Ken Bowersox
- STS -50 ( 1992)
- STS -61 (1993)
- STS -73 (1995)
- STS -82 (1997)
- STS-113/Sojus TMA-1 (2002/ 2003) ISS Expedition 6
Kenneth Duane " Ken " Bowersox ( born November 14, 1956 in Portsmouth, Virginia ) is a former American astronaut.
Training
Bowersox grew up in Bedford (Indiana) up, left in 1974, the High School and attended the United States Naval Academy in Maryland. With a bachelor as aviation and aerospace engineer, he finished his studies in 1978. In the same year he received his commission by the U.S. Navy, followed by a degree in mechanical engineering with a master's degree in 1979 at Columbia University.
Military career
Then Bowersox was trained as a Navy pilot. In 1981 he was assigned to the attack squadron 22, the members of "Fighting Redcocks " call themselves. Stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, he flew missions with the Vought A- 7E " Corsair II". Among other things, the unity between September 1982 and May 1983 was patrolling in the Pacific.
Bowersox attended the Test Pilot School of the U.S. Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base in 1985 and put the exam off. Then he was at the weapons testing center of the Navy on the edge of the Mojave Desert operates. One and a half years he worked at China Lake as a test pilot with machines of the type A- 7E and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18.
NASA activities
Bowersox came with the twelfth astronaut group in June 1987 to NASA. He was one of seven candidates for the position of the shuttle pilots. The one-year basic training was completed in the fall of 1988.
STS -50
The end of 1990 was Bowersox, who is nicknamed " Sox ", prepared for its first flight in the near-earth orbit. Originally he was to work on STS- 50 in the function of a mission specialist. As a pilot, John Casper was assigned to another flight, Bowersox took over his place. The mission took place in the summer of 1992 and was known as the " United States Microgravity Laboratory " ( USML ). In the 13 days and 19 hours to go the longest shuttle flight experiments in the fields of materials science, process engineering and fluid physics were carried out.
STS -61
Bowersox 's second deployment as a pilot was made with STS -61 in December 1993. It was the first repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST ). The primary mirror of the three and a half years previously started observatory was faulty, resulting in blurred images. Five outboard work ( EVAs ) and four subjects were required to install the correction instrument and the COSTAR WF / PC II camera. Furthermore, the solar panels have been replaced for the power supply for the HST.
STS -73
Three years after the first USML company's follow-on mission was carried out in October / November 1995. Bowersox was appointed commander of STS- 73. Many of the experiments carried out on the 16-day Spacelab flight were already on STS -50 here.
STS -82
STS -82 was the second HST repair flight. This time headed Bowersox the ten-day mission in February 1997. As with STS -61 five EVAs were performed (only four were planned). In addition to a tape recorder, which was replaced with a core memory, the HST received the infrared camera and the spectroscope NICMOS STIS. For two spectrographs were expanded.
End of 1997, Bowersox was appointed commander of the third resident crew of the International Space Station (ISS ). He trained with his Russian colleagues Dezhurov and Tyurin until two years later, surprisingly astronaut Culbertson took over the position of Bowersox.
ISS Expedition 6
Since the spring of 2001, Bowersox 6 prepared as commander of ISS expedition for a six-month deployment to the space station. Together with Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin he started with the shuttle mission STS -113 end of November 2002 in the direction of the ISS. With Flight Engineer Pettit he undertook two exits: mid-January 2003, she worked at the P1 carrier and took early April before servicing. After 156 days, the three astronauts returned aboard Soyuz TMA-1 back to Earth.
Bowersox is facing since March 2004 the Flight Crew Operations Directorate and decides on the composition of space flight crews at NASA.
Private
He and his four years younger wife Ann have three sons.