Ten years ago today — November 23, 2002 — the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center en route to the International Space Station.
(The shuttle’s cargo bay during STS-113, with the limb of the earth providing the main illumination. NASA image.)
Mission STS-113 astronauts Paul Lockhart, James B. Wetherbee, Michael E. Lopez-Alegria, John B. Herrington, Kenneth B. Bowersox, and Donald R. Pettit, along with cosmonaut Nikolai M. Budarin, delivered and installed the P1 truss on the space station. This mission also exchanged the ISS Expedition Five crew — cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergei Treschev and astronaut Peggy Whitson — with the Expedition Six crew — Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin.
Also on this date, 35 years ago, the European Space Agency’s Meteosat 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket as part of the Global Atmospheric Research Program.
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