WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

Charles Precourt, chief of the Astronaut office in Houston, and Daniel Goldin, NASA administrator, welcome back to Earth Senator John H. Glenn Jr., from a successful mission STS-95 aboard orbiter Discovery. Glenn served as payload specialist, one of a crew of seven that included Mission Commander Curtis L. Brown Jr.; Pilot Steven W. Lindsey; Mission Specialists Stephen K. Robinson, Scott E. Parazynski and Pedro Duque of Spain, with the European Space Agency; and Payload Specialist Chiaki Mukai, M.D., with the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). They landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility at 12:04 p.m. EST, after 9 days in space, traveling 3.6 million miles. The mission included research payloads such as the Spartan solar-observing deployable spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker, as well as the SPACEHAB single module with experiments on space flight and the aging process.