Reflections

April 29, 1985, dawned bright and early at Cape Canaveral. A beautiful blue spring sky signaled to those of us in the crew quarters at the Kennedy Space Center that we'd soon be heading to the launch pad, preparing for our seven day adventure in space aboard Challenger and the Spacelab module tucked away in the payload bay. Ten years later I can look back with pride at the accomplishments of our mission, as we pushed back the veil of secrecy surrounding spaceflight and its effects on the thirty-three mammals onboard. I can't speak for the two monkeys and twenty-four rats, but the seven human crew members certainly had the experience of a lifetime.

Sometimes I reflect about our mission. The growing of a perfect crystal, the long-sought proof of special drop dynamics theories of Sir Isaac Newton, finding unknown facts about the Aurora, determining the pollution levels in the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere, and the study of weightlessness on the mammals, all begin to fade in the memory, but all were accomplishments that added more data to unlock the mysteries of spaceflight and lay the groundwork for future activities on our nation's Space Station.

Today, March 15, 1995, the rest of our crew can only salute and wish godspeed to our fellow space traveler as he climbs aboard the Russian Space Station MIR to start his ninety-day research. Astronaut Norm Thagard was my Mission Specialist/Flight Engineer for our STS 51B/Spacelab-3 flight ten years ago. I spent many a long hour with Norm in our mission simulators as we prepared for our flight. Norm, a former fighter pilot, electrical engineer and physician, was the perfect flight engineer. His depth of knowledge on the systems proved invaluable numerous times as we simulated together. His calm voice backing us up was always a reassuring vote to me and my pilot, Fred Gregory, as we solved the most complex problems that the simulation team could throw at us. Fortunately, we never had to use that extra training, as Challenger behaved perfectly throughout the whole mission.

As we look to the future with an International Space Station manned by Astronauts and Cosmonauts from the USA, Russia, Europe and Japan, I can take pride in my crew's contribution to the program and the little pieces of data we contributed to the whole picture.