In 1993, the German astronaut Hans Schlegel launched into space with the Spacelab as part of the D2 mission. Many of the rules and procedures that were developed during the development and construction of the Spacelab have found their way into the processes that are still used to develop and build space equipment in Germany, at DLR and in Europe today.
Image: 1/2, Credit:
NASA
Astronaut Ulrich Walter shows the weightlessness in the Spacelab during the D2 mission in 1993.
26.04. - 06.05.1993 on STS-55 Columbia German Astronauts: H. Schlegel, U. Walter
D-2 was the second Spacelab (SL) mission under German mission management in the year 1993. Payload co-ordination and control was performed from GSOC as a Payload Operation Control Centre (POCC). More than 200 experimenters, performing some 90 scientific experiments, were located in the POCC during the mission. A remote User Support Centre (DLR/MUSC in Cologne for telescience operations) and several Experiment Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) were connected to the POCC. D-2 was a multi-disciplinary mission covering the fields of material- and life-sciences mainly dedicated to µg-research and also technology, automatics and robotics, earth and space observation experiments with experimenters from Europe, Japan and the United States.
