Spacelab 1: A Model for International Cooperation

Nov 27, 2023

Forty years back, in 1983, the Space Shuttle Columbia flew its very first worldwide spaceflight, STS-9The objective consisted of– for the very first time– the European Space Agency’s Spacelab pressurized module and included more than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese researchers. Europeans were especially happy with this “impressive action” since “NASA, the most popular area firm on the world,” consisted of the lab on an early Shuttle objective. NASA was similarly delighted with the Spacelab and called the effort “history’s biggest and most thorough international area job.” The Spacelab ended up being a unifying force for all the getting involved countries, researchers, and astronauts. As discussed by among the objective’s payload professionals, Ulf Merbold, while the primary private investigators for the onboard experiments may be British or French, “there is no French science, and no British science [on this flight]Science in itself is worldwide.” Researchers flying on the objective, and those who had experiments on board, were working cooperatively for the advantage of mankind. As then Vice-President George H. W. Bush discussed, “The understanding Spacelab will revive from its lots of objectives will come from all humanity.”¹

Training for the flight necessary global cooperation on a totally brand-new scale for the American area program. Today it is not uncommon to find out about an astronaut training for spaceflight at various places and centers around the world. NASA’s astronauts have actually grown familiar with training beyond the United States for months at a time before flying onboard the International Space Station, however that was not the experience for the majority of NASA’s flight teams in the firm’s early spaceflight programs. Objective training primarily happened in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) and in Florida at the Cape. The Apollo-era included just one worldwide flight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP)with astronauts training in the 2 getting involved countries: the USSR and the United States.

It likewise hardly ever makes news nowadays when somebody who is not an expert astronaut or cosmonaut flies in area. In the past, flying in area was an expert profession. This all altered with the advancement of the Space Shuttle and Spacelab, which birthed a brand-new area tourist: the payload expert. The people picked for these positions were not profession astronauts. The payload experts were professionals on a particular payload or an experiment, and throughout the early years of the Area Shuttle program originated from a variety of backgrounds: the Air Force, Congress, market, and even the field of education. The primary detectives for this science-based objective picked the payload professionals who flew in area and ran their experiments. Spacelab 1 was special in offering the very first chance for a non-American, a European, to fly onboard a NASA spacecraft.

In the summertime of 1978, NASA picked scientist-astronauts Owen K. Garriott and Robert A. R. Parker as objective professionals for the Spacelab 1 team. Garriott, who had actually been chosen as an astronaut in 1965, had actually flown on America’s very first spaceport station as a member of the Skylab 3 team, a group that surpassed all expectations of flight coordinators and primary detectives. Parker had actually likewise used to be a scientist-astronaut and was picked in 1967. His class jokingly called themselves the “XS-11” [pronounced excess-eleven]since they had actually been informed there was no space for them in the corps and they would not fly in area, not instantly anyhow. Parker dealt with Skylab as the program researcher, once the program ended, he accepted a brand-new title: chief of the Astronaut Office Science and Applications Directorate, where he invested the next couple of years dealing with Spacelab matters. It was best timing for the astronaut to turn his attention to this worldwide program. When Skylab ended in 1974, agents of Europe’s Space Research Organization (ESRO) and members of ERNO, the Spacelab specialist, began taking a trip to Houston and Huntsville to offer the 2 NASA centers updates on the advancement of the Spacelab and to hold conversations on the module. In a 1974 interview, ESRO’s Heinz Stoewer stressed the “extremely extreme cooperation,” he saw “with our good friends here in the United States in making this program become a reality.”²

Around the exact same time, as Spacelab was being developed, the European Space Agency (ESA) started considering who may fly on that very first flight. 3 days before Christmas in 1977, ESA launched the names of their 4 payload professional prospects: Wubbo Ockels, Ulf Merbold, Franco Malerba, and Claude Nicollier. 2 Americans, Byron K. Lichtenberg and Michael L. Lampton, were chosen in the summer season of 1978 as prospective payload experts.³

The Spacelab 1 payload team, which ran the module and the objective’s experiments in the payload bay of the Orbiter, consisted of 2 objective professionals, Garriott and Parker, and 2 payload experts, one from the United States and another from the European Space Agency. The payload team and their backups started training several years before the Space Shuttle Columbia introduced into area on STS-9. (The initial launch date of December 1980 kept slipping so the team wound up training for 5 years.)⁴ Training in Europe started in earnest in 1978, while training in the United States and Canada started in 1979.⁵ Merbold was ultimately picked to fly on the objective in addition to Lichtenberg. The whole payload team invested a lot of their time taking a trip to Europe that John W. Young, who was then chief of the Astronaut Office, called their flight project and European training, which included travel to unique places like Rome, Italy, “a stunning boondoggle. In my next life,” he stated, “I’ll be an MS [mission specialist] on S Lab [Spacelab]”⁶

