Abstract
It is almost a standard question in a job interview to ask the prospective employee what their expectations are, if they are hired. In fact, during his interview with the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company in St. Louis, Missouri, 29-year-old aerospace engineer Charles D. Walker had a crystal clear view of the type of career he was seeking. His answer was simple, “Technical work, design development for a few years, opportunity to move into management and oh, by the way, along the way, if anything I’m working on has the opportunity to fly into space, I would like the opportunity to approach NASA to go fly with it.”
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Notes
- 1.
The Kármán “line” at an altitude of 62 miles represents the boundary between the atmosphere and space. Simply put, whoever crosses this line earns the title of astronaut.
- 2.
The buffer liquid is the carrier of the substances that are to be separated via electrophoresis .
- 3.
Refer to Chapter 5 for details of the first contingency spacewalk of the Shuttle program.
- 4.
From the first US manned flight into space through to the early years of Shuttle program, it was standard practice to have a backup crew for each mission to guarantee that a given mission would be able to be flown on time in the event of a member of the primary crew becoming unavailable. With this in mind, NASA convinced McDonnell Douglas that they too should have a backup for Walker , as it could have been difficult for a mission specialist to work on the CFES if Walker was unable to participate.
- 5.
Although the name SPACEHAB is written in capital letters is not an acronym.
- 6.
As Rockwell International built all the Space Shuttle Orbiters, they were well suited to critically evaluate the Citron proposal.
- 7.
The difference between the SSDA signed in 1989 and the NASA contract ratified in 1990 was that the former allowed a SPACEHAB module to fly on the Shuttle as privately owned payload with commercial and private payload along with NASA own experiments. The latter formally specified NASA as a user of the module to fulfill its own needs and become an anchor tenant for the first eight flights.
- 8.
The dimensions of a Spacelab laboratory meant it required a dedicated flight with no sharing opportunities with other payloads.
- 9.
Refer to Chapter 4 for details on the OAST-1 experiment.
- 10.
A micron is one millionth of a meter, while a nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
- 11.
A semiconductor behaves either as a conductor or as an electric insulator upon careful manipulation and exploitation of its atomic properties.
- 12.
Based in Houston, the SVEC was another NASA Center for the Commercial Development of Space.
- 13.
Although the free-flyer is often referred to as the WSF , strictly speaking the WSF was the combination of the SCBC and the free-flyer.
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Sivolella, D. (2017). Space Industries. In: The Space Shuttle Program. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54946-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54946-0_8
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