Verification Flight Test Two

Sixty-seven miles (108 kilometres) above the home planet, racing to orbit at a dozen times the speed of sound—six times faster than a bullet—everything in the world dropped out six minutes into the Spacelab-2 mission. It was the afternoon of 29 July 1985 and Shuttle Challenger had just launched with a seven-man crew. Theirs was the second Spacelab Verification Flight Test to evaluate a ‘train’ of three unpressurised pallets, laden with solar physics, space plasma physics and astrophysics instruments.