Come Fly with Us

NASA's Payload Specialist Program

Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496212245
• Print ISBN:
  9780803278929
• Subtopic: North American History

2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space History

Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as “payload specialists” came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA’s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks.

While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Genesis of the Payload Specialist
• 2. Integrating the Payload Specialists
• 3. Spacelab, a New Era in Spaceflight
• 4. Mission to Planet Earth
• 5. Time to Specialize
• 6. The Supermission
• 7. Europe’s Coming Out Party
• 8. Supersonic in a Paper Airplane
• 9. The Highest Ground
• 10. Space Walker
• 11. First Passenger
• 12. International Goodwill
• 13. The Spaceman from Chilpancingo
• 14. On the Way to Disney World
• 15. Walking through Fire
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Summary of Missions Carrying Payload Specialists, 1983–86
• Sources
• Index