STS-60

STS-60 was Discovery's February 1994 mission carrying SPACEHAB-2 and the first Wake Shield Facility flight. Charles Bolden commanded the six-person crew, with Kenneth Reightler as pilot and Franklin Chang-Diaz, N. Jan Davis, Ronald Sega, and Sergei Krikalev as mission specialists. Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A on February 3, 1994, and landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility on February 11 after 8 days, 7 hours, and 9 minutes in orbit. The flight marked the first Space Shuttle mission to include a Russian cosmonaut as a crew member and became the opening mission of the Shuttle-Mir cooperation era. Krikalev's role aboard Discovery connected NASA and the Russian Space Agency operationally before the later Shuttle-Mir dockings, and the crew conducted joint medical and radiological investigations along with high-profile U.S.-Russian communications events during the flight. STS-60 also carried a busy science and technology payload set. SPACEHAB-2 operated a group of materials, life-science, and space-dust experiments, while the Wake Shield Facility was intended to create an ultra-clean vacuum wake for semiconductor thin-film growth. Deployment issues kept WSF-1 attached to the Shuttle's robotic arm rather than free flying, but the crew still grew five of the planned films and returned the hardware safely. Additional Get Away Special payloads, ODERACS radar-calibration spheres, BREMSAT, and other experiments rounded out the mission's research program.