Wielka Brytania musiała czekać długo na nieprywatnego astronautę.When Britain had a small astronaut corpsJonathan Amos | 16:35 UK time, Friday, 19 March 2010
For Richard Farrimond, it was a case of the "right stuff" but at the "wrong time".
Their task was to assist in the deployment from the orbiter of what were to be Britain's new military telecommunications satellites - Skynet 4A and Skynet 4B.
This was back in the days when the shuttle was going to launch every month and make the expendable rocket market redundant.
The idea was never very realistic and it stalled completely on 28 January, 1986, when the Challenger shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after launching from the Kennedy Space Center.
A lot changed that day.
For the small British astronaut corps it meant packing their bags and heading home. Their opportunity to go into space was withdrawn. The Skynet satellites, too, never got their shuttle experience. One was sent to South America to be launched by Ariane; the other went up on a US Titan rocket.
But twenty-four years on, Richard still speaks effusively about his time at Nasa and the friends he made - and lost.
Last week, he retired from the space business, stepping down as the UK military marketing manager at Europe's biggest space company, EADS Astrium. (...)
In the media, we like the phrase "Britain's first official astronaut". We're still waiting for one.
All those Brits who've gone into space so far have done so as private individuals (Richard Garriott) or on private programmes (Helen Sharman), or with Nasa after having taken out US citizenship (Michael Foale, Nicholas Patrick, etc).
The "Skynet four" were certainly "official" - they had the Union flag on the shoulder as Richard's publicity shot on this page testifies. But they never flew.
Now, the "burden" of being the UK's official number one has been passed to Tim Peake, the rookie recruited last year into the European Space Agency's (Esa) astronaut team. (...)
https://cancelled-space-shuttle-missions.fandom.com/wiki/STS-61-H
Wątek: Richard Alfred Farrimond (1947-2026) (Przeczytany 249 razy)