CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Due to an undisclosed injury, shuttle pilot Gus Loria has been replaced by Paul Lockhart for the early-November launch of shuttle Endeavour on the STS-113 mission, NASA officials said Tuesday.
Loria "had had an accident at home and suffered an injury. He requested to be pulled from the mission because he got behind on training," said NASA spokesman Doug Peterson at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Citing privacy rules about medical records, Peterson would not elaborate on the nature of Loria's injury, exactly when it took place or what effect the injury had such that the crewmember was unable to train for his flight.
Loria, 42, is a U.S. Marine Corps Major from Newton, Mass. He earned a BS in general engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy. The military test pilot was selected as an astronaut in 1996. This was to have been his first spaceflight.
It is not clear if the injury will permanently keep Loria from flying in space.
"I don't know that he is leaving the astronaut office, I don't think he is. I know that he's applied for a fellowship but that's something that's out there in the future somewhere," Peterson said.
If Lockhart's name is familiar, that's because he was the pilot on the most recent shuttle flight -- Endeavour's STS-111 assembly and crew rotation mission to the International Space Station. The STS-113 mission is very similar: it includes some assembly work and a crew rotation.
"Since Paul Lockhart had just been up to space station and was all primed up and ready to go from his spaceflight, he was reassigned into that slot," Peterson said.
Lockhart, 46, is a U.S. Air Force Lt. Col from Amarillo, Texas. He earned a BA in mathematics from Texas Tech and an MS in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas. He was selected as an astronaut in 1996. This will be his second spaceflight.
Although rare, there have been instances during the past 21 years of shuttle operations when a crewmember was replaced so close to a flight for one reason or another. In one case an entire shuttle crew flew back-to-back missions with the same shuttle and payload because of a problem during the first of those two missions.
In other cases a crewmember died and was replaced with someone who just flew, and during the pre-Challenger days before 1986 astronaut assignments -- especially those of payload specialists -- often were juggled along with the mission manifests.
Payload specialist Charlie Walker, then a McDonnell Douglas engineer, still holds the record for being the shuttle's most frequent flyer within a short time span, flying three shuttle missions between August 1984 and November 1985.
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