Five Shuttle Veterans to Man Next Flight

Navy Capt. Frederick H. Hauck, who led the recovery of two marooned satellites by a space shuttle crew in 1984, was named Friday to command the first flight of the shuttle since the Challenger disaster.

NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher said four other veterans of shuttle missions would make up the crew for the flight, now scheduled for launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Feb. 18, 1988.

Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly, the agency’s associate administrator for space flight, called the crew’s selection “a major event in the process of returning the shuttle to flight.” NASA officials had been eager to have an early announcement of the crew to make them a rallying point for the agency, which is still working its way out of the tragedy’s aftermath.

Training for the flight, which will launch a new tracking and data relay satellite, will begin immediately for the flight crew and the team that will man the mission control center.

Others Chosen

Named for the mission along with Hauck were:

--Air Force Lt. Col. Richard O. Covey, 40, who piloted the shuttle Discovery on a 1985 flight, during which space-walking astronauts repaired an orbiting communications satellite after they had launched two others.

--John M. Lounge, 40, an astrophysicist who was a mission specialist on the same flight, which was called the most successful shuttle mission up to that time.

--George D. (Pinky) Nelson, 36, an astrophysicist who made two “space walks” outside Challenger to repair an inoperative solar observatory in April, 1984. He was also a crew member on the last successful shuttle flight, the Columbia mission that concluded just days before the Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger launching, which ended in a fireball 73 seconds after liftoff.

--David C. Hilmers, 36, a former Marine and a veteran of the secret military mission flown for the Defense Department by the shuttle Atlantis in 1985.

Hauck, a 45-year-old native of Long Beach, had been rumored as the space officials’ choice for the first post-Challenger flight ever since it was disclosed that he was soon leaving his assignment as the space agency’s associate administrator for external affairs in Washington.

Hauck, who is also a nuclear engineer, was brought into NASA headquarters soon after the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger catastrophe strongly recommended that more astronauts be put into space agency management positions.

Upbeat Assessment

As he made the announcement Friday, Fletcher gave one of the most upbeat assessments of NASA’s situation since the accident plunged the agency into disarray nearly a year ago.

“We have turned the corner in our recovery efforts,” he told reporters. “Step by step, in a systematic and orderly way, we are reshaping and rebuilding the agency to prepare the nation for a new era of spaceflight, one more stable, more reliable and safer than before.”

NASA had planned to announce the crew selections at a press conference next week in Houston, but the names were disclosed Friday by Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.

The crew announcement for the upcoming flight, to be carried out by the orbiter Discovery, occurred as NASA officials announced a further beefing up of its headquarters management after a nine-month study by retired Air Force Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, a one-time director of NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program.

100 Recommendations

In his final report to NASA officials at the end of the year, Phillips made about 100 specific recommendations for strengthening agency management.

In one response to the report, Deputy Administrator Dale Myers announced that longtime NASA official Philip E. Culbertson was being named an associate administrator for policy and planning and that Robert Aller, a NASA executive, was being assigned to a newly created post as associate administrator for spaceflight operations. Another associate administrator’s position is being established for policy, and another to oversee institutional matters.

Myers said officials “endorse the report wholeheartedly” and plan to have “almost all” of the recommendations implemented or under way by the end of the year.

At the same time that the solid rocket boosters blamed for the Challenger tragedy are being redesigned and tested, Fletcher said, the shuttle’s main engines are undergoing their most rigorous testing. Last month, he said, the engines were test-fired 10 times for a total of 5,350 seconds, “the longest period of testing since we started flying.”