The Nation - News from June 8, 1988

Three space shuttle astronauts made a mock emergency landing during a comprehensive launch rehearsal that tested hundreds of changes resulting from the Challenger explosion. The practice session for the nation’s first shuttle mission in 2 1/2 years, scheduled for late August, put the launching team at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and flight controllers in Houston through the final three hours of a countdown and the minutes of a failure requiring split-second decisions. Astronaut Bob Crippen, deputy director of shuttle operations, said the test pointed up a few areas in problem-solving that needed to be improved, but “all in all, it was an excellent exercise.”