Interview: Hoot Gibson July 11, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration, Video Interviews.Tags: Space Shuttle
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We continue our astronaut video interview series with Hoot Gibson, five-time shuttle astronaut. The only orbiter that Gibson didn’t get to know from the inside is Discovery, which is now in the Orbiter Processing Facility as part of its journey to the National Air & Space Museum. Gibson flew on the shuttle’s 50th flight, a Spacelab mission in 1992 that included among its crew the first Japanese astronaut. Gibson’s final shuttle flight was on Atlantis, which is currently in orbit on the last space shuttle flight ever. That mission, STS-71 in 1995, was the first to dock with the Russian Space Station Mir.
Gibson participated in the investigation of the Challenger accident and, with Lofty Ambitions guest blogger Allan McDonald (click HERE for guest post), in the redesign of the shuttle’s solid rocket booster (which we saw up close today!).
Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson is married to astronaut Rhea Seddon, whose interview we posted a couple of weeks ago (click HERE for that one). Gibson left NASA in 1996 for the private sector.
Don’t mean to be petty, but don’t you mean Spacelab rather than Skylab? Unless it’s still secretly up there, of course.
Thanks for catching the typo. We made the correction. We’re running on very little sleep, and we had to rush off to an awesome interview with Stephanie Stilson, the NASA manager for transitioning the orbiters from flight ready to museum ready. (A Skylab mention dates us, doesn’t it?).