History
The program was conceived by NASA's Shuttle program manager John Yardley, and announced in the fall of 1976. It was canceled after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003. The last Getaway Special, which was carried aboard STS-107, was the Freestar experiment package, which carried six different experiments. Much of the data was lost when Columbia was destroyed, but some data was transmitted during the mission.
After reorganization of the Shuttle Program, NASA cited the need for the remaining shuttle fleet to complete assembly of the ISS to justify its decision to cancel the program. The GAS program canisters and GAS Bridge combined weight were only usable on low orbit missions, which were rescheduled with higher priority payloads. With payload and program limits set on the remaining shuttle missions until the expected STS close-out in 2010, the GAS program was eliminated.
| # | Shuttle Flight | Experiment | Organization |
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | STS-3 | Flight Verification Payload | NASA |
| G001 | STS-4 | The First Flight | NASA |
| G026 | STS-5 | German Materials Processing | |
| G005 | STS-6 | Japanese Snowflakes | |
| G049 | STS-6 | Air Force Cadets | |
| G381 | STS-6 | Exposing Seeds to Space | |
| G002 | STS-7 | German Students | |
| G009 | STS-7 | Purdue University Students | |
| G012 | STS-7 | New Jersey Students | |
| G033 | STS-7 | Cal Tech Students | |
| G093R | STS-88 | Vortex Ring Transit Experiment | University of Michigan |
| G093 | STS-89 | Vortex Ring Transit Experiment | University of Michigan |
Read more about this topic: Getaway Special
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)