They fixed Hubble telescope: Pair of shuttle-era astronauts enter U.S. hall of fame

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — The two new members of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame may be the 112th and 113th members to be enshrined, but they’re part of an even smaller club. They both touched the Hubble Space Telescope.

Read more Bishop Moore impresses in jamboree sweep; Lake Howell coach proud, but not satisfied

“But not with our bare hands. Really bad for your health,” joked four-time spaceflight veteran Joe Tanner standing alongside fellow inductee Tom Akers, who also flew on the shuttle four times.

Each had a mission to service the space telescope during their careers, although Akers one-upped Tanner during his mission — he got to crawl inside the telescope.

“There’s a picture of me totally inside and standing up,” he said.

Both took the stage to receive medals during their induction ceremony under the Space Shuttle Atlantis display at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. They were joined by a gaggle of former astronauts and previous hall of fame inductees.

Combined, they flew eight shuttle missions spending 683 days in space. They became the 27th class of inductees since the first in 1990.

Eligibility requires astronauts’ first spaceflight to have occurred at least 15 years before induction, be NASA-trained, a U.S. citizen and have orbited the Earth at least once. The hall of fame was created by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and is represented at the visitor complex with its own building honoring inductees.

Akers, 74, was raised in small-town Eminence, Missouri, where he still lives. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Missouri-Rolla and tried to get a teaching job, but ended up becoming a high school principal.

“After four years I went looking for an easier job, so at 28 I joined the Air Force as a statistical analyst, so I could use my math, and that’s how I started my journey to NASA,” he said.

He was then selected for the USAF Test Pilot School flight test engineer.

“I got to ride in the back of an F-4 when I was 30 years old. Got sick, used a barf bag for the first, and not last time, but fell in love with flying,” Akers said.

He was passed over his first time around, but chosen in 1987 as a mission specialist and flew STS-41 on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, which deployed the Ulysses spacecraft to study the sun; the maiden flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-49, in 1992, participating in an unplanned, but historic, three-person spacewalk to repair a stranded satellite; STS-61 in 1993, again on Endeavour, for the first Hubble repair mission; and his final flight, STS-79, on Atlantis in 1996 to the Russian space station Mir.

Tanner, 76, didn’t join NASA’s astronaut corps until 1992, also getting passed over for several classes. The Danville, Illinois native earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Illinois before joining the Navy — earning his Naval Aviator Wings in 1975. His love of flying landed him at NASA in 1984, though, even if he wasn’t an astronaut yet. Instead, he trained astronauts as a research pilot and flight instructor at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Read more Florida in control in softball regional, routs Georgia Tech behind Rothrock, Cahalan

At the time of his first spaceflight in 1994, at 44 years old, he was the oldest person to make a debut trip to space. That mission, STS-66 on board Atlantis, carried a payload to study the ozone layer. He followed that up during a 16-year NASA career with STS-82 in 1997 on board Discovery to service Hubble, STS-97 on Endeavour in 1999 to the International Space Station — the last human spaceflight of the 20th century — and STS-115, again on Atlantis in 2006, which was the first shuttle to the space station since the Columbia disaster in 2003.

Both men paid homage during their speeches to the orbiter hanging above them, but to Tanner, the spacecraft was slightly more significant as it flew him on his first and last missions. Still, the two agreed Endeavour, the last orbiter to debut, may have the slight edge among the three orbiters.

“Endeavor was a little cleaner because the paint hadn’t been chipped on the inside as much, but other than that, you almost couldn’t tell,” Akers said. “It had that new space shuttle smell.”

The pair were happy for one another when they found out they were chosen to join the hall of fame together. Tanner considers Akers one of his mentors, even though they didn’t fly together.

As four-time spaceflight veterans, they both agreed they found themselves almost too busy to appreciate the time in space.

“It’s kind of like you pinch yourself, did we really do that, because frankly, once you get there and go start going through training, and even when you fly in space, it’s becomes a job,” Akers said. “You just figure out how to go do your job as you can.”

He said after each flight he tried to tell himself he’d take the time to appreciate it.

“Every doggone time I’d get in, you’d look out the window a little bit, next thing you know, you grab the camera and you’re taking pictures, you know, you aren’t just literally sitting there and absorbing what you’re getting to do,” Akers said.

Tanner said he had the benefit of knowing his last mission would be his final spaceflight.

“I got up an hour and a half early, came to the flight deck, tried not to wake everybody else up, put some music on,” he said. “I was over Japan. An hour and a half later, I was over Japan again, watched the whole (revolution).”

Read more Orlando Fringe Festival reviews: Dogs, dating, daring and Deadwood