Grab Instantly Come Fly With Us: NASAs Payload Specialist Program (Outward Odyssey: A Peoples History Of Spaceflight) Envisioned By Melvin Croft Released Through Digital Format
Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from preChallenger days to Columbia in.
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 NASAs struggle to integrate the wideranging 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 highprofile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn who returned to space at the age of seventyseven, and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS.