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Veteran Astronaut Tapped for Station Mission
By Glen Golightly
Houston Bureau Chief
posted: 07:00 am ET
10 May 2000
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wetherbee_000510 HOUSTON Space agency officials announced Tuesday that veteran astronaut and Johnson Space Center Deputy Director James Wetherbee will command a shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) early in 2001. Rounding out the crew are pilot James Kelly and mission specialists Andy Thomas and Paul Richards. This flight of Space Shuttle Discovery will also carry the second resident crew to the ISS -- cosmonaut Yuri Usachev and astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss, who are also scheduled to visit the station next week aboard Atlantis. Returning to Earth aboard Discovery will be the first ISS crew astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko -- who will fly to the station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in November. Discovery is currently slated to lift off on February 15, 2001, but delays due to the current efforts to launch Atlantis will probably postpone the flight a few weeks. Mission tasks for Wetherbee and crew include performing two construction spacewalks on the station, delivering supplies to the U.S. laboratory module, and delivering the Italian-built Leonardo module. Wetherbee, a Navy captain, became an astronaut in 1984. He commanded a mission in 1995 that tested docking procedures with the Russian space station Mir. In 1997 he returned to Mir, delivering astronaut Dave Wolf and bringing back astronaut Michael Foale.
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