved the Spartan satellite and latched it firmly into the payload bay. Commander Curt Brown and pilot Steve Lindsey guided the orbiter back to a landing at KSC on 7 November 1998, and the crew was welcomed with a fanfare rarely accorded a returning space shuttle crew, thanks to their pioneering payload specialist who rekindled so many memories of NASA’s glory days.

Since Glenn’s 1962 orbital flight, the so-called Canyon of Heroes, the lower section of New York City’s skyscraper-lined Broadway, had offered six ticker tape parades for returning astronauts. In a rare second trip down the famed thoroughfare on 19 November 1998, seated atop a vintage automobile with his wife, Annie, alongside, Glenn and his fellow STS-95 crewmates were showered with confetti and streamers from tens of thousands of appreciative New Yorkers. Glenn waved, smiled, and flashed his very familiar thumbs-up to the throngs of admirers. It was a fitting end to a public relations coup by the nation’s space agency that would be moving into the daunting era of space station construction over the coming years.

With the space shuttle fleet at long last performing the task for which it was originally conceived, there was little opportunity for onboard research and subsequently no seats available for payload specialists. Glenn and Mukai would be the last to fly for more than four years, until the two-week-long STS-107 mission of Columbia in January 2003. In the intervening years, the NASA organization, while never publicly far removed from the lessons of the STS-51L tragedy, was gradually drifting further and further away from the very architectures it had put in place to prevent another disaster.

Although many factors and pressures contributed to the slow degradation of the safety culture within the space shuttle program during the late 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, perhaps none were more prevalent than the need for on-time launches to build, supply, and service the ISS. The ISS assembly required critically timed launches of vital hardware in a specific sequence in order to integrate the enormously complex structure successfully. Schedule pressure once again caused managers to make decisions based on orbiter turnaround time in order to keep the program on track and confirm NASA’s commitments to their international partners. Once the first Russian and U.S. elements of the ISS were linked together in December 1998, the pressure was on to move forward and complete the project.

With NASA laser focused on the ISS assembly and eventual operations, it seemed unlikely that another shuttle-based research mission would be conducted before the new facility became operational. Columbia was too heavy to contribute much lift capacity to the effort without extensive weight-reducing modifications, but before those were to be done, NASA decided to fly one more Spacehab science flight aboard the flagship orbiter.

45. NASA administrator Dan Goldin (left) greets Senator John Glenn upon his return from space aboard Discovery on 7 November 1998. Courtesy NASA.

Ilan Wolfermann knew he wanted to be a fighter pilot from the age of sixteen, when a coworker of his father took him up in a light Cessna airplane, even allowing him to manipulate the controls for a time. Growing up in Beersheva, Israel, he would from that day share a passion for flying with his father, and the two of them spent countless hours soaring up into the clouds in unpowered sailplanes. He was accepted into the Israeli air force in September of 1972.

As was customary for Israelis, Ilan would change his name to Hebrew as he began his military service, in honor of his home country. Taking a combination of the letters from his father’s name, he came up with Ramon, as he would be known for the rest of his life. Ilan Ramon was a naturally gifted pilot and was even sent into combat while still a trainee, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He would go on to fly the American-built A-4 attack jet, the French Mirage IIIC, and eventually the General Dynamics F-16.

It was his expertise in the F-16 that would lead to his selection to participate in a daring top secret raid to destroy an Iraqi nuclear facility in Tuwaitha on 7 June 1981. A year later, Ramon would again distinguish himself in combat during the Lebanon War, in which the Israeli air force downed eighty-two Syrian MiG fighters in less than two days. He received his bachelor of science degree in electronics and computer engineering in 1987 and returned to the air force to fly the F-4 Phantom.

Promoted to colonel, he managed weapons systems procurement for the Israeli air force until 1997. As he neared retirement, his superiors unexpectedly offered him the chance to become his nation’s first astronaut. Unbeknownst to Ramon, at a summit between President Bill Clinton and the Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres in 1996, Clinton proposed the mission in order to further good relations between the two allies, and a formal agreement had been executed between NASA and the Israeli Space Agency shortly thereafter. After Ramon accepted the offer with great enthusiasm, he and his backup Lt. Col. Yitzhak Mayo moved their families to Houston in June 1998 to begin training.

