Forty years ago, in 1983, the Space Shuttle Columbia flew its first international spaceflight, STS-9. The mission included—for the first time—the European Space Agency’s Spacelab pressurized module and featured more than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese scientists. Europeans were particularly proud of this “remarkable step” because “NASA, the most famous space agency on the globe,” included the laboratory on an early Shuttle mission. NASA was equally thrilled with the Spacelab and called the effort “history’s largest and most comprehensive multinational space project.” The Spacelab became a unifying force for all the participating nations, scientists, and astronauts. As explained by one of the mission’s payload specialists, Ulf Merbold, while the principal investigators for the onboard experiments might be British or French, “there is no French science, and no British science [on this flight]. Science in itself is international.” Scientists flying on the mission, and those who had experiments on board, were working cooperatively for the benefit of humanity. As then Vice-President George H. W. Bush explained, “The knowledge Spacelab will bring back from its many missions will belong to all mankind.”
The knowledge Spacelab will bring back from its many missions will belong to all mankind.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
U.S. Vice President (1981–1989)
Training for the flight required international cooperation on an entirely new scale for the American space program. Today it is not unusual to hear about an astronaut training for spaceflight at many different locations and facilities across the globe. NASA’s astronauts have grown accustomed to training outside of the United States for months at a time before flying onboard the International Space Station, but that was not the experience for most of NASA’s flight crews in the agency’s early spaceflight programs. Mission training mainly took place in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) and in Florida at the Cape. The Apollo-era featured only one international flight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), with astronauts training in the two participating nations: the USSR and the United States.
