STS-95 Mission Highlights

On Oct. 29, 1998, astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn launched as a payload specialist aboard space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-95 as part of a seven-person crew including Commander Curtis Brown, Pilot Steven Lindsey, Mission Specialists Scott Parazynski, Stephen Robinson and Pedro Duque, and Payload Specialist Chiaki Mukai. At the age of 77, Glenn was the oldest person to date to fly in space. During the nine-day mission, Glenn’s presence on the flight provided valuable data on how weightlessness affected him compared to his experience 36 years earlier on his Friendship 7 flight. Medical data also gathered on the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on the elderly. Mission objectives included a variety of science experiments, the deployment and retrieval of the Spartan free-flyer payload, and operations with the Hubble Space Telescope Orbiting Systems Test (HOST) and the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker payloads.