Ramon and mission specialists Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, and Laurel B. Clark were named to crew STS-107 in September 2000, with commander Rick Husband and pilot William (Willie) McCool being assigned in December. The mission was to fly in 2001, but due to additional wiring inspections on Columbia, it was delayed and then put off again when the heavy, old orbiter was called into service to save the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2002. By June, cracks found in Discovery prompted more inspections of the orbiter fleet, requiring the removal of Columbia’s three main engines.

46. Ilan Ramon, Israel’s representative aboard STS-107, during emergency egress training in November of 2002. He would be the last payload specialist to fly aboard the space shuttle. Courtesy NASA.

Columbia and its tight-knit crew of seven finally lifted off from KSC on 16 January 2003, carrying the Spacehab double module stocked with seventy-seven different payloads in a wide variety of disciplines. During the ascent, a chunk of insulating foam roughly the size of a suitcase separated from the external tank into the violent supersonic slipstream, slamming into the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing in a brief spray of white vapor that could be seen on tracking cameras on the ground. Without any knowledge of a debris strike to their ship’s wings that would glide them home through a hypersonic reentry, the crew went on to activate their orbital laboratory for the following sixteen days of microgravity research.

Over the course of the next several days, engineers on the ground analyzed the foam strike using high-speed photography from launch and computer simulations that were utilized to estimate debris size and potential damage to the orbiter. Insulating foam was known to have separated from the external tank on at least six previous missions, as far back as STS-7 in 1983. Given this history of foam loss without critical damage, mission managers mistakenly concluded not only that the event on Columbia was considered to be “in family” but also that it posed no safety-of-flight concern for the orbiter and crew.

On several occasions, informal requests were made between NASA personnel and DoD contacts to take images of the shuttle in orbit in order to ascertain the extent of any damage that may have occurred, but all these requests were retracted at the direction of NASA management. The conclusion had been made—and as one witness recalled later, the imagery “was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn’t do anything about it. The program didn’t want to spend the resources.”

On 23 January, the halfway point of Columbia’s mission, ground controllers sent Husband and McCool an email titled “Info: Possible PAO [Public Affairs Office] Event Question.” In it NASA officials for the first time informed the commander of the debris impact and their analysis:

There is one item that I would like to make you aware of for the upcoming PAO event. This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter.

During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris from the area of the Bipod Attach Point came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing, in the area of transition from chine to main wing, creating a shower of smaller particles. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC [leading-edge reinforced carbon–carbon panels] or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.

The analysis was wrong. The chunk of foam liberated from the external tank had in fact slammed into the wing with such force that it blasted a hole the size of a bowling ball in the critical reinforced carbon–carbon panels. The mortal damage to the ship had been inflicted in an area of the wing’s leading edge that could not be seen from Columbia’s flight deck windows, and the mission carried no robotic arm with its TV cameras, which could have been used to image the critical wound.

On 21 January 2003 Barbara Morgan was seated at the CAPCOM console, working with the STS-107 crew on the sixth day of their mission. She had been named as a member of the STS-118 crew that would fly aboard Columbia in November after modifications that would allow flights to the ISS. NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe had called her personally the previous December to tell her the news.

On this day, with the space shuttle Morgan was to fly aboard orbiting the planet, O’Keefe held a press conference to publicly unveil his new plan to recruit additional teachers for future astronaut classes, beginning in 2004. “NASA has an unfinished mission,” O’Keefe said. “It is time for NASA to complete the mission—to send an educator into space to inspire and teach our young people.”

Morgan was thrilled that after a decade and a half, the day was finally coming when she could head into orbit and teach from space, as McAuliffe was to have done. But the excitement of that possibility was soon to be replaced by tragic sorrow for yet more lost friends.

On 1 February 2003 as Columbia streaked high above California on its way to a KSC landing, observers on the ground saw the first of several unusual flashes within the glowing trail of plasma the returning space shuttle left behind. As the blowtorch-hot gases blasted into the hole in the left wing, they began slowly destroying the orbiter from within. Flight controllers could only watch as critical temperature and pressure sensors located in the wing began fluctuating and failing.

Unlike Challenger, which was unmistakably destroyed in an instant with millions of people watching, Columbia came to an end over several horrifying minutes in a virtual world of telemetered data—and on the exasperated faces of the controllers as they were slowly realizing their greatest fears. Tire pressure indications on the left main landing gear spiked momentarily before dropping off-line, prompting the final communication with Columbia’s crew.

Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last call.” Commander Rick Husband responded, “Roger, buh . . . ,” and was suddenly cut off in a burst of garbled static. At that instant, America’s flagship space shuttle lost its battle with the searing heat of hypersonic flight. Tumbling and spinning wildly out of control, Columbia broke up in the skies high over eastern Texas, raining meteor-like flaming debris over a large swath of the state. But all of this went unseen by mission control. Repeated calls by CAPCOM Charlie Hobaugh of “Columbia, Houston, comm check” went unanswered.

It wasn’t until astronaut Ellen Ochoa, seated in the back row of the control room, received a phone call informing her of the eyewitness reports from Texas that the tragic reality set in. As STS-1 pilot Bob Crippen would later say of his beloved orbiter, “I’m sure that Columbia, which had traveled millions of miles and made that fiery reentry twenty-seven times before, struggled mightily to bring her crew home safely once again. She wasn’t successful.”

The findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board closely mirrored the observations of NASA from sixteen years before. Faxes and telegrams had long been replaced by emails and video conferences, but the human failures in decision-making were virtually the same. The evidence was there. The failure that led to Columbia’s demise had been identified, studied, and set aside as an “acceptable risk.” Once again, NASA managers took the successes of the past to assume success in the future. They had literally dodged a foam bullet for more than one hundred ascents, until one slammed squarely into Columbia’s left wing on 16 January 2003. As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report noted, “By the eve of the Columbia accident, institutional practices that were in effect at the time of the Challenger accident—such as inadequate concern over deviations from expected performance, a silent safety program, and schedule pressure—had returned to NASA.”

NASA’s payload specialist program, controversial since its conception yet ultimately an unqualified success, would end on this tragic note. Ilan Ramon was the last payload specialist to ever undertake the hazardous journey aboard America’s space shuttle. Amazingly, during the exhaustive recovery effort of Columbia’s shattered body, searchers came across a small pile of torn, soaked pages of what turned out to be Ramon’s personal diary that he kept during the flight.

The diary pages, which contained his notes and thoughts through the first six flight days of the mission, were painstakingly restored and deciphered. Within the heavily damaged, handwritten text was an entry from flight day 6, which read, “Today was the first day that I felt that I am truly living in space. I have become a man who lives and works in space.”

In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, President George W. Bush directed a shift away from the dangerously complex, aging space planes. The shuttles would be used only for the essential missions to complete the space station and then be ushered into retirement to make way for a new manned-exploration program of the moon and Mars, while continuing ISS operations in low Earth orbit.

Barbara Morgan would finally make it to orbit on 8 August 2007. She flew aboard Endeavour, the space shuttle that was built to replace the lost Challenger, more than two decades after the tragedy that claimed the lives of her predecessor and six others. On the eve of her launch, NASA public affairs officer Eduardo Campion, who had worked closely with Morgan and McAuliffe throughout their selection and training in 1986, sent an email to his coworkers. Campion pointed out that over those 7,861 days, Morgan had, without fail, carried the teacher-in-space banner, because she “recognized the potential the program had for inspiring youth,” and he urged them to stop what they were doing, turn on their televisions, and “watch an event that will hopefully remind you that there are still people like Barbara who can inspire all of us.”

Morgan was an integral part of the STS-118 crew, having gone through so many years of training as a mission specialist. During the flight, she controlled the robotic arms of both the shuttle and the ISS, to help install a structural truss segment to the station and transfer an external stowage platform from Endeavour’s payload bay. Morgan also took several opportunities to speak with schoolchildren, from the orbiting space complex, including a ham radio call to students in her hometown of McCall, Idaho.

Morgan never missed an opportunity to remind people that the tragic loss of her friend Christa McAuliffe changed her life and the makeup of the nation’s astronaut corps. “She was, is, and always will be our first teacher in space. And she did a fantastic job representing the best of our profession,” she reflected in a December 2011 NASA interview. “I was lucky to get to help carry that on. And what I am most proud of for all of us is what Christa started has continued on.”

47. A teacher in space. Astronaut Barbara Morgan, STS-118 mission specialist, floats in the middeck of the space shuttle Endeavour in August 2007. Courtesy NASA.

