Loren Shriver
MS astronautics ’68
Born: 1944
Missions: STS-51C, 31, 46
Loren Shriver participated in three NASA missions and spent more than 386 hours in space.
Loren Shriver NASA Bio
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He twice served as mission commander, including on STS-31 (space shuttle Discovery) in 1990, where the five-person crew deployed the Hubble Space Telescope and conducted a variety of middeck experiments. During the mission, the crew also used two IMAX cameras to record new vantage points of Earth’s features as Discovery reached a then-record altitude of 333 nautical miles. The footage appeared in the 1994 IMAX film, “Destiny in Space.”
Selected as an astronaut in 1978, Shriver’s first NASA mission came in 1985 as pilot of STS-51C. The Department of Defense-initiated mission saw the crew deploy a modified Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) vehicle from Discovery’s payload bay. In 1992, Shriver commanded his final NASA mission, STS-46, aboard Atlantis. During the eight-day mission, the crew deployed the European Retrievable Carrier satellite and conducted the first Tethered Satellite System test flight – a joint project between NASA and the Italian Space Agency.
After completing his bachelor’s degree at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1967, Shriver enrolled in a Purdue graduate program designed in cooperation with the Air Force Academy for students with an interest in astronautics. Shriver is one of seven graduates of the program who went on to become astronauts, joining John Blaha, Roy Bridges Jr., John Casper, Richard Covey, Guy Gardner and Gary Payton.
He was commissioned in 1967 and served from 1969-73 as a T-38 academic instructor pilot at Vance Air Force Base. He was later assigned to the 6512th Test Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base and participated in the Air Force development test and evaluation of the T-38 lead-in fighter. In 1976, Shriver began serving as a test pilot for the F-15 Joint Test Force at Edwards Air Force Base.