Sunday 14 March 2021

mir eo-18

Becoming one of the founding mission specialists that would establish the space shuttle programme in 1979 and subsequently flying four missions on board Challenger, Atlantis and Discovery, NASA astronaut Norman Earl Thagard became on this day in 1995 the first US citizen to reach Earth orbit in a Russian craft (see also), traveling with the crew of the Soyuz TM-21 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, effectively the first American cosmonaut for his fifth and last spaceflight. As researcher, Thagard spent six months aboard the space station Mir conducting a battery of experiments and presently teaches engineering and acts as a technical advisor for filmmakers producing space-based movies.