With the successful completion of her long-awaited flight, Morgan retired from NASA in August 2008 to become the Distinguished Educator in Residence at Boise State University. The mission that she and Christa McAuliffe began with their selection in 1985 lives on within NASA’s astronaut corps, with three educators—Joe Acaba, Ricky Arnold, and Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger—joining their ranks in the class of 2004. All three flew space shuttle missions to the ISS, and Acaba completed a four-month mission as part of the Expedition 31–32 crew in 2012. In September 2017 he headed for the station once more for a five-month stay. Following Acaba’s return to Earth, Arnold launched aboard Soyuz MS-08 in March 2018 as part of Expedition 55–56.

Manned spaceflight operations aboard the ISS are far different from the brief one- or two-week sorties of the space shuttle missions. NASA’s astronauts and those from partner countries train for years for expeditions typically lasting from four to six months. ISS crew members have to be proficient in such a wide range of activities—from flying a spacecraft to onboard scientific research, in-flight maintenance, and spacewalking—that there is no place for a specialized scientific researcher to take one of a very limited number of Soyuz seats.

Even NASA’s current corps of astronauts has shrunk from a high of 149 in 2000 down to 44 (at the time of this writing), all of whom compete, along with a handful of eligible astronauts from Canada, Japan, and Europe, for one of the half-year missions. The 2017 class of NASA astronauts only consisted of eight candidates, reflecting the limited flight opportunities in the foreseeable future, and the twelve-member 2018 class is just beginning their initial training before becoming eligible for a mission.

NASA spent the 1980s touting the benefits of the manned space program to people here on Earth in an effort to retain its political support after Apollo. Low Earth orbit was to be the place where the space station and a steady rotation of space shuttles would carry out cutting-edge research and manufacturing that would improve the lives of everyday people. While it is entirely possible that the payload specialist concept could have carried over to the ISS, the loss of two orbiters, the reliance on Russia’s Soyuz three-seat crew vehicles, and the resultant limitation of a six-person onboard crew have sharply reduced the available manpower for research aboard the station. Developmental contracts for commercial crew transport were awarded to the Boeing Company and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for more capable vehicles, but neither would fly before 2018, after arduous funding issues and technical delays.

However, there is great promise for scientists and engineers to be able to conduct space-based microgravity research in a coming age of suborbital—and even orbital—private spaceflight. Two aerospace companies—Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin—are developing two radically different designs for passenger-carrying spacecraft intended to (initially) launch fare-paying thrill seekers on brief suborbital flights above one hundred kilometers, which is the generally accepted definition of “space.”

Virgin Galactic, owned by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, partnered with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and the Spaceship Company of Mojave, California, to produce SpaceShipTwo. In 2004 Rutan and his team claimed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, after successfully launching the prototype SpaceShipOne three times above the 328,000-foot mark utilizing an air-dropped, rocket-powered, composite-hulled airplane. The design featured a unique feathering mechanism of the twin-boomed tail that allowed a relatively benign, hands-off reentry into the atmosphere, with minimal frictional heating.

Blue Origin operated largely in secret for several years before publicly revealing the unmanned test flights of its New Shepard capsule design, which to date has been flown successfully six times and recovered under three main parachutes, much like the Apollo spacecraft. Blue Origin utilizes a more conventional ground-launched rocket for its passenger ship, which will ultimately carry up to five people on short spaceflights, and the booster rocket is fully reusable by means of a powered vertical landing to return it to Earth.

Both of these companies are looking to the possibilities of conducting space research as an additional source of revenue along with their primary space-tourist business model. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will be able to provide a brief but very pure microgravity environment lasting approximately three to five minutes and can also offer spaceborne atmospheric and astronomical scientific research.

According to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo: An Introductory Guide for Payload Users, SpaceShipTwo will eventually offer more than a one-thousand-pound payload capacity, five hundred cubic feet of shirtsleeve working space, frequent and responsive flight access for “science of opportunity,” large observation windows, and payload mounting systems that can accommodate most current experiment designs. “We are currently taking refundable deposits for flights of autonomous payloads on SpaceShipTwo,” the company states. “In limited cases, we may also accept reservations for the flight of tended payloads—that is to say, flights of both the research experiment and the researcher him or herself.” The company is also taking a page from NASA’s payload specialist program and offering that “educators interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outreach” might fly into space with them.

