2/23/2024 0 Comments Crew of endeavour space shuttle"The sky's the limit, and I really hope our country understands the value of exploration and the value of the unknown that's out there. His first trip to the space station came in 2004 as the flight engineer on Expedition 9 and he followed that with the 2009 mission as commander of Expedition 18, accumulating 366 days of spaceflight and six Russian-based spacewalks. In the Air Force, he was a test engineer and logged 1,000 flight hours in more than 30 different aircraft. The native of Pittsburgh holds master degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford and planetary geology from the University of Houston. "I spent a year in space, but I've never launched on, or landed on, a space shuttle before, so it was with great surprise and pleasure that I got assigned to STS-134," says Fincke. space endurance record during Endeavour's flight by eclipsing the current 377-day cumulative mark held by Peggy Whitson.īut after spending two tours of duty on the International Space Station using Russian Soyuz capsules for transportion, Fincke is taking his very first space shuttle voyage as Endeavour's mission specialist No. And Endeavour always looked the cleanest, it was the most pristine, and it was my favorite vehicle from the very start," he says.Īir Force Col. And so I became familiar with all of the different shuttles that I spent a lot of time in all of them. "When I first became an astronaut a dozen years ago, one of my early jobs was to help prepare the vehicle and the crews for launch at the Cape, flipping switches, setting up procedures, taping things down. Johnson arrived at NASA in 1998 and flew on the Endeavour mission in 2008 that delivered Japan's first module and constructed Canada's Dextre handyman robot. I was seven years old, in Michigan at my grandparents' house watching a black and white TV with my brother and sister and parents, and we watched with great interest on a fuzzy black and white TV as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and made his first speech as he stepped on the moon," he recalls. "I know the day that I was inspired to be an astronaut, and that was July 20th, 1969. The retired Air Force colonel has combat experience from Operation Desert Storm and Operation Southern Watch, plus flight test credentials and over 4,000 flight hours in more than 40 different aircraft. Pilot Greg Johnson is making his second spaceflight aboard this particular spacecraft. Read his NASA biography here and Spaceflight Now+Plus subscribers can watch an extended pre-launch interview. We're going to do four spacewalks with really critical ISS assembly/maintenance tasks during the mission, and then a host of other things, primarily cargo transfer is a big part of it, and then we have an objective called the STORRM (Sensor Test for Orion Relative Navigation Risk Mitigation), which is a sensor for follow-on spacecraft." We also have a pallet of external spares called ELC-3 (Express Logistics Carrier) that has some spare parts. It's the premier physics experiment it's probably the most expensive thing ever flown by the space shuttle. "We've got a whole list of mission objectives, probably 30 things on the list, but the big objective is to get the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer installed on the outside of the space station. Now, Kelly flies on Endeavour again for the ship's retirement voyage. "I remember thinking, boy, that would be something to be able to fly a rocketship into space." "I remember thinking about being an astronaut during Apollo," Kelly says. His first command came in 2008 as Discovery's skipper on STS-124 that launched the Japanese laboratory module to the space station. The 47-year-old Navy captain from Orange, New Jersey, has 5,000 flight hours in more than 50 different aircraft and logged over 375 carrier landings, plus performed 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm.Ī veteran of three previous space shuttle missions, Kelly initially flew as pilot of Endeavour on the STS-108 logistics servicing to the International Space Station in 2001 and Discovery's STS-121 test flight in 2006. Privacy note: your e-mail address will not be used for any other purpose.Īt the controls of space shuttle Endeavour for her 25th and final journey is commander Mark Kelly. Sign up for our NewsAlert service and have the latest news in astronomy and space e-mailed direct to your desktop. Spaceflight Now | STS-134 Shuttle Report | Meet shuttle Endeavour's six-man crew
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