Word: crippen
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...finale of the shuttle's eleventh and most ambitious mission was supposed to have taken place at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, site of the launch. But just as Shuttle Commander Bob Crippen and his crew prepared to descend from orbit and end their seven-day, more-than-2 million-mile flight, storm clouds began gathering near Cape Canaveral, complicating Challenger's descent. The California touchdown will force NASA to transport Challenger back across the U.S. to Florida and will add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of the mission. The trip across the continent...
...will represent the space age's first retrieval and repair of an earth satellite. Challenger is scheduled to begin its historic fix-it flight from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Friday, April 6, at 8:59 a.m. E.S.T On this eleventh shuttle journey, Navy Captain Bob Crippen, 46, a veteran of two earlier missions, and his four-man, all-rookie crew will be breaking other new ground...
...satellite. Then the shuttle's 50-ft.-long, remote-controlled mechanical arm, operated from inside the cockpit by Electrical Engineer Terry Hart, 37, will lock onto a grappling device on Solar Max. (Challenger's fifth astronaut is Dick Scobee, 44, a onetime airplane mechanic who will be Crippen's copilot.) With helpful nudges from Nelson and Van Hoften, Solar Max will be eased into a special cradle in the cargo bay for the repair. The astronauts' task in the bay will be to remove a defective attitude-control module, a 500-lb., orange-crate-size package...
...landing at Kennedy, Challenger would put down on its next orbit (its 98th) on the dried-out lake bed in the Mojave Desert where shuttles have come home from space on five previous occasions. True to the Right Stuff test-pilot tradition from which he hails, Navy Captain Robert Crippen, 45, Challenger's commander and the only space veteran on board, acknowledged the decision with cool resignation. Said he: "Well, we would like to have gone in there very much, but if the weather's bad, that's not the right thing...
Certainly Mission Control had no problems with the five-member crew, the largest yet to fly on a shuttle. Barely a day after their flaming on-time liftoff, Crippen and company set out two commercial communications satellites, one Canadian, the other Indonesian. By week's end the satellites had completed their long six-day climbs to "geostationary" orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. "That's four for four," Ride announced proudly, tallying up the number of commercial satellites successfully launched by the shuttle...