“I get extremely excited thinking about what the scientists and researchers of the world will do with [launch aircraft] WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo,” Branson offers to potential applicants. “It is so critical that researchers have the opportunity to send payloads to space, or even to fly themselves. I can’t wait to see what great new ideas emerge and which of life’s biggest questions will be solved using data gathered onboard our vehicles.”

Blue Origin has teamed with Nanoracks to offer customers two different-size payload lockers for scientific experiments aboard its suborbital spacecraft. According to the company’s website, “Our frequent flight schedule will allow you to launch your experiment multiple times to iterate on findings, improve statistics, or rapidly collect data. As human flights begin, you’ll also be able to fly with your payloads for hands-on experimentation.”

Each of the designs has its own unique benefits in terms of flight environment and safety. Though these two competing projects have been in the works since the success of the X-Prize flights, they have been met with many challenges that have precluded the initiation of this new industry of private space travel. The first SpaceShipTwo built, christened VSS Enterprise, was lost in a tragic accident during a powered test flight on 31 October 2014, killing test pilot Michael Alsbury and critically injuring Pete Seibold, who miraculously survived after being hurled out of the disintegrating vehicle at supersonic speeds.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin both now stand at the threshold of completing their testing and finally beginning to open space to many more people than ever before possible. There will no doubt be more difficulties in the future, more accidents, and even more lives lost. But the same intense desire that drove the payload specialists of the space shuttle era will bring a new breed of researchers full of curiosity to accept the risks that come with manned spaceflight. As these new endeavors gain momentum and the commercial sector expands in low Earth orbit, Boeing and SpaceX could be ferrying scientists and engineers, tourists and teachers, and perhaps even the occasional politician to space destinations such as Bigelow Aerospace’s twelve-thousand-cubic-foot BE-330 expandable space habitat. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin may not be far behind, with exciting new orbital designs being conceived even today.

Perhaps, at last, the future of manned spaceflight for everyone that NASA promised throughout the latter quarter of the twentieth century might finally come to fruition. The invitation will once again go out to a larger section of the world’s population than ever before: “Come fly with us!”

Today, the three remaining space shuttles no longer thunder from the Florida Space Coast on their blinding bright-orange tongues of flame. Discovery was retired to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy annex at Dulles International Airport in 2012, now resting on its landing gear as if just returning from space. Endeavour resides at the Los Angeles Science Center, supported horizontally with its wheels retracted as it awaits a move to the vertical position when it will be mated to a flight-built external tank and solid rocket boosters. Atlantis remains at its home at KSC, spectacularly displayed with payload bay doors open and remote manipulator arm deployed, canted toward visitors at an angle of 43.21 degrees in homage to the countdowns that culminated in its thirty-three successful missions.

Their black tiles, white quilted thermal blankets, and fragile gray carbon-carbon wing leading edges still show the dings, dents, and scorching of millions of miles travelling to and from space. Subtle streaks of burned residue sweep dramatically from the noses of the ships, giving the stark impression of the fiercely hot plasma each endured through their combined ninety-seven reentries. Even to the young children who see the shuttles up close for the first time, the swooping lines of the vintage delta-winged space planes are an iconic shape. More often than not, the first word out of one’s mouth when first coming face-to-face with a space shuttle is, quite simply, “Wow!”

Among the throngs of visitors who view the three orbiters in the various corners of the country, there is occasionally one in the crowd who lingers a bit longer than most, with a longing gaze and a slight smile. Maybe a little older today than the last time they met but unlike the tourists who are seeing Discovery, Atlantis, or Endeavour for the first time—appreciating their reunion with the retired ships as when seeing an old friend. With long-misplaced memories flooding back from more than three decades ago, a Charlie Walker, a Gary Payton, a Rodolfo Neri, or a Bob Cenker stand in awe of the magnificent flying machine that catapulted them violently into orbit and returned them safely to Earth.

Vibrant images of the friends they flew with, unimaginable views of planet Earth, and the surreal oddity of weightlessness come instantly back to reality. Undoubtedly, memories of friends lost undertaking that same great adventure come to mind as well. As life goes by and new experiences fill the years since those seemingly detached events, it is sometimes hard to believe that spaceflight was part of their reality—that someone found them worthy of undertaking a mission to space. They may well find themselves asking quietly, “Did that really happen to me?”

“Wow!”