Come Fly with Us NASA`s Payload Specialist Program

Croft, Melvin/ Youskauskas, John/ Thomas, Don (Foreward By)

ISBN 10: 1496238621 / ISBN 13: 9781496238627

Published by Univ of Nebraska Pr, 2024

About this Item

456 pages. 9.00x6.00x1.01 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-1496238621

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Come Fly with Us NASA`s Payload Specialist Program
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496238621
• ISBN 13: 9781496238627
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.67 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the 2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space History

Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as “payload specialists” came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA’s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks.

While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.

About the Author

Melvin Croft has more than forty years of experience as a geologist and is a longtime supporter of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. John Youskauskas is a professional pilot with more than thirty years of aviation experience in flight operations, aviation safety, and maintenance. Both authors contributed to Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 (Nebraska, 2010). Don Thomas is a former NASA mission specialist and the author of Orbit of Discovery: The All-Ohio Space Shuttle Mission.