Joe Engle - NASA Career

NASA Career

Engle was one of 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. He was back-up lunar module pilot for the Apollo 14 mission and was due to land on the moon as lunar module pilot for Apollo 17, but was replaced by geologist Harrison Schmitt after Apollo 18 was cancelled with pressure from the scientific community to have a scientist explore the Moon, and not just test pilots who had been given geology training. According to Engle, Deke Slayton asked him whether he would prefer to fly on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, or the Space Shuttle; Engle responded that he would prefer the Shuttle as it was an airplane.

Engle was commander of one of the two crews that flew the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test Flights from June through October 1977. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was carried to 25,000 feet on top of the Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, and then released for its two minute glide flight to landing. In this series of flight tests, Engle evaluated the Orbiter handling qualities and landing characteristics, and obtained the stability and control, and performance data in the subsonic flight envelope for the Space Shuttle. He was the back-up commander for STS-1, the first orbital test flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. Together with pilot Richard Truly he flew as commander on the second flight of the Space Shuttle, STS-2. He was also mission commander on STS-51-I and logged over 225 hours in space.

Engle is the only human being to have flown two different types of winged vehicles in space, the X-15 and the Space Shuttle. He is the only astronaut to have manually flown the shuttle through reentry and landing.

He served as Deputy Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight at NASA headquarters from March 1982 to December 1982. He retained his astronaut flight status and returned to the Johnson Space Center in January 1983. He also participated in the Challenger disaster investigation in 1986, and did other consulting work on the Shuttle well into the 1990s.