STS-75

STS-75 was Columbia's February-March 1996 Space Shuttle mission for the Tethered Satellite System Reflight and the third United States Microgravity Payload. NASA lists Andrew Allen as commander, Scott Horowitz as pilot, Franklin Chang-Diaz as payload commander, Jeffrey Hoffman, Maurizio Cheli, and Claude Nicollier as mission specialists, and Umberto Guidoni as payload specialist. Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39B on February 22, 1996, and landed on Runway 33 at the Shuttle Landing Facility on March 9. The TSS-1R payload revisited the NASA and Italian Space Agency tether experiment first attempted on STS-46. The crew deployed more than 19 kilometers of tether and returned valuable electrodynamics and plasma data, but the tether snapped before full deployment and the satellite was lost. The mission also carried USMP-3, a set of microgravity investigations in materials science and condensed-matter physics that operated normally and added laboratory data from Columbia's extended stay in orbit. Updating this mission replaces a one-person production stub with the complete seven-person crew, Columbia, the correct launch and landing sites, Shuttle family metadata, partner organizations, and source-backed context for the mixed TSS/USMP outcome.