Abstract
As Steve Hawley explained, the astronauts would not be able to rotate through every support position in their careers, but some assignments were clearly more popular than others. “I never got to be a Capcom [Capsule Communicator], for example, but that’s a job that lots of people get rotated through,” Hawley observed. By the fall of 1979, with their Ascan training program completed a year earlier than planned, the rookie astronauts were assigned to technical and support roles in the Shuttle program, which they hoped would lead to at least one flight into space on the Space Shuttle.
“We actually have more jobs that we support
than any one individual can do in a career.
All of them have training value of some kind.
All of them are important to the program in some way;
some of them probably a little more fun than others.”
Steve Hawley, JSC Oral History
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Notes
- 1.
As the odds of actually landing at one of these site were slim, the equipment available there was kept to the minimum. Early sites included Morón (southern Spain), Banjul (Gambia, West Africa) and Ben Guerir (Morocco, North Africa). Dakar (Senegal, West Africa) was also an early site for TAL aborts, as was Zaragoza Air Base (eastern Spain).
References
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Email to author David J. Shayler from Steve Hawley, January 29, 2019.
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Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, June 1986, Recommendation II, p. 199, and Recommendation V, p. 200.
Email to author David J. Shayler from Steve Hawley, January 23, 2020.
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Shayler, D.J., Burgess, C. (2020). Silver Pin Astronauts. In: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45742-6_7
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