Scobee Central

Dick Scobee, aged 6, with his younger brother James.

This marks the final post of ScobeeCentral, so I saved this one for last. I started this page back in January in the hope of getting a few photos out into the world that I had not seen hosted online anywhere else, and at the same time, with the aim of trying to raise Scobee's profile as much as I could amongst spaceflight fans. He deserves to be remembered for so much more than his misfortune to be Challenger's final commander.

This was a man who risked his life countless times in Vietnam to protect squadron mates while flying an unwieldy aircraft that was designed to carry cargo, not face deliberate enemy fire. He had to fight every promotion board that dared to hold his age against him, and yet he came out on top every time. He fought tooth-and-nail to gain his place in the test-pilot fraternity and it was only natural that he would find his way to the Astronaut Office. He was not the youngest in Astronaut Group 8, nor was he even a fighter-jock, and yet George Abbey, John Young and Alan Bean considered him the best of the 15 pilots in the 1978 intake. There was a reason he was assigned as the pilot for STS-41-C, the most complex and challenging mission that a Space Shuttle had flown up to that date. It wasn't just a random selection.

Every single anecdote that I have come across paints the picture of a thoughtful, introspective, generous and diligent individual. Amongst his colleagues in the Astronaut Office, he was certainly peerless. The enlisted engine mechanic who became a spacecraft commander... What an example to others, no matter what their dreams or goals in life.

Extracts from Deke! by Donald K. Slayton with Michael Cassutt (1994)

  'About the time I left in 1959 the F-4 Phantoms were coming in. They ran a competition between the F-103 and the F-4H and the F-4 won. I flew chase on that a couple of times, but I never got a chance to fly one until long after that. In fact, Dick Scobee took me on an F-4 flight when we were running approach and landing tests on the shuttle at Edwards in the 1970s. Scobee was like Fitz Fulton, one of the few cargo pilots who moved to fighters. There's still just a little bit of prejudice against guys with that background in the astronaut office.'

- p. 65

  'On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, I was in my office when Bobbie called and told me the Challenger had blown up. The commander of that flight was one of my better friends in the new generation of astronauts, Dick Scobee.'

The flight crew for STS-41-C

Commander Bob Crippen, Pilot Dick Scobee and Mission Specialists T.J. Hart, James van Hoften and George Nelson. The flight was one of the few chances that NASA got to demonstrate the full list of capabilities that the Shuttle could offer, from pedestrian scientific experiments through to daring, free-flying satellite retrieval using the MMUs.