Come Fly with Us
eBook - ePub

Come Fly with Us

NASA's Payload Specialist Program

  1. 456 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Come Fly with Us

NASA's Payload Specialist Program

About this book

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. 

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Yes, you can access Come Fly with Us by Melvin Croft,John Youskauskas in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

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