Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations by Jay M. Chladek

Author:Jay M. Chladek [Chladek, Jay M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Space, Science, Research, Illustrated
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-07-31T14:00:00+00:00

Europe’s First Astronauts

Once Spacelab began flying, there was the question of who would conduct the research. By this time, NASA’s astronaut corps had been organized along the ranks of pilot and mission specialist. The pilot group included shuttle commanders, and their job would be operating the shuttle as needed for mission support. The mission specialists would be responsible for the EVAs, running the robot arm and tasks related to shuttle systems. While some mission specialists would be assigned to conduct scientific research on missions, some payloads had a need for a crewmember that had more in-depth knowledge into the hardware being flown and less need to operate the shuttle systems. This required a new classification, the payload specialist.

A payload specialist is essentially a part-time astronaut. They would get a minimal amount of spaceflight training, usually only six months to a year, while the pilots and mission specialists were career astronauts with at least two years of training under their belts. Some payload specialists would be little more than VIPs, on hand to conduct satellite launches for their countries. Others would be integral to operating the payloads that were flown, as they knew the experiments better than anyone else.

In 1978, the ESA selected three astronauts to fly as payload specialists, and the trio journeyed to Houston for training. They were Ulf Merbold, Wubbo Ockels, and Claude Nicollier. Ulf Merbold was born in what became East Germany after World War II, but escaped to the West before the Berlin Wall was erected. He became a physicist and holds a PhD in that field. Prior to joining the ESA, Merbold worked for the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart. Wubbo Ockels was born in the Dutch town of Almelo and has PhDs in both math and physics. His primary field of research before the ESA was the creation of radiation particle detectors. Before being accepted for a job with the ESA, Claude Nicollier was a pilot with the Swiss Air Force and studied physics while holding down a job as a commercial airline pilot.

The first two men would get to fly as payload specialists, with Merbold taking part in several missions and Ockels only one. Claude Nicollier, on the other hand, wouldn’t fly for many years, but he added a diploma from the Empire Test Pilots School at Boscombe Down, England, to his resume in 1988; he became one of the ESA’s first mission specialist astronauts. He took part in several high-profile shuttle missions, including the first repair mission of the Hubble Telescope on STS-61 in 1993. A fourth astronaut candidate, Franco Malerba of Italy, was also selected by the ESA, but he didn’t journey to NASA for training and remained in Europe. Malerba eventually flew as a payload specialist on STS-46. He holds a PhD in physics, specializing in biophysics.

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