Atlantis roars into the night on 15 November 1990, 25 years ago, tomorrow, to begin the secretive mission of STS-38.
In spite of its relatively benign appearance on paper, the assignment exposed Covey to the innermost details of the most secret missions ever undertaken by the shuttle fleet. For Covey, the assignment did not come as a complete surprise, for in early 1989 he had replaced Brewster Shaw as the Astronaut Office’s lead representative on the DoD shuttle missions. Springer had flown one previous mission, and Covey two, whilst their crewmates were all embarking on their first flights. Its crew-Commander Dick Covey, Pilot Frank Culbertson, and Mission Specialists Charles “Sam” Gemar, Bob Springer, and Carl Meade-were announced by NASA on and entered a standard 12-month training regime.
But as with so many aspects of these classified missions, real events and rumors have become strangely juxtaposed and there can be little doubt that it will be many more years before any hard facts about this mysterious flight see the light of day.Īs outlined in a previous AmericaSpace series of articles, available here and here, STS-38 was originally targeted for launch in May 1990, but fell victim to a fleetwide series of hydrogen leaks which plagued Atlantis and Columbia.
To this day, the exact details of what the five-man STS-38 crew did during their five days in orbit remain enshrouded in secrecy. Against this stormy backdrop of an impending war which would define a generation, as well as set the groundwork for later assaults on Iraq and the eventual overthrow of Saddam, in November 1990-25 years ago, next week- Atlantis rocketed into orbit on the seventh classified shuttle mission for the Department of Defense. Photo Credit: NASA, via Joachim Becker/Ī quarter-century ago, the world stood on the brink of outright conflict in the Middle East, following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. The STS-38 crew consisted of (from left) Pilot Frank Culbertson, Mission Specialists Carl Meade, Bob Springer and Sam Gemar, and Commander Dick Covey.