by The commander of the unsuccessful space shuttle flight Challenger is being remembered 40 years after his first space flight with a commercial spacecraft that bears his name.
The 21st Northrop Grumman cargo vehicle is named after NASA astronaut Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, who flew Challenger twice – first as pilot in 1984 and then as commander two years later.
“For every commercial replacement mission to the International Space Station, we name our Cygnus spacecraft after a pioneer in human spaceflight. Today, I am honored to announce the naming of the Cygnus cargo spacecraft that will be used in the upcoming NG-21 mission. to the International Space Station for Francis Richard Scobee, a former astronaut, pilot and engineer,” Brandon White, vice president and general manager of tactical space systems at Northrop Grumman, said in a video statement released by the company on Monday ( 1 July).
“We are privileged to honor Dick Scobee’s legacy and recognize his achievements as a pioneer who contributed so much to human spaceflight and our collective access to space exploration,” said White.
Selected to become an astronaut in 1978 with NASA’s first group of shuttle trainees, Scobee logged nearly seven days as pilot of STS-41C, the first repair mission to an Earth-orbiting satellite. Scobee came to NASA from the US Air Force, where he was a combat aviator in the Vietnam War and a test pilot for the Boeing 747 jetliner, the X-24B lift body and the C-5 Galaxy cargo plane.
Related: The space shuttle Challenger and the disaster that changed NASA forever
On January 28, 1986, Scobee and his six STS-51L colleagues were killed when Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its 10th mission, the result of a failed seal in one of the spacecraft’s two solid rocket boosters. (In 2018, Northrop Grumman acquired the company that produced the Challenger boosters, as well as all the solid rocket motors used during the 30-year space shuttle program.)
Scobee was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal and inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2004. The Challenger Center, an educational organization founded by the families of the STS-51L crew, keeps his memory alive. Scobee’s widow, June Scobee Rodgers, was the center’s founding chairman.
“Dick’s legacy continues to inspire generations of aspiring pilots, engineers and students, who are driven to test the limits of human spaceflight and space exploration technology,” said Quinn Duffy, engineer at Northrop Grumman.
The goal is to send the “SS Francis R. ‘Dick’ Scobee” to the space station in early August. It will be the second Cygnus to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as Northrop Grumman transitions its Antares rocket from using Russian-built engines to US-based hardware developed with Firefly Aerospace.
The NG-21 Cygnus will carry food, supplies and equipment to the space station, including a bioreactor to demonstrate blood and immune stem cell production and investigation of vascular liver tissue. The mission will also fly several test articles to observe water flow in microgravity as part of NASA’s new educational outreach payload “STEMonstration”.
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The SS Francis R. “Dick” Scobee is the second Cygnus spacecraft named by Northrop Grumman for a fallen STS-51L crew member. Mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, who was the first Asian American to launch into space on his maiden flight in 1985, was also honored when the spacecraft was named NG-16.
Other Cygnus names include company executive JR Thompson, Air Force Manned Orbiter Laboratory (MOL) candidate Robert Lawrence, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and astronauts David Low, Gordon Fullerton, Janice Voss, Deke Slayton, Rick Husband, Alan Poindexter, John Glenn, Gene. Cernan, John Young, Roger Chaffee, Alan Bean, Kalpana Chawla, Piers Sellers, Sally Ride and Laurel Clark.
The latest Cygnus, the SS Patricia “Patty” Hilliard Robertson, named for an astronaut who suffered a plane crash before she could launch into space, has been at the station since January. It is scheduled to be released from the orbital complex on July 12 to proceed to a destructive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
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