Today marks a historic anniversary for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. It was on this date forty years ago that the European Spacelab module blasted off for the first time aboard the Space Shuttle. Marshall managed the twenty foot long science compartment which paved the way for the work done the International Space Station. NASA astronaut, and University of Alabama graduate, Bob Hines worked aboard ISS for one hundred and seventy days. APR news asked about his favorite memory of the mission…
“Really, when I think of my time on on station, it is thinking about my crewmates and the time that I get to spend with my crewmates, especially when we're all just hanging out in the cupola looking at the Earth as it passes by underneath us, often in just stunned silence at the amazing beauty that we're watching.”
Spacelab launched aboard Space Shuttle Columbia on November 28, 1983 with international crew including German astronaut Ulf Merbold. The European Space Agency, which built the science module in partnership with NASA, says one hundred and twenty six astronauts worked inside Spacelab on twenty two missions until the program ended in 2008. The list of people who conducted research aboard Spacelab includes Mae Jemison of Decatur, Alabama. She who was the first African American woman to fly in space. The veteran astronaut has visited the University of Alabama campus as did Bob Hines. He visited the Tuscaloosa campus this month for UA Space Days. Hines says there’s a lot going on NASA and they’ll be looking for people like the Alabama students he came to inspire.
“The incredibly successful first flight of the Orion capsule, which went and flew around the moon and launched aboard the Space Launch System rocket in such an incredibly successful test flight. Our next one we have assigned our crews to go fly on it'll be the first crewed test flight of SLS and Orion (NASA’s new crew capsule.” They also will go around the moon and they'll be the first people around the moon and over 50 years. And after that the next mission we're supposed to be landing on the moon. So it's, it's really close. It's happening fast and it's really, really exciting.”
The Marshall Space Flight Center went on from managing Spacelab, to supervising the science now going on aboard the International Space Station, where Bob Hines worked. The European Space Agency says many of Spacelab’s features live on in space hardware that is flying today. The design for the module's outer hull as reused for compartments on the Space Station, as well as spacecraft that carry supplies from Earth for the orbiting outpost.
