Between 30 October and 6 November 1985, these three European astronauts served as payload specialists (science astronauts) on the first spaceflight with a crew of eight (STS-61A still holds the record for the largest crew aboard any single spacecraft for the entire period from launch to landing).
This was only the fourth flight of Spacelab, the ESA-designed laboratory module carried in the Shuttle’s payload bay, but this was the first time that an entire payload was controlled from outside NASA’s mission control centres.
Wubbo Ockels working in Spacelab D1 during the STS-61A flight called the Spacelab D1 mission, it was the first to have German mission management and to be controlled from the German Space Operations Centre of the German Institute of Aviation and Spaceflight Research and Development (DFVLR, a precursor of present-day DLR) at Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich.
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