Getaway Special

History

The program was conceived by NASA's Shuttle program manager John Yardley, and announced in the fall of 1976. It was canceled after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003. The last Getaway Special, which was carried aboard STS-107, was the Freestar experiment package, which carried six different experiments. Much of the data was lost when Columbia was destroyed, but some data was transmitted during the mission.

After reorganization of the Shuttle Program, NASA cited the need for the remaining shuttle fleet to complete assembly of the ISS to justify its decision to cancel the program. The GAS program canisters and GAS Bridge combined weight were only usable on low orbit missions, which were rescheduled with higher priority payloads. With payload and program limits set on the remaining shuttle missions until the expected STS close-out in 2010, the GAS program was eliminated.

#	Shuttle Flight	Experiment	Organization
N/A	STS-3	Flight Verification Payload	NASA
G001	STS-4	The First Flight	NASA
G026	STS-5	German Materials Processing
G005	STS-6	Japanese Snowflakes
G049	STS-6	Air Force Cadets
G381	STS-6	Exposing Seeds to Space
G002	STS-7	German Students
G009	STS-7	Purdue University Students
G012	STS-7	New Jersey Students
G033	STS-7	Cal Tech Students
G093R	STS-88	Vortex Ring Transit Experiment	University of Michigan
G093	STS-89	Vortex Ring Transit Experiment	University of Michigan