Charles D. Walker - NASA Activities

NASA Activities

STS-4 demonstrated the difficulty of Walker assisting astronauts with the complex CFES device. He and others could not speak directly to the shuttle; the capsule communicator and two other people approved and relayed all messages to space. McDonnell Douglas proposed that Walker fly as a Payload Specialist to operate the CFES himself. NASA calculated that flying Walker would cost McDonnell Douglas $40,000 per flight, and in May 1983 he was assigned to STS-41-D.

Walker's flight was part of a NASA effort in the 1970s and early 1980s to fly civilians on the shuttle. Although Europeans were training for Spacelab Payload Specialist duties, he was the first non government-affiliated person in space. Walker remained a McDonnell Douglas employee, and commuted between company headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Training included a flight on a Northrop T-38 Talon jet trainer aircraft, and about 40 flights on the "Vomit Comet". He later stated that his experience showed that a "working passenger" could fly after an abbreviated training program of a few months.

Although Walker believed at the time that 41-D would be his only flight, he also accompanied the CFES equipment on STS-51-D, and STS-61-B, accumulating 20 days of experience in space and traveling 8.2 million miles. Aboard these Space Shuttle missions Walker also performed early protein crystal growth experiments and participated as a test subject in numerous medical studies. He began training fellow McDonnell Douglas employee Robert Wood to fly on STS-61-M in 1986, and expected to fly at least once more himself, perhaps on Space Station Freedom, before the destruction of Challenger in January 1986 ended commercial shuttle payloads.

Since 1986 Walker has served in various NASA study and review team capacities including as a member of the NASA Microgravity Material Science Assessment Task Force, the NASA Space Station Office Quick-is-Beautiful/Rapid Response Research Study Group, and the NASA Space Station Operations Task Force. He has served on the national panels of the NASA/Industry Manned Flight Awareness Program and the NASA/Industry Education Initiative. He also makes a public appearance occasionally to sign memorabilia at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and also appears for the complex's "Lunch with an Astronaut" program.