crew As an incentive for a spacecraft owner to contract with NASA to use a Shuttle launch instead of an unmanned, commercial launch system,
NASA permitted contracting companies to apply for a payload specialist seat on the same mission. When RCA contracted with NASA to launch Satcom Ku-1,
RCA Astro-Electronics' manager of systems engineering for the Satcom-K program Bob Cenker, and his co-worker
Gerard Magilton, were selected to train as
payload specialists so that one of the pair could accompany Satcom Ku-1 into space. Cenker and Magilton trained with career astronauts as well as other payload and mission specialists, including those scheduled for the next scheduled flight, that of the
Challenger mission,
STS-51-L. This flight of
Columbia was originally scheduled to occur in August 1985, but the timeline slipped. In July 1985 the payload was finalized to include the RCA satellite, and Cenker was assigned to the mission, now designated as
STS-61-C. Magilton was assigned as the back-up. Prior to its successful launch,
Columbia had several aborted launch attempts, including one on January 6 which was "one of the most hazardous in the Shuttle’s operational history" to that point. As documented in Crewmember Bill Nelson's book "Mission: An American Congressman's Voyage to Space", and as reported in Spaceflight Insider, "The launch attempt on Jan. 6, 1986 was halted at T-31 seconds. The weather was perfect for the scheduled launch at dawn, but a failure of a liquid oxygen drain valve prevented it to close properly. The valve was then closed manually, but not quickly enough to prevent a low temperature in one fuel line." However, Nelson says that what really happened was that "the valve did not close because it was not commanded to close", and that it was later determined that the
Rogers Commission, investigating the series of mistakes that forced this second scrub, recognized that the problems were personnel-related, caused by fatigue from overwork: One potentially catastrophic human error occurred 4 minutes 55 seconds before the scheduled launch of mission 61-C on January 6, 1986. According to a
Lockheed Space Operations Company incident report, 18,000 pounds of
liquid oxygen were inadvertently drained from the
Shuttle external fuel tank due to operator error. Fortunately, the liquid oxygen flow dropped the main engine inlet temperature below the acceptable limit causing a launch hold, but only 31 seconds before lift-off. As the report states, "Had the mission not been scrubbed, the ability of the orbiter to reach a defined orbit may have been significantly impacted. There was another near-catastrophic launch abort three days later. Referring to the January 9 abort, pilot Charlie Bolden later stated that it "...would have been catastrophic, because the engine would have exploded had we launched. In all, it took a record eight attempts to get
Columbia off the ground.
Columbia finally launched and achieved orbit on January 12, 1986, with a full crew of seven. Along with Cenker, the crew included
Robert L. "Hoot" Gibson, future NASA Administrator
Charles F. Bolden,
George D. Nelson,
Steven A. Hawley,
Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, and
US Representative Bill Nelson. Cenker and his crewmates traveled over 2.5 million miles in 98
orbits aboard Columbia and logged over 146 hours in
space. During the six-day mission, January 12–18, Cenker performed a variety of physiological tests, operated a primary experiment – an infrared imaging camera – and assisted with the deployment of
RCA Americom's Satcom Ku-1 satellite, the primary mission objective. Satcom Ku-1 was deployed nearly 10 hours into the mission, and Satcom later reached its designated
geostationary orbital position at 85 degrees West longitude where it remained operational until April 1997, the last major commercial satellite deployed by the Space Shuttle program. In a 2014 video of the "Tell Me a Story" series titled "Close My Eyes & Drift Away", posted to the
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex YouTube channel, Cenker tells a humorous story regarding a
zero-g sleeping problem he faced on his mission. The next Shuttle launch, ten days after the return of
Columbia, resulted in the destruction of the
Challenger with the loss of all aboard, including Cenker's counterpart from
Hughes Aircraft, civilian crew member and Payload Specialist
Greg Jarvis. Accordingly, commander Gibson later called the STS-61-C mission "The End of Innocence" for the Shuttle program. Following the Challenger disaster, the Shuttle fleet was grounded until 1988. Even after Shuttle missions resumed, civilian payload specialists like Cenker were excluded until the payload specialist program was reinstated on December 2, 1990, when
Samuel T. Durrance, an
Applied Physics Laboratory astrophysicist and
Ronald A. Parise, a
Computer Sciences Corporation astronomer, flew aboard
STS-35. By that time, RCA had been purchased by
General Electric, and RCA Astro-Electronics became part of GE. Following two additional ownership transitions, the facility was closed in 1998. As a result, Cenker was the only RCA Astro-Electronics employee, and only employee in the history of the facility under all of its subsequent names, to ever fly in space. NASA's Payload Specialist program has been criticized for giving limited Shuttle flight positions to civilian aerospace engineers such as Cenker and Greg Jarvis (killed aboard
Challenger), politicians such as Bill Nelson, and other civilians such as
Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe (also killed aboard
Challenger). Even the flight of former
Mercury astronaut and US Senator
John Glenn was questioned. The concern was that these people had replaced career astronauts in very limited flight opportunities, and some may have flown without fully understanding the level of danger involved in a Shuttle mission. ==Post-spaceflight==