Lichtenberg remembered the science team, the prime and backup payload professionals and objective professionals, took a trip the world “like travelling college students … to study at the labs of the primary detectives and their associates.” In these labs, universities, and at proving ground throughout Europe, Canada, and Japan, they learnt more about the devices and experiments, consisting of how to fix the hardware if something broke or stopped working in flight. Lichtenberg seemed like he was making numerous postgraduate degrees in the fields of astronomy and solar physics, area plasma physics, climatic physics, Earth observations, life sciences, and products science. The advantages of training were many, however possibly the most essential were the individual and expert relationships that were developed with the private investigators from throughout the world and with his crewmates.⁷

For the payload professionals, developing relationships within the astronaut corps showed to be more complex. Merbold remembered taking a trip to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and getting a warm welcome. “But in Houston you might feel that not everybody enjoyed that Europe was included. Some likewise felt bitter the brand-new principle of the payload expert ‘astronaut researcher,’ who was not under their control like the pilots. We were viewed to be burglars in a location that was booked for ‘genuine’ astronauts.” As an example, the European astronauts might not utilize the astronaut health club or participate in T-38 flight training. In time, mindsets altered, and Garriott credited STS-9 Mission Commander John Young with the shift, therefore did Merbold. As the team was preparing to fly, the previous moonwalker took Merbold on a T-38 trip, and when the payload expert asked if he might fly the airplane, Young voluntarily used him the chance. After that flight, Merbold remembered that he “took pleasure in John Young’s unqualified assistance.”⁸

Relationships progressed on the 6 man-crew. Parker called Pilot Brewster H. Shaw and Commander Young “2 of [his] friends to this day.”⁹ For Merbold, the flight sealed a considerable bond in between the STS-9 astronauts. He had “no bros, no siblings,” he was an only kid, however the Columbia team became his household. “My siblings are those guys with whom I trained and flew,” he stated.¹⁰ Young and Merbold had a particularly close bond. Garriott saw that relationship up close on the Shuttle, and later on informed an oral historian, “Young had no much better pal on board our flight than Ulf Merbold.” The 2 stayed close up until Young’s death.¹¹

Following landing, Flight Crew Operations Directorate Chief George W.S. Abbey informed the team that the science neighborhood was “extremely delighted.”¹² The very first global spaceflight because ASTP brought researchers, astronauts, and area firms from around the world together, laying the structure for bringing Europe into human spaceflight operations and beginning a various method to training and carrying out science in area. As Spacelab 1 Mission Manager Henry G. Craft and Richard A. Marmann described, the program “exhibited what can be achieved when researchers and engineers from all over the world sign up with forces, interacting and working together to more advance clinical intelligence.”¹³ Ultimately, the worldwide cooperation Craft and Marmann experienced resulted in today’s extremely effective International Space Station Program

Notes

1. Walter Froehlich, Spacelab: An International Short-Stay Orbiting Laboratory (Washington, DC: NASA, 1983); St. Louis Post-DispatchNovember 28, 1983.
2. JSC News Release, “Mission Specialists for Spacelab 1 Named at JSC,” 78-34, August 1, 1978; Robert A.R. Parker, interview by author, October 23, 2002, recordsJSC Oral History Project; “Europeans To Fly Aboard Shuttle,” RoundupMarch 29, 1974, 1.
3. “Four European Candidates Chosen for First Spacelab Flight,” ESA Bulletin (February 1978), no. 12: 62; “Two United States researchers picked Spacelab payload experts,” RoundupJune 9, 1978, 4.
4. In the team report, Parker counted his time keeping an eye on the Spacelab, so he concluded that the objective professionals trained even longer, from 5 to 9 years.
5. “Spacelab Scientists Tour USA,” Area News RoundupJanuary 12, 1979, 1.
6. Harry G. Craft, Jr. to George W.S. Abbey, February 25, 1982, Spacelab 1 Payload Crew Experiment Training Requirements, Robert A.R. Parker Papers II, Box 28, JSC History Collection, University of Houston-Clear Lake.
7. Byron Lichtenberg, “A New Breed of Space Traveller [sic],” New Scientist, August 1984, 9.
8. ESA, “Ulf Merbold: STS-9 Payload Specialist,” November 26, 2013; ESA, “Ulf Merbold: keeping in mind John Young [1930-2018],” August 22, 2018.
9. Parker interview.
10. ESA Explores, “Time and Space: ESA’s very first astronaut,” podcast, November 25, 2020.
11. Owen K. Garriott, interview by Kevin M. Rusnak, November 6, 2000, recordsJSC Oral History Project; ESA, “Ulf Merbold: keeping in mind John Young.”
12. Garriott interview.
13. Henry G. Craft, Jr., and Richard A. Marmann, “Spacelab Program’s Scientific Benefits to Mankind,” Acta Astronautica 34 (1994 ): 304.

About the Author

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the NASA Human Spaceflight Historian. She is the author of Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe and Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space.

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