Former astronaut David M. Walker, 56, passed away Monday morning while being treated at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He is survived by a wife and two sons.
A Navy test pilot, Walker was commander of STS-30, a five-day mission on the shuttle Discovery during which the Magellan Venus probe was deployed. Eight months after its May 1989 deployment, Magellan successfully entered orbit around Venus and began to produce the most detailed radar images yet of the surface of that world.
Walker previously served as a pilot aboard shuttle mission STS-51A in November 1994, during which astronauts Joseph Allen and Dale Gardner performed the first "space salvage" operation, collecting two malfunctioning satellites and stowing them in the payload bay of the orbiter Discovery for return to Earth. The 51A crew also deployed two new satellites.
Walker was born May 20, 1944 in Columbus, Georgia and grew up in Eustis, Florida, where he graduated from high school in 1962. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1966.
Walker underwent flight training in Florida, Mississippi and Texas. After becoming a naval aviator in 1967, he served on two combat tours in Vietnam, piloting an F-4 Phantom from the carriers U.S.S. Enterprise and U.S.S. America. Returning to the United States in 1970, he attended the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California, then was assigned to the Navy's Air Test Center at Paxtuxent River, Maryland as a test pilot. At the time he was chosen by NASA, he was an F-14 pilot aboard the U.S.S. America in the Mediterranean and was based at Oceana, Virginia.
He logged over 7,000 hours of flying time, including 6,500 hours in jets.
Walker was one of the 35 astronauts selected by NASA in January 1978 and qualified as a shuttle pilot in August 1979. He served as a chase plane pilot for STS-1 and has worked on shuttle computer software at the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). Other technical assignments include a tour as technical assistant to the director of flight crew operations (1981), mission support group leader (1982-83) and head of the astronaut support team at the Kennedy Space Center (1985). He was in training to command shuttle mission 61-G, scheduled for May 1986 when the Challenger accident forced NASA to suspend all shuttle flights. Following STS-30 in 1989, he acted as head of the space station design and development branch of the astronaut office.
On May 5, 1989, while piloting a NASA T-38 to Washington, D.C. for ceremonies honoring the crew of STS-30, Walker had a near miss with an Airbus jetliner. That encounter and other infractions of NASA flying rules caused him to be grounded from July to September 1990, costing him to command of STS-44, to which he had been assigned in April 1990.
Walker's last technical assignments were as chief of the station/exploration support office in the flight crew operations directorate and chairman of the Johnson Space Center safety review board.
He retired from the Navy and resigned from NASA in April 1996 to become vice president for sales and marketing for NDC Voice Communications, San Diego, California. In April 1999, Walker joined Ultrafast, Inc. of Malvern, Pennsylvania as vice president of aerospace sales.
Biographical information used in this article was excerpted with permission from Who's Who in Space: The International Space Station Edition by Michael Cassutt.
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