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Richard O. Covey
Richard O. Covey orbited four times aboard Space Shuttles, including two very high-profile flights - as pilot of the first launch after the Challenger disaster and as commander of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission.
He was born in Fayetteville, Ark., in 1946, and received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Sciences, with a major in Aeronautical Engineering, from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1968 and a Master of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University in 1969. He earned his Air Force wings and from 1970 to 1974 he was an operational fighter pilot, flying the F-100, A-37 and A-7D. In this period he flew 339 combat missions during two tours in Southeast Asia. At Eglin AFB, Fla., from 1975 to 1978, he was an F-4 and A-7D weapons system test pilot and joint test force director for electronic warfare testing of the F-15.
NASA selected Covey as an astronaut candidate in 1978. His first shuttle flight was as pilot of Discovery, which lifted off in August 1985 with five crew members on a satellite deploy and repair mission. Early on, the astronauts successfully released communications satellites for the Australian government and for American Satellite Co. On Day 3, they deployed Leasat 4, a sister satellite to the Leasat 3 Navy communications payload they hoped to repair later in the flight. Leasat 4 shot into its planned orbit, but it failed to operate because of a faulty transmission cable, and the Navy wrote it off as an $84 million loss. Then Commander Joe Engle and Covey guided Discovery during to a rendezvous with Leasat 3, ailing in orbit for four months because of a wiring problem. During two complex space walks, William Fisher and James "Ox" van Hoften repaired the payload and set it loose for a useful life.
After Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members, NASA initiated a multi-million dollar overhaul of the remaining shuttle fleet to correct many flaws in the system. When shuttles were ready to return to flight in 1988, the space agency selected five veteran shuttle fliers to test the redesigned spacecraft. The commander was Frederick H. "Rick" Hauck, with Covey seated beside him as pilot. Excitement, tempered by memories of Challenger, built as the countdown entered the final hours on September 29, 1988, and more than a quarter million people and 2,400 news media were gathered in the Kennedy Space Center area. Discovery lifted off flawlessly, and at the White House, President Ronald Reagan declared, "America is back in space." Six hours into the flight, the astronauts deployed a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, like one destroyed in the Challenger disaster. During four days in orbit, the crew tested more than 200 design changes made to the shuttle. A day before they returned to Earth, they paid an emotional tribute to the Challenger astronauts.
Covey's first shuttle command, aboard Atlantis in 1990, received far less attention than Discovery's "return to flight" mission. That's because it was a dedicated military flight during which the five-person crew conducted Defense Department operations during five days aloft. NASA and the Pentagon revealed little about the flight. But the spotlight was on Covey again in 1993 when he was in command of Endeavour as it took off in pursuit of the Hubble Space Telescope on the most difficult space repair mission ever attempted. Hubble, hailed as astronomy's most advanced observatory, was launched by another shuttle crew in 1990, with scientists hoping to observe space objects 10 times more clearly than terrestrial instruments. But Hubble relayed blurred pictures and engineers calculated that the telescope's mirror had been ground to the wrong specifications and that there were camera flaws. Fixes were devised, and Endeavour's flight captured the public's imagination, as millions around the world watched extensive television coverage as Covey chased down Hubble and "parked" within 35 feet, close enough for the crew to grab it with the robot arm and berth it in the shuttle's cargo bay. Viewers watched spellbound as four astronauts, working in teams (Jeff Hoffman and Story Musgrave; Tom Akers and Kathy Thornton) took a record five space walks totaling 35 hours 28 minutes. They successfully completed one fix after another and then set the 13-ton telescope loose. After reviewing new images, Hubble managers declared he spacecraft even better than intended.
After leaving NASA, Covey served as President of the Boeing Service Company in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In January 2006, he left Boeing and was named Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of United Space Alliance (USA).
Richard Covey was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on May 1, 2004.