Expedition One commander William (Bill) Shepherd poses for a photo in the Zvezda Service module of the International Space Station Alpha. Credit: NASA
Did someone call for a contractor? william shepherd
Another Navy Astronaut, William
Shepherd, was born July 26, 1948
in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. However
if you ask him, he calls Babylon,
New York his hometown. He too attended the U.S. Naval Academy
where he earned a Bachelor of
Science degree in aerospace engineering. However, unlike many of
his fellow Navy astronauts, he did
not go down the path of a pilot,
instead he served with the Navy’s
Underwater Demolition Team Eleven,
SEAL Teams One and Two, and
Special Boat Unit Twenty. This was
a much different path to becoming an astronaut then most other
Navy astronauts before him.
Captain Shepherd was selected
as an astronaut in 1984 and went on
to fly three Space Shuttle missions.
STS-27, his first mission was a mission for the Department of Defense.
Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on
December 2nd, 1988 on a 4 day mission. In its payload bay was a satellite named ONYX, the mission was to
simply release it into orbit, however
upon release, one of the antenna
dishes failed to deploy. The crew
retrieved and repaired the satellite before releasing it once again.
Repairing the satellite would have
required an unscheduled spacewalk
which Shepherd and fellow crew
member Jerry Ross would have had
to perform. But that’s all just speculation, in truth, only the Astronauts and
some people at NASA and the DoD
really know what happened since
the mission, was, and still is, classified.
His next mission would be STS-41,
while not a classified mission, it was
never the less, very important. On
board was the European Space
Agency’s Ulysses spacecraft which
they were to send on a mission to the
sun to explore its polar regions. The
mission was a success, Ulysses made
it to the Sun and spent 18 years orbiting our star carrying out its studies.
His last Space Shuttle mission
would be on STS-52 which launched
on October 22nd, 1992. The primary mission was the deployment
of the Laser Geodynamic Satellite
also known as LAGEOS-II. Other
mission experiments were also
performed and Columbia returned
to a landing at the Kennedy Space
Center on November 1st, 1992 after a highly successful mission.
That, however, was not the end
of Captain Shepherd’s career as an
Astronaut. He did fly one more time
aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft,
blasting off on October 31st, 2000,
and docking to the newly born
International Space Station two
days later. He and his crew of two
Russian Cosmonauts spent almost
6 months as the very 1st crew to
man the orbiting outpost. They were
responsible for getting everything
working inside and preparing the
station for future crews and future
expansion of the outpost. This was
quite the daunting task to say the
least, which could be why NASA
put an Ex-Navy SEAL in command.
Captain Shepherd returned to Earth
aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery
on March 21st, 2001. That would be
his last time flying in a spacecraft,
as he retired from NASA in 2002,
but you can go outside and see his
work flying overhead still today.
11
www.RocketSTEM .org 11