Earthgazers

Years after it should have taken place, Owen Garriott did not recall doing much training for a Shuttle mission he never flew. On the day that Challenger vanished in a fireball in the cold Florida sky, Garriott was eight months away from launching on a flight like no other: the only Spacelab mission ever manifested with a ‘short’ pressurised module—the nine-feet-long (2.7-metre) ‘core’ segment, minus the ‘experiment’ segment (see Chapter Three)—and single pallet, a mission which began life as a pair of missions, later merged into one. The Earth Observation Mission (EOM), first planned in 1983, foresaw multiple flights of instruments previously demonstrated on Spacelab-1 for solar physics, astronomy, space plasma physics, atmospheric physics and Earth observations.