![]() The payload specialists were experts on a specific payload or an experiment, and during the early years of the Space Shuttle program came from a wide variety of backgrounds: the Air Force, Congress, industry, and even the field of education. The individuals selected for these positions were not career astronauts. This all changed with the development of the Space Shuttle and Spacelab, which birthed a new space traveler: the payload specialist. In the past, flying in space was a professional occupation. It also rarely makes news these days when someone who is not a professional astronaut or cosmonaut flies in space. The Apollo-era featured only one international flight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), with astronauts training in the two participating nations: the USSR and the United States. Mission training mainly took place in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) and in Florida at the Cape. NASA’s astronauts have grown accustomed to training outside of the United States for months at a time before flying onboard the International Space Station, but that was not the experience for most of NASA’s flight crews in the agency’s early spaceflight programs. Today it is not unusual to hear about an astronaut training for spaceflight at many different locations and facilities across the globe. Training for the flight required international cooperation on an entirely new scale for the American space program. Bush explained, “The knowledge Spacelab will bring back from its many missions will belong to all mankind.”1 Science in itself is international.” Scientists flying on the mission, and those who had experiments on board, were working cooperatively for the benefit of humanity. As explained by one of the mission’s payload specialists, Ulf Merbold, while the principal investigators for the onboard experiments might be British or French, “there is no French science, and no British science. NASA was equally thrilled with the Spacelab and called the effort “history’s largest and most comprehensive multinational space project.” The Spacelab became a unifying force for all the participating nations, scientists, and astronauts. Europeans were particularly proud of this “remarkable step” because “NASA, the most famous space agency on the globe,” included the laboratory on an early Shuttle mission. The mission included-for the first time-the European Space Agency’s Spacelab pressurized module and featured more than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese scientists. If you are planning on boating or flying on launch attempt days, it's important to check this information.Forty years ago, in 1983, the Space Shuttle Columbia flew its first international spaceflight, STS-9. Space Launch Delta 45 posts hazard and airspace restrictions for each launch here on the Space Coast. Hazard and Airspace Restriction Information While you can see launches from almost anywhere on the Space Coast, check out this Google Map for some local favorites & NASA suggested spots for the best rocket launch views. *All launch dates and times subject to change No Earlier than March '24: Atlas 5 - CST-100 Starliner Crew Flight Test: Boeing gets to test its new Starliner capsule with humans. ![]() TBD: ULA - Vulcan Centaur - Dream Chaser 1: ULA launches the Sierra Space's Dream Chaser on it's first flight to space.TBD: Falcon 9 - Polaris Dawn: Civilian Astronauts take off to perform the first civilian space walk.TBD: ULA - Vulcan Centaur: ULA launches the Peregrine lunar lander on Vulcan Centaur's inaugural flight.Jan 2024: Falcon 9 - IM-1: SpaceX will deliver science payloads to the surface of the moon.
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