On 26 July 2005, Wendy Lawrence suited up and boarded the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She and her six fellow crew members were headed for the International Space Station.
They had spent a year and a half training and preparing for this mission. It was the first since 1 February 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing all seven crew members aboard—colleagues that Lawrence had known and worked with.
Since the accident, NASA had been researching and implementing improvements. Lawrence and her colleagues on the STS-114 mission were continuing that research by testing safety procedures and repair techniques. Lawrence flew the space station’s robotic arm during two of the mission’s three spacewalks, and flew it again to install a work platform on the space station.
“Usually, when you’re assigned a mission, you know exactly what you’re going to do at the start of your training flow,” Lawrence said. “This wasn’t the case for us. We had to come up with new ways of doing things once we were up in space. We were figuring things out as we went.”
In spite of the uncertainty, the mission was successful. Nearly 14 days and 5.8 million miles later, the crew landed at Edwards, having revived U.S. space exploration after unimaginable loss.
Feature originally appeared in the U.S. Naval Academy alumni magazine, Shipmate.