The Flickr Normthagard Image Generatr

“STS-7 SATELLITE VIEW OF ORBITER---The Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Challenger over a clouded Earth was captured by a 70mm camera onboard the temporarily free-flying Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS-01) during a busy day 5 on the STS-7 mission. Visible in the cargo bay are the protective cradles for the now vacated Telesat Anik C2 and Palapa B communications satellites, the pallet for the office of Space and Terrestrial Applications, NASA; the remote manipulator system (RMS) and the Ku-band antenna. The RMS and the STS-7 crew of astronauts later retrieved the SPAS and returned it to a stowed position in the payload bay for return to Earth.”

“STS-30 --- The Space Shuttle Atlantis glides toward a landing on the Mojave Desert after spending just over four full days in space. Aboard the spacecraft were Astronauts David M. Walker, Ronald J. Crabe, Norman E. Thagard, Mary L. Cleave and Mark C. Lee. Moments later, the spacecraft’s landing gear came to a stop at 12:44:33 p.m. (PDT), 8 May 19890. It landed on Runway 22, a concrete facility, like a number of other NASA flights. Still others have landed on unpaved dry lake bed strips.”

Not a mention of the mission, the deployment of the Magellan/Venus radar mapper spacecraft - THE FIRST U.S. PLANETARY MISSION IN ELEVEN - 11 - IIIII IIIII I years! But by golly, now we know that, like a number of other orbiters, it landed on a concrete runway! The pièce de résistance: 'still others' landed on unpaved dry lake beds!!! No!?! Really?!? That being the key takeaway from this photograph. O - M - G. The bar being exceedingly low, at least it didn’t reference the pretty clouds in the bright blue sky.

Norman E. Thagard was one of five space shuttle astronauts present at the 2012 Astronaut Autograph and Memorabilia Show at KSC whose autograph I did not have in my book. So when my friend, who went to the show in 2010 said he was going again, I gave him my Space Shuttle: 20 Years book and indicated on which page I would like signed.

Thagard flew on five flights: the second flight of Challenger (STS-7, an addition to the crew to study space sickness); two Spacelab flights, 51B/Challenger (Spacelab 3) and 42/Discovery (International Microgravity Laboratory-1); STS-30R/Atlantis, which deployed Magellan, the first planetary probe launched from Shuttle; and STS-71/Atlantis, in which he returned to Earth from the Russian Mir space station.

As part of the latter flight, Thagard was a cosmonaut researcher on the Mir 18 mission, and flew to the Russian space station on Soyuz TM-21 - the first American to fly on Soyuz.

As a contributor, Thagard was also either the No. 40 or 41 person to write an essay for the book. He was the No. 130 overall signature.