WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

Looking excited about their upcoming spaceflight, the Dog Crew II departs the Operations and Checkout Building. Leading the way is . While they are wearing the traditional crew emblem designed for each Shuttle mission, the STS-69 astronauts are also sporting a special patch denoting them as the Dog Crew I, continuing a tradition of comaraderie that began on an earlier flight, STS-53, on which both Walker and Voss were crew members. Each of the STS- 69 crew members took on a dog-theme name, and the patch, showing a bulldog peering from a doghouse shaped like the Space Shuttle, was designed to capture their sense of esprit de corps. Awaiting the crew at Launch Pad 39A is the Space Shuttle Endeavour, undergoing final preparations for liftoff on the fifth Shuttle flight of 1995. Launch is scheduled during a two and a half hour window opening at 11:09 a.m. EDT. This will be the second try to get STS-69 off the ground; a first attempt on Aug. 31 was scrubbed due to a faulty fuel cell.