![]() Commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson (far right) leads Pilot Guy Gardner and Mission Specialists Bill Shepherd, Mike Mullane and Jerry Ross out of the Operations & Checkout (O&C) Building to Pad 39B on launch morning. ![]() And it was not until after STS-27 ended that the crew-and flight controllers-became fully aware of how close they came to death. The events of the next few days would highlight how fine the line was between success and failure on a shuttle mission. Nine minutes later, the astronauts reached space, albeit not safely. Next day, conditions were more suitable, and Atlantis sprang from Pad 39B to begin her third orbital voyage. Launch was originally targeted for 1 December 1988, but was scrubbed, due to unacceptable cloud cover and strong winds at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Not for five years after the mission were the crew permitted to reveal even the slimmest of facts: that they utilized the shuttle’s Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System (RMS) to deploy their classified payload. “It constrains you significantly on how and where you can do business,” Ross told a NASA oral historian, adding that he sometimes could not even tell his wife where he was going or when he might be home. Years later, in his memoir, Riding Rockets, Mullane remembered that the flight software was classified, and Ross noted that they worked in secured training facilities, which were electronically “swept” to ensure no inadvertent electronic or voice signals getting in or out. As a secret mission, not even the launch time of STS-27 was released until 24 hours prior to T-0. ![]() During their training, they earned the nickname “Swine Flight” from the astronaut office secretaries, and were even given novelty pigs’ snouts, as a result of Gibson’s penchant for making animal-like snorts whenever attractive women were in the vicinity. Gardner, Mullane and Ross had been training at the time of Challenger’s loss to fly the first shuttle mission out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., whilst Gibson and Shepherd were new additions. The crew had been announced a year earlier, in September 1987. STS-27 astronauts Jerry Ross (seated) and Bill Shepherd, pictured during training in February 1988. Although that objective apparently proceeded without significant incident, the mysterious flight of STS-27 earned a place in the history books, when the hands of fate unexpectedly turned against the astronauts and brought them within a hair’s breadth of disaster. Two months earlier, her sister Discovery had brought the fleet back to active service and the task of the five STS-27 astronauts-Commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson, Pilot Guy Gardner and Mission Specialists Mike Mullane, Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd-was to deploy a classified payload on behalf of the Department of Defense. EST on 2 December 1988, Atlantis rocketed into crystal-blue Florida skies to begin the second shuttle mission in the wake of the Challenger tragedy. Atlantis roars to orbit on the morning of 2 December 1988, 30 years ago today.
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