Marine Corps and Early NASA Career
Overmyer entered active duty with the Marine Corps in January 1958. After completing Navy flight training in Kingsville, Texas, he was assigned to VMA-214 in November 1959. Overmyer was assigned to the Naval Postgraduate School in 1962 to study aeronautical engineering. Upon completion of his graduate studies, he served one year with Marine Maintenance Squadron 17 at MCAS Iwakuni, Japan. He was then assigned to the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Colonel Overmyer was chosen as an astronaut for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Program in 1966. Colonel Overmyer logged over 7,500 flight hours, with over 6,000 in jet aircraft.
The MOL program was canceled in 1969, and soon afterward Overmyer was selected as a NASA astronaut. His first assignment with NASA was engineering development duties on the Skylab Program from 1969 to 1971. From 1971 to 1972, he was a support crew member for Apollo 17 and was the launch capsule communicator. From 1973 to 1975, he was a support crew member for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and was the NASA capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in the mission control center in Moscow. In 1976, he was assigned duties on the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) Program and was the prime T-38 Talon chase pilot for Orbiter Free-Flights 1 and 3. In 1979 Colonel Overmyer was assigned as the Deputy Vehicle Manager of OV-102 (Columbia) in charge of finishing the manufacturing and tiling of Columbia at the Kennedy Space Center preparing it for its first flight. This assignment lasted until Columbia was transported to the launch pad in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Robert F. Overmyer
Famous quotes containing the words marine, corps, early, nasa and/or career:
“People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create something the size of NASA to make one.”
—H. Ross Perot (b. 1930)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)