One of the crew members on STS-77 was Canadian Mission Specialist Marc Garneau. Garneau was the first Canadian to fly in space back in 1984 on mission STS-41G.Other STS-77 crewmembers would tease him that it was such a long time ago, that it must have been back in the Apollo program days.The name "Apollo" stuck and slowly but surely, all the crew members were given nicknames of mythological gods. Of course, commander John Casper became the supreme god Zeus after the famous Greek inhabitant of Olympus. Pilot Curt Brown became Saturn. Saturn is the somethimes cantankerous Roman god of agriculture and since Brown is part owner of a Texas farm and can be said to share some personality traits with Saturn, the crew bestowed that name on him. Mission Specialist Andy Thomas name had appeared on numerous mission related documents as Andy Thoron before the error was caught, so he immediately became the Norse god of thunder, Thor. Mario Runco was named for the Roman god of the sea, Neptune, because of his professional background in oceanography. Dan Burch was initially nicknamed Pan for the Greek god of flocks and shepherds as he was the one who seemed to arrange for the crew's social gatherings. However, since Burch was the shortest member of the crew, the original reference to Pan was quickly lost and was displaced by a reference to the cute but impish figure of Pan from Walt Disney's movie "Fantasia". Later it was changed to Bacchus for the Greco-Roman god of wine to recapture the social reference. (text by, Jacques van Oene and Bert Vis)
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