Bidspirit auction | Astronaut Charles Walker signed Space

Astronaut Charles Walker signed Space Shuttle FDC PM Kula, HI Aug 30 AM 1984 96790. Missions STS-41-D STS-51-D STS-61-B. STS-4 demonstrated the difficulty of Walker assisting astronauts with the complex CFES device. He and others could not speak directly to the space shuttle; the capsule communicator and two other people approved and relayed all messages to space. McDonnell Douglas proposed that Walker fly as a payload specialist to operate the CFES himself. NASA calculated that flying Walker would cost McDonnell Douglas $40,000 per flight, and in May 1983 he was assigned to STS-41-D. Walker's flight was part of a NASA effort in the 1980s to fly civilians on the shuttle. Although Europeans were training for Spacelab Payload Specialist duties, Walker remained a McDonnell Douglas employee, and commuted between company headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Training included a flight on a Northrop T-38 Talon jet trainer aircraft, and about 40 flights on the ””Vomit Comet””. He later stated that his experience showed that a ””working passenger”” could fly after an abbreviated training program of a few months. Although Walker believed at the time that 41-D would be his only flight, he also accompanied the CFES equipment on STS-51-D, and STS-61-B, accumulating 20 days of experience in space and traveling 8.2 million miles. Aboard these Space Shuttle missions Walker also performed early protein crystal growth experiments and participated as a test subject in numerous medical studies. He began training fellow McDonnell Douglas employee Robert Wood to fly on STS-61-M in 1986, and expected to fly at least once more himself, perhaps on Space Station Freedom, before the destruction of Challenger in January 1986 ended commercial shuttle payloads.