Even for veteran astronauts, October’s shuttle mission was unusual. When Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, more than 250,000 people -- including President Clinton -- watched the launch in Florida. For the first time in more than a decade, the nation was caught up in the drama of space travel.
“I’m really happy with the outcome of the flight,” says Scott Parazynski, ’83, MD ’89, who along with Steve Robinson, MS ’85, PhD ’91, and four other crewmembers accompanied John Glenn on his return to space after almost 36 years. Robinson and Parazynski were two of the 17 Stanford astronauts profiled in the magazine’s March/April 1998 issue (“The Voyagers”).
It wasn’t until they returned to Earth that Parazynski and Robinson grasped the impact the flight had on public awareness of space travel. “We were kind of shocked by the welcome back home,” Parazynski says. “It’s sort of overwhelming.” A week after Discovery touched down, the crew rode through the streets of New York for a ticker-tape parade. Parazynski brought along a home video camera and his family -- wife, Gail, and son, Luke, 2. “New Yorkers usually don’t make eye contact with you -- and all of a sudden, there were hundreds of thousands cheering for our flight,” he says. “It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
